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wilderness. They fused often fantastic technical skill with the hacker’s instinct for control - admixed with a criminal’s hunger for profit. The first computer viruses and worms were part of what they sold. These had appeared in the 1980s, mostly as curious intellectual exercises. There was a desire among computer engineers, a scientific sort of craving, to see what might be done on the systems they had built. It was not unlike those whistling telephone tones that had so fascinated Cap’n Crunch and Steve Jobs and Woz. Could you make the big room-sized machines twitch in ways no one had imagined? Absolute, undeniable thrill ran through this sort of activity. I can still recall returning to my office one day in the mid-1990s with a Ziploc-bag that contained a floppy disk marked “Viruses” which I used to promptly break my computer so completely it had to be reformatted. Twice. Such adventures, however, were also producing some of the best programmers of my generation. Managing tricks inside those early systems required then, as it does now, a profound intimacy with the code defining their electrical operations. (Computer programs are called “code”; people who write and test them are “coders”.) But the secret moves behind those early cracks and exploits were rarely secret for long. The informal culture of stapled together magazines like 2600 told you what you needed to know about this band: It was a group that liked to share, to brag, to indulge each other in stories about systems they had cracked open, to play with a bit of light paranoia about who might be watching you and who might care. Computers. Systems. That’s my bag. You might as well spread some of the adrenaline rush of your adventure with others. The sense of a “shared alternate reality” most of us had first experienced in games like Dungeons and Dragons or the pages of Dune fit nicely into the digital world. This open, friendly temperament animated most of the people spread across that Amsterdam field, jumping into the lake instead of showers, talking math, buzzing at each other like a fridge. We had the programmer’s raw fascination about what a machine might be made to do, even in ways that were deeply unintended. We were harmless. The Warez Dudes, however, were different. Their fascination was a greedy, nasty obsession. 2. The business of playing with and inside of connected computer systems was, even as we sat on that Amsterdam summer lawn, shifting. It was slipping from earnest hobbyists and system managers to something a bit more sinister. We had just begun using a new phrase, “malware,” to describe the malicious software that took advantage of Postel’s “be liberal” instinct in order to devastate connected systems that were filled with too many trusting, unlocked doors. It wasn’t merely the relaxed system design of the early ‘net or computer systems that made exploitation easy. It was also that the networks and machines themselves were slipping with a kind of frictionless momentum towards increasing complexity. This meant, invariably, that popular programs often shipped to users with mistakes or programming oversights that invited hijack. The year before the Amsterdam conference, for instance, a cruel program known as “Michelangelo”, which would overwrite the data on hard disk 95 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018327