Two days ago I've had a pre-college exam and if I did good enough I might have the shot to go to college. But let's put this aside for a while, I have something more important to say.
A year or so ago I was a passionate gamer who knew only a little bit more about computers. Lazy with no goal in his life. I had no idea what I would study in the future, nor what I would like to be, except a professional gamer:D.
Then I got a bit interested in computers, hacking in particular. The idea of doing wonders with the computer was very attractive to me back then, still is
. So I searched the net for hacking web sites, forums or blogs. I was surprise when I realized that they aren't as secret as I thought there would be. I found a few of those eye-candy skiddie sites and was pretty impressed. I didn't have internet at home back then, all activities where done in a net cafe (the perfect proxy 
), so I quickly wrote the addresses of those sites on a piece of paper to not lose them. The little tutorials on those sites I could read in the net cafe, but the big ones I had to copy to my USB disk and read at home. That's my first exploiting experience. You see, the net cafe had a program that disallowed USB's, well not disallowed but you couldn't access them via my computer > usb drive, so I found a way to exploit that: find a random image on the net, go to save as..., opens the window to browse where to save, search for the USB (try out d: / e: / g: /h: ) and the rest was easy. Damn, I was so l33t back then . After that I ran home to and hit the computer to read all those tutorials. I didn't understand 90% of what there was in them, but I didn't mind, it was a good deal if I would learn the smallest thing from each tutorial back then, partly it still is . The tutorials weren't something special, it all was like "You get your victims IP by using this program, then you use this one to connect to it, use this one to...". From all those sites there was one that accidentally pointed me into the right direction. The site was SoH (www.SchoolOfHackers.com - doesn't exist any more) was kind of a default site for me back then, like suck-o is now. At first, well at least when I joined it, it had a dark theme, it all was kinda shady and illegal. Then one day the owner of the site, avada (he seemed to be a really nice guy), changed the theme from dark and shady to white/silver and clean. By changing the theme my view on it changed from blackhat criminal hacker forum to a computer expert education forum which made me think "hmm, I wonder what the good side of the hat is doing". So after researching the good side of the force I realized that it's not so bad, not bad at all, even better than the dark side. That's the point of transition from black to white/grey hat for me (it's not like I ever hacked something anyways, but it's the mindset that counts
). At that point the eye-candy skiddie sites stopped being interesting and I searched for hacking forums once again, this one the real thing. Of course I stumbled upon progenic's top list, there I've encountered suck-o for the first time.Here at suck-o I started to take all that hacking more seriously, before that it was just fooling around, feeding my curiosity. I still remember the feeling reading that thread on the newbie section about what a hacker really is, I kinda found myself in that even though I had no real knowledge about anything and no experience in hacking whatsoever. I can say for sure that this community changed me more than I though and hoped.
All those hacking activity before suck-o was just something like a warm-up before the real thing. I'm lucky I found a community of grey/white hat rather than black. If it was the other way around who knows where I would be now.
You may be wondering why all that autobiography talk. Well I pictured it to be a thank you, and to help you realize what you have done guys.
I am really truly grateful to you all! Thank you guys! You changed my life for better.
To sum it all up: I was a gamer with no future, no perspective with no knowledge about computers other than for playing games, and now I'm on my Linux box with hardly any game on it (only the default like chess, cards etc.) with a .pdf archive of 1GB pdf about computers, programming, development, hacking, who is, hopefully, about to go to a computer college. Pretty big don't you think?
Well it is, and it's all (95%) because of you guys, so be proud Tomorrow I'm getting the results of the exam but no matter what happens thank you guys! Thank you Suck-O.
