lpret's Journal: Mentors Hacker Manifesto

I've started checking Zone-H.org's list of defacements that are pretty much live. It's interesting to read what people are willing to get caught for are saying. I've found that in the last couple days, most are Turkish or Morrocan hackers who are against the war in Iraq and dislike Bush. Ok, that's pretty standard, but what else is out there? I found a page that is in Florida, presumably one by the department of state. It was an unpatched NT4 box, so it wasn't that hard I would assume. Well, here's what the kid wrote:

Another one got caught today, it's all over the papers. "Teenager Arrested in Computer Crime Scandal", "Hacker Arrested after Bank Tampering"...

Damn kids. They're all alike.

But did you, in your three-piece psychology and 1950's technobrain, ever take a look behind the eyes of the hacker? Did you ever wonder what made him tick, what forces shaped him, what may have molded him?

I am a hacker, enter my world...

Mine is a world that begins with school... I'm smarter than most of the other kids, this crap they teach us bores me...

Damn underachiever. They're all alike.

I'm in junior high or high school. I've listened to teachers explain for the fifteenth time how to reduce a fraction. I understand it. "No, Ms. Smith, I didn't show my work. I did it in my head..."

Damn kid. Probably copied it. They're all alike.

I made a discovery today. I found a computer. Wait a second, this is cool. It does what I want it to. If it makes a mistake, it's because I screwed it up. Not because it doesn't like me... Or feels threatened by me... Or thinks I'm a smart ass... Or doesn't like teaching and shouldn't be here...

Damn kid. All he does is play games. They're all alike.

And then it happened... a door opened to a world... rushing through the phone line like heroin through an addict's veins, an electronic pulse is sent out, a refuge from the day-to-day incompetencies is sought... a board is found.

"This is it... this is where I belong..."

I know everyone here... even if I've never met them, never talked to them, may never hear from them again... I know you all...

Damn kid. Tying up the phone line again. They're all alike...

You bet your ass we're all alike... we've been spoon-fed baby food at school when we hungered for steak... the bits of meat that you did let slip through were pre-chewed and tasteless. We've been dominated by sadists, or ignored by the apathetic. The few that had something to teach found us willing pupils, but those few are like drops of water in the desert.

This is our world now... the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore... and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge... and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals.

Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for.

I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto. You may stop this individual, but you can't stop us all... after all, we're all alike.

---Mentors Hacker Manifesto

So, that's what's written on there. The Hacker Manifesto. Basically, the kid is saying, I don't fit in the system -- I am so beyond what they are trying to teach me. This his whole reason for starting to hack. It's to do something that is worth his time. I know this feeling really well, I felt it all through high school. But I didn't start go hacking, I just found social things to do -- for me social things were much harder to do than computers. You write a program correctly, and it works. You act "correctly" and you don't make the friends/girlfriends. It's a whole different world to be able to survive and do well in the social world. It wasn't enough for me to continue writing programs and stuff, I found that tedious and repetitive. The only difference from what I was doing and what some uber-programmer was doing was a whole lot more time spent in front of the monitor. On the converse, I am now able to interact in the social world -- much more than some computer people I know. Yet I can still program. I play bass guitar -- mostly funk and jazz, but I enjoy a little RATM once in a while. I am a dj, I can sense the mood of the crowd and play what they want. I drove a Toyota Corolla WRC 2.0L up to World Rally Class specs competitively. I enjoy fashion, to me, confidence comes from knowing your own style. And girls.

You see? I focused on the opposite side of the spectrum -- learning more about how to interact with other people instead of learning how programs interact. It was perhaps the greatest move I ever made. I am now a Human Resources major. I love observing people's behaviour and their reasoning behind it. I love finding out how to create the best environment for a worker -- how to best train them for their job. People are so much more complicated than computers that it's years ahead of trying to write a script that automates picking your clothes for you. but that's just me.

I have seen this before

[Dr Reducto]

I think it was in some hacking e-zine a long time ago.