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

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.