Got a minute.

I'm trying to write a paper on the discourse of the hacker, wondering if anyone cares to right a short response to the question "What does hacking mean to you?"

Is it a way of living? Or a culture? Or do you see it more as a style of problem solving?

What about hacking draws your interest and how does this fit into your sense of self?

If the paper turns out well enough, i'll try submitting it here as an article.

Its definitely a problem solving thing for me, the problem being I like breaking into websites and stealing other peoples data.

I don't care about the lifestyle or cultural aspects of "hacking", because they're all made up bullshit, and have no relevance in the real world.

I don't do it to make money, or to help make the web a safer place, I do it because I can.

I just think it's fun. I've been doing a lot of malware reverse-engineering lately and I like knowing that somewhere, someone wrote this code to prevent me from doing what I'm doing. And yet I'm still able to do it. It's a very adversarial practice that will constantly keep me on my toes.

To the authors, I'm the bad guy and they must not let me in. To me, they're the bad guys and I must not allow myself to be bested. Game on.

Being presented with this type of opportunity (and the skills to accept it) is simply amazing to me. I started playing around on this site 8 (holy shit!) years ago as a hobby and now I am able to do the things I learned here for a living for all of the foreseeable future. Cool.

• Futility

(PS. if you want a more complete "statement" or to further pick my brain, feel free to give me ping! Also, a couple of my colleagues have done/are doing work in this area. I'm sure they'd be willing to help you out.)