For years I've sat there listening to even intelligent good developers saying "sucks boo to perl, my php can do anything I need" and I've never had a decent argument to say back to them (knowing, since vaster intellect is needed to use perl, that of course you can't defend php against perl, in a debate) and even had to settle on the fact that php is (obviously) much easier to break into than perl!

Then along came a spider. Or rather a malicious korean hacker trying to screw my machine for money - just using it to send emails out. Just a basic hijack of some parts. For two reasons my meeting with him made me see the reason why you can't beat perl...

1. When I saw that the hacker was using perl and shell, I realised it was a bloody clever hacker, hard to pin down - and I thus suspected him/her of being either Russian or Korean. Not Israeli since Israel has too many jobs to breed that scale of intelligent hacker. And my guess was right - he turned out to be Korean. That's the sad state of the world, across Europe, India, USA, Europe, and other 'developed' places, you find a lot of pointless overuse of php and easy scripting systems made for anyone, regardless of maths skills, to easily master. But the real clever gits all use perl, and nowadays apart from Russians, Israelis and Koreans, that's hardly anyone any more. Even the indians are more concerned with their pathetic spam cash from countless pointless and idiotic blogs, forums and other "social media" / "consumer generated media"

2. Because of all my skills in perl and shell, I was able to pursue and hunt the mutha, and keep it all under control, and learn how to set up amazingly twisted big-brother type hacker (and of course i can throw the spammers in there too) hunting and patrolling and screwing-over software inside my server. all has to be custom made. otherwise, just like a server can be breached due to "known" holes in its known nature, findable from its server identity, so your hunting tools can be bypassed, breached, avoided, etc - by people who know what to evade.


The moral is: if you are a western developer, learn perl asap, because (1) more and more koreans are coming to get you and me and all of us here and (2) if you want to do anything genuinely powerful on the internet, you'll need something like perl and shell, or failing that you'll need to use a good solid linux environment combined with immensely clever c++ scripts, using things like gcc

It's no joke - the reason I got this korean hacker on my *** was that in one month I have soared in terms of traffic, exposure and global reach. Thus I appeared on the radar of various hackers, and one of them actually got through.

Hacking is massively on the rise, and by having such warped feudal systems on our planet, causing untold disputes, lines in the sand, wars between peoples, we make it fairly inevitable that this sort of thing will go down. Lucky for me I was prepared for it - when I was much younger hackers broke in and used my site to do something much worse than what I caught this korean doing. My server suffered it and I found out via my isp who made me take my naughty server home and teach it a lesson.

This time I was way ahead of it, and I caught the mutha when he came in. But most people would not, in our times. Servers are hard to monitor unless you become fanatical about their insides or are a high-paid server admin person in a company that affords that sort of mutha. everyone else is paddling in the dark in (korean and worse, russian) shark infested waters. high seas.

So there it is: the ultimate reason why PERL always wins in the match of PERL vs the world - because the meanest, most hostile hackers there are will always use perl and shell and things which behave like them (but perl is the wizard tool at the core of it all, the magic dust you sprinkle on a computer to cast it under your spell) and thus the most fierce security agents have to, by nature, since their nature must be exactly the same as that of the most hostile hackers, by perl wizards.

As a result of this latest encounter I am now starting to move one of my business models toward the phenomenal new goal of starting an I.T. security firm, producing effectively military resources, to sell to goverments, big businesses, etc - i.e. tools for fighting various malevolent hackers (crackers is the correct word, but hey, most people here can't even speak english properly, let alone get down to the nuances, the subtleties...)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtLdFP1SCKg

hey you!

I believe you are right when discussing the idea of security professionals being in HIGH demand with the recent exploits occurring all over the world at this time.

Also, I find it interesting to reflect on the idea of how this has actually caused others to become increasingly conscious about the world they are living in as a result of such occurrences.

There seems to be a big "net-fear" going on right now with the recent Chinese hacks into the Pentagon. And the exploitation of scriptlance.com from (purportedly) Chinese origin.

With an increase in fear among the populace and a necessity to secure one's assets, there does seem (or will seem) to be an increase upon the opportunity to capitalize upon such things.

True indeed. Perhaps it may also change the way I.T. recruits are hired - currently they will usually hire one white person, not necessarily an expert at much I.T., and get them to run a department with a few other white people and several hired guns temporarily brought in from India.

Whenever I applied for I.T. jobs I was fobbed off very quickly. It was very painful for someone with my skill and talent, who far outprograms your average mainstream mutha, to be told they don't think I have what it takes!! Ignorant lying cheating idiots. They barely disguised their racism by interviewing me for less than 5 minutes, in which how in crap could they find out my programming abilities? The only thing you can see in 5 minutes is skin colour, accent and attire. They did comment on my clothes - claimed I was too smartly dressed and should "look more like a programmer than a salesman". All of which is of course illegal.

Well now they are screwed because the people like me who are good at working things out on our feet and the most vital tool in the fight against hackers from the Far East and Russia and South America are the one thing these muthas now badly need, and I doubt I'm the only one who would give them a (big) bill to pay upfront (and the finger) if they asked!

Right now I'm very pleased with my progress. After following Tripy's advice (as well as, of course, doing tonnes of other stuff and reading), I managed to 100% block the attack I was suffering. Naturally I am keen to find out what the next successful breach will be! It's bound to come sooner or later, unless I rapidly get on top of updating every single part of my server asap.

I'm already confident that I totally have what it takes to build my security firm, and the growing market bodes well. I look back at those big organisations who refused to employ me as a perl programmer and would have kept me running round job interviews for many more months had I not thrown in the towel and got a job in sales, and I do feel pity for them. I have met I.T. directors maybe 10 years older than me with absolutely no intelligence, no I.T. talent visible whatsoever, the only visible reason for their job - talking English the non-geeky way (ie minimal syllables, short sentences, basically accessible to morons). People like that are totally screwed. Who are they going to trust now? Are they going to hire foreign guns to deal with integrity breaches? That doesn't sound very safe to me.

As someone explained in the press the other day (somewhere that no one reads, but me, I imagine) if you don't have a rich diversity of employees working within your institution, things can get a bit "in-bred". And that's what's happened in the west. Massive social in-breeding has resulted in a wide variety of "diseases" - everything from crashing banks, tumbling property prices, unstoppable foreign "viral" attacks, not to mention the catastrophically contradictory consumer and business marketplaces where people have long forgotten the real rules of how to make money and have been deceived into thinking that the best way to make money is with more money, oh it's so sad. If this society could have just stopped being such a wanker long ago, none of the current trend toward third world status would be happening.

But why moan. Justice comes in the end! I've seen it with my own eyes. All around me undeserving morons who used to live it up (whilst the bulk of the world live in abject poverty) are being crushed - because when you take away their bank balance they don't really have anything else going for them - talent, integrity, drive... these things belong not to the spoiled classes but to those of us forced to fight even for our own survival!

You're definitely on to something when you talk about poor hiring practices in not only the computer industry, but the I.T. industry as a whole.

The businesses who hire the brains are more interested in making money than they are about adequately financing a tech company.

I have heard much online from people who complain.

From programmers who are forced to sit in the same proximity or room of people making sales calls, and receptionists - to not being allowed to listen to music, from being told that they had do something a way that would cost more company money, and perhaps make the job more difficult on the programmer than if the programmer was able to use his knowledge to both save the company money and expedite the time frame on a project.

Still, one cannot complain. At all.

And I say that not as a motivational speaker, or someone who tries to motivate others- but as as someone who knows, if you have the proper skills, you can set up your own biz and start working for yourself.

F the lot of 'em. Let them take care of themselves, and try to set a more fulfilling president with your own company/vision.

"Still, one cannot complain. At all."

Why not? I say complain. Most people will be stuck in jobs their whole life. Better the poor gits have some improvement to their condition.

Do you know that in the UK the vast majority of people will never get past 40k a year and yet they'll spend 15 to 20 years starting at 20k and slowly moving up, being promised that one day they'll make "much" more - most won't even reach 30k - 75% of people will only get to about 25k tops. This is all before tax, btw - which is a fifth on the first 20k (after an "allowance" of about 5k without tax)... that's pretty bad!

At least I.T. workers have genuinely commercial skills which can be used to found companies. Most office workers are 100% dependent on the people who underpay and exploit them. They may as well just move to Iraq or Afghanistan and stand in front of an American machine gun or tank! They have not really got much better lives than the other victims of their bosses. As well as masses of obesity, skin trouble, and other problems associated with the methods of overwork the ratrace workers are forced to treat as their everyday duty, the very real threat of swine flu is going to harm a lot of them. So many ways in which these people genuinely give up their lives for a military industrial complex which, unsurprisingly, does not value them or their lives or their families or their future. Or anyone's future.

"not being allowed to listen to music"
(currently I'm listening to a tune called "Soul Limbo" which a fellow programmer/hacker pointed me toward the other month)

the vast majority of ratrace workers I know or have met really genuinely believe that listening to music is the enemy of doing your work, they really do - they are puritanistic goonfaces who should realise their soul is worth more than the 40k a year which is the most that most of them will ever be able to dream of getting

but it's true, programming is a job which requires music - when i have met a few programmers from teams from out in the ratrace they've always looked at me like lost dogs, they've always been visibly unhappy, very underpaid, and were the most likely people in a company to break rules, generally.

i was always, naturally, working as a sales caller! you get much more money for it, and control - the managing director was probably a salesman in his youth. of course, it's better to have been the engineer, right? well me, i'm happy to say i'm both. sales is a very good skill to have.

i think if you want to guarantee marrying the woman you particularly want to marry, for example (or in my case form an unbureaucratically-condoned soulful partnership with her, lasting not just in this lifetime but previous and future ones) having the ability to "push the right buttons" is always good, and I don't mean anything crude (nor are the buttons on a keyboard). Just think of Sergeant Bilko. I mean Steve Martin's Bilko, of course, though massive respect and bigup the original Bilko, of course.

Martin's Bilko is quite a cool character and his dealings with his woman are the crown of that film, although it is what she has behind her back when they get married that really is the clincher which makes it such a sterling moment of meaningful film comedy. It reminds you that in the end, no matter how skilfully you manipulate that woman to make her yours, it was ALL her plan the whole way through and you were never not at her mercy. She she just felt flattered that you thought you had to try so hard...

I keep forgetting not to post these salient thoughts in places where the skilful tracker might, dressed in mounty uniform or not, correlate my words with my identity... one thing you don't want to lose on account of is a big mouth.