The fall of an era

It seems as if my one and first true love of the internet IRC shall no longer be. Well to be correct, IRC will probably live on but all my friends from there are now gone.

The early years:
I got my first taste of IRC back in 1996 but didn't have much access until 2 years later. After 1998 I started to get the hang of it but still bounced between networksthe place, changing aliases not really calling anywhere home. It was about december 1999 I came across a chanel #scripterz where I met a bunch of people who I would become close friends with for the next 5 years.

The dark middle ages:
As I used irc on dailup I became exposed to a world of linux and at a summer job in 2001 I worked under an ISP admin who seemed to be a guru at linux, at this point in time I vowed to be just as good as him. I had a 166MHz i686 machine w/ 32MB of ram which I used as my test linux box (it still resides in my closet today) and slowly but surely my linux skills grew. It was kind of pointless to have a linux machine on dialup as the only way they shine is on the internet and I didn't have any money at the time to buy access to a linux machine(shell) online to aid with my irc usage, the used to cost around $10usd/month for a basic package. So I started my downward path to the darkside, hacking.

In learning to use linux at home and my studies at UWI I became quite good at C and coupled with my growing knowledge of the internet I became a force to recon with, acquiring access to all the unix machines to fill my every desire. Social engineering, sniffing, stack smashing, man in the middle attacks,... ,I used every method in the book to hack. This grew my knowledge base swiftly too as I had to learn about the machines under my influence. IRIX, SunOS, OSF/1, BSD, SCO, linux, .., you name it I had a machine somewhere around the world with it, all driven by my need to use IRC with a higher availability. I was a mostly good hacker though, I didn't destroy anybodies data and secured their machines after I got in, so one could call me an elf that worked when nobody was looking :). It was all about being able to have the resources at my disposal and not have the legit admin aware of my presence.

The last mile:
After having hundreds of Unix machines under my belt I went back to the basics and focused on just programming and using IRC. At this point in time, 2004, I was just out of university and working as a C programmer writing code for verifone terminals. I was referenced by friends online and got small jobs writing security and OS applications for shell companies then providing me with legit access to unix machines, thanks to my abilities and the friends who suggested me.

Bang bang, you're dead:
Of course will all that experience my resume was a little bit more interesting that other recent grads of UWI and this caught the eyes of my current employers, I was interviewed for a unix systems administrators position and got the job. The tables had turned, I was now the person I had for so many years tried to outsmart and hack. I have become exactly like every other admin out there, I am sure there could be a hacker on one of my servers and I wouldn't realize it for now. Also since the start of this job my programming has gone to the dogs, yesterday I was looking at some snmp code and saw a variable being defined as size_t I had to rack my brains to figure out what that was before I eventually remembered what it was.

I did manage to work away at the years of atrophy and managed to code a program over the previous two days that will collect data to automate a new report which my supervisor now requires that takes out a good hour or so out of my Friday mornings. Now I can go back to doing nothing at all, yup on Fridays again :) but this coding reminded me of my hay day and when the internet was fun. Is this enough for me to leave my life of a well paid sys admin to be a programmer just scraping by? or a broke student with no care in the world hacking the planet? hells no.. ain't nothing going on but the rent + I am good at what I currently do.

I always knew in the back of my mind one day I would outgrow IRC, I just didn't believe it would actually happen. Hopefully I can find my friends via email but if not I am sending my final greetz to m[X], tannsi, badassy, ashay, Geewhzz, d3p and BringMe.

On a side note: while we are on the topic of the past I notice this snapshot of my old site from 2001 shows my old somewhat blog getting more hits than this one there was more content than that there but the snapshot didn't capture it. Hopefully I still have a copy of that site on my hard drive :)