Many years from now, a child will look up at his father and ask him for a tale from his wild and untameable youth. The man, whose eyes will scream a life without regret, will chuckle quietly and pat him gently on the head.
“Well,” he will say, “There was this one time I drank all this Red Bull and stayed up all night and wrote this algorithm that made Twitter users’ accounts spam other users’ accounts with a message telling them there’s a really funny picture of them online and they should totally click it - and then they did and it sent it to all their friends!”
“Lol,” he will add, as the boy shakes his head and punches him in the knee cap. Hard.
This is the fate that awaits those would-be computer hackers who imagine retiring to an Italian safe house with an exotic European woman and a pistol tucked into their Tommy Hilfigers.
Inspired by “hacktivists” such as the enigmatic Anonymous group and encouraged by the attention gained by Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, keyboard warriors across the globe are setting out to make a pseudonym for themselves.
But while Anonymous is well-known for taking on both governments and large corporations - such as US security Firm HBGary Federal and the Syrian Ministry of Defence - their adoring copycats are considerably less interested in political movements or individual freedoms.
Mostly, they are interested in famous pairs of breasts and creating links that cause mild irritation (as several MPs, such as Ros Bates and Kate Jones, recently found out).
The FBI is currently spending countless hours “reviewing the evidence” to determine who hacked Scarlett Johansson’s phone and leaked her nude photos to the internet.
Among the list of possible suspects is a hacking ring that trawls through celebrities’ phones and computers to find naughty pictures.
It’s all part of their ingenious plan to topple our bourgeois oppressors by putting more boobs on the internet - because there aren’t enough, apparently.
What’s with these guys? Admittedly, they’ve managed to do what millions of “Scarlett Johansson + naked” Google Image searches around the world couldn’t, but where is their imagination?
Where are the Swiss bank accounts, the henchmen, the villainous threats that draw retired ‘80s action stars out for one last job? Where is their Y2K-esque plan to plunge us all into the dark ages?
Remember that whole Y2K unpleasantness? Nothing that crazy ever happens anymore. There we were all freaking out about zeros in clocks and the End Days and the collapse of civilization and all we got was a shitty Jim Carrey movie and Erin Brockovich.
Now that was some exciting shit.
Instead, these folks steal one Mila Kunis photo and they think they’re the digital equivalent of people who punch sharks.
These days, everyone avoids the traditional “mum’s basement” stereotypes, because hackers are supposedly sexy - Daniel Craig sexy. Years of Hollywood glorification has convinced them that they’re the Jason Bournes of the online world, heroically infecting citizens’ computers with malware and whispering “I know Kung Fu” whenever they solve an equation that they’ve written on their windows in chalk, while wearing Target bath robes and bumpuffing cigarettes.
As a constant stream of curvy female assassins move around the room pushing random buttons, they upload evil viruses that make your cursor do weird, annoying shaky things.
All the while, they sip stale Gatorade and scream “It’s pure anarchy!” into the harsh, night air.
And then, one day, their six-year-old child punches them in the knee cap and they crumple to the floor in tears.
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