WHAT’S up, Times readers? Normally right now you’d be nodding off over a very thoughtful prescription for offering Qaddafi an honorable exile at a plastic surgery teaching hospital. But not today, people! Because I deleted that snoozer when I hacked my way in here.

That’s right. I hacked the Op-Ed page. You’re only reading this because I broke into The Times’s internal network (“The Old Gray Linux Box” we call it) and put this piece in the lineup myself.

Surprise, surprise: a dead-tree media company’s cyber-security was no tougher to crack than Citibank’s or the C.I.A.’s or any of the other institutions my brethren have hacked into in the past few months.

You’re probably wondering what I want. To be clear: I, along with a large group of my associates, am acting alone. We take orders from no one. Though in the spirit of disclosure, in this one Estonian chat room there’s a 9-year-old boy with some surprisingly good ideas.