the origin of my name

this is a response to a friend of mine's post about where your LJ name/handle ect. came from.

I've told the story a few times, but I will do so again here for posterity.

In about 1992 and up 'til about 1999, I was ALWAYS on IRC and various hacking this and that's on the net.

I spent a ton of time on IRC as it was, and still is, one of my favorite communities on the net. I was on DALnet a lot and I found that channels were taken over often by Bots, software scripts which usually did menial tasks on networks such as mass pinging and other network commands which could be used to compromise an IRC channel and take it over. I began to get known because I wrote a number of scripts which killed these bots, and thus helped a lot of sysadmins who had their hands full. I got known as the botkiller.

You can probably still find some of my scripts on the net somewhere, if you look.

As time went on, I started running a hacking website and blogging before blogging was this bullshit called the "blogosphere". I ranted and raved about things political, and a lot about the mistreatment of Kevin Mitnick and other hackers and the state of hacker community in general.

I continued to use the name botkiller at this point because in my mind, the point was that people think like robots, and my goal was to stop that. Not by killing them, but you know, it's better than "botviewchanger".

I stopped running this site in 2000 or so, when I was getting at least 1500 hits a day or more. I had, as far as I could tell, one of the most popular hacking/free speech "blogs" on the net at that time.

That brings us to now, where I use the name botkiller in all forms, but mostly just in that I like the name, I like that other people don't have it, and I like that it is my name. It does not apply to my music directly, as if it did I think I would be making much more harsh music, and I don't.

That's all there is to it, now you know. And knowing, my friends, is half the battle.