With the latest Harry Potter book out and all the online fuss about it – somebody got a copy and leaked it online – I thought that now would be a good time to point out that the Harry Potter universe is nothing but a metaphor for Unix hacking.

Sure it is! Consider:

• Magic is nothing but hacking. It’s all a matter of knowing the right spell – particularly with Unix commands!
• Wands are just program shells.
• Potions are compiled C programs. A lot of magic compacted into a small container to be used later.
• The Hogwart’s Marauder’s map is nothing but the Unix ‘ps’ command. ‘Ps’, done with switches such as “aux”, will show every running process and who’s running it.
• The Avada Kedavra spell is the kill -9 command. Other unforgivable curses are just heavy-damage commands.
• The Obliviate spell is the equal to ‘rm -rf ./*’.
• The Pack spell is the ‘tar -cf ‘ command.
• The Accio spell is ‘apt-get’.
• The Imperio curse is the ‘sudo’ command.
• The houses are just user groups.
• The Hogwarts Express is a ssh session. At least when entered from platform 9 3/4.
• Lord Voldemort is, of course, a black-hat hacker.
• Hogwarts staff members are system admins. They range from the relatively benevolent wizard Dumbledore to the BOFH nature of Severus Snape.
• Hogsmeade is the Blogosphere.
• The owls are the email network. Note that they continue to resend packets as long as they keep getting dropped, and they can even spam a message!
• The house-elves are daemon processes. They’re always working invisibly in the background.
• The Floo Network is the Internet. Complete with an administrative body and special equipment which must be connected to function.
• Muggles are… users! Or more correctly, “lusers”, as a system admin would put it.
• An animagus is just a trojan virus. They can change their appearance to appear innocent while the infiltrate the system.

What? I could go on and on… and before you all start emailing it to each other, I think if we put our heads together in the comments we could complete the list. This was just off the top…

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