
Infamous "Hacker" Ankit Fadia revealed - manojlds
http://forbesindia.com/article/beyond-business/ankit-fadia-revealed/34793/1
======
petenixey
Off 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.

~~~
acoleman616
That'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...

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danso
Amazingly, 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&ol...](http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ankit_Fadia&oldid=540914391)

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
The Wikipedia page talk compensates though
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Ankit_Fadia>

There's added a Controversy[1] section

[1]<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ankit_Fadia#Controversy>

~~~
danso
Looks 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
Yes. 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.

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kamaal
He just replied: <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
"I dont bother remembering my account passwords, I just hack into them."

<https://twitter.com/ankit_fadia/status/306741837295661057>

~~~
frozenport
Social hacking

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friendly_chap
This 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.

~~~
kshatrea
Totally.

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.

~~~
kamaal
Problem, 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.

~~~
execat
Confirming that this guy isn't bullshitting about Bollywood.

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kenkam
I 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).

~~~
jychang
Well, 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.

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machbio
No 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
I 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
care to explain what is wrong with Herbert Schildt?

~~~
defrost
On 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
To 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.)

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sushantsharma
I 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-r...](http://forbesindia.com/article/beyond-
business/ankit-fadia-revealed/34793/0)

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kaka189
Here is a hilarious but true answer about him on quora
[http://www.quora.com/Expertise/What-are-examples-of-
experts-...](http://www.quora.com/Expertise/What-are-examples-of-experts-who-
in-the-end-are-not-really-experts/answer/Varrun-Ramani)

~~~
truncate
Quora answer says, even the top engineering institutes of India aka IITs,
invited him for workshops. Now that's _really_ sad.

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jasonzemos
He 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?

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JanneVee
This guy has been in this page for ages:
<http://attrition.org/errata/charlatan/>

there are comments going back over a decade
<http://attrition.org/errata/charlatan/ankit_fadia/>

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nos4A2
I 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"..

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ameen
I 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.

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kriro
Never heard of that dude

~~~
execat
You probably aren't an Indian then.

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neya
Come 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'.

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jmd_akbar
oh crap.. not this liar again... he's gonna say "they recognize me"!! NOOOO!!!
NOOOOOOO!!! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!

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frozenport
What do Indians mean when they say _ethical_? In the US we rarely find the
need to qualify our degrees with such superlatives.

~~~
shared4you
It 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.

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rikacomet
You know what, I'm outta here. This article is messing with my head, and that
is the only solution to it.

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dredmorbius
TL;DR? Writing and pagination insulting.

For starters, who is this about and why should I care?

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npguy
For some reason, I find this to be a very disturbing story overall.

