Internet today what's left for hobbiests 2418

Plenty, though I realize sometimes it's not obvious under the commercial gloss that coats home computer use these days.

There's more open-source software available than anyone could look at in a lifetime. Go to Sourceforge and browse for projects that grab your interest. They all need work.

There are plenty of open-source OSes, both for running your actual hardware and emulated. Hack away.

Grey-hat security research is a hotbed. Go to SecurityFocus and sign up for BUGTRAQ and VULN-DEV. Start researching and developing exploits. Software security is slowly improving, but it's only gone from "unmitigated disaster" to "slightly mitigated disaster". There are tremendous resources available now, online and commercial (books and clbuttes), for all aspects of security work, from the most abstract to the dirtiest.

Play with esoteric programming languages. We're discussing APL and J in another thread; they're not as esoteric as some, but they're on the fringe. And there's a whole webring of truly esoteric languages, like INTERCAL and Unlambda, which exist just to make things difficult for programmers. They might not be practical, but they can be a lot of fun and an enlightening experience.

There's a thread right now in comp.programming where people are making lists of things "every programmer should do".1,2 It's worth checking out - might give you some ideas for new projects to take on.

I'd say this is actually in some ways the best era for hacking that we've seen yet. True, the glory days of bumming code are mostly over (though not entirely - most computer systems are still small embedded ones with very tight resource constraints). But opportunities abound and a tremendous amount of information is readily available.

--

The way things were, were the way things were, and they stayed that way because they had always been that way. -- Jon Osborne