Masters of Deception: The Gang That Ruled Cyberspace (2 page)

This alone would be worth the trip. For a carload of teenage hackers, the opportunity to gawk through the big plate-glass windows at the matrix of electronic circuitry is better than Dorothy's arrival in the Emerald City.

Theoretically, tonight's conditions are ideal. It's an early summer weeknight, no rain, and the dumpsters are in a quiet alley on the side of the building. In the park, just enough kids are hanging out to provide an acceptable cover. There's plenty of promising garbage in big plastic bags, heavy as feed bags. It's much more auspicious than last week, when some guys took the trouble to climb the fence before they figured out the dumpster had already been emptied. Somebody on the street saw them, yelled up, "Hey, those windows don't open. You can't get any TVs up there. " Like they would even want TVs.

And theoretically, tonight's crew is ideally suited to the job. These teenagers are not Central Casting's idea of computer nerds. Not a plastic pocket protector in the bunch, nobody squinting myopically through thick lenses. In fact, no one here wears glasses, and Paul and Hac, at least, are as muscled as the first-string running backs who graduated with them from high school last year. If they weren't so jumpy, they could toss around thirty-pound bags like Nerf balls. Look at Paul he's the pale, serious one. He's always the quiet one in a crowd. Because he's a big kid, his silence is intimidating, whether he means it to be or not, as he stands staring with flat, Slavic eyes. Those eyes take in everything and return nothing.

Eli is his physical opposite. He's the one the girls like, the hip-hop guy, the cool one. Eli has a slow smile that starts like a conspiracy and spreads up to his eyes and pulls you in. His eyes are black as blueberries. His hair is as black as his eyes.

This is Paul's first time trashing, and frankly, if you knew him, you'd be shocked to see him here. He is, after all, the valedictorian of Thomas A. Edison High School's Class of 1988. Winner of the all-city computer programming competition.

A boy with a future.

Paul learned to read before he got to kindergarten. He knew his colors and his numbers, and his favorite book was Three Billy Goats Gruff. He was captivated by the troll under the bridge. Maybe he would be all his life, maybe not, but at four, Paul was simultaneously drawn to and repelled by the powerful monster that lurked below. This was the authority figure that stood between you and where you wanted to go.

By the time Paul was six, he knew why he wanted to cross the bridge. He learned about the computer on the other side.

It looked like a typewriter but had extra keys. He saw it at his dad's office Christmas party in 1976. The winking cursor on the phosphorous screen enchanted him. How did it work? The boxy computer was one of twenty that sat, like a museum exhibit, behind a Plexiglas wall in the corner. Paul was taking the grand tour of the Royal Composing Room in Manhattan, where his dad was a typesetter; it was the first time he'd been to the office, and everyone was calling him Paulie, just like his dad did. When one of the guys saw him staring at the cursor, with that look in his eye, he took Paul and his father into the climate-controlled, dust-free sanctum where the computers hummed.

"Do you want to play around with one?" the guy asked.

Paul sat down at the keyboard, which was similar to his mom's manual typewriter. Using only his index fingers, he pecked in each letter of a short article from that day's newspaper, and watched as the words miraculously formed on the monitor.

He could hit a key and just erase any error, type the word again. He typed the article perfectly.

The same guy came back, inspected Paul's work, and printed it. Out came a piece of plastic film, four inches by five inches, with the article, some story about the old JFK administration, typeset on it in black letters. Paul held it, still warm and smelling of chemical fixatives, and realized: If a computer did that, what can't such a wondrous machine accomplish?

It was software that made the computer work. It was the code, the precise and logical lines of instructions, that caused the silicon chips to react, just like neurons firing in a brain. It wasn't long before Paul was engrossed in magazines, reading about and actually digesting the rudiments of computer programming. He read Byte, and Compute!, and Personal Computing. He didn't have a computer of his own, and wouldn't for a few years, in fact he didn't even have one at school.

But that didn't stop Paul from becoming a programmer. He learned to speak the programming language called BASIC.

Writing programs without having a machine to run them is like learning chess moves without a chessboard. You have to hold everything in your mind. But here's the thing about Paul: one thought follows another logically in rapid-fire progression. Paul thinks like a computer, so it wasn't so hard for him to start writing for one.

The first program the eleven-year-old ever wrote was a challenge he read in a magazine: Devise a program that will search two groups of twenty numbers and tell which is the highest in each group. Paul thought about this for a while, thought about how it should work, with each command flowing from the previous one so that the problem was solved methodically. And then he wrote:

5 HI = 0

10 DIM A(20), B(20) 15 FOR I = 1 to 20 20 READ A(I)

25 IF A(I)> HI THEN HI =A(I)

30 NEXT I

35 PRINT "HIGHEST A VALUE IS "; HI

40 HI = 0

45 FOR I = 1 TO 20

50 READ B(I)

55 IF B(I) > HI THEN HI =B(I)

60 NEXT I

65 PRINT "HIGHEST B VALUE IS "; HI

70 END

100 DATA 5, 8, 2, 15, 7, 3, 7, 8, 36, 18,

45, 32, 68, 55, 44, 0, 16, 7, 8, 2

110 DATA 6, 4, 6, 8, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4,

3, 2, 14, 15, 33, 22, ll

The program would sift through the two sets of numbers at the end and identify 68 and 33 as the highest. Paul could tell just by looking at the terse lines of code that it would work. It had taken him ten minutes to write it. Then he wrote a program that tracked NFL football team statistics during the season: wins, losses, standings. Some programmers will tell you that it can ruin an up-and-coming hacker to learn to write in the computer language called BASIC because it's so clunky and primitive. Sure, you can write any program in BASIC you could write code for the space shuttle if you

wanted. But it would be millions of lines longer than writing the same program in a more efficient language. You can't express commands succinctly or elegantly in BASIC. Yet somehow the limitations didn't hinder Paul. The simple but sensible structure of the programming language hooked him. He wrote all his programs down in notebooks, page after page with very little erasure. The funny thing was, when he finally got his hands on a computer years later, he never checked to see if any of the programs worked. He just knew they would.

By the time he got to junior high and took his first real computer class, Paul could have been the teacher. A typical assignment took him about two minutes to complete. His teacher let him zip along at his own pace. The other students didn't know that BASIC was a simple interpreter for the even more complex native tongue computers speak, known as machine language. Machine language is a kind of numeric Morse code in which all the commands are expressed in a sequence of zeros and ones instead of in words recognizable to humans. Paul was by now talking directly to the computer in machine language.

Some people always remember their first car; others their first bike. These are the things that promise to liberate us from our ordinary lives and take us to places where anything is possible. Paul will always remember his first computer.

He got it in 1983, a gift from his parents, a Commodore 64 just like the ones at school. No one in his family knew anything about computers, but his uncle bought him Commodore's own Programmer's Reference Guide. Another guy might tinker endlessly with his '64 Mustang. Paul had his Commie 64, and man, did he get a kick out of peering under its hood. He'd open up the box and look at the microprocessors, understanding at the most basic level how the computer digested information, how the hardware interacted with software.

One thing about the Commie 64: it could run an awesome library of games, if you had the money to buy them. He bought Annihilator and 3-D Pac Man. They each cost twenty dollars. But Paul's taste got more expensive and the best games cost up to fifty dollars. So he traded with his friends. After a while, the games themselves weren't that challenging.

Cracking their copyright protection was.

When the first generation of games hit the market, there was no such thing as software cracking. Games came on cassette tapes and were meant to be copied. But with the advent of floppy disks, the world changed. Software became a big business.

The software companies realized they needed to protect their franchises. The last thing they wanted was one teenager in Cambria Heights buying one copy of Zork and passing it out to one hundred pals. That's a hundred times fifty dollars the companies don't make.

So the companies started to lock down their software. It was easy at first. The programmers simply hid an intentional error on a part of the floppy disk. They called it Error 23. Then every time the game loaded, it had to verify that Error 23 was on the disk. The beauty of it was that most software programs wouldn't copy a disk that has an error on it. The floppy drive on the copying computer takes one scan of the disk, and says, "No way. "

But wait a second. Didn't some kid just fork out fifty dollars for this program? Shouldn't he be able to copy it as many times as he wants? It's his, after all. What if his sister accidentally on purpose stuck his disk in the microwave? How's he going to play?

This was a widespread concern among teenage boys all over the country. It was perhaps their first conscious political stand. Even if they didn't know it, they were following a basic truth identified by Whole Earth Review founder Stewart Brand: Information wants to be free. To liberate it, these kids became "warez" dudes, amateur software pirates who put their collective ingenuity together. They traded tips for breaking lame copy protections. They even wrote little lockpicking programs, like Kwik Copy, that could copy a disk protected by measly Error 23.

It was a macho thing to do. Computer macho.

Naturally, the companies abandoned Error 23. Trying to be sequentially cryptic, they used Error 21 to protect their games.

The first one with Error 21 was Flight Simulator, so you can imagine how anxious the dudes were to crack it.

Some guy in Canada wrote a program that could copy a disk with Error 21. He called it "Fast Hack 'Em. "

That worked for a while. Then the hottest new game to hit the warez circuit was released: Summer Games, for Commodore. Its advent coincided with the 1984 Olympics, and it had eight different games, including a totally awesome pole-vault event that required you to jiggle your joystick as fast as you could to propel your little pole vaulter across the screen, up and over a little bar. The graphics were the best.

Paul did not have fifty dollars for the game. Now, Paul did not use warez-dude utility programs like "Fast Hack 'Em" not

that it would have helped on Summer Games. A guy who reads BASIC like it's his mother tongue can fast hack 'em on his own. If he wanted to copy a game, he simply loaded a program onto his computer that allowed him to X-ray the game. He could see all the underlying code on the game's disk, could see the hidden error, and tweeze it out like a splinter. That's why kids would bring Paul new games fresh out of the shrink wrap. Some of Paul's friends worked at computer stores, and at the end of their shifts, they could sort of borrow a game and bring it to him. The next day they'd return the original to the store. Paul never made a penny off this. He was more interested in defeating the troll.

Summer Games was tougher, though. Summer Games was the first one with Error 29.

Someone brought Paul a legitimate copy. At first it stumped him. Then he approached the problem like he approaches everything. He broke it down to its basic parts, figured out how each part worked separately, then figured out how they worked together. Just like an engineer. He scanned the sectors of the disk, looking for a clue. If he tried to delete the error, the program would still instruct the computer to look for the error and, not finding it, wouldn't run. The computer would say it found 0. Zero was a problem, because the software expected to find Error 29. But then, Paul figured it out.

He could remove the error and at the same time convince the computer that it wasn't looking for an error.

Don't look for Error 29, he told the computer.

LOOK FOR 0

If you can't get rid of the troll, go around it.

It was a way of acknowledging that the error existed, while negating the power of the error.

Now he could make a million copies if he wanted.

Paul was proud of his work. He was an artist, and no artist wants to hide in a garret. Paul signed his work, inserting a new line at the bottom of his pirate floppies:

THIS GAME CRACKED BY: SCORPION PWS

Who was Scorpion? Paul didn't know. Scorpions were fast, silent, and dangerous. He knew who PWS was, fourteen-year-old Paul William Stira. He hoped the two were the same person.

Scorpion wouldn't be afraid to take risks. Scorpion wouldn't balk at climbing a fence and jumping into a phone company dumpster in Astoria. Which is not to say it's relaxing to be the "bag" man. Every time an ambulance screams by on its way to the Astoria General Hospital emergency room down the street, Paul starts and squints into the dark as if he expects to be pinned in the beam of a police flashlight. Hac's up on the roof of a utility shed next to the dumpster, and Eli is down on the street. Paul's the only one who might not make it to the Supra if the cops come. He tries to concentrate on the work: feel around in the dark for a bag, hope it's a dry one, then haul it up from the pit and pass it to Hac. It's like a bucket brigade, except that every time Paul hoists a bag, he almost loses his balance and falls into the dumpster. Do rats live in dumpsters? Paul wonders.