Masters of Deception: The Gang That Ruled Cyberspace Read Free Page A

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