THE TRUTH ABOUT CORE

CORE, the ultimate 0DAY group, the group that has been with the
scene and has been the spine of the scene for so many years,
they have been crucial to form what today is known as the 0DAY
scene.

Formed in the 90's, it quickly emerged on expense of other
groups, swooping in any talent they could find, driving their
members to the very brink of what their minds could tolerate
and is as close one could get to dictatorship online as one
could get.

I would know, I was there.

At one point the group was unstoppable, untouchable and could
handpick any recruit they saw fit. The leadership forcefully
pushed for the elitest ways, getting there one keymaker at the
time. And soon you found yourself forced to focus on keymakers
even if they weren't legit keymakers according to rules.

Hardcoded serials? No problem, fish them all and put them
in a keymaker. Having problems reversing the application? Let's
see if we can find a previous released title, and reverse that
keymaker instead. Chances are that the competitor didn't
protect it, and even if they did - reversing the keymaker
would take less time to get to the goal, the keymaker.

Why? While CORE quickly jumped towards scene glory, the council
also forgot about their members. The key elements of fun, 
friendship and knowledge. Forcing weekly work results would
drive any talented reverser to find shortcuts. Shortcuts which
involved stealing from other reversers, finding solutions
in web-based groups or delude nukers by hiding potential
problematic releases inside a rush of releases.

The nukers would probably not even care to check them all was
what we were told, and that's also what happened. We were
high on the adrenaline, we were the best group, we had it all
but something felt wrong. I had become a robot.

Reversing wasn't fun anymore.

Sure, by now I had been active for so many years so I thought
I would be an exempt to the forced requirements. And I was,
for a few months. Then I was approaced, told that I would need
to become more active if I wanted to keep my resources. Else,
the resources would need to be pushed to other active
people.

This astonished me, not only had I been putting hours and
hours of work into this, but also, the group had so many sites
so I had a hard time understanding why my little slot would
be needed. Being a bit irritated, I blatantly asked why this
would come up now; the answer shocked me.

"We need it for our asian re-seller"

Perhaps was this said in a tone of irony, perhaps was this
a result of bad humour, but it did lead me to quickly end my
relationship with the group, and the scene in all. Several
years have passed since then, and the reason I now come
forth with this information is that I see CORE is more and
more acting up.

There is no news in CORE thinking highly about themselves but
when it leads them on a rampage against 0DAY scene in general,
the scene they once held dear and now is ravaging, that makes
me sad. Very sad. This is not how we built our group, this is
not how I want my precious CORE to be remembered. Why would
you leave the path that lead to glory, to bash as kids?

Remember what we used to live by? Challenge of Reverse
Engineering. These days it appears that the challenge more
aims at boosting the ego, the mentality and to fire up
against the competitors. Back when I was active, we had
fun competing, it wasn't personal, we helped eachother, we
acted like a family.

Now it appears that every 4th NFO released by CORE contains
bashing, flaming or other idiocracy against groups they
compete with. Sure, we always had fun doing some mild
bashing, but this is beyond anything. Has the scene really
fallen so far from what we set out to enjoy?

Was all the hours spent building the group a waste of time?

Once I was CORE of all heart, now I root for the competition,
and most notably the group that was a underdog when I
was active, the group that seem to be the Achilles' heel
of CORE - Linezer0, not even responding to the continous
bashing by my former glorious group.

CORE, my beloved CORE. Why, why would you ruin the name as
you do? Why would you forget what is important.

My heart was CORE, now I cheer for the ZERO.

You're lost.

I am sad.

~ The Mighty Thor ~