I will agree and disagree with this depending on the definition of “hack.” If you mean that you can make the program behave in a way that the original programmers did not expect then yes you can hack anything. If you mean being able to run an exploit against the program, more specifically a remote exploit then no you can’t hack anything. I believe the original discussion is about the latter.

If a program has no bugs then there is no way an exploit can be found. The definition of an exploit is taking advantage of a bug in the software. The tricky part of this definition is there have never been any bug free programs and there never will be. Even a simple hello world program may be prone to an exploit at some time due to a bug in the underlying OS or any of the API’s called. In the software engineering community bugs are measured as defects (bugs) per 1000 source lines of code. A good number that a program should shoot for is usually around 2. This means that a program with thousands or even millions of lines of code will always have bugs.

The technical answer is that you can create a program that can not be exploited but the practical answer is that you can always be able to exploit a program.

I agree with ethergeek about Google and their opensourceness... simply because on Jabber, it's quite universal, I can use basically any third party client or iChat to go on Jabber and talk with my friends on Google Talk (which really is just Jabber).

However, I'm forced to use Windows Live Messenger since most of them are on the network. Now I use WLM, AIM, Skype and Jabber. If these companies would just all agree and merge their stuff into Jabber, my life would be so much simpler, but in the world of closed source software and everything must be = $$, I don't see that happening any time soon.

xboxrulz

i wouldnt waste your time trying to hack it. Not saying it cant be done just its really really hard now a days. Its not like the good old days were you could brute force it. There servers have high security. good luck though.