DEAKSTER

I started FS HOT when I was young enough to think the name was unquestionably cool. I’m now approaching fifty. The name remains — some things improve with age.

FS HOT has never been a conventional commercial project. It’s a personal web presence, a workshop, a place to experiment and occasionally a place to say “I wonder if I can make that work.” Sometimes that becomes software. Sometimes an article. Sometimes a utility. Sometimes something completely unnecessary. The important part is making it properly.

I grew up with the 1990s demoscene, early PCs, Amiga culture, bulletin boards, dial-up connections and the emerging personal web. It was a different internet: smaller, stranger, more technically demanding, and considerably less interested in telling you who you were supposed to be.

The machines had limitations, so people became inventive. The software wasn’t always polished, so people learned how it worked. And if something didn’t exist, there was always the possibility of making it yourself. That mindset stayed with me.

I’ve always had more respect for quiet competence than theatrical expertise. A real hacker doesn’t need to look like one — no uniform, no particular haircut, no collection of glowing keyboards, no requirement to explain your threat model to strangers. Curiosity matters more than appearance. Understanding matters more than terminology. And the ability to question your own assumptions matters perhaps most of all.

Don’t believe something simply because you’ve always believed it. Test it. That principle applies to software, security, science, privacy — and occasionally to yourself.

Privacy isn’t about disappearing. It’s about choosing what you disclose. I have little interest in the modern assumption that convenience should automatically mean surrendering control. I prefer systems that are understandable: software that doesn’t need to know everything about me, services that don’t require unnecessary information, hardware that does what it says, and the ability to leave when something stops working in my interests.

This isn’t paranoia. It’s personal autonomy — and autonomy is considerably more useful when it becomes ordinary rather than performative.

There isn’t really a uniform — just a tendency towards things that work. Nothing particularly fashionable, nothing particularly unfashionable. The objective isn’t to look like a hacker; it’s to get on with things.

The photograph above is, admittedly, slightly more stylised than reality. The real version is considerably less dramatic. Probably.

And, occasionally: if you can build it yourself, why not?

There’s a temptation, running a website this long, to turn the person behind it into a brand — I’ve never been particularly interested in that. Read the full story of the site itself on About FS HOT, or head back to fshot.org for the current tools and utilities.