The year was 1984. The movie "WarGames" had just been released in theaters and we had the avid wishes. Influenced by the movie, we procured an incredible plan. Only, we needed to convince our parents to buy us 'Commodore64' computers - with modem and all, just like in the movie. We did a lot of begging and pleading, it took some time and we had to cross our fingers for Santa to follow through but the day finally came! Christmas morning and I'm darting down the short narrow hall of our low-income apartment and around its corner where the tree of .... good and evil .... (like ....) stood. My eyes glimmered like stars as sure enough, they were! But was it there? Did Santa come through or not ?? I unwrapped it quickly, the anticipation was killing me! Then there, before my eyes, The plan? ... to hack the government .... .... we ended up playing only tho instead. GreetingZ Hey there. I'm Hache-D. I was only 9 years old, but I've been addicted to computers and technophilia ever since. It started to escalate when a neighbor introduced us to a little secret he had. It was a program called "Super Clone". It made copies of 5.25 "floppy disks in about 20-30 minutes, I believe, and I knew the purpose of this and the sharing started. This must have been going well for my folks cause we moved cities and onto a better home. I moved up to a 80286 processor when I was about 13-14. I met another friend who was in computers as I was, more than I was actually, and he introduced me to the BBS world. He knew a local kid around the block that was the Sysop of a BBS, He let us log on to his board and well, the journey begins again. My list of bulletin board systems grew fast from there. I remember being apart and desiring to be apart from boards like "The Birds Nest", "XTC", "The Liberty", "USAFlight, ACiD, iCE," The Humble Guys "and man. a group of really talented kid misfits and we went by the crew name of P / HaRM. Phreakers / Hackers and Ruthless Merchants (or Mercenaries but I don ' So I Decided I was going to give it a shot and run my own Bulletin Board System. I'm glad I had my close friend Puffer near by, with him, we were going to Sysop and CoSysop at BBS. HQ was my house and we ran a WWIV board from it. Even though I joined P / HaRM it was not HQ of anything, actually. ... Right! So the name of the board was "Mind of a Lunatic", taken from a Ghetto Boys song track back in the late 80's early 90's. My hand back then was Valaraukar given to me by a mentor who went by the alias Pazuzu. He introduced me to the p / h side of the wire. Thing's where all good till one night .... I get caught. I remember getting out my "beige box" (which was just about 5,000 yard of phone wire with a phone handset on one end and two alligator clips on the other) and heading out early in the morning, around 1 am and I would un-spool the cables down to a green box at the end corner of the street. It took a ratchet to get it open and with those alligator clips it all stuck like glue. Ran that down to my house and started the war-dial. Before sunrise I would, at times, have a nice batch of (xxx) 950's-xxxx phone codes ready to use. Holland, Netherlands, here i come. I was 16. But one night I decide NOT to use the beige box -end of story. Just my luck the company (ThriftyTel) that I was hacking codes from was like the center of many phreakers, to the point they knew something was wrong and called in the government to investigate. With ANI (Automatic Number Identification, [Caller ID actually ... shhh. It was expensive back then!) And ESS (Electronic Switching System) there was no escape from the law if you were not safe. No longer into the Phreak / hack scene I started to become more "social" and through the hurt I meth friend That Was into computers just as well. It was maybe 1996 and I was introduced to a new venue that replaced the age of the BBS / dial up era - the IRC. I started in the Undernet and found some other networks that were pretty awesome as well, at that time. I joined a small encoding group in the IRC that provided KVCD's back in 2006 I believe. It was fun and the learning curve was not too bad as most things were already pre-set. But then in 2008, I suddenly had no place to call home. Sure I lived in my car for a few months, but after the car gets impounded due to a whole different story, I found myself on a really cool night sleeping with nothing but the clothes on my back and card board. It took one night of that, Ill never forget it. I reached out to the family where I could and they helped. I stayed at my family. After a short period I had to move across the country with a computer and maybe $ 60 bucks in my pocket from slinging movies. (ha ha) When I got to Florida, I was lucky enough to get a job quite quickly. I worked my way to earning money to buy a small netbook and shortly I revisited some of the sites I was on before. Although my accounts were deactivated on most for inactivity, In 2010 I took a leap of faith and moved back across country, this time with a computer (the net-book) and song --kinda-- a spiritual hymn if you will. I was going to church actually. A religious mission that lasted for 2 years and some odd months. It was awesome, looking back it was cool. That's the short end of stick my friends. I feel like I'm ranting so I'll just end with a thank you to the communities that have and continue to accept me and to sites that have risked it so that some may be encouraged by what is shared. L ive L ong and PROPER. , | ` ';, .-.'` {_Hache D _} ' `-,;..'` |,