‘White hat’ is well-known term in the hacker community—as someone who works with the ‘good guys’. In the ‘black hat’ community, white hats are seen a bit as sellouts, people who took their talents and used them to reinforce the position of ‘the man’. More generally, white hat hackers can be understood as those who break systems in order to make them better. We see this happening every day now: Fac
ebook, Google, and a variety of more localized groups host hackathons in order to crowdsource innovative new solutions to systems in need of improvement. In a way, hacking is the new language of our world, even if we have not explicitly recognized it as such yet. Old systems and traditional models are failing—disrupted, hacked, obsolete. With the push of a button, the most mighty institution can fall to an individual who only requires the capability to understand how to search through endless data flows. With a simple program put into the hands of the right people, an entire economic ecosystem can crumble into obscurity; and no longer are ‘the right people’ necessarily the most wealthy or most powerful in their community. The world created by the Industrial Revolution seems a slow and lumbering dinosaur next to the new creatures of the Technology Revolution. At WhiteHat Magazine, we look at the ways technology is changing the world—the flames that engulfed a Tunisian street vendor that lit bigger and bigger fires the farther it spread; the power of a message shorter than 140 characters to create a crisis in diplomatic circles; the insight a machine can bring into the reemergence of a forgotten disease in a sealed off nation—and we see an optimism in our common dialogue of what promises it holds. If 90 percent of all the photographs in existence were taken in the past year, what have we documented about the human condition? If humanity could go to the moon on less computing power than a mobile phone, then where are we capable of traveling? WhiteHat Magazine is a publication of Fibonacci Media Co., a Utah Benefit Corporation. Content may not be copied or republished without permission.
