Hacking gets a bad reputation and there is of course a good reason for that, but it’s not entirely true. Of course hacking has it’s negative sides I’m not going to try and argue that it doesn’t, but I think that to often those negatives are focused on to much despite their positives.  So I hope to maybe spread the word that it’s not all bad and there are good things that come out of it.

Hacking tends to lead to piracy it’s a sad fact that I have to accept and I refuse to try and deny. People hack their Xbox or the Ps3 and the download pirated games burn them and play them with giving a cent to the company that made them. None of this is untrue so I refuse to deny it, but there is a lighter side to this.

Hacking leads to innovation. It’s true it does you would be amazed at some of the things we have now that we didn’t before simply because someone hacked something. I think a great current example is the kinect for the 360. The device came out with one purpose, but with a little research you can see people hacking it and doing so many clever things with the device it truly is amazing. It’s still early, but with what they are achieving by hacking the Kinect it boggles the mind to think of the many advances and tech we may make and all because a guy thought “What else can it do?”. This could lead to a new device that capitalizes on these new discoveries or it could lead to microsoft realizing there is a market for these new things and unlocking their device to accept them. The possibilities are endless.

Check out the Iphone and all that has been achieved by the people who hacked it. For the Iphone it’s called Jailbreak and the honestly it’s a much more fitting term. If you knew half the things your iphone can do that apple doesn’t allow you would be amazed. In fact the benefits to Jailbreaking are so huge that the federal government ruled that it wasn’t illegal to do. Do you have the unfortunate situation of being stuck with an old model Iphone like the 3G? These old ones don’t allow you to record video despite having the capability. Did you know that if you jailbroke your Iphone  that the old 3G model of yours could actually record video? Recently Apple added categories, backgrounding and tethering. Do you know where that started and why they added it? Jailbreakers started these things. Apple didn’t allow it for years, but these hackers found a way in to the system to allow these features that this amazing product was capable of, but the manufacturer didn’t allow. So Apple to try and curve people away from jailbreaaking and finally allowed it. A feature that should of been basic with the iphone custom backgrounds and text tones was not allowed either until only recently, but take a guess at who was able to do it first and where it started. That’s not even everything It would take me weeks to explain every thing you can do with a jail broken iphone, but I’ll leave you with this. My Jailbroken Iphone 3G is better than your non Jailbroken Iphone 4 because I have more features many more in fact and your newly added features I’ve had for years and they still work better for me. I also don’t have reception trouble *Cough Cough.

The PSP is not that different either. Sadly people mostly use their hacked PSP to pirate games, but there are many other features. People have managed to turn it in to an emulator to play Nintendo or even Ps1 games on their PSP. Other homebrew (as it’s called) allows you to essentially turn your PSP in to a portable computer. You can add notepad, calculators and all kinds of other things. People even create their own games off of these homebrews. I don’t think Sony purposely left out many of these I think mostly they just never thought to add them. That’s the great thing about the hacking though because these guys have all this time to be creative and think of never before done things to these devices.

All of this is evidence of how hacking pushes us forward and benefits us in positive ways. Companies like Apple (and it’s not just them) purposely leave things out so that you get excited for the next new exciting phone that lets you have that feature you always wanted. The sad truth however is that the phone you already have could of done it had they not purposely blocked it or straight up neglected to add it.  This is why hacking benefits us all because it pushes these companies to not leave things out to try and continue to advance rather than adding features they could of added three models ago. Sadly when most of you thinking about hacking you think about pirating things and don’t realize the endless possibilities this brings us. Especially with the fact that not all hacks bring good. The 360 hack is only for pirating games there are no cool applications that microsoft left out and this kind of hack makes the rest look bad.

I just hope next time you hear about something being hacked or think about hacking a device your mind doesn’t instantly go to pirating games or other things and maybe just maybe you spend a little time thinking about the benefits for us all.

Related articles

• New ‘Untrackerd’ Jailbreak Hack Stops iOS From Storing Location Data (cultofmac.com)
• The Pros & Cons Of Using Hacked iPhone Apps (makeuseof.com)
• Websites now offering hack-free iPhone unlocking (tuaw.com)