Revised Hacker Test

Questions updated by Zephyr


Have you ever used a computer?
... for more than 4 hours continuously?
... more than 8 hours?
... more than 16 hours?
... more than 32 hours?

Have you ever missed a class while programming?
... Missed an examination?
... Missed a wedding?
... Missed your own wedding?

Have you ever programmed while drunk?
... Did it make sense the next day?

Have you ever written a flight simulator?

Have you ever voided the warranty on your equipment?

Ever change the value of 4?
... Unintentionally?
... Intentionally?

Are you a hacker?
... Are you sure?

Have you named a computer?

Do you complain when a "feature" you use gets fixed?

Do you know how many days old you are?

Have you ever wanted to download pizza?

Have you ever invented a computer joke?
... Did someone not 'get' it?

Have you ever read UNIVACKY?

Can you recite Jabberwocky?
... Backwards?

Have you read the Hacker's Manifesto?

Have you seen "Donald Duck in Mathemagic Land"?

Have you seen "Tron"?

Have you seen "Wargames"?

Do you know what ASCII stands for?
... EBCDIC?

Can you read and write ASCII in hex or octal?

Do you know the names of all the ASCII control codes?

Can you read and write EBCDIC in hex?

Can you convert from EBCDIC to ASCII and vice versa?

Do you know what characters are the same in both ASCII and EBCDIC?

Ever define your own numerical type to get better precision?

Can you name powers of two up to 2^16 in arbitrary order?
... up to 2^32?
... up to 2^64?

Can you remove a hard drive?
... Without destroying the power cable/supply while trying?

Have you ever patched binary code?
... While the program was running?

Have you met any IBM vice-president?

Do you know what EIGRP stands for?

Have you ever melted a graphics card?
... a processor?

Have you ever heard a dying hard drive?
... And found it hilarious?

Have you ever committed forgery with your graphics editing skills?

Do you understand recursion?

Did you ever optimize a bubble sort?

Does your computer talk to you?

Have you ever talked into an acoustic modem?
... Did it answer?

Does your modem play music (in your point of view)?
... Can you imitate it?

Can you whistle a telephone number?

Have you witnessed a disk crash?

Have you ever built a computer?
... From a toaster?

Can you play music on your printer?
... Your hard drive?
... Your floppy drive?

Do you know what DoS is?
... Ever done it?
... And got away with it?

Do you have ASCII art of...
... the Mona Lisa?
... Einstein?
... Oliver?

Have you ever made ASCII art?
... Are you better at it than drawing/painting?

Do you know what the following stand for?
... DASD
... Emacs
... IEEE
... M$
... SNA
... NAT
... TCP/IP

Have you ever used...
... Telnet?
... FTP?
... Emacs?
... ed?
... vi?
... grep?
... sed?
... Named Pipes?
... Do you know what all of them are?

Can you do subnet calculations?

Have you ever configured a router?
... Or better yet, compromised one?

Have you ever received a Fax or a photocopy of a floppy?

Have you ever shown a novice the "any" key?
... Was it the power switch?

Do you know what the following are?
... ARPANet?
... IIS?
... Caldera?
... wargames (not the movie)?
... 802.llb?

Have you ever visited The Farm?
... Are you sure you're still alive?
... If you are, are there snipers outside your window?

Have you ever seen voice mail?
... Can you read it?

Have you ever taken a Turing test?
... Did you fail?

Have you ever debugged machine code over the telephone?

Have you ever popped the battery off your mother board?
... Just for the fun of it?

Have you ever used netcat?

Have you ever received a case of beer with your computer?

Does your computer come in 'designer' colors?

Ever interrupted a UPS?

Ever killed a server?

Have you ever played ARP games with another box or router?
... Did it work?
... Do you know what successful ARP poisoning lets you do?

Ever made your box give a "System critical: shut down in # secs" error?
... Intentionally?

Do you have any defunct documentation?
... Do you still read it?

Ever reverse-engineer or decompile a program?
... Did you find bugs in it?

Ever help the person behind the counter with their computer?

Ever tried rack mounting your telephone?

Ever thrown a computer from more than two stories high?
... Shot one with buckshot?

Ever patched a bug the vendor does not acknowledge?

Ever fix a hardware problem in software?
... Vice versa?

Can you use IRC?

Ever had your activities mentioned in the newspaper?
... Did you get away with it?

Do you use 1337 speak?

Do you think of the selection sort when you sort your hand of playing cards?

Ever physically destroy equipment from software?

Ever tried to improve your score on the Hacker Test?

Are your passwords 256 or over chars long?
... Can you remember them?

Ever used == for = in math class?
... put a ; instead of a . at the end of your sentences?
... Did your teachers give you a funny look?

Can you convert postfix to prefix in your head?
... hex to octal in your head?
... binary to decimal in your head?

Have you ever starved while dining with philosophers?

Have you solved The Halting Problem?
... Correctly?

Do you know what count to infinity (in terms of routing) is?

Ever written a self-reproducing program?

Do you know what "stateful" means?
... What a state table is?
... Can you overflow one?

Ever create an unkillable program?
... Intentionally?

Ever been asked for a cookie?

Ever speed up a system by removing a jumper?

Do you know...
Who wrote The Hacker's Manifesto?

The REAL name of The Hacker's Manifesto?

Do you know Gray code?

Do you know what HCF means?
... Ever use it?
... Intentionally?

Do you know how to read a TCP packet?
... edit one and have it still being valid?

Do you know the difference between DTE and DCE?
... Do you know what DTE stands for?
... What about DCE?

Do you know what RJ-11 is?

Do you know the RS-232C pinout?
... Can you wire a connector without looking?

Do you have...
... a copy of Dec Wars?

... a copy of The Canonical Collection of Light Bulb Jokes?

... a copy of the Hacker's Dictionary?
... Did you contribute to it?

... a copy of The Hacker's Manifesto?

... a PRISM based card?
... Do you know what one does?

... a copy of the Anarchist's Cookbook?
... Ever made something from it?

... a modem?

... a NIC?

... a router?

... a personal computer?
... a laptop?
... a mainframe?
... a supercomputer?

... a hypercube?

... a printer?
... a laser printer?

... a tape drive?

... an outmoded peripheral device?

... a programmable calculator?
... Does it use RPN?

Have you ever owned more than 1 computer?
... 4 computers?
... 16 computers?

Do you have an SLIP line?
... a T1 line?

Do you have a separate phone line for your computer?
... Is it legal?

Do you have over 256 megs of RAM?
... over 512 megs?
... over 1 gig?

Do you use more than 256 megabytes of disk space?
... 1 gigabyte?
... 16 gigabytes?
... 128 gigabytes?
... 512 gigabytes?
... 1 terabyte?

Do you have a packet sniffer?
... an AP sniffer?

Do you own more than 16 floppy disks?
... 64 floppy disks?
... 256 floppy disks?
... 1024 floppy disks?

Do you still have any 8-inch disks?

Do you have dual hard drives?
... dual processors?
... dual graphics cards?

Have you read The Guides To Mostly Harmless Hacking?
... Do you own copies of them?
... Was the author male or female?
... Do you know who wrote them?

Do you know how to edit BIOS settings?
... Do you know what BIOS stands for?
... What about CMOS?

Do you have any IT related articles over 10 years old?


School/Career:


Do you mess with your school/company's network?
... Were you attacking the database by any chance?
... Were you successful?
... Did you get away with it?

Have you ever been a system administrator?

Do you have more megabytes than megabucks?

Do you claim...
...that people ph34r you?
...to have taken down the KKK site?
...to have broken into the Pentagon?
...to have retrieved alien pictures from a government network?


Games:


Have you played...
... Pong?
... Tetris?
... Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure?
... Duke Nukem?
... Doom?
... Quake?
... Core Wars?
... Tux Racer?

Have you ever beaten...
... XBill?
... The Hackers Lab Wargame?
... Minesweeper (on Expert)?
... Doom?
... System Shock 1 or 2(without cheating)?
... Half-Life (without cheating)?

Have you ever written any redcode?
... Do you know what it is?

Have you ever moded for a game?

Have you ever written a game?
... a 3D one?
... using OpenGL?
... With multi-player?


Hardware:


Does your case have a Plexiglass window?
... Did you cut it yourself?

Do you know what any of these stand fir and what they do?
... a NIC?
... a CPU?
... RAM?
... CD-ROM?
... CD-RW?

Have you ever built...
... a multi-computer?
... a quantum computer?

Do you know how to use...
... an oscilloscope?
... a cable tester?
... a transformer?
... an ammeter?
... a punchdown tool?
... a soldering iron?
... a logic analyzer?

Have you ever over clocked your processor?
... to 3 times?
... Did it even last 2 minutes?


Historical:


Have you ever seen paper tape?
... Do you know what it is?

Do you know what ENIAC is?

Have you ever seen a punch card?


OSI:


Do you what the OSI model is?

Do you know how many layers it has?
... Do you know what each layer does?

Do you mumble "application, presentation, ses..." in your sleep?

Were you forced to memorize the layers and its functions?
...Did you think it was useless?
...But realized it was useful later?


Languages:


Do you know more than 1 programming language?
... 2 languages?
... 4 languages?
... 8 languages?

Have you ever designed a programming language?

Do you know what Basic stands for?
... Pascal?

Can you program in Basic?
... in C++?
... in Java?

Do you know the first line a Perl script must start with?

Do you know what HTML stands for?
...PHP?
...ASP?
...CGI?

Do you know HTML?
... PHP?
... ASP??
... CGI?

Do you know what a vector is?
... Is it the same as an array?

Can you program in assembler on 2 different machines?
... on 4 different machines?
... on 8 different machines?

Have you ever heard of...
... APL?
... Ada?
... BCPL?
... C++?
... C?
... Comal?
... Eiffel?
... Forth?
... Fortran?
... Hypertalk?
... Icon?
... Lisp?
... Logo?
... MIIS?
... MUMPS?
... PL/I?
... Pilot?
... Plato?
... Prolog?
... RPG?
... Rexx (or ARexx)?
... SETL?
... Smalltalk?
... Snobol?
... Turing (the programming language)?
... VHDL?

Can you talk VT-100?
... Postscript?
... SMTP?
... UUCP?
... English?


Disks:


Ever copied a copy-protected disk?

Have you ever made a "flippy" disk?
... Do you know what one is?

Have you ever recovered data from a damaged disk (HD, CD, floppy)?

Ever booted a naked floppy?


Networking:


Have you ever been logged in to two different time zones at once?

Have you ever packet sniffed?
... Did you understand the output?

Have you ĉused' (I don't mean for normal use) a sendmail server?
... Was it to forge email?

Do you know what the HOSTS.TXT table is for?
... Have you memorized it?

Can you name all the top-level name servers?
... Have you memorized their addresses?

Do you know what a MAC address is?

Do you understand how ARP works?

Have you ever bypassed router restrictions?

Can you banner grab?

Do you know the maximum length of distance vector?


Operating Systems:


Can you use...
... BSD Unix?
... non-BSD Unix?
... IRIS?
... MS-DOS?
... Win 3.1?
... WinNT?
... IOS?
... OS/2?
... OS/X?

Do you know what the following are...
... AIX
... VM/CMS?
... VMS?
... TOPS-10?
... PRIME?
... RSTS/E?
... GS/1?
... COS?
... NOS?
... Decserver?
... IRIS?
... IRIX?
... HP-x000?
... Multics?
... ITS?
... Vulcan?

Have you ever manually edited the registry?

Do you know what HKLM stands for?
... HKCR?
... HKCC?

Have you ever found an operating system bug?
... Did you exploit it?
... Did you report it?
... Did it really turn out to be a bug?

Have you ever killed the kernel?
... Intentionally?


People:


Do you know any people?
... more than one?
... more than two?

Can you social engineer?
... Do you know what it is?


Personal:


Is your box on 24/7?

Do you log in before breakfast?

Are you addicted caffeine?

Do you answer an either/or question with "yes"?

Do you own an up-to-date copy of any operating system manual?
... *every* operating system manual?

Do other people have difficulty using your customized environment?

Do you dream in any programming languages and escape characters?

Do you find the fourth dimension interesting?
... Did you ever create a representation of a 4D object (virtually or physically)?

Do you despise the CAPS LOCK key?

Do you believe menus belong in restaurants?

Is your desk covered with hardware?

Have you decorated with CDs or floppies?

Ever made "snowflake patterns" with floppies?

Have you ever seen the dawn (while sitting at your computer)?
... Twice in a row?

Do you use "foobar" in daily conversation?
... "bletch"?
... "box"?

Do you automatically respond to any user question with RTFM?
... Do you know what it stands for?

Do you think garbage collection means memory management?

Do you have problems allocating horizontal space in your room/office?

Do you have a handle?

Have you ever taken the ORIGINAL Hacker Test?

Ever have an out-of-CPU experience?

Ever been in a flame war?
... Aren't they fun?

Do you talk to the person next to you via computer?


Programming:


Can you write a keylogger?
... a port scanner?

Can you read machine dump?

Can you disassemble code in your head?

Have you ever written...
... a compiler?
... an operating system?
... a device driver?
... a text editor?
... a binary converter?
... a database system?
... a compression program?
... a networking protocol?
... a virus?
... exploit code?
... a priv escalation exploit?
... race condition exploit?

Can you script in batch?
... a virus in batch?

Have you ever found a prime number of more than a 500 digits?
... found a way to factor astronomical numbers and broke PGP?

Have you ever computed pi to more than a million decimal places?
... the number e?

Have you ever written self-modifying code?
... Are you proud of it?

Did you ever write a program that ran correctly the first time?
... Was it longer than 20 lines?
... 100 lines?
... Was it in assembly language?
... Did it work the second time?

Can you solve (using programming) the Towers of Hanoi recursively?
... Non-recursively?

Do you know what a matrix is (no, not the movie :P)?

Do you know how to do XOR?
... Can you solve 1001010101 and 1110101101 XORed?

Do you know DeMorgan's Law?
... Can you solve !((a <= b) && (b > c) || (c != a))?
... Was your answer (a > b) || (b <= c) && (c == a)?

Ever spend ten minutes trying to find a single-character error in your code?
... More than an hour?
... More than a day?
... More than a week?
... Did the first person you show it to find it immediately?


Unix:


Can you use Berkeley Unix?
... Solaris?

Can you use the man pages?

Do you know what the 9 deadly keystrokes are?

Do you know what the Unix file system is like?

Do you know the max length for a Unix pw?

Do you know a priv escalation technique using "file"?
... Have you ever used it?


Windows:


Is it crappier than Unix?

Can you use the net * commands?

Do you think Win2k is the most fun Win OS to mess with?

Do you know any IIS exploits?

Have you ever corrupted the registry?
... Did you recover without losing important data?

Can you use SMB?
... Do you know what it is?

Can you answer the following...
Should you run a web server as LS?
... Do you know what LS is?

Does a Win pw ever cross the wire?

Are Win2k pw's hashed?

What does nbtstat do?
... What does it stand for?

What does netstat do?

Have you ever seen the Blue Screen of Death?

Do you know how to make custom login banners?


Phreaking:


Do you know what it is?

Can you name all of the 'colors' of boxes?
... and their associated functions?

Do blue boxes still work?

Have you read PlowskÑ Phreak's "How To Begin In The World Of H/P"?