A hacker is a stalker first and foremost. To hack a hacker, I need to stalk it (gender-neutral). This is a cyber game played out in the dark. In the dark, I need to listen. No stalker/hacker can remain silent absolutely and totally. When and if I catch the sound of its silence, I can and will move to defang it. Before that, though, I have to bait it. My bait is the sound of my silence. Mind you, I'll not present myself as an easy prey, which won't excite seasoned hackers. I am after seasoned hackers and seasoned hackers only.

Seasoned hackers are lurking around, always. I spotted one recently. To bait it, I posted two bilingual pieces, about 10 days apart. Both of them shared something unappealing to a certain authoritarian regime. Meanwhile, each of them went on attracting a fast-growing readership. As expected, I got hacked. The hacker wiped 100,000 hits off my first post, followed by another 38,000 hits off my second post. Perhaps over-excited with such a bounty, the hacker forgot that it had left behind two identical Chinglish sound bites, which registered with me as a Chinese-speaking hacker's fingerprints on a cyber-crime scene. It's just too bad that English was above this seasoned hacker's pay grade. 

Like it or not, English makes sense of algorithms. But Chinglish? Not so much.

--- by Lingyang Jiang