Hackers by David Bischoff

Author:David Bischoff [Bischoff, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

10

The Competition This was the deal:

The contest was to hassle the Secret Service and achieve something to avenge the way that Joey had been treated.

Dade Murphy and Kate Libby had agreed to let Fantom Phreak outline the tasks they would use to prove who of the two was the superior hacker.

“Me, Nikon, and Cereal are the judges and referees,” Phreak had proclaimed. “Our decisions are made final by a vote of at least two to one. No appeals. The duel lasts until a winner is declared. You may use only the dial-ups, access codes, and passwords in your collections. You can’t ask for any help from us.”

The next day the two opponents hit the streets, notebook computers in hand, the Three Hacketeers along for observation purposes.

“How quaint,” Kate Libby said upon seeing Dade’s plain vanilla machine.

“It’s all I need,” Dade assured her.

Under Phreak’s supervision, they set up temporary operations at two pay phones on a low-trafficked street. Dade went first, while they all watched. Dade called the Village Voice, hacked into certain computer operations.

“He’s in the personal ads!” Kate said. “Looking for a date when you don’t get one from me?”

“Nope,” said Dade. “A date for somebody else.”

The ad listed some very embarrassing dating specifications, and it gave Secret Service Agent Richard Gill’s personal office number.

This resulted in a countless stream of phone calls one night that got logged onto Gill’s phone mail and caused a great deal of annoyance to him. Even worse was when he got phone calls during the day. As The Plague looked on with amusement, Gill finally got a line out to Bob and Ray, who had been stationed to watch Joey’s activities.

What was the kid up to?

He was watching Star Trek, returned the agents. Classic Trek. “City on the Edge of Forever,” starring Joan Collins. Good episode.

Gill hadn’t authorized a bug, so he wanted to know how they knew. The Plague answered that one: it wasn’t a bug. It was a phone company computer which went on people’s lines between two and four a.m. checking for maintenance problems. The Plague had subverted this computer for Gill’s purposes to work around the clock, because the side effect was that it turned a phone receiver into a speakerphone. Thus, Bob and Ray knew what Joey had been watching on TV-and knew that he had not been responsible for all the obscene phone calls.

This prank impressed the Hacker Committee very much indeed. Kate’s had been good too-she’d managed to get sixty-seven pizzerias from the tri-state region to make deliveries to Gill’s home at the same time—but they liked Dade’s better. However, they conferred first on the subject.

“Dade’s been strokin’ twenty-four/seven,” Phreak said. “Your boy want to interface?”

“Say,” Phreak said, “wouldn’t you rather a nice clean-cut freak like Crash be with Acid Burn than Curtis?”

“Right, Mr. Simplex. Good point,” Nikon agreed.

“Listen up,” Phreak said. “We gotta keep declaring their duel a tie. Sooner or later, chemistry will take over.”

Cereal offered another possibility: “Or we’ll be accessories to a murder.

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