Qoan-e-Gaohari-39

Renowned computer hacker and social engineer Bachhuda asked Badshah Namdar Gaohar, “Tell me O Guru, what is the best operating system and programming language for a hacker.”

Badshah Gaohar smiled and gave him a URL to the ‘Best of 90s rock.’

Bachhuda was enlightened.

Becoming an artist does not merely mean learning something, acquiring professional techniques and methods. Indeed, as someone has said, in order to write well you have to forget the grammar.  -Andrei Tarkovsky

This installment is about one of the most controversial questions always asked in the tech world but often safely ignored by geeks and veterans who chuckle warmly to avoid such fruitless arguments.

Isn’t it a surprise that people never ask questions like:

1. What’s the best language for being a poet? (Assume there’s no language politics.)
2. What’s the best pen and paper for writing a masterpiece poem?

I believe hacking is a branch of the Art of Thinking. To be precise, a branch of Philosophy. The process of being a hacker, aka binary wizard, is not different from being a poet or a guitarist. I’ve never heard poets or guitarists arguing about which pen, paper, guitar or gear is best for their creation.

I think Operating Systems and Programming Languages solely depend on a user’s expected results, the problems s/he wants to solve, needs, philosophy, passion and superstitions.

Here, the term superstition stands for excessively credulous belief in and reverence for a community, outlook, logo or brand.

The whole concept of the avant-garde in art is meaningless. I can see what it means when applied to sport, for instance. But to apply it to art would be to accept the idea of progress in art; and though progress has an obvious place in technology — more perfect machines, capable of carrying out their functions better and more accurately — how can anyone be more advanced in art? How could Thomas Mann be said to be better than Shakespeare?    - Andrei Tarkovsky

I am not a CS major. From my personal and professional experience, an operating system is a piece of software that gives a user I/O interface to a machine, provides tools to control it, maintains/automates hardware-software abstractions and accomplishes tasks as per the command(s) given by a user.

And a programming or scripting language is a pseudo-human language to communicate with a system or instruct it to accomplish and automate tasks.

From this point of view, arguing on which guitar and pedal is best for creating a heart-touching composition like ‘Coming back to Life’ is totally meaningless, isn’t it?

The maturity of man—that means, to have reacquired the seriousness that one had as a child at play. – Friedrich Nietzsche

During my office hours, hobbyist music recording and post-production sessions, the OS, programming language, and tools I use are not important. Moreover, the audience need not know how often I use cheap or faulty guitars and trivial daily life props to compose a piece of music. At home, I use Audacity for bare minimum editing on a Debian box.

When working from home, I use the same box equipped with Selenium and Python, Postman and JavaScript, OWASP ZAP and Burp Suite community edition with sprinkles of Bash scripts. There is also a virtual environment with Kali Linux that I sometimes use to create web application vulnerability PoC reports.

I push all of my code to GitHub and no longer need to worry about my official laptop, which runs on a Windows distribution.

I use Bash to automate tasks like controlling local and remote login in LAN nodes and configuring them, writing routines for scanning LAN for unwanted WiFi intrusion by keeping a log at certain intervals of time, and above all, automating utility tasks for daily needs.

Python is my first choice for developing web application automation suites, simple network and attack tools, and web scrappers that I can run both on *nix and *NT boxes smoothly with minimum or no tweaks at all.

That's all about my point of view to OSs, programming languages and their scopes.

Masterpieces like those of Jibanananda Das and WB Yeats were not created by a magical language or typewriter. Rather, the poets themselves wrote timeless poems with universal accessibility.

Similarly, no magical programming language or operating system exists as of today that can fly a system with a $ fly command or “hack” Google with root@kali# hack google --verbose. It is the geeky thinker who uses an operating system along with programming and scripting languages to solve problems and automate tedious and monotonous tasks.

Unfortunately, cyber criminals also use these same programming languages and operating systems to commit crimes. Even the "sophisticated NSA things" are written in the same programming languages and use the same operating systems; only the brains behind them differ.