Geek Is *Not* Chic

Point 01: Geek counter-culture
Point 02: NULL pointer exploit

It's hard to pinpoint exactly when it started, but it did. All of a sudden, 'geek' was the new 'cool.' Why did this happen? What sort of Twilight-Zone-Screetch-Is-Zack-Morris wormhole did we travel through?

Some of us think back to the geek, nerd, spaz, dweeb, pointdexter caricatures of Revenge of the Nerds, Family Matters, and Saved By the Bell. There was no uncertainty in these movies/shows. On one side were the cool kids: popular, athletic, attractive, go-getters; and then there was the rest: quirky, spasmatic, socially awkward, occasionally smart, outcasts. While these geeky characters were surely popular, they certainly weren't setting any trends or serving as role-models to young, impressionable viewers.

Then I recall a timid, unassuming, Ed-Grimley-looking, civil engineering student from UC Berkley humbly slink his way in front of a 3-judge panel and about 20 million viewers and proceed to create a cultural phenomenon. Following that, some genius TV executives figured out that there's gold in those dere hills and we saw a slew of geek-themed programming in the form of original, new shows. Sometimes we laughed at the geeks: Beauty and the Geek, The Big Bang Theory. Other times, we laughed with the geeks: The IT Crowd, Freaks and Geeks.

So there was the turning point. Geek becamse synomimous with cool. However, as with any over-used, over-hyped meme it has completely diluted and devalued the original idea it was supposed to represent. In a way, geeks were the counter-counter-culture hippies of the 90s and 2000s (in the 90s, the counter-culture was grunge and in the 2000s it was... still waiting on that one). Then all of a sudden the counter-culture gets a brand name sticker slapped on its carefully-starched, overly-tight, pocket-protected polo (metaphorically speaking) and everyone wants to be part of the geek revolution. We now have books and websites that celebrate the once-shunned.

If you're a computer science geek like me, you become unexplicably, and--to be completely honest--frighteningly excited about recent work done over at IBM. Mark Dowd was able to document a reliable, cross-platform, virtually undetectable NULL pointer exploit in Flash. Even for some hardcore CompSci geeks the original paper may be a little daunting so I recommend this little writep if you're confused. I recommend you read the writeup and then read the white paper to fill in the details. As we in the computer business know, when an application tries to access and/or dereference a NULL pointer, the application crashes. In addition, many application crashes and/or bugs can be linked back to NULL pointers. However, until now, even though they were everywhere, many had thought that trying to exploit them was pointless or even impossible. Afterall, what can you do with it if it's just going to crash the application anyway. This is why most of today's application exploits deal with buffer overflows instead. Mark Dowd has shown everyone that they were just lazy, stupid and just plain wrong about NULL pointers.

To me, as I read this paper, it was like peering into the brain of Einstein as he was figuring out relativity. It is a glimpse into the mind of a genious. I only wish more people could understand what this man was able to figure out. As I read it, I decided that the word 'geek' gets thrown around a little too casually nowadays. Therefore I am going to reclaim this word for the true geeks out there so that it does not become the next 'extreme.'

If you see someone claim geekiness because they check their local weather on Google or upload their birthday pictures to Flickr, let them know that it takes far more ability than that to be truly one of us. You may be chic with your BSOD t-shirt and frapaccino specs, but you are *not* geek because of it.

"It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value."
- Arthur C. Clarke