Masters of Deception: The Gang That Ruled Cyberspace Read Online Free PDF

piece of paper that lists the phone numbers of about a dozen phone company computers in Queens.
    It's like a directory. No ordinary White Pages, though, this is a secret list of internal New York Telephone Company numbers. It's an excellent find. Now when you call up the phone company business office, pretending to be Lou in Provisioning, you can let it drop that you know all about a certain computer at a certain phone number. You're a part of the great Bell family, and of course the business office is going to give you the information you request. You can sound like you know the person: "Don't you remember me, Barry? We've talked before, fella. "
    Another great thing about the list is that it's like a schematic diagram that tells which computers are in Queens, and how they're related. How it all fits together.
    The list is a map of a trip that, until now, Paul and Eli had been taking separately. Before they met tonight, they were just your typical lone spelunkers, rubbing their hands along cave walls in the dark. Now, with this shared experience, this set of directions, they're part of a team. There's a new breathlessness to them, a warm guy-feeling, because when you're trying to figure out something as labyrinthine as the nation's phone system, it helps to have friends.
    The phone system is intentionally closed off to outsiders. Adolescent boys aren't supposed to be hooking up their computers to it, exploring its intricacies. But Paul and Eli and their friends are just playing an adventure game. This is merely a little trespassing. The very fact that they have to dive into a dumpster to get something as mundane as phone numbers for company computers only heightens their desire to get inside the system.
    A few days ago, just before they decided to meet for the garbage run, there was a moment on the phone when Paul decided to give Eli something. He told him a secret.
    Paul told Eli about the strange computer that answers the phone when he dials 555-9940, a number in Laurelton, Queens. "I think it has something to do with the phone system, " Paul said, in a typically understated way.
    In fact, Paul had found three separate phone numbers that all seemed to dial the same computer in Laurelton. Almost every day, Paul had been hooking up to this computer and trying to figure out what it does. The work was tedious.
    At first, Paul would sit hour after hour at the keyboard in the basement, trying one combination of letters, then another, hoping to stumble across some command that the computer would respond to. He had plenty of time because Paul wasn't the type to do homework. Even though he was number one in his class, he did better when he didn't study too much.
    Studying could actually make him freeze up on a test, could confuse him when it came time to think through the questions and write down the answers. So forget that. Besides, you learn more from a computer than from any book. Computers interact with you. You do something. The computer responds. It's almost organic. So while his mom watched TV in the living room, he tried to hack the strange computer. When his brother went off to work on the night shift in the subway, he tried to hack it. It was like jiggling a handle on a door, wondering what was on the other side. He knew it was technically illegal. But who would know, and who was he hurting, and who could possibly care? He didn't think it was morally wrong.
    555-9940
    555-9941
    555-9942
    But each number seemed to lead to a separate place in the computer, because each one behaved differently, he told Eli.
    It was one of those absorbing puzzles that would ultimately teach him something. This was far more complicated than programming in BASIC; there was no manual to tell him how to proceed.
    The last phone number was useless, actually, but it took him a long time to figure that out. Whenever he called 555-9942, he heard a sound, as if the computer were pulse-dialing, like one of those old rotary phones. He was calling the