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APPROACHING ZERO

First-time callers are met with a request for their user-name and their phone number. Lamers who enter their real name and real phone number have already blown it. The correct procedure is to enter a handle and a fake phone number — a healthy dose of paranoia is a good sign that a caller is a real hacker. The next step is to provide personal references, which will determine the level of access to the pirate board. Hacker boards often have several grades of users, with only the most trusted callers able to access the 'good stuff', and the reference query is designed to elicit the names of other pirate boards the caller has access to, his level of access on those boards, and any other trusted hackers he may know. If the references prove satisfactory, the caller will be granted leave to use the board. Some boards go a step further: they ask the caller to write a short statement explaining his reasons for wanting access, or they ask him to complete a questionnaire to test his technical expertise.

Complementing the boards in America is a sporadically functioning underground press. Newsletters — most distributed electronically; that is, on computer — contain articles about busts, tips on hacking and phreaking, and technical descriptions of computer operating systems. The oldest is PHRACK (the name is an amalgamation of phreak and hack), which 'published' off and on from 1985 until 1990. Others that have appeared sporadically include the Legion of Doom: Hackers Technical Journal, Phreakers/Hackers Underground Network and the Activist Times. A traditional — printed — publication, 2600 The Hacker Quarterly, has been published since 1987 and is available on some news-stands. The '2600' in its title is a bow to the infamous frequency tone used by phreakers to make toll-free long-distance calls.

Membership of the computer underground means belonging to a self-selected group of high-tech junkies. Some individual hackers — generally members of a particular board — work as a group and acquire a gang handle. The Inner Circle, in 1982, was the first to claim credit for breaking into the US military computer network. The 414 gang, named after their local Wisconsin area code, specialized in cracking telephone company systems.

The telephone company, or 'telco', is still a favourite target for many hackers. Those who specialize in exploring and mastering the telco system are sometimes called phreakers, like their predecessors

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