I owe my interests in computers in part to James, a boy I met when I was about eleven. James brought me from the boring censored world of myspace and facebook to the exciting land of 4chan, rich with tits and gore. He put the word hacking into my head. Not hacking in the lame meaning of "let's build a (mobile) app" but instead "let's fuck up someone's computer." I can't say he taught me to do anything interesting/impressive, but his eagerness to take a walk outside of the fence of allowed thought and action opened up my world view.
James transferred into my middle school1 at the beginning of sixth grade. Friendships and cliques had already been established so integrating was difficult for the annual 1-2 new kids. And the integration of James, who severely lacked charisma, was no exception. He was a scrawny pale kid who lived in a small apartment with his single mother.2 I can't remember why I went to his house the first time or started hanging out with him. I imagine my mother organized some play-date, she has always been the soccer mom who makes sure no kid sits lonely in the corner.
I remember distinctly that his bedroom had a motherboard glued to a wall. This was probably just some good 'ole green on black hacker signalling, but the site of someone's exploration into the inner workings of a computer caught my eye enough that I remember it today. I disliked my time hanging out at his place. He spent the time looking at YTMND,3 a website for a meme generating community that has since shut down.
Although I only went to his house once or twice, we continued to hang out during and after school. James constantly received detention for pissing off teachers. There was a period where he would bring into school this device that emitted a high frequency noise that went in and out of human hearing range. The sound was so fucking annoying and it destroyed any possibility of learning. Since it went off irregularly, it was impossible for the teachers to find the small little gadget.
James pulled me into one of the other ways he liked to be annoying: prank phone calls via Skype. Instead of speaking ourselves we used soundboards, redirecting our audio output into the microphone input. My favorite soundboard had soundbytes from the thriller Phonebooth, a movie where a gentleman picks up a ringing telephone and finds out the person he's speaking with is a sniper aiming a rifle at him. The soundboard had a clip of the villain calmly saying, I have a highly magnified telescopic image of you. Now what kind of a device has a telescopic sight mounted on it? ... A 30-calibre bolt-action 700 with a Carbon One modification and a state-of-the-art Hensoldt tactical scope. And it's staring straight at you. *cocks gun.* At least one prank call recipient threatened to call the police.
James died suddenly in his sleep from an aneurysm a couple of years ago. I hadn't seen or spoken to him since the end of middle school. Our friendship fell apart because I started spending all my time with my first girlfriend. James almost went on a date with her friend, but she stood him up. He took revenge by calling her mother with a fake caller id - 911 - pretending to be a police officer investigating his own suicide. Speaking as the police officer, he said that he saw the girl's name mentioned in the suicide note and asked do you know why that might be? They bought it; the girl called me in tears. I learned about caller id spoofing that day, Jame's diabolic schemes usually contained a lesson.
- A small, private, catholic all-boys school on the upper east side of NYC [↩]
- This was quite a different situation than some of the other kids in my middle school, some of whose parents had the "oh there's no flights to our three story house on a ski resort in Utah this weekend? Let us get you a private jet then so you can make it out anyways" type of money. [↩]
- You're the man now dog! [↩]
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