Another Hacker’s Manifesto .

By Christian As. Kirtchev

We are the ELECTRONIC MINDS, a group of free-minded rebels. Cyberpunks.
We live in Cyberspace, we are everywhere, we know no boundaries.
This is our manifest. The Cyberpunks’ manifest.

I. Cyberpunk

1/ We are those, the Different. Technological rats, swimming in the ocean of information.
2/ We are the retiring, little kid at school, sitting at the last desk, in the corner of the class room. 3/ We are the teenager everybody considers strange 4/ We are the student hacking computer systems, exploring the depth of his reach. 5/ We are the grown-up in the park, sitting on a bench, laptop on his knees, programming the last virtual reality. 6/ Ours is the garage, stuffed with electronics. The soldering iron in the corner of the desk and the nearby disassembled radio- they are also ours. Ours is the cellar with computers, buzzing printers and beeping modems. 7/ We are those that see reality in a different way. Our point of view shows more than ordinary people can see. They see only what is outside, but we see what is inside. That’s what we are - realists with the glasses of dreamers. 8/ We are those strange people, almost unknown to the neighborhood. People, indulged in their own thoughts, sitting day after day before the computer, ransacking the net for something. We are not often out of home, just from time to time, only to go to the nearby radio shack, or to the usual bar to meet some of the few friends we have, or to meet a client, or to the backstreet druggist… or just for a little walk. 9/ We do not have many friends, only a few with whom we go to parties. Everybody else we know we know on the net. Our real friends are there, on the other side of the line. We know them from our favorite IRC channel, from the News-Groups, from the systems we hang-around: 10/ We are those who don’t give a shit about what people think about us, we don’t care what we look like or what people talk about us in our absence. 11/ The majority of us likes to live in hiding, being unknown to everybody except those few we must inevitably contact with. 12/ Others love publicity, they love fame. They are all known in the underground world. Their names are often heard there.
But we are all united by one thing - we are Cyberpunks.

13/ Society does not understand us, we are “weird” and “crazy” people in the eyes of the ordinary people who live far from information and free ideas. Society denies our way of thinking - a society, living, thinking and breathing in one and only one way - a clichc. 14/ They deny us for we think like free people, and free thinking is forbidden. 15/ The Cyberpunk has outer appearance, he is no motion. Cyberpunks are people, starting from the ordinary and known to nobody person, to the artist-technomaniac, to the musician, playing electronic music, to the superficial scholar. 16/ The Cyberpunk is no literature genre anymore, not even an ordinary subculture. The Cyberpunk is a stand-alone new culture, offspring of the new age. A culture that unites our common interests and views. We are a unit. We are Cyberpunks.

II. Society

1/ The Society which surrounds us is clogged with concervacy pulling everything and everybody to itself, while it sinks slowly in the quicksands of time. 2/ However doggedly some refuse to believe it, it is obvious that we live in a sick society. The so called reforms which our governments so adeptly use to boast, are nothing else but a little step forward, when a whole jump can be done. 3/ People fear the new and unknown. They prefer the old, the known and checked truths. They are afraid of what the new can bring to them. They are afraid that they can lose what they have. 4/ Their fear is so strong that it has proclaimed the revolutional a foe and a the free idea - its weapon. That’s their fault. 5/ People must leave this fear behind and go ahead. What’s the sense to stick to the little you have now when you can have more tomorrow. Everything they must do is stretch their hands and feel for the new; give freedom to thoughts, ideas, to words: 6/ For centuries each generation has been brought up is a same pattern. Ideals is what everybody follows. Individuality is forgotten. People think in a same way, following the clichc drilled in them in childhood, the clichc-education for all children: And, when someone dares defy authority, he is punished and given as a bad example. “Here is what happens to you when you express your own opinion and deny your teacher’s one”. 7/ Our society is sick and need to be healed. The cure is a change in the system…

III. The System

1/ The System. Centuries-old, existing on principles that hang no more today. A System that has not changed much since the day of its birth. 2/ The System is wrong. 3/ The System must impose its truth upon us so that it can rule. The government needs us follow it blindly. For this reason we live in an informational eclipse. When people acquire information other that that from the government, they cannot distinguish the right from the wrong. So the lie becomes a truth - a truth, fundamental to everything else. Thus the leaders control with lies and the ordinary people have no notion of what is true and follow the government blindly, trusting it. 4/ We fight for freedom of information. We fight for freedom of speech and press. For the freedom to express our thoughts freely, without being persecuted by the system. 5/ Even in the most-developed and ‘democratic’ countries, the system imposes misinformation. Even in the countries that pretend to be the cradle of free speech. Misinformation is one of the system’s main weapon. A weapon, they use very well. 6/ It is the Net that helps us spread the information freely. The Net, with no boundaries and information limit 7/ Ours is yours, yours is ours. 8/ Everyone can share information, no restrictions. 9/ Encrypting of informattion is our weapon. Thus the words of revolution can spread uninterrupted, and the government can only guess. 10/ The Net is our realm, in the Net we are Kings.11/ Laws. The world is changing, but the laws remain the same. The System is not changing, only a few details get redressed for the new time, but everything in the concept remains the same. 12/ We need new laws. Laws, fitting the times we live in, with the world that surrounds us. Not laws build on the basis of the past. Laws, build for today, laws, that will fit tomorrow. 13/ The laws that only refrain us. Laws that badly need revision.

IV. The vision

1/ Some people do not care much about what happens globally. They care about what happens around them, in their micro-universe. 2/ These people can only see a dark future, for they can only see the life they live now. 3/ Others show some concern about the global affairs. They are interested in everything,in the future in perspective, in what is going to happen globally. 4/ They have a more optimistic view. To them the future is cleaner and more beautiful, for they can see into it and they see a more mature man, a wiser world. 5/ We are in the middle. We are interested in what happens now, but what in what’s gonna happen tomorow as well. 6/ We look in the net, and the net is growing wide and wider. 7/ Soon everything in this world will be swallowed by the net: from the military systems to the PC at home. 8/ But the net is a house of anarchy. 9/ It cannot be controlled and in this is its power. 10/ Every man will be dependent on the net. 11/ The whole information will be there, locked in the abysses of zeros and ones. 12/ Who controls the net, controls the information. 13/ We will live in a mixture of past and present. 14/ The bad come from the man, and the good comes from technology. 15/ The net will control the little man, and we will control the net. 16/ For is you do not control, you will be controlled. 17/ The Information is POWER!

V. Where are we?

1/ Where are we?
2/ We all live in a sick world, where hatred is a weapon, and freedom - a dream.
3/ The world grows so slowly. It is hard for a Cyberpunk to live in an underdeveloped world, looking the people around him, seeing how wrongly they develop.
4/ We go ahead, they pull us back again. Society suppressses us. Yes, it suppresses the freedom of thought. With its cruel education programs in schools and universities. They drill in the children their view of things and every attempt to express a different opinion is denied and punished.
5/ Our kids grow educated in this old and still unchanged system. A system that tolerates no freedom of thought and demands a strict obeyance to the reules…
6/ In what a worlds, how different from this, could we live now, if people were making jumps and not creeps.
7/ It is so hard to live in this world, Cyberpunk.
8/ It is as if time has stopped.
9/ We live on the right spot, but not in the right time.
10/ Everything is so ordinary, people are all the same, their deeds toos. As if society feels an urgent need to live back in time.
11/ Some, trying to find their own world, the world of a Cyberpunk, and finding it, build their own world. Build in their thoughts, it changes reality, lays over it and thus they live in a virtual world. The thought-up, build upon reality:
12/ Others simply get accustomed to the world as it is. They continue to live in it, although they dislike it. They have no other choice but the bare hope that the world will go out of its hollow and will go ahead.
13/ What we are trying to do is change the situation. We are trying to adjust the present world to our needs and views. To use maximally what is fit and to ignore the trash. Where we can’t, we just live in this world, like Cyberpunks, no matter how hard, when society fights us we fight back.
14/ We build our worlds in Cyberspace.
15/ Among the zeros and ones, among the bits of information.
16/ We build our community. The community of Cyberpunks.”

Unite!
Fight for your rights!

We are the ELECTRONIC MINDS, a group of free-minded rebels. Cyberpunks.
We live in Cyberspace, we are everywhere, we know no boundaries.
This is our manifest. The Cyberpunks’ Manifest.

February 14, 1997

Christian As. Kirtchev

This one has to be the best reinvention of the original Mentor’s manifesto. A hacker named DarkPontifex wrote this and it is brutally true.

The Real Fucking Manifesto

I wanted to know, I wanted to understand, I wanted to go further then the rest. I never want to be held down by contracts and agreements.

You say I should grow up. You say I should find better things to do with my time. You say I should put my talent to better use. You’re saying I should fall in line with the other zombies and forget everything I believe in and shun those with my drive, my curiosity, tell them it’s not worth it, deny them of the greatest journey they will ever
experience in their lives.

I am not a blackhat. The term is insulting, it implies I am the opposite of you. You think i seek to defeat security, when I seek something greater. I will write exploits, travel through networks, explore where you are afraid to go. I will not put myself in the spotlight and release destructive tools to the public to attract business. I will not feed the fear and hysteria created by the security industry to increase stock prices. I can, and will, code and hack and find out everything I can for the same reasons I did years ago.

I am a Hacker, don’t try to understand me, you lost all hope of that when you crossed the line. You fail to see the lies and utter simplicity behind the computer security industry. Once, you may have shared my ideals. You fail to see the fact that security is a maintenance job. You’ve given up hope for something better. You fail to see yourself as worthless, fueling an industry whose cumulative result is nothing. I dont hate you, I don’t even really care about you - If you try to stop me, you will fail, because I do this out of love — you do it for money.

This is our world now.. the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without  paying for what could be dirt cheap if it wasn’t run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore… and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge… and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias…and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat and lie to us and try to make us believe it is for our own good, yet we’re the criminals.

Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for.  I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto. You can’t stop me, and you certainly can’t stop us all.

I have this remarkable speech of reality by one of the greatest BlackHat Hacker of all time. It was an outburst of a down to earth real hacker when a Whitehat community called him a script kiddie. One who calls himself an elite hacker should always read this speech everytime he gets up in the morning and find his reality. If a person knows 90% of what this speech means and asks , they can call themselves the elite one. It was such a wonderful to the ground speech that I couldn’t resist myself from putting it up in the blog. Enjoy Reading !
”
* Do you know how to program in C? Are you intimately familiar with ISO C89? C99? While other people in your neighbourhood were out partying, were you sitting at home in bed making an almost biblical study of the POSIX standards? What about those from The Open Group?

*Do you know how to write hash tables? Balanced trees? Do you know the art of algorithms? Do you know Knuth’s work like the back of your hand? Did you teach yourself everything about computers that one would otherwise only learn by paying thousands of dollars for in Computer Science tuition?

* Do you know how to juggle assembly code in your head for multiple architectures, such as MIPS, SPARC, x86? Do you understand the peculiarities of each architecture down to the nittiest, grittiest details? Can you optimize your own assembly routines? Can you take advantage of things such as Pentium instruction pairing or the delay slots in various RISC architectures? Do you understand the deal with the I-Cache on MIPS? Are you fluent in assembly language? Hell, do you even know what SPARC stands for? Quadrants in PA-RISC, make sense?

* Do you know how to write your own exploits? Do you know how to audit software with surgical precision for the most intricate bugs imaginable? Do you know how to take advantage of buffer overflows? Do you know how to exploit off-by-one errors on a little-endian machine? Do you know about integer overflows and signedness issues? Can you exploit format string vulnerabilities? Can you gain control of a process vulnerable to a heap overflow via a deep knowledge of the malloc implementation on the target host? Do you know how to bypass the “security” afforded by crap like Openwall, StackGuard, PaX? Or is your knowledge of these things limited to the papers that non-hackers publish? You probably think the people trying to help the security community with bullshit patches/fixes like this are hackers, when in fact no hacker would ever publish any such thing that aims to improve security.

* Have you studied the UNIX kernel with as much fervour as some would have for physical pursuits such as basketball or baseball? Do you know the data structures and organization in the kernels of various operating systems? Have you read books on UNIX internals cover to cover? Do you know how Linux works under the hood? Can you write your own kernel modules for both defense and offense? Ever written a kld on FreeBSD? Can you write a device driver for a peripheral that your OS doesn’t support? Can you find flaws in kernel src trees that allow you to compromise a machine given local access?

* What do you know about evading (N)IDS? Your knowledge isn’t limited to what Thomas Ptacek & Tim Newsham have said years ago, right? Surely you don’t rely on tools written by people like Dug Song who like to think of themselves as hackers, when in fact they are traitors to the underground, assuming they were ever a part of it to begin with.

* What do you know about defeating firewalls? What techniques have you innovated and pioneered on your own? What tools have you written that allow you to toy with firewalls? Hell, the fucktard security community is probably limited to lameass crap like Firewalk.

* What do you know about web security? Do you sit back and laugh at the “cross-site scripting” revolution governed by an idea that has been around well before the CSS/XSS sensation that literally blew the dumbass security community apart? Must’ve wasted a lot of brain cells with that gigantic stretch of the imagination. Do you laugh at all these “SQL injection” papers and how most of them overlook the blatantly obvious: they have you believe you have to fumble around with all kinds of convoluted queries to achieve something that can be done with minimal typing if only they’d read the fucking documentation for various DBMS. Their CGI experts like RFP and Zenomorph call certain script conditions non-exploitable, e.g. when you can’t get arguments supplied to a binary that you’ve managed to trick a Perl script into running — RFP mentions this in his Phrack article — yet any moron can easily figure out that you can use the POST method, make the script run /usr/bin/perl for instance, and have it run a script of your choice that is fed as stdin from the HTTP request’s POST data. Oh God, sorry for pushing the realm of web security forward with this INCREDIBLY COMPLEX revelation.

* Have you written your own tools that exploit protocol weaknesses? Have you written your own tools for routing protocol weaknesses, e.g. RIP, BGP? Have you written your own tools that play games with DNS? Have you written your own ARP cache poisoning / mitm tools? Your own tools for shit like icmp redirects and router advertisements? Can you write a tool that will exploit the TCP sequence number prediction + IP spoofing vulnerability of older days? Or can you only mock Mitnick for his 1994 attack, calling him a scriptkiddy? Or utter useless banter about ISNs and cookies that you digested from some textfile? Who are you kidding? Fuck, have you read all 3 volumes of the glorious TCP/IP Illustrated, or can you just mumble some useless crap about a 3-way handshake? Do you know Net/3 code? TCP algorithms? TCP extensions? Perhaps you’re some fucking security expert because you’ve memorized /etc/services — a walking fucking getservbyport, a la 70% of the Vuln-Dev subscription base.

Its kinda old shit but still old is gold. The essence of our ideology has it roots from mentor’s infamous 19 80’s speech shortly after he got arrested. This foundation seems to be a logical start to what we guys have to offer on this blog.

by
+++The Mentor+++
Written January 8, 1986

Another one got caught today, it’s all over the papers. “Teenager Arrested in Computer Crime Scandal”, “Hacker Arrested after Bank Tampering”…

Damn kids. They’re all alike.

But did you, in your three-piece psychology and 1950’s technobrain, ever take a look behind the eyes of the hacker? Did you ever wonder what made him tick, what forces shaped him, what may have molded him?

I am a hacker, enter my world…

Mine is a world that begins with school… I’m smarter than most of the other kids, this crap they teach us bores me…

Damn underachiever. They’re all alike.

I’m in junior high or high school. I’ve listened to teachers explain for the fifteenth time how to reduce a fraction. I understand it. “No, Ms. Smith, I didn’t show my work. I did it in my head…”

Damn kid. Probably copied it. They’re all alike.

I made a discovery today. I found a computer. Wait a second, this is cool. It does what I want it to. If it makes a mistake, it’s because I screwed it up. Not because it doesn’t like me… Or feels threatened by me.. Or thinks I’m a smart ass.. Or doesn’t like teaching and shouldn’t be here…

Damn kid. All he does is play games. They’re all alike.

And then it happened… a door opened to a world… rushing through the phone line like heroin through an addict’s veins, an electronic pulse is sent out, a refuge from the day-to-day incompetencies is sought… a board is found. “This is it… this is where I belong…” I know everyone here… even if I’ve never met them, never talked to them, may never hear from them again… I know you all…

Damn kid. Tying up the phone line again. They’re all alike…

You bet your ass we’re all alike… we’ve been spoon-fed baby food at school when we hungered for steak… the bits of meat that you did let slip through were pre-chewed and tasteless. We’ve been dominated by sadists, or ignored by the apathetic. The few that had something to teach found us willing pupils, but those few are like drops of water in the desert.

This is our world now… the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn’t run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore… and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge… and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias… and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it’s for our own good, yet we’re the criminals.

Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for.

I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto. You may stop this individual, but you can’t stop us all… after all, we’re all alike.