You might have known me as Dr on IRC Xnet back in the mid 1990s, or icebsd on 2600.org.au and Ruxcon in the 2000s. Or draichess (and j00n1x) in #hackers on yahoo in 2003.
I’m probably the guy that taught you C or C++ or x86 assembly on IRC or on a mailing list. Or talked about hacking, networking with the BSD socket API (TCP/IP/RAW) on Linux/SunOS. Or maybe even dabbled with you on low-level embedded systems.
Here’s what I attribute my knowledge to: my father.
He was really a great man. He passed away in 2010 from kidney cancer. He spent every dollar he earned on buying technology for me to learn. Stupid things. Like a Tatung Sun-compatible workstation that costs around $10k AUD. Or just providing the necessities like food, shelter and clothes; so that we weren’t starving and on the streets. That sort of thing.
Now that I’ve grown 25 or so years later, I feel that I need to do the same, but I have yet to find the right partner to start a family with. I also question what it would be like to have kids with this new “AI” industry that’s coming around. Would they learn to code? Would they learn anything at all? Does anyone care, unless you’re a billionaire?
I feel like that’s the wrong sort of thing to be headed. They need to stay humble and true to themselves and their passion. If it’s all just about being the richest person on the planet, then they will ultimately fall from grace.
However, being a hacker, you fall from grace from day one and accept it and move on. Everything you do is wrong. Wrong to society, wrong to everyone and everything. You break things. You want to see how “weird and funny” it would be to you if someone or something gets “repurposed” to doing something else. And then you either grow out of it, or turn it into your profession. But you can’t have it both ways. There’s no grey-hat middle ground. You’ll get screwed over the minute you try being both a white-hat hacker and a black-hat hacker.
So what’s the choice? You still strive to explore the unknown and find out what’s out there. But the law limits you. The law is defined by politicians and what they think they know what’s best. Or at least, what’s best for protecting people, which they believe is in the best interest of the public; hence why they got jobs as politicians. They need their votes.
Anyway, that’s the boring shit. The real cool shit is what people do after hours. Everybody is hitting it up. They look so innocent in the day time, but at night, they’re all animals. Nobody gives a damn. What do you mean, you might ask. Well, let’s just say you’re not human if you don’t react to your hormones once in awhile…
Now imagine a piece of technology — well, there’s plenty of tech that does this — but a special piece of technology that allows you to spy on anyone, at any particular point in the past… a form of physics…
It’s really simple to be honest. Light travels until it hits an object. But since light travels upwards to the atmosphere, it escapes out of earth’s orbit and keeps on going. If you were an advanced enough alien civilisation, you could see these light rays and find out what people are doing (unless they’re in the privacy of their own home, which case you won’t see visible light, but other electromagnetic spectrum). So the light keeps traveling. The further out it goes, 1 light-year, means it was 1 year old. So you can see in the past 1 year ago. And so on. You just have to be at the right point in the universe to see it.
Now here’s the kicker. You don’t have to be able to travel FASTER than LIGHT to track that photon. What if I told you the universe isn’t expanding? What if the universe was really just a singularity and we didn’t know it? Or if it was some holographic disc? That is, using a form of quantum physics, we could entangle photons that are really distant. I know this isn’t yet in the theory books, but imagine if it was. Then you could entangle the 1 light-year away photon and see what happened. You could literally entangle any distant photon — and trace back in time what happened.
That is the power of “God sees everything.” — if God made the universe, the universe would be like a singularity to God. It would be like a programmer who can access a file on a computer. Now, a hacker is someone who can also access that file. What the universe doesn’t yet have, is a “universe hacker” that can break the simulation trap we’re in and gain access to the universe like a singularity.
This is why you shouldn’t act like an animal. Cause God sees you. And maybe, so can others. Or just go ahead and act like an animal but be willing to face the consequences.
This goes back to the white-hat vs black-hat vs grey-hat, and that’s why grey-hat won’t work. Cause a grey-hat does things that a black-hat does, but doesn’t want to compromise themselves if the consequences backfire. As a grey-hat, you are screwed either way. A black-hat doesn’t give a shit, because they’re probably state-sponsored. A white-hat gets away with it, cause they do it in the name of security. Or otherwise known as, also state-sponsored hacking, but for “the other side”. Haha. Hypocrites? Yeah, white-hats are kinda hypocrites.
Being a programmer — who does “things” and “regrets later” — that makes me more closely affiliated with being a grey-hat than a white-hat or black-hat. It’s not necessarily breaking into computer systems — I won’t say whether I have or not, but I have written some “weird” programs. Some of them are cute, like being run in a simulator — e.g. core wars. Some of them are serious, like being trojans / backdoors into systems (whether I deployed them on computer systems or not is out of scope of this article). And then some of them were protective, like chroot / jail shell systems.
Nowadays though, I find that the toolkit to create those programs are unnecessary. “Living off the land” attacks are basically the way to go. Also getting lazy. Lazy wins in the end.
So where does this lead us? Eerily, nowhere. It leads to sadness. Everyone was learning in the beginning, but now everyone’s just fighting a war. They’re not coding. They’re “Living off the Land”. It’s just sad.
I don’t want to be a part of this sadness. I feel like I’ve reach a point where I can’t learn anything new, and that it’s just all pointless. AI, AGI (artificial general intelligence), SI (super intelligence) — or whatever you want to call it, you may as well take over from here on out.
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