Well, what happens when you leave your blog for a bit too long... spammers mess up everything! Spent the last hour manually deleting all the comments, so I'm afraid it's going to be moderated from now on.

Hopefully I'll find time to post again soon. Shame that all my friends from the good old days have gone commercial.

No one seems to share anything these days... and all the new certified university "hackers" are completely uninventive and most don't know how to code.

My definition of a hacker would be someone who will work on a problem 24x7 for as long as it takes. Solving the problem is more important to us than eating, friends and family. It is our world.

This new idea of learning to be a "security professional" at university does not equate to being a hacker.

Some irony, originally a lot of "hackers" or "skiddies" were involved in the fxp scene. We used to make fun of them and labelled them as a low class of hacker and had little respect for what they did. And then there were "crackers" etc who we labelled as dangerous and thought they gave the rest of us a bad name.

But now we have lost our world altogether. No one will share or help. There is no community. I remember about 8 years ago, I would chat with other hackers on irc and jointly develop projects until the early hours of the morning, virtually every single day. There was a real sense of community and incredible energy and brilliance.

Today the fxp world remains the same, if not stronger. They still have this energy and have not sold out - no one makes money from it. We have destroyed our own little universe by commercialisation and things will never be the same again.

Long live phrack.