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Comment by andrewfelix | Hacker News Reader

I was confused by the writing style as well. It seems to be almost intentional. I wonder if it's a way of avoiding any style or nuances that could be attributed to a single person. Almost like a cut and paste ransom note.

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I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest. A lot of work has been done on adversarial stylometry recently, for precisely this reason.

ccc presentation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-b0Ta9h62_E

EDIT: also as grumpysimon says, it's a proud tradition going back decades.

It's elite (or 1337 if you will). It's supposed to sound cool. All the underground computer groups have talked like that since the early warez/cracking/phreaking scene.

Are you sure they're not just really bad at writing?

A lot of the "scene" traditions and symbols has a lineage back to adolescent boys in the early 80's as that's when many of the influential groups exploded onto the scene, so even if they're emulating a traditional style, they're emulating one that arose out of kids who wrote badly who tried to sound cool.

(I've some really horrible examples to my credit too, but thankfully I don't think any of it has survived)

It struck me as well-written but highly in-jokey, and targeted at a very specific audience. If they were writing for the general reader, this would be terrible. But I took it as addressing other members of the hacker scene, hoping to prompt them into similar politically-focused action.

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