Underground: Hacking, madness and obsession on the electronic frontier Part 28

'Yeah,' Phoenix answered, then rushed on. 'OK. Cacao. Cache. Cachet ...'

'Tell us. What is it?' Electron cut Phoenix off.

'Cachinnation. Cachou ...'

'Do you know?' Electron asked again, slightly irritated. As usual, Phoenix was claiming to know things he probably didn't.

'Hmm? Uh, yeah,' Phoenix answered weakly. 'Cackle. Cacophony ...'

Electron knew that particular Phoenix 'yeah'--the one which said 'yes'

but meant 'no, and I don't want to own up to it either so let's drop it'.

Electron made it a habit not to believe most of the things Phoenix told him. Unless there was some solid proof, Electron figured it was just hot air. He didn't actually like Phoenix much as a person, and found talking to him difficult at times. He preferred the company of his fellow hacker Powerspike.

Powerspike was both bright and creative. Electron clicked with him.

They often joked about the other's bad taste in music. Powerspike liked heavy metal, and Electron liked indie music. They shared a healthy disrespect for authority. Not just the authority of places they hacked into, like the US Naval Research Laboratories or NASA, but the authority of The Realm. When it came to politics, they both leaned to the left. However, their interest tended more toward anarchy--opposing symbols of the military-industrial complex--than to joining a political party.

After their expulsion from The Realm, Electron had been a little isolated for a time. The tragedy of his personal life had contributed to the isolation. At the age of eight, he had seen his mother die of lung cancer. He hadn't witnessed the worst parts of her dying over two years, as she had spent some time in a German cancer clinic hoping for a reprieve. She had, however, come home to die, and Electron had watched her fade away.

When the phone call from hospital came one night, Electron could tell what had happened from the serious tones of the adults. He burst into tears. He could hear his father answering questions on the phone. Yes, the boy had taken it hard. No, his sister seemed to be OK. Two years younger than Electron, she was too young to understand.

Electron had never been particularly close to his sister. He viewed her as an unfeeling, shallow person--someone who simply skimmed along the surface of life. But after their mother's death, their father began to favour Electron's sister, perhaps because of her resemblance to his late wife. This drove a deeper, more subtle wedge between brother and sister.

Electron's father, a painter who taught art at a local high school, was profoundly affected by his wife's death. Despite some barriers of social cla.s.s and money, theirs had been a marriage of great affection and love and they made a happy home. Electron's father's paintings hung on almost every wall in the house, but after his wife's death he put down his brushes and never took them up again. He didn't talk about it. Once, Electron asked him why he didn't paint any more. He looked away and told Electron that he had 'lost the motivation'.

Electron's grandmother moved into the home to help her son care for his two children, but she developed Alzheimer's disease. The children ended up caring for her. As a teenager, Electron thought it was maddening caring for someone who couldn't even remember your name.

Eventually, she moved into a nursing home.

In August 1989, Electron's father arrived home from the doctor's office. He had been mildly ill for some time, but refused to take time off work to visit a doctor. He was proud of having taken only one day's sick leave in the last five years. Finally, in the holidays, he had seen a doctor who had conducted numerous tests. The results had come in.

Electron's father had bowel cancer and the disease had spread. It could not be cured. He had two years to live at the most.

Electron was nineteen years old at the time, and his early love of the computer, and particularly the modem, had already turned into a pa.s.sion. Several years earlier his father, keen to encourage his fascination with the new machines, used to bring one of the school's Apple IIes home over weekends and holidays. Electron spent hours at the borrowed machine. When he wasn't playing on the computer, he read, plucking one of his father's spy novels from the over-crowded bookcases, or his own favourite book, The Lord of The Rings.

Computer programming had, however, captured the imagination of the young Electron years before he used his first computer. At the age of eleven he was using books to write simple programs on paper--mostly games--despite the fact that he had never actually touched a keyboard.

His school may have had a few computers, but its administrators had little understanding of what to do with them. In year 9, Electron had met with the school's career counsellor, hoping to learn about career options working with computers.

'I think maybe I'd like to do a course in computer programming ...'

His voice trailed off, hesitantly.

'Why would you want to do that?' she said. 'Can't you think of anything better than that?'

'Uhm ...' Electron was at a loss. He didn't know what to do. That was why he had come to her. He cast around for something which seemed a more mainstream career option but which might also let him work on computers. 'Well, accounting maybe?'

'Oh yes, that's much better,' she said.

'You can probably even get into a university, and study accounting there. I'm sure you will enjoy it,' she added, smiling as she closed his file.

The borrowed computers were, in Electron's opinion, one of the few good things about school. He did reasonably well at school, but only because it didn't take much effort. Teachers consistently told his father that Electron was underachieving and that he distracted the other students in cla.s.s. For the most part, the criticism was just low-level noise. Occasionally, however, Electron had more serious run-ins with his teachers. Some thought he was gifted. Others thought the freckle-faced, Irish-looking boy who helped his friends set fire to textbooks at the back of the cla.s.s was nothing but a smart alec.

When he was sixteen, Electron bought his own computer. He used it to crack software protection, just as Par had done. The Apple was soon replaced by a more powerful Amiga with a 20 megabyte IBM compatible sidecar. The computers lived, in succession, on one of the two desks in his bedroom. The second desk, for his school work, was usually piled high with untouched a.s.signments.

The most striking aspect of Electron's room was the ream after ream of dot matrix computer print-out which littered the floor. Standing at almost any point in the simply furnished room, someone could reach out and grab at least one pile of print-outs, most of which contained either usernames and pa.s.swords or printed computer program code. In between the piles of print-outs, were T-s.h.i.+rts, jeans, sneakers and books on the floor. It was impossible to walk across Electron's room without stepping on something.

The turning point for Electron was the purchase of a second-hand 300 baud modem in 1986. Overnight, the modem transformed Electron's love of the computer into an obsession. During the semester immediately before the modem's arrival, Electron's report card showed six As and one B. The following semester he earned six Bs and only one A.

Electron had moved onto bigger and better things than school. He quickly became a regular user of underground BBSes and began hacking.

He was enthralled by an article he discovered describing how several hackers claimed to have moved a satellite around in s.p.a.ce simply by hacking computers. From that moment on, Electron decided he wanted to hack--to find out if the article was true.

Before he graduated from school in 1987, Electron had hacked NASA, an achievement which saw him dancing around the dining room table in the middle of the night chanting, 'I got into NASA! I got into NASA!' He hadn't moved any satellites, but getting into the s.p.a.ce agency was as thrilling as flying to the moon.

By 1989, he had been hacking regularly for years, much to the chagrin of his sister, who claimed her social life suffered because the family's sole phone line was always tied up by the modem.

For Phoenix, Electron was a partner in hacking, and to a lesser degree a mentor. Electron had a lot to offer, by that time even more than The Realm.

'Cactus, Cad, Cadaver, Caddis, Cadence, Cadet, Caesura. What the f.u.c.k is a Caesura?' Phoenix kept ploughing through the Cs.

'Dunno. Kill that,' Electron answered, distracted.

'Caesura. Well, f.u.c.k. I know I'd wanna use that as a pa.s.sword.'

Phoenix laughed. 'What the h.e.l.l kind of word is Caduceus?'

'A dead one. Kill all those. Who makes up these dictionaries?'

Electron said.

'Yeah.'

'Caisson, Calabash. Kill those. Kill, kill, kill,' Electron said gleefully.

'Hang on. How come I don't have Calabash in my list?' Phoenix feigned indignation.

Electron laughed.

'Hey,' Phoenix said, 'we should put in words like "Qwerty" and "ABCDEF" and "ASDFGH".'

'Did that already.' Electron had already put together a list of other common pa.s.swords, such as the 'words' made when a user typed the six letters in the first alphabet row on a keyboard.

Phoenix started on the list again. 'OK the COs. Commend, Comment, Commerce, Commercial, Commercialism, Commercially. Kill those last three.'

'Huh? Why kill Commercial?'

'Let's just kill all the words with more than eight characters,'

Phoenix said.

'No. That's not a good idea.'

'How come? The computer's only going to read the first eight characters and encrypt those. So we should kill all the rest.'