me, Zanus (Zane)

[Zane]

I'm 20 years old. I'm from the farthest west city you can go in North Carolina.  For those of you who watch the news, it's the city where they caught Eric Rudolph (one of the Top Ten Most Wanted)

The first time I remember really soaking myself into a computer was with an old Gateway2k running Windows 3.1 Never thought I would be making anything useful on one though.  By the time high school rolled around I could take them apart and troubleshoot whatever as well as make some sort of cheesy website with Homestead/Geocities/Angelfire/ or Tripod.  I can't even remember how I found PHP.  I guess I just knew that I needed a way to create a form and found the best way and wala.

I go to a Community College aiming towards a Computer Technology Systems degree and am struggling through the welcome path to the "real world."  I speak English and Spanish..(thanks to 10 years of dedication) and I like to party and get ~retarded.

It's amazing how you can look at a thread you posted years ago and think "Did I really write that?"  But alas, I did.  That's all me up there. (exactly 3 years and 3 weeks ago.. yesterday)  So as you can tell, I've been here for quite some time.  Trying my best not to spend ALL my time here.

I don't have much of a portfolio (at all really) nor do I even have a job.  If I were lucky enough to find one in this horrible recession, I'd either have found one putting together motors or serving burgers.  Web development jobs seem to go to the women (in my town) who know enough to manipulate an Excel spreadsheet or Word document.  I guess this is one reason why my county is the 3rd most poorest county in the state of North Carolina right now.

 

It feels like deja vu saying this but I'm currently still in Southwestern Community College.  And the ironic thing about me not being able to find work is because I've yet to graduate/get my degree.  If only I could find a place that would work me for free for one 40 hour week (The Internship Class) I would be finished.  But for some reason I've found that businesses (around here) don't seem to be too keen on actually putting interns to work.  In order to pay me they'd have to hire me which they've all made clear to me is no option.  Not even a "yet", "maybe", "someday" or "GTFO".

 

Epilepsy has been a major part of my life for the last 8 years.  I'd say it's safe to say it's been with me my entire life.  This has a lot to do with the fact that I haven't graduated yet.  I don't know how many times I've dropped the semester because of a seizure..fearing there would be more or I would be unable to focus and make terrible grades because of it.

 

As far as programming experience and such goes though, which seems to me to be the most logical reason to even post an Introduction.  PHP is my main thing.  It was my first programming language I ever used and I still continue to use it.  Back in high school.. in order to use the internet we had to login to this thing called I-Gear.  It was a completely web-based login system (ran through the school's network of course).  It was all based on CGI scripts.  All the students would login with "mhstudent" (no password) and would have nothing but restrictions for everything you could think of.  E-mail and porn mostly.. since that was the biggest thing back then.  By now I'm sure myspace, facebook, "evil" stuff like bomb assembly and much more have made it into the mix.

 

All the while the teachers and ANYONE that could login using a password was able to view all this stuff.  This is when I made a my first real program that did anything remotely productive.  In this day and age that program would be called phishing.  Basically I sent out a mass e-mail to all the teachers on Presidents Day (with the From header forged for the principal's email) with a link to a greeting card .. somewhere.  It then immediately redirected to my script on my server (I know.. pretty insecure and retarded. but so were they) that resembled an incorrect login page that EVERYONE in the school was so used to.  As you can imagine I programmed it to e-mail me their input and within a day I had at least 30 user/passes for my own personal unrestricted internet access at school

 

Today.  I like to mess around with Javascript a lot...and CSS.  Back in the day I was a big fan of using tables for layouts and swore by MS Frontpage 2003

But now I'm astonished that methodologies exist such as AJAX (which really existed all along) that takes fad out of disabling Javascript...finally.  I knew Javascript had it's purpose in the world other than just not working and being disabled all the time.  What I love even more are the new Javascript libraries.  I've only really use jQuery, but I know there are many more that can do SO much more.

 

I can't think of anything else to rabble on about.

[Koobi]

i'm back at the forums after a while too.

i THINK i remember you from back in the day.

 

i didn't read your entire post but welcome back

[Zane]

i didn't read your entire post but welcome back

 

Well I was never really gone.. although I was maybe a little inactive in 07.  But other than that I've pretty much stuck to this place like a junkie hangs onto his crackpipe.

 

I'm pretty much just redoing my introduction from the archived version and promoting this new board at the same time.

 

Though it's the thought that counts so thanks for the welcome back!

[GingerRobot]

All the while the teachers and ANYONE that could login using a password was able to view all this stuff.  This is when I made a my first real program that did anything remotely productive.  In this day and age that program would be called phishing.  Basically I sent out a mass e-mail to all the teachers on Presidents Day (with the From header forged for the principal's email) with a link to a greeting card .. somewhere.  It then immediately redirected to my script on my server (I know.. pretty insecure and retarded. but so were they) that resembled an incorrect login page that EVERYONE in the school was so used to.  As you can imagine I programmed it to e-mail me their input and within a day I had at least 30 user/passes for my own personal unrestricted internet access at schoo

 

Brilliant, lol.

 

Did you get caught for that one?

[Zane]

I never got caught because I never mentioned my endeavor until after I was out of school. 

 

I guess I was too afraid of getting into trouble or telling the wrong person that would gossip about it to whoever that would gossip to so and so and so on.  I didn't really trust anyone with what I did..lol  I did give away a few passwords here and there but never took credit for finding them.

 

When I think back to it though I was an idiot for never mentioning it.  I probably could have shown up in the local newspaper or been offered some off-the-wall scholarship in the end.  Like I said, my redneck town is really small and something as mediocre as a phishing page would have made the eyeballs bulge out of their heads.  As if I just "cracked the pentagon" or something.

 

I guess that just goes to show you that if you're gonna be a white hat hacker, then you'd better tell people about what you're doing when or after you do it.  If not, you just go on forgotten.