Before moving forward, I am not here to point out, call out anyone. This is a reference to spiders in a bunch of findings as a cautionary tale. I am not trying to intentionally do any type of harm so moving forward.
DMX said at one point, trust everyone to be themselves, but also trust that you can see them well.
There was this documentary series on YouTube called *Soft White Underbelly*. This is a documentary series based on people who are struggling with addiction and other difficult circumstances. A lot of their documentaries take place near, if not directly on, Skid Row in California.
In the last few months, a *Soft White Underbelly* documentary about a hacker appeared as a recommendation. At first, I thought it was some type of AI-generated content, but no.
It was a hacker documentary, and a very weird one too.
It was sloppy, all over the place, and I had a hard time following it.
What caught my eye was the discussion about the H/HU cards because I used to hack the football cards back then, and it all started on EFnet in the DTV channel.
I figured out how to update the card when the keys got scrambled. I just had to update and hex-edit the new keys until it became a problem. Eventually, I had to reach out to another friend locally at the time to get one that could last a month.
I thought I heard somewhere that they spoke on this podcast about how they had even cracked the P4 cards. At the time, they were considered uncrackable, but eventually a new solution appeared, and it was FTA boxes, or free-to-air boxes.
These boxes needed a JTAG, and you could apply the Dish Network keys to them. This worked great until Dish and DirecTV changed their systems. It was stupid easy to update the FTA boxes, and it would only take every few months for a new key to be needed.
A lot of these claims felt like bits and pieces of other stories taken from different places.
Now, when you hear “Gummo,” what do you hear?
For me, it’s a movie called *Gummo*, a gross but brilliant indie film.
Then recently, I was recommended the second follow-up documentary, and it clicked: Gummoxxx on X was Gummo, a retired black-hat hacker allegedly.
What caught my attention was that they had recently interviewed an X troll named Liam Nissan like the car. Now, I had been following Liam for a while. He’s a brilliant troll, and I love his content and his style of epic trolling.
Gummo, or Kate, threw me off because the interview didn’t seem as professional as one would expect.
I mean, Kate is interviewing a troll. It was cool and different, though.
After watching the follow-up documentary on Gummo, I decided I wanted to know more.
So I started doing some Google-fu, no AI and found a Reddit post from someone who had the same suspicious feeling I did. They had found more information, old aliases, and so on.
I’m not here to dox anyone or give out their information.
There was one thing that really got me. It was a post on what is now a dead website that contained a lot of mixed information. One claim was that someone had been an instructor under another alias, which I eventually found out was completely false.
There were also claims about being professional members of HOPE and the CCC, as well as long-time members of the Phrozen Crew and the Cult of the Dead Cow.
I almost opened a DM to Medus4 to confirm whether this was true or fake.
I decided not to, What’s the point?
So, if all of these claims are false, then so is the documentary.
Sadly, what addiction was in this documentary?
So what is real?
Kate’s poorly named YouTube channel contains Bitcoin-mining operations. I can only speculate that they mined a lot, but most definitely not as much as they claimed on the follow-up documentary.
Overall, My Conclusion
After trying to figure all of this out, my impression is that the Never Rain podcast sounds like a big hacker fanboy—or fangirl—project that was made by rich stoners.
I’m not saying my shit is even better.
But I don’t go off topic and into endless tangents, and I obviously don’t just reshare DEF CON talks without some type of commentary. Not once have I ever done that since I’ve been going to DEF CON, starting with DC7.
Advertising as hackers(dot)XXX is bad for business. There’s a good chance that a .XXX domain will be flagged or filtered as a porn site. Now, with a lot of “red states” blocking porn sites, and countries that outright ban pornography, that can create a problem for your audience.
Universities already block anything with .XXX and whatever follows it. If you really are this professor that your past self claims to be, you should already know this.
Learning Joomla is cool, but understanding that Joomla can also become a giant security issue is another thing entirely, especially if you don’t keep up to date on the vulnerabilities.
From experience, hosting forums these days is a full-time job and can be easily flooded with AI advertising bots especially how easy it was to create a quick account.
If I had a base like you have, I would pivot. I would understand that sometimes you have to kill your own pride, sit down, and clean things up.
I would also pivot away from the stoner podcast and focus more on teaching and learning real hacker culture instead of borrowing it to sound bigger than it is. But hey that is me.
I became an unsung hero.
I stole credit cards and bought myself cool shit, like a ruby-red iMac and shit back then.
I took over an ISP because I was in packet wars with Skrilla on DALnet aka Ruben C. from Tyler, Texas.
I’ve built a drone army, and even back then, I felt like a god.
I used to be a top site for Razr1911 before they got popped during Operation Buccaneer. Then I got sick with cancer as it advanced.
I was basically living at the ISP at the time, and I had unmetered bandwidth through a T3 that I had figured out how to get working myself. I taught myself Cisco because I needed to understand the network from the inside out. I had to figure out how the VLANs were routed, where the bandwidth limits were being enforced, and how to change them without anyone noticing. This was before Google was around to simply look up the answer, so I had to learn the system myself, piece by piece, by figuring out how everything worked.
Avec, aka Stacy, used to hang out on DALnet in AppzNGamez, where I met them. I was also in SleepyHollow, hosted by Dspril, aka MercuryC. RIP, homie. Where Avec also hang out in.
USA, or Ultimate Sanity in Anarchy, also known as JD, gave me AnarchyRulesDOTCom before he stepped away from WDC, WarezDOTCom. But I lost it because of my battle with cancer.
It wasn’t until a few years ago that I was even able to recover the site, I was hacking with Jaynus from gH, Global Helll
I gave BNCs to YTcracker back on r00tabega on EFnet. I hosted my own IRC networks with DugNet, Digital Underground, with sniper-, downkaos, and skream9 when he hosted PrankNet.
Pimpshiz was a crazy hacker. Fun as fuck to play games with, but we also helped each other out when it was necessary and shit.
I also became a part of the Smoked crew. I was too afraid of getting popped by the feds, so I did what I could to keep my handle out of it.
But they still shouted me out. I live forever in Attrition and in random defaced websites because of that.
That’s the difference
I don’t have to create a hacker past, not saying they didn’t have one.
I don’t have to borrow somebody else’s stories, but also not saying they actually borrowed someone else life.
I don’t have to make myself sound like something I wasn’t, but then again I wasn’t there to see who they where. Maybe they where Zerocool and shit.
in the end I was there, I lived it.
Refferences:
- https://www.reddit.com/r/hacking/comments/oytu7z/comment/k19k1nd/?context=3
- https://web.archive.org/web/20150214102158/http://keason-tanner.com/about.html
- Video 1
- Video 2
