I want to be a hacker man 5000 but I don't know where to

>>18583349
You start learning to program, and you never stop. You keep learning programming languages, you read increasingly obscure forums and magazines, you read other people's dissertations and publications, you go to conferences to find contacts, mentors, and colleagues. You never stop doing any of that. You keep doing it for 10 hours every day for the rest of your life.

>>18583365
Damn. So programming is the north star I should follow and everything will be self explanatory from there?

1/2

>>18583374
No. Programming is your toolbox, the more you know, they more tools you have at your disposal. Without programming you won't even be able to start on your journey. The only way to journey is to build the vehicles you want to use yourself. This means you have to actually write computer programs that become increasingly complex. On very rare occasions you'll create a wonder in a day, more often you'll stare at the screen going through hundreds or thousands of lines of code one by one wondering why this piece of shit you wrote doesn't do what you want it to.
To go back to the metaphor, you'll probably start by building a simple raft consisting of one tree trunk and try to paddle that thing up a paved road. Then you'll make some rollerskates and attempt to go up the river with those. Then you manage to build a proper canoe and find out that the river has disappeared and now you need a bicycle. There is no star to follow. You're wanting to head into a field that changes and develops all the time, knowledge you gain today may be obsolete in two years, or still valid in 20.

Sure, there are programs written by others you can use if you want to bypass a password, or encrypt something, or log what someone is doing on a particular computer. That's like a child being allowed to turn the ignition key to start the car its parent is driving. Try driving yourself and you'll hit a tree if you're lucky, and a person if you're not, the police will come and your parents will have a load of trouble to sort out.
Funny how well that fits with both driving and programming/hacking, actually.

2/2

>>18583448
The thing is, to be a hacker or any kind of programmer you need to keep accumulating knowledge all the time. Knowledge about programming languages, about hardware, about OSs, what works how, what works in one instance but not in another, I can't stress enough that IT NEVER STOPS, there's always more, you'll never be finished. As soon as you stop, that peak you've been trying to reach and that looks so close will suddenly shoot up beyond the clouds and out of sight. By the time you are hacker man 5000, there's a ton of new models and hacker man 13466 is where it's at.

If you have the will and stamina for that, my greatest respects. But even if you only make it to the level of hacker man 34 where you can configure an operating system, understand the basics of the tools that others have written and you use, and can write simple programs yourself that do something funny or silly for people's birthdays, you'll be ahead of about 98% of the rest of the world.
If you want to go for it I wish you the best of luck, and even if you don't end up being the god and rebel you probably envision, it's never a bad idea to understand something about the devices that surround as everywhere today.

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>>18583349
Hacking isn't magic. It's just like any crime: Learn everything you can about the target and the trade and then come up with the way to bypass the security (either by force + escape or undetected).

If there are some styles to hack or some kind of programs that do the hacking for you they will soon be patched.