Ah. This takes us in a slightly direction.
I, as an engineer and a programmer can understand why people hack. An engineer asks ‘can it be done’, and probably before they have finished another engineer is asking ‘can we break it?’. I remember back in about 1985 my company getting a computer phone exchange which could allow you to forward calls from phone A to phone B. Within 5 minutes we had found you could not forward calls from phone A to Phone B, and from phone B back to phone A. Within five minutes we found you could forward calls between three phones in a loop, and there was no way to undo this other than to reboot the exchange. There was no real malice in this - just an itch to see what happens. It takes a different sort of person to want to do this to get money or do harm.
Printers have a similar itch. They want to know how well they can copy a banknote. They work on it in their spare time. As they get good at it, they think of new ways to do it better. In the end they try passing some of these notes in shops to see whether other people are fooled. They are not trying to make money - probably the notes cost more to make then their apparent worth. Professional forgers are a different breed.
It would be nice to believe some of these people are just innocent hackers in human behaviour. This guy might have been…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Voigt
Somehow, I feel the guy in this story is doing it, not because he wants to know if it can be done, but because he wants the result. He’s like the professional hacker, or the professional forger. No, I have no rational basis for this feeling, but there you go.
