For the Inner Circle, cracking software is a challenge. For the wannabe underground, collecting it is an obsession. For the software industry, it's a billion-dollar nightmare.
By David McCandless
Sunday morning, 7 a.m., somewhere in US Eastern
Standard Time: Mad Hatter gets up, has a glass
of Seagram's Ginger Ale and a cigarette, and
checks his machine, which has been running
automated scripts all night. He looks for errors
and then reads his email. He has 30 messages
from all over the world: some fan mail, a couple
of flames, a few snippets of interesting
information, three or four requests - some
clear, some PGP-encoded. After a quick espresso
and another cigarette, he surveys the contents
of a few private FTP sites, filters through a
bunch of new files, and then reroutes the good
stuff to his newsreader. After breakfast with
the family, another wave of automated scripts
kicks in. The ISDN connection hums to life. A
steady stream of bytes departs his machine 128
Kbps and vanishes into the ether. By the end of
the day Mad Hatter, a ringleader of the software
piracy group called the Inner Circle, will have
poured 300 Mbytes of illegal "warez" onto the
Internet.
Monday morning, 9 a.m., Greenwich Mean Time:
Phil arrives for work in Bracknell, England, in a
suit and tie, just back from a few days in
Switzerland. Inside Novell UK's glossy
five-story headquarters, he lets himself into his
office. It looks like a mad, bad bedroom - shiny
desktops and derelict ones, disemboweled
minitowers and battered servers, every last
expansion slot distended with DAT machines,
CD-ROM burners, extra hard drives. A metal shelf
unit contains a rack of monitors, some video
equipment, spare keyboards. Everything is wired
insanely to a single ISDN line. After a coffee,
Phil boots up and skims his email. Twenty
minutes later he has ceased to be Phil. For the
next week, he will pretend to be a trader, a
courier, a cracker, a newbie, a lamer, a lurker, a
leecher. He is an undercover Internet detective,
a "technical investigator." He spends his days
roving the Net, finding people like Mad Hatter -
and busting them.
This is a story about a universe with two
parallel, overlapping worlds. One is the familiar,