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An AP English compare and contrast essay. My profoundest apologies for conflating hackers and crackers, the teacher was unfamiliar with the correct terminology (plus it gave me an alliteration 🙂 )

Hackers of Honshū

Lithe, dark-clad, burglar-assassins of medieval Japan; Scrawny techies who can infiltrate and destroy any network. Ninja and hacker: these kindred classes of cunning cutthroats are (or were) both feared and revered throughout their respective domains[1]. Interestingly, the connection between them is deeper than first meets the eye. Or it would be, if you could see either before they struck.

Their similarities begin at birth. Ninjas spring from the mountains of Koga, Japan, hackers from Mountain View, CA. As children they are utterly unstoppable. No cookie jar is safe from a nascent ninja, and a young hackerling leaves no appliance un-disassembled. In their teen years, impudent hacker dudes have been known to break into school networks and modify their grades, just to flaunt their emerging abilities. Teenage ninjas (the non-mutant and non-turtle sort), if present in Western society, would undoubtedly do the same, albeit by rappelling through the skylight of the administrative office and deftly switching their transcripts with forged copies.

Upon reaching maturity, both depart to places of legend for advanced training in their secretive arts. Ninjas trek to hidden springs where ancient martial monks beat them into unstoppable shadow warriors. A trainee is deemed ready when he has the quickness and control to pluck a pebble from his master’s palm. Hackers have a less daunting search but an equally brutal education. They study by day under the computer science gurus of Stanford, UC Berkeley, and MIT, and by night under the dark counterparts of these professors, who tell them, “only when you can snatch the admin passcode from the database is it time for you to leave.”

Now, not everybody manages to earn the approbation of these Spartan sages and venerable code sharks. Ninjas who don’t make the cut end up playing bit parts in lame kung-fu movies. Invariably, they portray the villain’s evil henchmen who get thrashed by the hero. Hackers who can’t hack it go to work for Microsoft. They’re in charge of writing the code that keeps Windows from crashing.

Those students who do manage to graduate enter the turbulent worlds of their respective professions. Hackers generally hack for a noble cause (like the open source software movement), but some black-hats occasionally will trash systems for their own amusement or take jobs as freelance cyber-hitmen. Conversely, ninjas are far more often roving mercenaries than staunch idealists. However, despite their let their lack of cohesion and unity of purpose, these guerrilla warriors are brutally effective: even in small numbers, they can wreak havoc upon those they are hired to “hack” (to pieces).

In plying their trades, ninjutsu[2] marauders and code-fu commandos are equally nocturnal. After midnight, you can find them both (though only with night vision goggles and a SWAT team) surreptitiously seeking their unsuspecting targets. They conceal their identities: ninjas mask their faces with shadowy cowls, hackers spoof their IP addresses. And to fortify themselves for these nighttime raids, both denizens of darkness chug copious quantities of caffeine: ninjas are partial to green tea, hackers prefer Jolt^® Cola. Once fueled up and prepared, ninjas grappling-hook their way onto the highest parapets and slay the sentries with quick flicks of their shurikens. Hackers, on the other hand, scale firewalls, then, with a rapid burst of typing dispatch hapless anti-intrusion programs to the software version of the afterlife.

Ninjas then proceed to infiltrate the inner sanctum of the palace or stronghold they have been commissioned to “gain access to.” They are so dreaded for their stealth and skill that many daimyo, or Japanese warlords, specially construct their sleeping quarters with floorboards that creak loudly, and, to distinguish friend from foe, make their servants wear clunky footwear. For similar reasons, we load our laptops with beeping virus checkers and clunky spyware scanners. Furthermore, some daimyo sleep with armed samurai posted around their bedrooms. Those sentinels, like overzealous security dialog boxes, are in charge of “cancelling or allowing” visitors – either permanently “deleting” them with the slice of a sharpened katana or respectfully offering them ocha[3].

But in the end, all this preparation is futile. Mere mortals do not have the power to prevent these prowlers of the night from achieving their nefarious ends – assassination, espionage, destruction, spam. Thus, some might wish that there were no ninjas or hackers, that they never even existed, but what then? For one, makers of antivirus software and clunky shoes would be seriously out of their jobs. And what about our comic books? Teenage Mutant Bonsai-Gardener Turtles just doesn’t cut it. And worst of all, when our PCs crash, we’d have nobody but ourselves to blame…except maybe the dropouts at Microsoft.

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[1] Technically, hackers aren’t necessarily malevolent – malicious hackers are called “crackers” or “black-hats.” But the media refer to both as “hackers,” so this essay does the same.

[2] Ninja karate style and weapons techniques

[3] Japanese tea ceremony