I'm in the Open University. Again, yes.
And I'm in Tim Jordan's office.
This is Tim Jordan's book with an axe on.
It's called 'Hacking' and this is Tim Jordan himself.
How are you?
I'm very well, thank you.
You've written a book on hacking.
It's right here. I have the evidence in my hand.
Is it available online as well?
No, it's not available free online yet.
The publishers are not interested in having it axed at this stage.
It is available as an electronic book but you have to pay for it.
Unless you get a hacker to release it from its informational prison.
Let's just film every page really slowly.
What kind of developments have there been in hacking at the moment?
Hacking started off with two big arms.
One is cracking - people who take computers, break into them,
do what they want with them, move on.
The other one is free and open source software
which is people who make software programs, who write them,
release them free and open source which means you can access the code
and if you're another coder you can change it yourself.
In the last perhaps 10, 20 years,
developments in hacking have led to two main groups emerging
that weren't there previously.
Hacktivists, which are politically-motivated hackers.
They're people who, for various reasons,
want to intervene and use hacking to change the world.
So they're people who write bits of software
that allow us to pass information securely,
particularly for human rights activists.
But also what we've seen is cracking coming much closer than ever before
to the criminal world.
So we've seen a lot more hacks that border on cracks
in order for financial gain.
So the two big changes in hacking - politically-motivated hacking
and an emerging connection with the criminal world
that has never really been there in a big way before.
I'm really interested in hacktivism, not personally, like I'd do it,
but I'm very interested in cryptography
becoming a little bit more user friendly.
Something that we could all have access to
because sometimes we don't want everybody reading our cookies
and reading our emails and reading our data.
The one thing everybody should know about the internet
is that nothing is secret on the internet.
Everything that you do on the internet
is recorded by someone somewhere.
So if you want to do anything on the internet
and not have people know, for whatever reason that might be,
you need to get involved with the kind of tools
that hacktivists provide and that various programmers provide
to allow secure identities.
These might be things like being able to send information securely.
So there's a program called Camera/Shy
which allows people to embed information in pictures
and put them on a web page.
You can then, if you've got the right password, read the information.
Everyone else sees a picture of a fluffy punny...
Strange animals. They're a cross between ponies and bunnies.
Google it.
Other people might see a fluffy bunny, you can see the information
that you might want as a human rights activist or for other things.
So there's a whole range of tools out there now.
Some of them are hard to use because they're meant for people
who are politically active and engaged
and are willing to put the time in.
Some of them are much easier to use.
Something like the Tor network - Tor, which means,
I won't tell you what that means.
The Tor network which allows people to securely surf the web.
It's a bit slow, it won't download all your pages exactly
but it will anonomise your access...
The onion router. It's really easy to download, easy to install.
I just keep forgetting to click on it, to be honest.
The interesting question in some ways
is not are all these tools available,
because cryptography's pretty easily available.
Nearly all email programs will have some kind of cryptography involved
and if you get away from the major corporations
and particularly use a free software or an open source one,
you'll usually be able to choose pretty strong cryptography
and it'd be very hard for someone to break.
How do you feel about Google now being...
This is a little bit of a conspiracy warning.
Let's put a little banner at the bottom.
Google investing massively in Firefox at the moment.
It's an interesting thing because free software and open source
has never been something that doesn't like big business.
In fact, open source was invented as a term
to get away from the political connotations of free software
in order to get business more involved in the production of this.
Free and open source software at its heart
is a technique for producing software
and a technique for allowing software to become better and better.
So its politics are all about better software,
they're not necessarily about freedom
and other things that might be implied by the term free software.
That's brilliant.
Let's summarise very quickly.
Here's your book, 'Hacking'.
What measures do you take to protect yourself?
I use Linux at home, I use Firefox, disable all the pop-ups.
Using Linux means I'm protected from 99% of all viruses and other things
because they were all written for Microsoft
because everyone uses a Microsoft computer.
So my recommendation is the Linux desktop is here.
I write about hacking, I'm not a hacker myself.
Linux you can use on your desktop.
Better, faster, free.
You heard it right here
and if you want to know a little bit more about this kind of stuff,
there's a book, very simply titled.
But if you do Google this, be warned: you'll probably be flagged.
Just Google Tim Jordan.
Bye.