Double Trouble Read Online Free PDF Page B

know and what purpose you have for the information in question. You fill them out in triplicate and sign them in blood. Yeah, why don’t you call them?”
    “Twelve it is,” I agreed, growly and disgruntled. “I hope you choke on them.”
    He laughed, then gave me an URL—which is a website address, in case you don’t know—and a password, along with the warning that it would only work for a single unauthorized access to the database. Then the charming, if inevitable warning. “I’d better get those brews on time. If you screw with me, Ms. Donut Paradise, I’ll find out where you live.”
    “Oh, I’m scared,” I whispered, then gave my best maniacal laugh and hung up the phone.
    I’d send him his brews—another matter of principle—but he’d never find me. Once you understand how this stuff works, it’s relatively easy to thwart.
    Like the phone cards—no one gets my name and address on their call display when I do this. They get the address of the donut shop. Big deal. The phone is used here so much that it’s pretty unlikely that anyone could hook me up with any specific call. I left the booth and someone else slid in to use the phone, proof positive of that.
    Because you see, once someone has your name and city of residence, then can get your address very easily. Phonebooks are great resources and readily available. You can get them at the library for all kinds of places and, even easier, snag them online.
    And speaking of the Internet, every time you log on and surf, my little pumpkins, you leave a trail of breadcrumbs. Those little snippets of code prove where you went from where, and tell interested souls a great deal about your particular habits. Marketing types feast upon this information, the better to deluge normal people with spam and direct mail.
    But I’m not normal people. I duck spam and dodge direct mail.
    Worse, your email address gets logged everywhere you go. Equipped with that email address, any junior league hacker can bust into the internet service provider and get a name, home address, telephone number. If that’s not bad enough, oh goody, he or she can snag that credit card number to which your account is billed every month.
    Are we having fun yet? See, you don’t even have to shop online to be vulnerable. We won’t even talk about the so-called cookies that various sites slide on to your drive when you aren’t looking, little spies inserted into your own hierarchy where they flourish away, undetected. Just being online puts you in the sights of all kinds of bounty hunters.
    On the other hand, so does walking down a city street at night. You choose your risks, we all do, and you live with them.
    In my business, I deal with a lot of people who could be professional class hackers. They’re good. They know how things work, they know how to find a weakness. There’s a big screwball factor out there in the wide wacky world of the World Wide Web. You never know what’s going to set someone off.
    Maybe it’s the role-playing games to which we’re all addicted. Maybe it’s spending too much time solo, maybe it’s the lack of a sexually integrated culture or maybe it’s just too many people who were labeled too smart too soon, so never learned their social p’s and q’s. Doesn’t matter. As more-or-less a female lone wolf in a den of horny men, I cover my own butt, thanks just the same.
    It’s not that I’m doing anything out of line—you’re probably thinking I run drugs out of this place or something—but it’s a point of pride that I learn from experience. I was stalked once and lived to tell about it. It’s never going to happen again.
    So, I have one computer which is not hooked into my office LAN. It’s a little island of its own, isolated and breathtakingly stupid, a laughably antique box. It chokes on most sites these days, its meager memory just incapable of dealing with all the data. Suits my needs well. It has nothing on its hard drive except applications as