Introduction to computer networking.

My oldest son has been showing some interest for computers lately. So, today I decided to give him an introductory lesson to computer networking using our own home network. For starters, I explained how in the old days most people had desktop computers at home, and these weren't even connected to each other (not to talk of the Internet!). I then explained how, in order to be able to put together a network with a few nodes, you need a way to address each individual component of the network, and how several different schemes had been developed to accomplish this. In the end, though, the Internet became so popular that everyone adopted its mechanism: IP addresses and TCP/IP. At a later stage, the task was connecting those networks with each other, therefore creating the figure of the gateway. I told him about the concept of a subnet, as well as the gateway and broadcast addresses. I then proceeded to explain to him that all this could be configured via a static IP configuration or via DHCP. Finally, I taught him how to find out the IP address assigned to his own computer both on an Apple Mac and a Linux system, and also both using the graphical interface and the command line, before teaching him how to use the ping command.

A History of Hacking.

There is no doubt that technology dominates and defines today's society. Yet, concepts like that of hacking are quite misunderstood. While at the beginning of the digital era, hacking was considered to be any sort of experimentation that one might do with new devices (especially, if one were to use them for a purpose they had not been originally designed for), it quickly became a synonym for a computer criminal in the 1990s. Computer hobbyists prefer to use the term cracker or black-hat computer hacker for the latter, but the word never truly made it to the mainstream media. As a consequence, most people out there identify hacking with illegal activities.

So, what I was trying to teach my kids with this vitamin is that hacking (in the original sense of the term) could actually be something creative and productive. That most scientists and inventors that have been were actually hackers in this sense. In other words, I tried to promote hacking as conceived by Paul Graham in his book Hackers and Painters: an activity that promotes curiosity, experimentation and creativity, associating disparate ideas and solving puzzles and problems. That is the time honored tradition of hacking, as described also in Steve Levy's classic book, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution.

In order to explain all this, we watched a documentary by Discovery Channel, which tells the story of three well-known hackers: John Draper (a.k.a. Captain Crunch), Steve Wozniak and Kevin Mitnick.