Wednesday, March 14, 2007

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 :)

18 comments:

SimplEnigma said...

You're such a geek. LOL. My eyes started glazing over when I saw Linux and SunOS.

LMAO...

Island Spice said...

Hello Adrian. Just passing by from Simplenigma.. completely lost me with the tech stuff.. but I'll come back anyways..

Adrian said...

@simplenigma:
yep.. I am a ubergeek, its written in my dna. I notice that girls are smothering my geekdom.. that needs to change.

Thanks for passing by island spice :)

Its a shame this was the first post you read, I figured it might be a bit much for people who read my blog but the post was mainly for me so I can remember this day and a bit of the past.

Unknown said...

I throughly comprehended and enjoyed this post. I suppose that indicates how much of I geek I am also.

Anonymous said...

Came across this when searching for my name on google....I assume this is "suid" ?

Adrian said...

lol an irc foo found my post?

This is Com3 :p

Anonymous said...

oh shit! I couldn't remember is suid was a scripterz person, yeah I remember com3 now, haha...didn't think you'd reply since the blog seems inactive. Talking to grafxguye about you now haha...

I have m[X]'s msn name if you need it also.

Anonymous said...

com3, its GRAFXGUYE! whzz just sent this to me, i have been looking for scripterz people for about a year.

btw, u didn't mention me? u forgot or what? ha just joking. hit me up on chat, 'grafxguye'.

Unknown said...

Hey Com3, it's d3p/Nullity. Great story man. Mr ^MaXeD_OuT^ needs to show his face. What's up GrafxGuyE, I still use your orange winamp skin. What's up geewhzz. Ha, I wanna say #shellrev, but I guess we all go back to #scripterz. Time passes by much different irl. We made nerds cool. Except dancing Finnish nerds... dmantilal[at]gmail

Adrian said...

aww.. I could shed a tear :'(

lol my scripterz buddies found my blog and they remember me!

well I must say I remember all of you even those whose name got left off :p

Anonymous said...

I got mentioned first..im special..You jamaican..I came back on irc a few months ago irc.abjects.net #paniked atleast drop.

Anonymous said...

suid, poison-x, gimpy, whoever.. any insiderz hoes that hung around in #syn09, #no-limits, #dv-chat, #wi-opz, #scripterz, #insiderz, #canada

report yall ass to #paniked on abjects.net - l8r niggers.. -dvy

Anonymous said...

you wh0re COMMY! you guys dont remember me huh !? :( - [acid-x aka goodcheese aka ac1dx aka acid]

where the fuck is the puerto rican
guy at?

Adrian said...

whaddup!

lol really now how did all you stalkers find this page? do you really sit down and google your names?

Anonymous said...

obviously..But i google others because my name doesnt work.. now get back on irc u noob

Unknown said...

Com3 the ircing jamaican!

Anonymous said...

lolol damn whats up faggots - Panik

BringMe said...

Damnnn, I read an article on IRC's 30th year and ended up here. LOL