▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ Interview #258 - @hacker09 ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬  Me being me as myself "a nerdy true story" Interview conducted by: @Atlos Reviewed by: @IrrelevantGuy Could you tell us more about yourself? I loved computers even when I was young and got a very old (and slow) one from my uncle; that was enough for me to start playing Atari games with a controller and emulators. But at that time, I just knew it was working and had basically no knowledge about computers—I didn't even know I was probably using an emulator... After that, my friends kinda made me play AdventureQuest Worlds and used hacks for it, so I got really interested in knowing how they worked. After looking every file and folder in C:\Windows, I fell in love with I.T. and began learning real stuff like how to format windows haha. Around the same time, I finally noticed that I loved animes, but I've always watched them since I was a kid; I just didn't know they were animes. I kept my reviews on a notepad, then in a more secure excel file I made with macros. I subsequently switched to using online secure text storage services and finally MAL, but most of my reviews are not here since they are written in my native language. How did you choose your username? I wanted something like just hacker, h4ck3r, cyber-sec, drhouse, or something similar to those, and the first one that worked for me was hacker09. Now that I'm a bit popular and people talk about me, I probably won't ever change it—because I kind of can't change it, since doing so will make people lose contact with me and I wouldn't be able to get any script suggestions or bug reports (or at least it would be difficult or much less frequent). Could you give us your brief history of your time on MAL? Oh, I forgot to mention that earlier, but I think I used MAL for 1 or 2 years before I decided to create an online account. I love the database of MAL and the fact that it is relatively easy to find everything related to an anime franchise on this site, which has helped me keep my offline anime list. I hate creating accounts online due to privacy concerns, but I wanted to give it a try, and now I really can't stop using it, especially after I made a bunch of tools that help me and others a lot too. How did you get into anime and manga? I never got into manga, but there was one manga that I was interested in, even though it was just one page of it and I never took time to read it fully. There were a good amount of shows I watched on TV as a kid that were actually animes. I tried my best to remember all of them and wrote them down on my profile so that I don't forget them. If you are interested in knowing which ones I'm talking about, you can see all of that I remember at least on my profile. I used to hate animes and Naruto a lot, as everyone I knew back then said it was for gays, and I believed it without never watching it. When I watched it I finally understood what they meant, especially because the first 20 or 15 eps of the first season are very childish and stupid. But after that, it has a very nice suspense that made me want to know the end of it, so I ended up watching the whole Naruto franchise. This also made me try other animes, and there were a couple that I really loved, while some are just total garbage. Could you recommend to us three of your favourite anime/manga? I can, but it really depends on what you like. Not knowing your preferences makes it harder to give good recommendations that you might enjoy. I like Steins;Gate because you really want the characters to be happy and together forever. Most people get confused while watching time travel anime and that's why hate them, but I personally think they are amazing. I would recommend Angel Beats too because it's about love, and kind of world/time travel too. This anime really makes anyone cry... If you like to cry a lot, my next recommendation would be AnoHana. It's very similar to Angel Beats but mostly about friendship and not love, but in case this is not what you like, then as everyone says and recommends. I would also recommend Death Note it's probably the nicest detective and suspense related anime that I know of. IrrelevantGuy: Seconded, although I don't think there's anyone here who hasn't watched Death Note lol Any users you like/dislike and why? The users I really like are on my friends' list, a bunch of nerds pirates who are willing to help create, help test, or use scripts to make their own life better. These are the users who know I won't explode their computers for fun with a simple script. I love all of them because they help me find information about a code I'm lacking, or anime I want to watch. They are basically well-known individuals on MAL and at least half of them made amazing tools, scripts, or something CSS related. Either that or they are the admins and creators of some amazing clubs or web pages. Only like 4/5 of them are users I've chosen to add because of my script "affinity to you". Since we have a somewhat high affinity, I chose to add them although we haven't talked yet. I do dislike some users, only 3 users so far to be specific, but I won't go as far as to mention their usernames. I don't like them just because it is impossible to keep any conversation with them. They asked for help, and I tried to help, but my help and answers weren't exactly 100% like they wished for, so they think they have the right to start being rude to me, instead of at least saying "Thank you, but that wasn't what I wanted". I don't think that it makes sense to ask for help, and be rude with the person who is trying to help you. Either that was the case, or they strongly believe that I'm the best hacker in the world, or an 11 year old kid with amazing hacking skills that just wants to explode their computers and change the scores of a couple of their entries randomly for fun. No matter how much I tried to just help this is what they will always believe. Any hobbies outside of anime/manga and MAL? Programming, playing FPS games, recently PUBG and Smash Bros. I'm also watching newly released movies, but I don't watch any series usually. How do you feel about how the site is run? Especially in regards to the moderators and admins. I almost feel like I could make this website again. Kineta made it while she was in college, and it was poorly written according to other mods, so the devs that MAL hired are all afraid of changing something and breaking something else or everything. If this is correct, I don't believe it even makes sense to not fire them and keep them hired to do basically nothing. But overall, it works really well most of the days at least haha—when the server is not down or something with internal error pops up. I see that message a lot and I can't even access the site when that happens. The mods do a good job overall when trying to erase spam stuff and following the old weird rules. At times, it seems like some of them go too far and ban users unnecessarily. At least this is what I have seen a few users saying, but I've never really seen it myself so I don't know if it is true or not. They are also good mods because they try to comment on a couple topics with the required answer sometimes, or at least they do a really good job at moving topics to the correct boards. I think that the main problem is that most of them never answer anything and don't seem to participate in the forums at all, whereas I believe mods really should be answering many more people and be much more active forum users. How did you get into making Tampermonkey scripts for mal? I would say that this was the very beginning: https://myanimelist.net/forum/topicid=1846937&show=0#msg60044337 I'm gonna credit @Chika_tetsu for asking for help and @Only_Brad for helping. He gave me instructions on that and also a little help. Now and then I still ask him about some stuff, but now it is just really complex things. I already knew other scripting and programming languages so I got good at it and stop searching and asking for stuff very quickly. But, much before that topic was created and I commented on it, I already had to do some JavaScript reading, writing and code changing for other purposes. I was basically always able to do whatever I wanted to, but I didn't fully understand how I did it. But now I understand JavaScript much better than I did before 2020. Have you ever made Tampermonkey scripts for other websites? Yes, for quite a good amount of other websites. I love pirating stuff, so I made a script to help me with that and find websites easily. This script basically works with 69 torrenting websites. Just to give an example... IrrelevantGuy: 69, haha (I know this is not funny...) Do you just make Tampermonkey scripts or do you do other types of hacking? (i.e ROM hacking) I do. I really like to root my phone whenever possible, so I can use apps and do things I otherwise wouldn't be able to. I study a lot about security and I.T stuff, so it isn't just a hobby. And even a hobby is basically helping me learn something new for my work area. Surfing on the Deep Web, playing around with trojans, keyloggers, DDOS tools and stuff like that is how I started all of this... I did these things many years ago while I didn't even really know how to make a script for TamperMonkey in JS. What do you think about the new API, is it well-made/easy to use? It's good because everyone always wanted and asked for that, so seeing MAL actually do something about it after so many years was shocking. But this API requires a token bearer that really sucks. I love Restful APIs that do not require some kind of token to track users and keep logs of everything. For TamperMonkey scripts, the MAL API is just a monster. It would require a lot of time, efforts, and lines of code just to make the token bearer work. So far no one besides the MALSync script devs have tried to play around with it, at least none of the TamperMonkey script devs we all know of. Not long ago I talked with another TamperMonkey script dev and he just said the exact same thing. Besides that a good amount of scripts just do a single thing that takes like 30 or less lines of code to be done without the API, while if the API was used it would probably take 200 lines to do the exact same simple thing... So most TamperMonkey devs are just using MAL Endpoints or other Restful APIs. You mentioned you could remake the site but if you could make 3 changes what would they be? A lot. I can't name only 3, but if you take a look at the scripts I made on MAL, you can pick 3 or even all of them and say that I would add them as internal MAL features. What's your opinion on internet piracy (think like torrenting emulation and the like)? It depends on who you are. If you are a singer, software developer, artist, or work in making movies, then you might just hate it and think all it does is take money away from you. But for any normal user who doesn't think deeply about it (or they are poor), torrent and piracy is amazing, and although I'm a dev, I never made something that would give me money, so overall pirating my scripts wouldn't hurt much I guess... I've actually read many discussions online about piracy, either on random forums and random people talking about it, or realistic journal researches, and I read multiple times that if something hasn't been pirated is because it is not good or not popular. Pirating does take money away from those who made whatever is being pirated, but it also ends up making the pirated thing more popular. Thus, it makes people who have money and don't like to pirate stuff, actually buy it and give money to the creator(s) of it. So there is both good and bad about piracy, it just depends on your point of view. So far no one has been able to conclude if it is actually a bad or goid thing. Is Naruto still for gays? 🤔 It has never been. I'm not aware of any gays who actually like it, although they do surely exist. It was just something kids said to each other if they didn't like animes. Have you ever been hacked? Sadly yes. I once was the second admin of a hacking group that originated from the Deep Web. Those in my group and I always frequented a popular hacking DW forum that was abandoned, so the admin of my group hacked that DW .onion forum and got me and he admined on it. Right after that, the real DW website admin finally came back after being inactive probably for years I guess, and hacked our website forum. That didn't really affect me in any way though, so I don't know if I really consider myself being hacked because of it. How long does it take to write a MAL script? by @MaxiDennis It depends on a bunch of things, mostly on what the purpose of the script is. It varies for me from 30 seconds to 30 days, so the time it takes to create a MAL script can't really be measured is what I believe. Most of the time my scripts were created to do a single simple boring task, but I gradually update them, fix bugs, and add multiple interesting features, so if we take into account all of that it takes 30 days or even more. At first a script doesn't really do a bunch of interesting stuff, but with time they start doing much more amazing things. Like, at first this script had 85 lines of code and just added 4 buttons on MAL that opened 4 websites and added the entry title to these websites url thus searching the website on those 4 websites. But now it has 440 lines of code and instead of just opening websites, it does it automatically for most of them and also other things. How long do you see yourself writing scripts for MAL and updating them? by @MaxiDennis Hopefully at least for the next 4 years or so, but I don't think I will ever stop creating new scripts and updating them. If they do stop being created or updated, you can check it by seeing if my last MAL login was longer than 60 days ago or so. Have you ever been approached by MAL to work for them? Or vice versa? by @MaxiDennis Haha, this was definitely the funniest question I have got so far!!! Of course not, they don't care that much about the website. They are totally going in the opposite direction of website development it seems like, especially when all they did about me or scripts is ban anything that does they consider "too many network requests". This is what a mod told me once: https://myanimelist.net/forum/?topicid=1973196 They made me take it down, and they did not accept my request to actually talk with them and let me fix the problem. Given your username, I have to ask, have you ever hacked someone? by @MaxiDennis Ofc, I started scripting by making simple script files that could shutdown computers and shared it with my friends, and they shared it with their own friends who were also my friends, so when they opened it their computer did shutdown. I could get into at least one website that I can remember due to it having a SQL injection vulnerably. But it has been there for a long time and a good amount of people knew about it (if I remember correctly), so I guess that the website admin didn't really care much about it. Recently, I was able to do a reverse encryption process in a website javascript. That website uses javascript to mask a torrent download link as a real magnet link, so after looking at the codes for a while, I understood how it worked and did the opposite process, thus "hacking" their encryption. Although multiple torrent websites use AES encryption to hide their links, and after/before the encryption process they use a simple BASE64 encoding to mask the real magnet download link, it is easy to do the opposite encryption process—especially because the decryption key of their AES encryption is easy to find, so I've been doing this reverse encryption process a lot recently. When I was a kid, my friend asked me to go to his apartment and make his slow computer work faster, and I actually did make it faster. But while he was looking at somewhere else, I downloaded a program that showed all his browser-stored passwords. So after doing it, I waited for him to look at the screen again so that he could see I got all his passwords and emails in one minute. He really loved what I did. Surprisingly, he is researching IT to work with Cyber Security, and he is even studying in the same places I studied myself. I once managed to install a trojan in one of my classmates' computer and see the PC webcam, files, photos, and keystrokes. The father of this person opened a bank link probably to log in, but I guess the PC security was good and reset its address or something like that, and I lost connection before getting the bank username and password—although I just did that for fun and testing. Even if I got that information, I know that doing this kind of thing is too illegal and would just throw it away. I've recently learned that is very easy to do cookie injection attacks on almost any website, so instead of writing my username and password every time on a website (almost any website), I could just do a cookie injection to "automatically log in" on a website I use. But I never did it and will probably never do, since it would be bad for me if someone got my cookie injection codes that I would use for myself hahaha. When I was in one of my IT classes, I did a DOS attack on Google. Ofc Google didn't go down world-wide, but nobody in the building could access google.com and they all thought it was very nice. Unsecure webcams world-wide with no password or default password are easy to find them as long as you know how to correctly use Google dorks, and I've played with those dorks before. Google dorks also makes it easy to find exposed databases with names, emails, passwords, and other stuff, even websites vulnerable to specific vulnerabilities like SQL attacks. I have used those before for fun and to learn. After I rooted my android smartphone, it became very easy for me to turn off the Wi-Fi connection for anyone in the network besides myself. Doing that is effective to get attention or make people stop using their phones, or also make my own speed faster since I'm the only one using the internet. After rooting my smartphone I've also changed all website images to memes for everyone in the network. While surfing in the Deep Web, I once found an image of the Instagram account of a person who did illegal stuff, but I will not get into the details of this one. I also know of other amazing stuff and tools that I can buy for hacking and testing. I hope I can get them one day just to have them or test them with myself. What is your favourite arch linux distro? by @Gween_Gween I don't have a specific one. So far I've used CentOs, Kali, Tails, Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, Ubuntu Server, Linux Mint, PuppyLinux, FatDog and Arch Linux. And maybe XUbuntu, Lubuntu and Manjaro. I believe that any distros have their own good and and purpose that they were made for. Finding a distro that matches your case and was made for what you want to do the most (your main purpose), will be the best distro for you. Do you see yourself leaving MAL in the near future? No, it was probably since the end of 2018 that I have been around here, and now I know people who like to use the scripts I make, so I would like to keep working for myself and for them too. Even if I left MAL I would probably keep using the site, I just wouldn't have an account on it. Is there something unasked that you would like to talk about? Not that I can think about anything now... Any feedback on the interview format? The format was good and had easy-to-answer questions. Could you recommend three members who we can choose from to interview next, and briefly explain why you would like to read their interviews? I have a couple users actually. These ones are all smart, although too mysterious maybe, so I would like to learn more about them @Kwanthemaster @Only_Brad @Shishio-kun @automaweeb There are also the mods: @NoLiferSoul @Luna @Kineta Because the first 2 ones are the ones I've mostly talked with, and I would like to learn something more about MAL or about being a mod. If I could choose I would choose the mods over the normal users though. Well then, that's the end of the interview. Thank you for your time. |
AtlosMay 27, 2022 7:46 PM
 _______I like rocks__  |
| That was a great interview and I really love you Hacker09 for all the things you've done with Scripts to make MAL much more enjoyable that it is. I probably wouldn't have had such an easy time navigating through MAL if it weren't for them Some of the scripts that I use are |
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| @hacker09 - Kwanthemysterious - he's so secretive, that he's hidden in plain sight: https://myanimelist.net/forum/?topicid=1973840 (I even nominated you here too; xD - might have asked a question if I knew you were having one) Anyway, this was a nice read. Really appreciate all the work you do for the community! Your name is a lot more fitting than I realized with everything you've gotten yourself into, but at least you try to stay honest about it all. Excellent anime recommendations too, if I do say so myself. ;) |
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| Our MAL resident hacker with the numerous Tampermonkey scripts, you're a legend dude. It's not people whom are sitting on high positions doing the work, but fan devs like you who are doing more justice to improve MAL substantially. Nice interview, and keep up the awesome work on the scripts! |
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