There is an amount of admiration for hackers, those system wizards that know far more than many PhD holders. It is powerful to be able to gain entry to secret information and as we all know, power corrupts. This is why there is a distinction between hackers; the White and the Black.

White hackers are the Robin Hoods, believe in information freedom, uncover secrets that are dangerous or harmful to the public, or plain unfair. Proprietary software to them is evil and open source the holy grail. They do not damage systems and can even help protect a system by informing the admins of holes. As an example, most police officers working on IT crimes have elements of White Hackers.

Black hackers on the other hand are the ones that crash systems, invade databases to destroy them or copy data to pass along to others for financial gain. There is no nobility in their actions, simply the need to spread chaos. The ideology is one of supremacy; if you were hacked, you simply were not strong enough, tough break.

Although most, if not all, hacking is a crime, the distinction is real.

When people admire hackers (and by people I mean members of the general public) it is the White hackers they admire. Which is how games such as Uplink and Hacker Evolution (henceforth HE) exist.

I prefer Uplink as I find HE too confining. Uplink has a better system of hiding your tracks compared to HE . In HE a trace is magically always on and depends on varying amounts on what you do. A wrong server ping will give you 1% more trace, while a password break will increase the trace by 15%. The way to reduce the trace is to run a log parser that automatically goes through the system and depending on what you did cuts down (anything from 0% to 12%), or to pay $500 for a 10% reduction. There are a lot of action in HE that raise your trace by more than 10% and the log parser never balances out. So one always needs to steal money to pay for trace reductions. Also, if you leave the game on forever, no one is ever going to catch you; you only get caught if your trace reaches 100%.

While that approach is understandable as a means of control over the actions of the gamer in balancing action with reaction and exploration in an effort to enforce tactical thinking instead of endless time attrition of the target system, hackers don’t do that.

Uplink has a better way. You are an agent for a hacking firm and you pick hacking jobs from the bulletin. Complete them and you get money, which you NEVER have to spend to cover your tracks. Money in Uplink is only for upgrades, either of the software you use or the machine upgrades of your gateway (which, in Uplink, is the computer you control remotely, so you give it a better CPU and you run decryptions faster). Tracing is either active or passive. Active tracing is initiated when you do something suspicious or something that is set as a flag. For instance, logging in with an admin account will always start an active trace, no matter what you do. If the trace reaches your gateway, it’s game over. Passive trace is in essence a person that goes through the logs of every server you went through till he reaches your gateway. This is much slower but always happens, even if you did not activate an active trace. So the way for you to cover your tracks is to bounce the connection through as many servers as possible to prolong the time the active trace will take and, more importantly, to go back to one server along the bounce route (usually the first one) and delete the logs that will incriminate you. This way the passive trace will end at this server as the enemy operator cannot find your gateway.

This is closer to what I think is like real world hacking. That is not to say that Uplink does not have its faults. One big one is really ridiculous. Most players have found out that there is one server that never changes the password for the admin account and more importantly, never traces you. Hence, it is the perfect server to start the bounce, and most do. All hacks in the game start with this server as the first in the long chain of server bouncing. All hacks end with the players logging to that server with no bounce and deleting the logs that point to them.

So here is the question; why would the game police not hack this server since 99% of all game hacks went through that server? Ah well…

If you like Uplink, check out this guide but careful of the spoilers.