I remember back in the day when I had a program that could alter nearly any variable in any running program. You just had to know which was which without accidentally crashing everything.
I remember my first time switching out textures, and in some cases, entire levels of a sonic game. Mods for doom, unreal, and the like...
In most cases, yes. But, there are a surprising number of kids I know who had been fully writing webpages, modding games, hacking social profiles, etc. by the age of 13. Regardless of how minimal these "hacks" are you know very well what kind of people these kids can turn into.
I wouldn't say modding a game or writing code for a web page as "hacking" in any negative way.
I myself use to mod Jedi Knight when it was popular around MSN Gaming Zone when Microsoft had a chance to build a PC Xbox Live type service in a successful way back then, but opted to kill it off instead.
If you are asking yourself WTF is MSN gaming zone then you never played those old games in 1997 did ya?
well, is there any other way to learn stuff? You look for info and then you practice... You learn hacking the same way you would learn any kind of math.
natural evolution in modern society for good and bad
Nothing new here.
Experts are just now figuring this out? Their expertise must suck then. Children have been hacking at that age ever since computers have existed.
Hacking was even more popular then than it is now because back then there wasn't much else to do on a computer besides hack things.
I remember back in the day when I had a program that could alter nearly any variable in any running program. You just had to know which was which without accidentally crashing everything.
I remember my first time switching out textures, and in some cases, entire levels of a sonic game. Mods for doom, unreal, and the like...
They think these children are writing the code? Not at all. They're just downloading stuff they've found online and using it.