It’s 2023, I’m 24 years old, my passion project, the OSINTBuddy project started becoming popular, I had cybersecurity companies, cognitive neuroscientists, notable Bellingcat members, even a fucking public sector intelligence agency employee following the project and interested in what I was building for fun. I was so excited, I was spending all my freetime working on the project! There was nothing that made me happier than banging out features on the weekends and during evenings, researching ideas, all in addition to working full-time as a software developer. Around June 28th, 2024, a developer going by the name of Daniel (name changed to respect their privacy and employment prospects) reached out to me on Discord from Hackcyom, a cybersecurity company based out of Paris France. The meeting goes well, me, Daniel, and Mr. Mouloud (Hackcyom CTO/CEO) all seemed to share a similiar vision and after building out the toy osintbuddy project/environment I was hungry to start fresh with all I had learned from it. Mr. Mouloud sends me an email shortly after on July 3rd…
I am looking into how we could contract your services.
For the time being we can’t “hire” you because of fiscal issues if you do not live in France.
However, we can pay bills.
For that, are you able to setup a sole proprietorship (solo enterprise that freelances usually create) in Canada?
That way you could bill us and we could start pretty quickly.
I had never ran my own business before, I’ve done some freelancing but that was under-the-table, I thought their requests seemed reasonable so I started up a sole-proprietorship with the Ownr service shortly after this request. The contract I signed with Hackcyom explcitly stated all my public work would remian mine, this was the only reason I accepted their offer. Ownr is a great service btw, I do recommend them (www.ownr.co - and no, this is not sponsored).
It takes some time until I’m able to get access to their private Gitea repos and apparently they had already started! Great I think but as Daniel is going over the code with me I feel a lump forming in my stomach. This looks remarkably like my OSINTBuddy project, in fact, it turns out a signifigant portion of it is literally ripped out of my AGPL licensed repo! Fuck… What do I do, I just left my other job, the software dev market is looking not great for getting hired but they’re fucking violating my AGPL license. I don’t have the money to bring them to court, I don’t have much runway in terms of finances and I don’t have any close friends or family in this city. Fuck fuck fuck. I requested payment from Hackcyom for my services, (aka the fucking code they stole without respecting the AGPL license). I get paid $9200-ish CAD and I stopped showing up and resumed my job search desperate for anything that I could find. I stopped limiting myself to only software jobs, I would’ve taken anything but the job market is a crap-shoot.
The desperation first set-in when I wasn’t able to afford the medications I need to take, then I got the eviction notice…
On February 19th I became homeless for the first time in my life, I lost all my belongings. Everything I had ever owned. I had a backpack with some clothes and a laptop bag with my laptop and some raspberry Pi’s. I live in Alberta so there was soon snow on the ground. The social services in this province are complete shit and I wasn’t able to secure income support for many months despite applying multiple times and dotting my i’s and crossing my t’s everytime. And in addition to that as it turns out when you’re homeless the well-meaning idiots running our social services actually pay you less despite being in a worse position. How brilliant is that! Pardon my french, but fuck this shitty Albertan province and their politicians and people voting for them all 9 ways to hell.
Long-story short, I was homeless for about 5 months in total and then proceeded to spend 4 months in the hospital due to not taking the medications I needed. Worst years of my life and I’ve been through some shit so that’s really saying something. Fuck Hackcyom. Only now do I feel like I’m finally recovering from this experience.
to be continued, I’ll likely elaborate more on this experience later but I can already feel my blood pressure rising simply thinking about it.