Why I'm Teaching Kids to Hack Computers
Posted3 months agoActive2 months ago
hacktivate.appTechstoryHigh profile
skepticalmixed
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CybersecurityEducationGaming
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Cybersecurity
Education
Gaming
The author is teaching kids to hack computers through a gamified app, but the community raises concerns about the app's design, target audience, and potential consequences.
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Oct 22, 2025 at 10:07 AM EDT
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I think it all stemmed from curiosity to learn and tinker. I wonder if gamifying it is enough but it’s a step.
1. there was a disk notcher (the Nibbler?) that would DOUBLE the capacity of a 5 1/4 floppy!
2. you could just use a regular paper hole punch and a few select clips to do the same thing!
All my C64 floppies had faint parallel pencil lines across the top to line up the slots and what looked like mouse-nawed holes on one side.
Amazing what you learn when you have no other distraction xD
Growing up with fewer resources than others paradoxically leads to better outcomes sometimes, since you’re conscious of the barriers around you and that motivates you to overcome them.
If I had grown up with the latest iPhone I would never have cared about rooting and custom ROMs, for example.
Hardware hacking tools have gotten more accessible since then. The Flipper Zero makes this easier now; 256KB RAM, open firmware, $200. Compare that to needing a full PC setup in the 2000s. Lower barrier, same curiosity-driven learning.
Guided challenges vs pure exploration; both work. The structure gets more people started. The ones who stick around will break out of the sandbox anyway.
I never figured out how to do that "cat flag" terminal privilege escalation.
https://www.hacktivate.app/img/framed-ipad-3.png
The game industry needs to move away from milking vulnerable people with pay-to-win schemes.
The link I used is the one from your site.
But you're right, the tutorial is playable too and it consists of the same kind of challenges, not just simple explanations how to play. So my initial statement was not correct.
https://nobsgames.stavros.io/
I feel like there are more practical and timeless topics that will still be relevant in 2040. Frameworks (abstraction) have largely solved SQL injection and bad cryptography.
Personally I would avoid a cybersecurity focused corriculum and just focus on regular software engineering. Being able to think like who you are attacking and knowing the common pitfalls is most of the battle.
It has to matter to them, and what's more, it gives you extra boost if you aren't supposed to do it and no parent or teacher pats you on the shoulder, but rather your friends or people in online forums like it, or simply you like it for yourself, seeing that the computer does what you want.
I learned computers by making a website for my school class, where we would put pictures from events and excursions, hosted a chat and a phpbb, designed the graphical elements in cracked warez Photoshop etc. This forced me to naturally pick up the skills. HTML, JS, burning ISO to CD, downloading things etc. Also warez games, learning about the Program Files difectory at like age 8 and how to copy the cracked exe there. Or setting up port forwarding for multi-player gaming.
Or when I modded GTA (3/VC/SA) with new car models that I built in 3D modeling software based on hunting down the orthographic projection blueprints of our family car, or adding the police vehicles from my country in GTA, messing with textures etc.
Or translating games from English, reverse engineering the binary file that contained the strings, I figures out that the length of each string was also there and I had to modify that too, learn about big endian and little endian, learn to work with a hex editor, understand what hex is. It was super exciting. If I had a lecture from some teacher about hex representation with some exercises at the end of the chapter for homework, I likely would have found it boring. But here I had context, I had a goal, and I had no idea what I was looking at when I opened the hex editor, I just saw that people used similar tools for translating other games and so I tried on less popular games where nobody had a specialized tool yet, it felt like making discoveries, going deep into the jungle and prevailing.
Now to contradict myself, I did have a lot of fun also while solving PythonChallenge.com, even though it's artificial tasks. But at least I found it myself online and wasn't handed to me and nobody knew or cared that I was working on it.
So I think this is just really hard to externally motivate if the kids don't have any desires or drive to see some effect caused by them. And maybe even I wouldn't do it in the current software and phone environment.
But we also have to remember that a generation ago it was also not many people who were really into computers.
I totally agree with you on learning for a purpose, picking up knowledge is super easy imo when you're in pursuit of a goal bigger than picking up knowledge. You don't even realize all of the things you learn in order to achieve your goal. But you have to want a goal.
I also totally agree sometimes it's fun to just do dumb problems, I found these CAD modeling youtube videos where guys will race each other modeling some part off of a print, spent a week just screwing around with those because it's fun to flex sometimes.
It gave me some head start that I knew Python and JS when learning C, but not super much. Other students, who were smart but didn't fiddle with computers as much, generally picked these things up along the way, 4-5 years college is plenty time to develop the skills if you got the talent.
Also my understanding of networks was super shallow based on just multi player gaming and learning router settings, and I only really built a proper mental model in college with OSI model, TCP/IP details, reading the Tanenbaum book, doing socket programming etc.
So these generic tech and computer skills are in my opinion more about giving people a sense of agency, which is still quite something. That you put together your own PC, that you download your own subtitle files for the movies and figure out how to adjust the sync to match your version of the movie etc. It just gives you a feeling that you can do things. If something is wrong, you can, and therefore want to fix it. It's a different attitude compared to just accepting everything as it is.
Thanks for all the hard work.
However, please get rid of micro-transactions...
I'm fine paying full price of the product for my kid, but not micro-transactions.
I get the market forces and such but I don't want to have an app subtly teach my non-existent kids to reach out to in-app purchases like that.
In the old days, the free version would be a limited preview of the game, and would direct users to purchase the full game. We called it a demo or shareware, as in you were intended to share and copy it widely.
You could also have the “in app purchase” be the full game unlock.
Dont get me wrong, at that time very little ppl in my country had ccs to actually buy any software even if, they wouldnt give it to kids :)
The fact that this isn’t open source, as it stands, means the latter is not a primary goal - which is not an indictment, just an observation.
The complaints will come, regardless, for that reason alone, given the marketing/narrative.
You’re selling a product to parents/educators who want to gamify the technical education of their children. That market, small as it is, despises micro transactions.
There are plenty of arguments for open sourcing things. “Closed source apps necessarily deprioritize helping children” is not an obvious argument to me. Can you draw the connection more explicitly?
Not to mention, it’s an app trying to help kids get exposed to underpinning technologies - seeing how the game itself is made would be optimizing for that end.
It’s not that closed source deprioritizes, but the “helping kids” were the sole and primary goal sought, there’s a clear answer to what would align with that.
All said, it’s not a critique of the OP - reconciling ideals and practical reality often require trade offs that would allow for a project like this to happen in the first place.
I also think there's a lot of people out there who would pay to have Hacktivate running offline, using the full power of their device, and with no external resources being required, so I made that too.
Suggesting that I need to make them open source to prove I want to help kids learn is really strange, particularly when literally thousands of students around the world are benefitting from my work without paying a cent.
But so too is making money off the iOS app, correct?
This isn’t “HackVille by Zynga,” it’s an indie dev trying to make a product they believe in. I hope it succeeds and inspires more high quality edutainment.
It'd be nice if we had robust, no-strings attached funding streams to make this kind of content, but we don't, so if we want it to exist, consumers need to pay for it.
I think it’s fair to claim that a large enterprise will eventually crank the money dial to maximum extraction. But a solo dev is free to follow their conscience and make money in a responsible way.
I don’t like the “pay per hint” model as currently implemented, but I’m willing to give the developer the benefit of the doubt that they didn’t think it all the way through.
2. Is it really true that "the game is X levels and in-app purchases is a-lot-more-levels" is banned but "the game is Y levels and limited features and in-app purchases gets you features and hints" is not?
https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#bet...
FWIW my favorite non-predatory pattern is a level-limited free version with a single “unlock full game” IAP. That way users don’t have to lose their progress switching to paid.
So take advice where it’s offered but don’t mistake complaints for advice.
When they get into the groove, at X+1 level show them "Did you like this? You can get 200+ levels if you convince your parents that this is a worthwhile investment for your learning." (copy TBD) and bam, you have a traditional game with a demo and a way to buy it that doesn't train kids to expect in-app purchases for every breath they take.
And btw, $25 is high even for an indie steam game, a mobile game will be even harder to market at that price. Just FYI. Best of luck!
I was not aware how predatory this market has become until an annual subscription after a "one week trial" renewed itself automatically despite having been already cancelled on the last day.
I'm assuming the money is lost because third party subscriptions might require earlier cancellation, but that was the last time I allowed for anything with such a short trial period.
> https://dmarket.com/blog/most-expensive-csgo-skins
> https://tradeit.gg/csgo/store
And that's another topic, plus this is part of the gameplay, not just some cosmetic stuff.
this is awesome, but way easier on a cheaper, more accessible device.
[0] https://overthewire.org/wargames/bandit/
[1] https://hacknet-os.com/
I don't believe you need Apple hardware for this.
However the blog post states "it’s not as powerful or as fun, but it’s entirely web-based and free". Not sure what is meant by "not as powerful"?
I bought the full version because I'm not a fan of in-app purchases in things marketed at children, and I'll give it a playthrough myself first to make sure it fits the bill. One of the upcoming projects we're going to do together is to build a mechanical keyboard. I'm also going to build a PC with her and try to teach her the basics so she can explore mostly uninhibited on Linux.
You need to understand your market better!
https://www.hackingwithswift.com/
They embrace learning for all levels and helped me so much getting into infosec professionally.