Case closed: AOL hacker
                  sentenced
                  By Margaret Kane
                  March 28, 1997 7:12 PM EST
                  PC Week Online 

                  A Yale University hacker who devised a
                  program to let America Online customers avoid
                  hourly charges was sentenced today to two
                  years of probation and six months of home
                  confinement. According to AOL, the sentencing
                  closes the case with the first ever conviction of a
                  crime that occurred on a private online service.

                  Nicholas Ryan, a computer science student at
                  Yale at the time of the 1995 incident, was also
                  fined and ordered to pay AOL $62,000. Ryan,
                  who went by the pseudonym Happy Hardcore,
                  pled guilty to a felony offense under the
                  Computer Fraud and Abuse Act in a federal
                  district court in Alexandria, Va.

                  Ryan's code, AOL4Free, allowed users to
                  log-on to the service without paying hourly rates.
                  In the installation instructions for an updated
                  version of his software, Ryan wrote that AOL's
                  software has a fundamental flaw in its design. 

                  "The simple fact is that a huge percentage of the
                  actual work done in presenting the AOL
                  experience is done not by the 'host' computer,
                  the ones in Vienna, Virginia, but by the client
                  AOL application you're running on your home
                  Mac/PC," he wrote. "There's nothing you can do
                  about the host, but you can, with enough skill,
                  make the client do whatever you want."

                  Reacting to the sentencing today, AOL's vice
                  president of integrity assurance Tatiana Gau
                  called the case a "legal milestone."