Life, Code & Idiocy

Thanks to a Reddit-savvy incoming freshman at the high school I just graduated, the post immediately preceding this one has enjoyed a considerable amount of popularity – both on reddit and elsewhere. Anyone that subscribed to my blog, thanks, I hope you get a good read out of it every once in a while.

The biggest result of “Re: ImageShack” was the comments I saw, both on my own post and elsewhere. There were some pretty damn good arguments but the view I like the most came from a comment by SyrioForel on reddit:

I think he and some other people missed the point that these are black hat hackers whose sole goal here is to prevent script kiddies from finding out their “secret” exploits. There is no other motivation.

This accusation of selfishness makes perfect sense: they have some exploit that works pretty well, and they want to keep using it for life, so they hate full disclosure. *NIXEDBLOG 3.0 points out that this is a pretty blatant violation of the Hacker Ethic, specifically the part about complete and total access to computers.

The more I read about this group, the more I lose respect for them. They’re really a bunch of script kiddies that know how to advertise strategically. That’s it. I had, admittedly, a bit of respect when they hacked ImageShack, but now I’ve pretty much lost that in light of seeing what their true motives probably are. The same goes for pretty much any hacker group: they’re still just a bunch of script kiddies who fap at the thought of pwning someone’s box.

Here I digress.

I’m in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware right now, on a vacation with my immediate family plus two of my dad’s brothers and their families. Been here since Saturday. I don’t feel like horking down more saltwater taffy so I’m blogging.

Getting Wi-Fi was fun. I installed DD-WRT x86 on Xombie, which was decommissioned as outlined in my welcome post for Charles Manson, in order to allow me to take my Linksys WRT54GL on the trip with me. I’m glad I did, because the Wi-Fi signals around this rental house are pretty weak. Most houses around here are rental houses, so they don’t have Internet access, much less Wi-Fi routers. Luckily I found a couple networks including one that seems to be a legitimately public free hotspot.

The magic of DD-WRT is in the abilities it gives to a single wireless chip. Apparently the firmware for the Broadcom chip in the WRT54GL is fully open source, so DD-WRT has allowed me to configure the router as a client for the hotspot network and as a master for two others – one secured for me, and one (with an SSID of “No Strings Attached”) unsecured for other folks on the street as well as others in my rental house. It works wonderfully because the dual antennas on there easily pick up a signal my laptop and iPod couldn’t dream of using and turn it in to a rather reliable solution for casual Internet access.

The house is really cool too. I’m not staying with my immediate family – they had to separate me from the other four because each of our two rental houses only permitted 8 occupants. So I’m staying with my uncle Doug, his family, his mom, and his wife’s mom and sister, while the rest of my family bunks in another (much farther inland) house with my uncle Jeff and his family. It works out great because I get to share a room with only one other person (my 16-year-old cousin Tim) and the house itself is positively beautiful. It’s old, meaning hardwood floors, solid wooden doors, and an attic not unlike that of the house where I grew up. It is apparently owned by someone, and not just by a real estate agency, which is good because it has kept its old-time charm. It’s even located in a crazy valuable spot: about 300 feet from the boardwalk.

Much to my delight and surprise, I also walked in to find a vintage piano in here, painted in a bright robin’s egg blue to match the rest of the living room, that is surprisingly not only in tune but also possessing a very intricate sound. Being a somewhat adventurous pianist, I’ve gotten a bit of enjoyment out of it. It is missing a couple of keys but I fixed their middle F# and am exploring possibilities for giving some love to D2 for which the hammer is broken off. It looks to be a fun week, as long as the weather holds up.