Security - random thoughts

Just some quick reflections.

The lecture was about hacking/security/privacy issues. When I was asked in class : "what is the difference between privacy and security", I was shocked -- not being shocked that prof named me even without looking at me, but I really had no words to answer. "They are just different." Sometimes getting more privacy means more secured, sometimes it means otherwise -- like surfing on the Internet and checking luggage in airports.

OK, no more mess up with words... let me start with my random thoughts --

" learn , build, hack, customize "

-- this is the road that all computer geeks will go through.

I want to focus more on the last two , since the first two are quite self-explanatory.

Hack:
"Hack" by here means "taking apart". After building yourselves some applications, you find flaws in your program (and some of them have no solutions), then:
1. you would want to hack other people's applications/computer systems -- to see if they had same headaches. This is called "comfort in shared suffering"， and that is quite a distorted kind of happiness :D
2. maybe you fail to hack other people's applications -- then you learnt something!

Customize:
Then you can choose to:
1. rebuild your app! Rome is not built in ONE DAY, and good apps are not built ONCE!
2. take that man's work and customize it! -- I prefer this way, and that is why I like Linux. :)