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Infamous "Hacker" Ankit Fadia revealed
- danso 14y agoAmazingly, this has been debated over on his Wikipedia page and yet the current page doesn't indicate the controversy at all, except noting the lack of sources for some of his claims. And yet the article has no header about controversies...this guy has a longer article than many historical figures http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ankit_Fadia&oldid=540914391 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ankit_Fadia&ol... Given wikipedias strict standards on living biographies and non notable people, never mind frauds, it is somewhat surprising to see the article as it is
- fakeer 14y agoThe Wikipedia page talk compensates though http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Ankit_Fadia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Ankit_Fadia There's added a Controversy[1] section [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ankit_Fadia#Controversy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ankit_Fadia#Controversy
- danso 14y agoLooks like it was just added. I know Wikipedia's a big site, but I just got the impression that editors were quite strict on the "notable" policy, to the point that many other editors rebelled. I guess there's not really any systematic checking, just various pages that do get noticed and debated over?
- fakeer 14y agoYes. The removals, just like additions are rampant and erratic. I see a lot of DO-UNDO-DO-UNDO for sections which actually deserve to be there.
- npguy 14y agoFor some reason, I find this to be a very disturbing story overall.
- neya 14y agoCome on guys, he's a comedian. Live with it. I'm surprised that someone even took the pains to verify his claims to disprove them. He didn't deserve all this precious time and attention. Just look at his twitter feed, I'm not even sure if he thinks he's clever, doesn't understand sarcasm, or if he's just 'living with it'.
- frozenport 14y agoWhat do Indians mean when they say ethical? In the US we rarely find the need to qualify our degrees with such superlatives.
- shared4you 14y agoIt is because most people hear the term "hack" for the first time in a context like "Someone hacked my computer", meaning the term "hacking" is associated with say breaching security, which may be illegal in some jurisdictions. So he qualifies it with "ethical" meaning don't use those techniques (whatever he claims) for unethical acts.
- dredmorbius 14y agoTL;DR? Writing and pagination insulting. For starters, who is this about and why should I care?
- sushantsharma 14y agoI have never heard of him. And the article is written in a way that I didn't read beyond first page and never guessed the author's sarcasm. Only after reading some other comments, I came to know there are two more pages. So, here is the single page link: http://forbesindia.com/article/beyond-business/ankit-fadia-revealed/34793/0 http://forbesindia.com/article/beyond-business/ankit-fadia-r...
- machbio 14y agoNo One on HackerNews knows him, that means it is only the few Indians who were fooled... and I am an Indian who was not fooled..
- James_Duval 14y agoI didn't know of him, but I was certainly fooled by Herbert Schildt when I started getting into programming... Schildt plays the same game, just on a subtler, smaller, more unassuming level.
- suhair 14y agocare to explain what is wrong with Herbert Schildt?
- defrost 14y agoOn the back of writing some fairly solid workaday code in C that was very MS-DOS specific and publishing several books about it he had the unmitigated gall to dare write an annotated guide to The C Language Standard in which he got a fair bit of detail about C the language of the C Virtual machine wrong. The first level of being a C Guru is an intimate understanding of Your C Compiler on Your OS using Your Hardware. The second level is the self realisation that everything you thought you knew was wrong. Poor old Herb positioned himself as an expert, wrote a book on that basis, angered the Gods who counter attacked with an annotated guide to what he got wrong and rubbed salt in by coining the term Bull Schildt. Frankly he did a service by taking a bullet like that as there now exists a kind of Platonic dialogue in which you can read the C Standard, read what someone thought it meant, and then read a commentary on that. Those C chaps can be a prickly bunch :/
- James_Duval 14y agoTo be fair, if you get something wrong in C, your computer might catch fire (not really, but you see my point. C will let you do a lot of things that you maybe shouldn't be doing, and getting something wrong can have more consequences than it does in many other languages. Accuracy is very important.)
- kenkam 14y agoI had to read the article twice to make sure the author was being sarky. That's taking sarcasm to the next level (or was he being serious? I still can't tell for sure).
- moveoergosum 14y ago'm on this with you. I was like, this can't be on HN front page just for this, before I saw the pagination.
- jychang 14y agoWell, he is making a lot more money than me. That's the beauty of the article: it works both if it's sarcasm or not, because both sides are true.
- kamaal 14y agoHe just replied: https://twitter.com/ankit_fadia/status/306659820910542848 https://twitter.com/ankit_fadia/status/306659820910542848 Hilarious!! He seems to be converting this whole episode to his advantage and using it as a marketing opportunity.
- tucson 14y ago"I dont bother remembering my account passwords, I just hack into them." https://twitter.com/ankit_fadia/status/306741837295661057 https://twitter.com/ankit_fadia/status/306741837295661057
- frozenport 14y agoSocial hacking
- cmpitg 14y agoShoudda learn how to make this kind of excuse! :-))
- StavrosK 14y agoIf I were him, my takeaway would be "top reporter apologizes for ever having doubted me".
- nos4A2 14y agoThis is why we shouldn't feed the trolls, they feed on attention.. Forbes fed the troll here, as are we..
- suhastech 14y agoHilarious. I almost mistook it to be a parody account. All of his tweets seems to be sarcastic (not sure if it was supposed to be): https://twitter.com/ankit_fadia/ https://twitter.com/ankit_fadia/
- ameen 14y agoI remember him, back when I was 11 my elder brother had bought one of his books and it seemed like he had a fledgling business. If anything, he was a Salesman more than a hacker.
- kaka189 14y agoHere is a hilarious but true answer about him on quora http://www.quora.com/Expertise/What-are-examples-of-experts-who-in-the-end-are-not-really-experts/answer/Varrun-Ramani http://www.quora.com/Expertise/What-are-examples-of-experts-...
- truncate 14y agoQuora answer says, even the top engineering institutes of India aka IITs, invited him for workshops. Now that's really sad.
- petenixey 14y agoOff topic but this is a wonderful example of how ad-driven pagination can go wrong. At the end of the first page it still wasn't clear that the author was being sarcastic. Since most people would have clicked back by that point, the majority of readers will see the article as endorsing Ankit.
- GhotiFish 14y agoI kind of got the gist after the first page myself. He praised Ankit for his ability to promote himself. Which basically harkens images of blow hard pretty boys from movies. The authors thrust seemed clear.
- acoleman616 14y agoThat's, in fact, exactly how I felt after reading what I thought was the entire article (but I'm finding out right now was only the first page). Suppose I'll go read the remainder now...
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- lacerus 14y agoI have done exactly that. Thanks for telling me :-)
- friendly_chap 14y agoThis guy is a genius! A liar, but a genius. I mean, building such a bussiness out of zero knowledge, this guy has some serious marketing skills. All respect to him, I bet I make 10 times less with 10 times the IT skills.
- hkmurakami 14y agoReplace IT with Finance and you get Bernie Madoff. Not convinced that you'd call Madoff a genius in similar vain.
- kshatrea 14y agoTotally. I was in first year of engineering when this guy (then in high school) walks in and gives a talk filled with such obvious bull and then gets a standing ovation from the faculty, most of whom weren't too knowledgeable either. I consider him a genius because of his ability to fool people, just like all the Indian godmen who have a great time cheating the Indian populace.
- machbio 14y agoDont Worry, if you have been fooled.. The Music Channel - MTV had honoured him with the "Youth Icon" award, some years ago.. A big corporation like MTV could be going wrong, then think of your faculty...
- kamaal 14y agoProblem, basically is. 1. Many folks are really computer illiterate beyond internet surfing and basic computer usage. If you show them a few tricks- you create the same effect a magician has on kids. People get mesmerized. 2. You can really fool people by marketing campaigns. "Best selling author" , "Helps crack emails for intelligence agencies" etc kind of campaign forces people to ask "Why would so many people buy his books, unless he has something genuine to write" - Hence increasing the books sales in this cycle. A relative of mine did a ethical hacking certification from this guy. He showed it to all other relatives like waving a flag out of pride. Nothing that I told convinced the audience as to why the certification wasn't even worth the paper it was printed on. It was all like they were asking me to shut up and stop spewing negativity about it. They were like "At least he learned something through the certification". 3. Job promises and resume decoration, If you tell some one your are a certified ethical hacker. Ordinary joe, who knows nothing of the topic will not only believe you but rather offer you job over say an actual ethical hacker. 4. We like degrees, certificates and titles next to our names. And lastly we just love famous people. Even if all they do is nothing. Bollywood is full of such examples.
- kriro 14y agoNever heard of that dude
- execat 14y agoYou probably aren't an Indian then.
- jmd_akbar 14y agooh crap.. not this liar again... he's gonna say "they recognize me"!! NOOOO!!! NOOOOOOO!!! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!
- jasonzemos 14y agoHe was kicked off box.sk (hackingtruths.box.sk) back in mid-2002 for plagiarizing directly from other box.sk sites at the time. I haven't heard anything about him since, but this is mildly hilarious. Stanford? Really?
- rikacomet 14y agoYou know what, I'm outta here. This article is messing with my head, and that is the only solution to it.
- nos4A2 14y agoI bet his next book carries the statement "Covered by Forbes and Hacker News".. We need downvotes in real life for this kind of thing, "Down voted into oblivion"..
- JanneVee 14y agoThis guy has been in this page for ages: http://attrition.org/errata/charlatan/ http://attrition.org/errata/charlatan/ there are comments going back over a decade http://attrition.org/errata/charlatan/ankit_fadia/ http://attrition.org/errata/charlatan/ankit_fadia/