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  • Hacker News
  • >how to do SQL injection, how to use rainbow tables to figure out hashes, how to use steganography to hide data in images, and more.

    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.

    by charcircuit
  • Eh… I just went to Stack Overflow and searched for "php mysql", and the first result (https://stackoverflow.com/q/79790370) – asked 12 days ago – had SQL injection
    by twostraws
  • Cool idea I was going to check it out but I don’t want to update my iPad to the latest OS for jailbreaky reasons. Any chance you could release support for something slightly before 18.5?
    by VladVladikoff
  • The app only uses one API from iOS 18 and later, so from a coding perspective I could make it support older versions easily. However, the bigger problem is testing: right now I test each release thoroughly on iPhone, iPad, and Mac, across iOS 18 and iOS 26, so adding another iOS version would require another set of devices and more time.
    by twostraws
  • Nice, I am a fan of this idea and have been trying to figure out the right way to engage my niece in computers in a real way. One of my biggest concerns from seeing how it impacted my stepdaughter (now in college) is how kids are not learning how general purpose computers work and are becoming too comfortable existing entirely in restricted environments like iPads and Chromebooks. With my niece, I'm taking more active measures to ensure she learns how things actually work.

    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.

    by tristor
  • Thank you! I hope you enjoy using the app together.
    by twostraws
  • Huge respect for not just building a tool, but building an experience that demystifies hacking in a structured, ethical, and genuinely fun way
    by TimByte
  • Thank you! I poured a lot of time and energy into making sure challenges are unique and interesting, but also graded so folks follow a cohesive pathway, and also feel fun – it's as close to a "Hollywood-hacker" aesthetic as I could get.
    by twostraws
  • Nice.. But Damn.. Apple only : (
    by rogermungo
  • Yeah, sorry; I know my limitations, and would rather do one thing very well than two things kinda average.
    by twostraws
  • I have not used the app but the developer Paul Hudson was the guy who taught me Swift and UIKit when I was in college and wanted to dig into iOS development for fun. He’s truly gifted when it comes to teaching.
    by mbsa7
  • Thank you for your kind words! I've spent over a decade teaching folks to build apps, and it's something I hope I can continue doing for a long time to come.
    by twostraws
  • Such a great idea and product!

    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.

    by agigao
  • >And if you’re dead set against Apple devices, you should check out the web version of Hacktivate – it’s not as powerful or as fun, but it’s entirely web-based and free!)
    by bob_theslob646
  • There's a separate version of the app that is a one-time purchase, with zero in-app purchases. It's available here: https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/hacktivate-education-edition/i...
    by twostraws
  • Just FYI: The App Store has an Education Edition which is the “same app but paid up front”.
    by Msurrow
  • Where would this sit between Over the Wire [0] and Hacknet [1]? I would try it but I don't own anything apple.

    [0] https://overthewire.org/wargames/bandit/

    [1] https://hacknet-os.com/

    by Zhyl
  • There's a web version at: https://www.hacktivate.io/

    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"?

    by Flere-Imsaho
  • The supposed target of this game do not at all match who can actually play it. Kids don't have Macs. Those who want to hack don't have iPhones. I would even say that a kid with an iPhone will never get the necessary curiosity about computers to want to hack anything.
    by vhantz
  • Why would people who want to hack not have iPhones?
    by wingerlang
  • I am no hacker, but for me it was exactly this which made me go What?!
    by Gerard0
  • i think this is a terrible assumption to make. the computer or phone a kid gets from their parents has nothing to do with their curiosity, intelligence, interests or ambitions.
    by liziwizi
  • I was with you up until the last statement which does not seem plausible at all. Curiosity about computers is not something you are born with.
    by dooglius
  • This is categorically not true. Source: watched a bunch of people enter the jailbreak scene
    by saagarjha
  • My son has been highly motivated to learn about hacking in his iPad to hack some of the games they play for school (blooket and prodigy). Those are web based games, true, but fiddling with the dev console, editing the dom, and finding and pasting scripts, is not nothing.
    by le-mark
  • I don't think you can recreate this in any top-down manner no matter how well-intentioned.

    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.

    by bonoboTP
  • I have found this while trying to teach my kids how to write anything software related from scratch. They've done some code.org, but it becomes boring quickly. We tried to make tic-tac-toe in js/html/css since they can do they whole thing in the browser. It held their attention slightly longer, but still became boring. It's not something they want to do.

    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.

    by 91bananas
  • In the early 2000s, growing up in a third-world country with limited resources meant computers and operating systems were constantly breaking. That scarcity pushed me to tinker and experiment, I learned to troubleshoot hardware, reinstall OSes, and reverse-engineer odd behaviors. I even experimented with keyloggers out of curiosity. That practical, trial-and-error schooling is where a lot of the so called “common sense” about security comes from. It is less theory, more failing, fixing, and learning what actually keeps one safe online.

    I think it all stemmed from curiosity to learn and tinker. I wonder if gamifying it is enough but it’s a step.

    by sikimiki
  • That era of breaking-and-fixing out of necessity was like the ultimate bootcamp
    by TimByte
  • I suspect gamifying it isn't enough, but as you say it's a step, and if it helps more people get involved then hopefully others can provide more steps to follow.
    by twostraws