The sad world of cyber hackers

Some nerds have so much time on their hands they can actually hack into Super Mario Kart on the Nintendo Wii, writes blogger Dan Wainwright.

I find this utterly absurd. The game is extremely addictive, especially as it allows you to race friends and complete strangers over the internet, removing all need to get out of your pyjamas to see anyone in person.

One of its particular charms is being able to compare the results of your time trials against the rest of geek-kind. But it seems that isn't enough for some people.

Some ultra-losers have actually spent time cracking the various codes in their games consoles so that they can fix their times and appear at the top of the world rankings, having completed Donkey Kong's snowboard level in less than two seconds.

It brings back the age old point of sportsmanship, that if you can't win on your own merits there's really no point in competing at all. These game hackers have not even had to risk the terrible side effects of steroids – the male breast growth or the failed urine tests – to reach the top.

And the Wii is not the only victim of the new generation of cyber hacker. While it is a sad fact of life that every time I open my emails I am offered fake Rolex watches and herbal ways of enhancing a certain part of my anatomy I don't expect to find this sort of garbage on Facebook.

The social networking site is meant to be a safe little community where the only messages you receive are from your "friends", or rather from a load of people you vaguely recognise from school who now want to tell you all about their lives and inflict upon you their pictures of themselves on yet another hen night, covered in flashing devil horns and L plates.

But instead I now find a series of sheepish messages from people I used to know apologising for offering me free videos of someone in Thailand "getting wild".

It seems that nowhere is safe from the sad little men, and yes they're always men, who have nothing better to do than find ways around the software designed to keep them out.

Hackers are inevitably people who were not very popular at school and were never invited to the parties. Frustrated at having no way to get in with the cliques they instead hide behind their computers and break into our online communities.

And I bet they've got hardly any friends on Facebook.