I was reading story of a guy who created a backdoor in an open-source project and then put an effort in promoting the project and increasing his influence. All of the story and the tricks he played along the way is just mind-blowing.
After reading the story, I felt the same as when I was listening to the stories Ali Bandari narrated in his podcast series. I ask myself: Why don’t I do such things? One shallow answer would be “because I’m a good person”. But is it all the reason behind it? I don’t think so. More than moral reasons, it’s the lack of imagination/creativity and skills that keeps me from doing it, or at least think about how to do it.
I mean, I never ever thought about how to hack people illegally. I was always framed by the formal education and the courses I had to pass. Although I’m interested in these stuff, I’ve never thought of how to do such a large-scale hack. This is what I’m calling lack of imagination. Maybe I should start to learn how to apply the things I’ve learned in the real world.
Apart from the imagination, it’s also about skills. The guy was technically skilled. He knew how to create a nontrivial backdoor. That part wasn’t easy. But more than the technical skill, it was his soft skills that astonished me. He manipulated the repo’s maintainer. He (probably) forced his opinion to others by creating fake accounts to support him in a discussion. He put in a lot of effort and gained some reputation in that project’s community. These all were new and astonishing to me.
Was he a single person and did all of it by himself? Or was he a member of a bigger group? That, we won’t know. But if it’s been the first case, then I really admire him.
P.S. Cut the bullshit if you wanna say “oh you don’t have to admire a criminal because he harmed others” or such similar things. I expect the average reader of this post to understand morality is not everything, and even immoral actions can be creative and smart.