Ethical Hacking

--Originally published at Stories by Juan Andrés Rocha on Medium

Hacking is a word often perceived as negative and really far from “ethics” and “good things”. But it is not.

Before we judge the so-called hackers, we must get familiar with the hacker culture:

Hacker culture emerged from a fusion of intellectual curiosity, counter-culture and a hate-on for any technology that you couldn’t easily get access to or tamper with. — Forbes

Basically, a hacker is a person who finds creative workarounds to turn their devices or technology pieces into something more useful to them, even if it means breaking, modifying or creating ‘frankensteins’ with them.

Some companies are trying to make hacking of their devices illegal, which I think shouldn’t be, because if you already paid for a device, and it could fit better your necessities, and you know how to change it to do so, why wouldn’t you? Why would a company limit what you can do with the devices you already paid for? Voiding the warranty is valid. Making it illegal is not.

A good example of the above is Jailbreaking iOS, which might seem unharmful, if you use it correctly (it also voids your warranty, so be careful) but it can be used for wrong, like pirating apps or downloading illegal content on your phone.

There’s also the issue of Ethical hacking. You might be wondering if that’s possible, and it might be, sometimes even necessary, for example: If you’re a network administrator, you should try to hack it every way possible to find vulnerabilities in your own creation, this will help you prevent other malicious persons gain access to your network in the future.

So, what do you think? Is Ethical Hacking a thing?

Computing Ethics

--Originally published at Computer and Information Security

Oh, hey reader! You are again here, it’s pretty cool that I keep getting your attention. This time I’m going to talk about the code of ethics in computing. Around the web there are a lot of documents, information and infographics that try to show what are those codes of ethics in computing, but  if you really want to know about computing stuff, you should always go to the official ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) web page, since this is the official organization that represents the computing community (Click here to get into the ACM web page).

As you know, all the present and future professions require a couple of rules of behaviour, like all humans do in society, in order to have a peaceful life and community, where we all look for each other like the good human beings we are. This means that by law we have to act with ethics and moral. In this case I’m going to show you the basic rules or behaviour, we, computing scientists or developers are forced to obey and accomplish, in order to have a good computer community:

1. PUBLIC – Software engineers shall act consistently with the public interest.

  • 1.01. Accept full responsibility for their own work.
  • 1.02. Moderate the interests of the software engineer, the employer, the client and the users with the public good.
  • 1.08. Be encouraged to volunteer professional skills to good causes and contribute to public education concerning the discipline.

2. CLIENT AND EMPLOYER – Software engineers shall act in a manner that is in the best interests of their client and employer consistent with the public interest.