The Hacker's Encyclopedia 1998

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==Phrack Magazine== Volume Six, Issue Forty-Seven, File 12 of 22 HoHoCon Miscellany ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- "HERTz vs Y" By Loq (for the uninformed, HERTz is the Hohocon Emergency Response Team, born to deal with pussy (err posse)-like hackers on the net) OK, here it is...The complete story about hohocon.org, or at least as much as I can piece together...I will try to restrict myself to hohocon.org information, as I sure plenty of people have their own comments on what happened at h0h0. I arrived at hohocon Friday evening, and there was nobody around. After phoning fool's VMB, I headed up to room 518, the computer room, to see what was up. f0t0n, MiCRO^[[, fool and other people were scattered throughout the room were supposedly working on getting the system up, but they were having some "routing" problem...Hmm... Nevertheless, they finally got it up a short time later, working reasonably well. hohocon.org consisted of a mass of computer equipment all kludged together, which nevertheless worked remarkably well. There was the main user machine, hohocon.org, which handled all the user logins, the (supposedly dual) 28.8k PPP gateway machine, photon.hohocon.org, the terminal server, oki900.hohocon.org, and then micro^[['s box, lie.hohocon.org (lie didn't allow logins to most people). Additionally, a last minute machine was added onto the network as sadie.hohocon.org. That machine was graciously provided by mwe, a dfw.net type who fool had hit up for terminal and had shown up with a mysterious overclocked '66 with a shitload of neat stuff including multimedia capabilities. He also brought us several "classic" (some call them ancient =) terminals that people were able to use to login. At some point, dfx showed up and made use of America's capitalistic system by offering various warez for sale, consisting mostly of those nifty red-type armbands to let people in to the main event...he pointed his camera at the systems..and then left. he's tooo uber for us... Friday night, everything was calm...Micro^[[, myself, and several other people started working on bouncing between sites on the net...Several people donated accounts to use for this task, and we ended up with a nice list, until we hit utexas.edu, when the whole thing came to a screeching halt...Must say something about University of Texas at Austin networking, eh? Not wanting to escape through tons of telnets just to kill the final one that went through utexas, we just killed the whole thing and decided that we would do it the next day (although we never did get around to it again... oh well)... For those interested, here is a list of some of the sites we were able to bounce through: usis.com (Houston, Texas) bell.cac.psu.edu (State College, Pennsylvania) pip.shsu.edu (Huntsville, Texas) dfw.net (Dallas, Texas) deepthought.armory.com (San Jose, California) falcon.cc.ukans.edu (Lawrence, Kansas) dunx1.ocs.drexel.edu (Philidelphia, Pennsylvania) solix.fiu.edu (Miami, Florida) thetics.europa.com (Portland, Oregon) yogi.utsa.edu (San Antonio, Texas) thepoint.com (Sellersburg, Indiana) aladdin.dataflux.bc.ca (British Columbia, Canada) itesocci.gdl.iteso.mx (Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico) tamvm1.tamu.edu (College Station, Texas) Joyce-Perkins.tenet.edu (Austin, Texas) earth.cs.utexas.edu (Austin, Texas) I left Friday night around 2 am because I had to work at 8 :(...I will never do THAT again...Nothing very eventful happened in the computer room, several people wandered by, ophie refused to say hi to me (j/k ophie) and plenty of jokes and stories were passed around... Saturday nite was when all the fun happened on the net. fool decided it would be a great idea to let everyone have accounts, and we finally got up to about a 60 line password file...Much of this traffic was over a 28.8k slip, which worked its way down to about 10bps by the time everyone started (ab)using it, not to mention the wonderful speed-decreasing/error-overcoming resolution tendencies of the v.fc protocol, which left us a bit...uhh... llllaaaaaaaaaggggggggggggeeeeeeeeddddddd. This was eventually switched down to 14.4k after photon realized the problems the v.fc was causing. The next problem was probably very predictable, apparently to everyone except for one "fool" who broke down and decided to give y an account. Everyone familiar with y (Y-WiNDoZE), knows his general habits around systems, and hohocon.org was no exception(ok,ok, so it wasn't completely fool's fault... Still...:) Apparently y next let x login under his account to look around. The details are a little sketchy, but the first thing X did was look around, check out the password file, check out the remote hosts, went on irc for a bit, and then he began his real attack. He ran pico and suddenly there was a copy of 8lgm's lprcp in his directory (presumably he ascii uploaded it into the editor) with the name 'posse'...hmmm... How ingenious (bah)...He then proceeded to copy the password file to his own directory, add a WWW account, password bin, and use lprcp to put it back in /etc/passwd. (copies of his .bash_history should be available on fool's ftp site by the time you read this...see below) DjRen and I, in the meantime, were out of the room having a small party for ourselves, so I didn't get a chance to see all this happening. Apparently nobody discovered it until y started wall'ing message about his eliteness and also started bragging to everyone on irc about it. When Dj and I returned, we discovered that X had managed to an account for himself on the system. X installed his own backdoors into the system and started playing around. At this point, I wasn't really fully aware of what was going on because of the buzz I had from that New-Years-Day bottle of champagne graciously delivered to us by an interesting Australian writer at the conference. Finally, Dj and I returned to the computer room, where I sat down at a terminal to IRC a little, and I heard a big commotion about how y had hacked root :) About the same time, y was on irc attempting to play netgod because he hacked hohocon.org :) Apparently even Mike got access to the system at one point, but it is not clear if he did anything once he was there. The people sitting at the hohocon.org consoles then began a massive scramble to kick them out of the system. Several times they were killed, but Y and X kept coming back. fool managed to find some of the accounts they had created, and I managed to hear the root password from among the commotion and I logged in to kill inetd keep them from being able to connect in. I then proceeded to do a find for all the suid programs, where I found a couple of x and y's backdoors (the oh-so-elite /usr/bin/time sure had me ph00led, y :) After I removed the backdoors I could find, I looked at /etc/motd, and noticed y's message: ================================================ Spock rules more than anyone WE SWEAR WELCOME SOUTH EASTERN POSSE TO HOHOCON!@#$ ================================================ I don't think I really have to make any comment about this message, it is clearly self-explanatory :) Thinking I could be elite too, I replaced his message with ================================================ Loq has defeated X and Y :) ================================================ Photon came in the room, and started working on getting the systems back together... That was the conversation where we coined the phrase the "Hohocon Emergency Response Team (HERTz)". About half-an-hour later, Eclipse ambled into the room telling me to login again...I do and somehow Proff had managed to get root access and add a line into the motd: ================================================ Loq has defeated X and Y :) And proff has defeated Loq. ================================================ I started to look around a little and suddenly it looked like all the files were missing... When I did an ls / I realized that Proff has replaced ls with his own copy that wouldn't show any files :) So for awhile, I had to do echo *'s just to get lists of files in the directories. At that point, I really didn't want to play the games anymore, as it was about 2am and I had to work at 8am that morning, but I congratulate Proff in being able to defeat all of us that one last time :) The rest of the con, with respect to the network, was pretty quiet... For those interested, most of the hohocon logs and information will be on fool's ftp site: ftp://dfw.net/pub/stuff/FTP/Stuff/HoHoCon The list of users that were finally on Hoho was pretty large, here is a copy of all the accounts that existed on hohocon.org at the time it went down: root bin daemon adm lp sync shutdown halt mail news uucp operator games man postmaster ftp fool yle djren mthreat shaytan loq mindV klepto btomlin nnightmare train patriot fonenerd joe630 plexor pmetheus vampyre phlux windjammer nocturnus phreon spock phred room202 novonarq thorn davesob f-christ gweeds cyboboy elrond onkeld octfest tdc mwe angeli Kream ljsilver marauder landon proff hos fool cykoma dr_x el_jefe mwesucks iceman eric z0rphix Other miscellaneous notes.... Thanks to fool for organizing as much as he did in such limited time. It sucks that the first hotel had to cancel and that caused us to lose our ISDN link...Hopefully next year I will be able to provide the link for you. Thanks to photon for getting the PPP link up and running...it disconnected many times and became really slow when the load finally came down on it, but overall it worked extremely well with few problems. Thanks to micro^[[ for the idea of trying to bounce the telnets around the world in the normal hacker tradition... Thanks to eclipse for the interesting conversations and for giving me a better understanding of Proff... :) A small note that Eclipse discovered: "To Root: (slang) To have sex..." ahh...no wonder all those people sit on the net on friday nites :) Thanks to Proff for the extra entertainment at the end of the nite... I look forward to battling you in the future :) Also thanks to X and Y for the entertainment as well :) Finally, thanks to both fool and eclipse for helping me review this text and get it somewhat accurate at least :) I am intentionally leaving everyone else's names off of here because I know I would forget someone that I met at hohocon, and I wouldn't want to cause hurt feelings or anything :) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Bits and Bytes Column by J. Barr (From Austin Tech-Connected) WaReZ <nOun> 1. Stolen software available to 'elite' callers on 'elite' bulletin boards. 2. Pirated or cracked commercial software. HoHoCon is Austin's annual celebration of the computer underground. Phreaks, phracks and geeks rub shoulders with corporate security-types, law enforcement officials, and various and assorted cyber-authors. It's an in thing, a cult thing, an elite thing. In many ways it reminds me of the drug-culture of the 60's and 70's. It has the same mentality: paranoia and an abiding disdain for the keepers of law and order. But after all, HoHoCon honors the Robin Hoods of the computer era: stealing from the rich, powerful, and evil prince (Microsoft, IBM, Lotus, et al) and distributing to poor dweebs under the very nose of the sherrif. A nose, by the way, that just begs to be tweaked. That's the romantic notion, at least. To others there is no nobility in computer crime. Whether it's a case of wholesome anarchy run amok or youthful pranksterism subverted to common criminal mischief: warez is warez, theft is theft. A month or two ago I had an email conversation with a young man and we discovered we both ran BBS's. He asked what my board was about and I explained that The Red Wheelbarrow) was for 'rascals, poets, and dweebs', and that it carried echos from FidoNet, USENET, and elsewhere. He replied that his was a private board, one that dealt mainly in "WaRez and 'bOts" and closed his note with an "eVil gRin." Not being sure what he was talking about, I asked him to spell it out for me. I never heard from him again. I mention this because at HoHoCon you either knew these things or you didn't; you were part of the elite or you were not. Like my questions to my friend the pirate board operator, my questions at HoHoCon went unanswered. The hype in various Austin newsgroups for this year's event talked quite a bit about the party last year. Cyberspace luminaries shared top billing with the mention of teenage girls stripping for dollars in a hotel room. I decided then and there it was the sort of function I should cover for Tech-Connected. I asked at the door for a press pass and was directed towards a rather small redheaded kid across the room. The guard at the door said he (the kid) was running the show. I expected to see lots of people I knew there, but I only saw one. John Foster is the man who keeps the whole world (including Tech- Connected) up-to-date as to what boards are up and what boards are down in Central Texas. John is about my age. He looked normal. Everyone else was strange. I saw more jewelry in pierced noses and ears walking across that room than I normally see in a week. Lots of leather and metal, too. HoHoCon '94 looked like where the tire met the (info) road: a cross between neo-punk-Harley-rennaisance and cyber-boutique. Most of the crowd was young. Old gray-beards like John and I really stuck out in the crowd. I found the redheaded kid. He was selling t-shirts at the table. Next to him an "old hand" (who must have been nearly 30) was reciting the genesis of personal computers to a younger dweeb. They quibbled for a second about which came first, the Altos or the Altair, then looked up to see if anyone was listening and smiled when they saw that I was. I waited respectfully for the redheaded kid to finish hawking one of his shirts, then repeated my request for a press pass. He just looked at me kind of funny and said he had given some out, but only to people he knew. I didn't know a secret handshake or any codewords I could blurt out to prove I was cool, so I just stood there for a moment and thought about what to do next. Perhaps a change in costume would make me cool. Maybe then these kids could see that I was OK. I picked up a black one, it read NARC across the front and on the back had a list of the top- ten NARC boards of 1994. Not wanting to appear ignorant, I didn't ask what NARC stood for. I figured it would be easy enough to find out later, so I bought the shirt and left. I returned Sunday morning, wearing my new NARC t-shirt, certain it would give me the sort of instant-approval I hadn't had the day before. It didn't. As I was poking around the empty meeting room, a long-haired dude in lots of leather came clunking up in heavy-heeled motorcycle boots and asked what I was doing. I explained I was there to do a story. That shut him up for a second so I decided to pursue my advantage. "Anything exciting happen last night?" I asked. "Nothing I can tell YOU about, SIR" he replied, then pivoted on one of those big heels and clunked away. Browsing the tables in the meeting room I found pamphlets left over from the previous day's activities. There was an old 'treasure map' of high-tech 'trash' locations in Denver. Northern Telecom, AT&T and U.S.West locations seemed to be the focus. There were flyers from Internet access providers (it seemed a little like carrying coals to Newcastle, but then what do I know), a catalog from an underground press with titles like "The Paper Trail" (just in case you need to create a new identity for yourself), "Fugitive: How to Run, Hide, and Survive" and "Secrets of Methamphetamine Manufacture." Good family reading, fer shure. For the purists there were reprints of issues 1 to 91 of "YIPL/TAP", the first phreak newsletter. For the wannabe's like me, there were more kewl t-shirts to be ordered. I decided I should have opted for the one with "Hacking for Jesus" across the back. I appreciate the art of anthropology a little more after trying to read the spoor left behind at HoHoCon. It is definitely a mixed bag. To this day, I'm not certain what NARC stands for. Someone suggested it was any state or federal officer interested in busting people, just like in the bad old days (or today, for that matter). Maybe it's shorthand for aNARChist. The definition I like best was given to me on an internet newsgroup, alt.binary.warez.pc. (Really, it exists right there in front of the Secret Service and everyone.) One reply actually had an answer. After a paragraph or two of the requisite 'my gawd what a stupid question from a know-nothing nerd', the suggestion was made that it stood for "Never At Rest Couriers." I like that one because it suggests a purpose for those 'bots my friend with the WaReZ board and the eViL gRiN mentioned in our conversation. Sitting in private channels on IRC servers, 'bots could be used to store and forward pirated goods across the internet in almost untraceable ways. Who knows for sure? Not I. One thing I'm certain of, I'm real careful what part of town I wear my NARC t-shirt in. I would really hate getting shot by a confused crack-cocaine dealer who thought my shirt was the signal his deal had gone bad. Because I had been excluded from the inner circle, because I had tried and failed to become part of the elite during HoHoCon, it was easy for me to work myself into a morally superior position from which to write this column. All I had really seen were a bunch of kids: wannabe's, cyber-groupies and counterculture alternatives to life-as-we-know-it, celebrating the triumph of crooks and petty thieves over legitimate big business and big government. But something bothered me about that safe, smug position, and the more I thought about it the more it irked. For one thing, something was missing. If they were criminals, where was the loot? Where were the Benz and BMW's that should have been in the parking lot? Where were all the fancy wimminz that follow fast money? Software prices are high these days, so even if they were only getting a dime on the dollar for their WaReZ, there should have been some real high-rollers strutting their stuff. A reformed phreaker gave me some input on this. He said it was about collecting a complete set, like trading baseball cards, not about making money. The software itself wasn't important. Having it in your collection was the important thing. Tagging in cyberspace. Making a mark by having one of everything. But still, it's illegal. Against the law, whether for profit or not. The news background as I write this story is about Microsoft, king of the PC software hill. The judge reviewing the Consent Decree negotiated between the Department of Justice and Microsoft is angry with the lawyers from Redmond. He tells them that he can't believe them any longer. They testified in September that Microsoft did not engage in marketing vaporware, which is an old IBM tactic of hurting the sales of a competitor's product by promising they would have one just like it, and better, real soon now. The judge has before him internal Microsoft documents which indicate that the employee who came up with the idea of using vaporware to combat new products from Borland was given the highest possible ranking in his evaluation. The tactic apparently worked to perfection. The suits have now told the judge it wasn't vaporware, because Microsoft was actually working on such a product. The judge is not amused. Are these crimes, this dishonesty, somehow more acceptable because they are done for profit by an industry giant? Because they're done by business men in suits instead of punk kids in jeans? How about Ross Perot's old company, EDS. Have the once proud men and women of the red (tie), white (shirt), and blue (suit) drifted astray since the days when 'the little guy' insisted that not even a hint of impropriety was acceptable? The state employee that negotiated and signed the contract with EDS that brought me to Austin in 1990 to install the statewide USAS accounting system for the State Comptrollers Office was hired by EDS as a 'special consultant' in 1992. Hint of impropriety? This was shouted from the roof-tops. EDS bought a full-page ad in the Austin American-Statesman to make sure that all the other bureaucrats in state government got the message. What about the cops? The federal storm-troopers who conducted the raids around town at the time of the Steve Jackson affair. The judge at that trial had dressed down the agent in charge like he was talking to a teenage bully who had been busted for taking candy from the other kids. No wonder the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) is so popular. It's the ACLU of the 90's and the uncharted terrain of cyber-space. Finally, how about me. I have the illegal software on my PC. It's a copy of Personal Editor II that I've had forever. When I worked at EDS I once had to code 250,000 lines of COBOL using EDLIN. In those days, management didn't think PC's were anything but toys and they would be damned before they spent any money buying editors to write software for them. Out of that ordeal came an abiding disdain for EDLIN and my own copy of PE II. I'm not sure where I got it. It was a legal copy at one time, though I'm not sure whose it was. When I transferred to Washington, D.C. in 1987, I took it with me. I moved it from my XT, to my AT, to my 386SX. Now it's own my 486DX2/50. I had a copy of it on every computer I used at work. I used it for everything I coded, for all the notes I wrote. These days I don't go into DOS unless I want to hear the guns fire in Doom II. OS/2 comes with TEDIT, which looks enough like an updated version of PE II to make me feel guilty every time I see it. But I haven't taken the time to learn how to use this legal editor. My taboo copy of PE II is much too comfortable. So who are the good guys and who are the bad? The suits who steal and bribe and leverage from within the system? The arrogant thugs with badges? The punks with body-piercings? Or an old phart like me, with illegal software on my own PC? Heady questions for sure. I thought I knew the answer when I started this column, now I'm not so sure. I can't condone the theft of goods or services no matter how altruistic or noble the cause, or how badly some noses need to be tweaked, or how ignoble some agents of law enforcement. I think it would be my style to point a finger first at the suits, then at the kids. But as long as I'm using stolen software, or 'evaluating' shareware long after the trial period is over, I don't have to go very far should I get the urge to set something right. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ho Ho Con '94 Review by Onkel Dittmeyer (onkeld@netcom.com) " If I would arrest you, you would really be under arrest, as I am a real officer that can actually arrest people who are under arrest when I arrest them. " - Austin Cop, HoHoCon '94 For those who missed it, dissed it or were afraid to go, here comes my very personal impression on HoHoCon 1994...flames: /dev/null. Drunkfux did it again. K0de-kiddiez, WaReZ-whiners, UNIX-users, DOS destroyers, linux lunatics - all of them found their way to the Ramada South Inn in Austin, Texas to indulge in a weekend of excessive abuse of information equipment and controlled substances under supervision of the usual array of ph3dz, narqz, local authorities, mall cops and this time - oh yes! - scantily clad Mexican nationals without green cards in charge of hotel security. Tracy Lords, however, did NOT show up. (I want my money back.) Well. When I walked into the hotel, I noticed a large handwritten poster that Novocaine put up in the lobby, marking his room as a "hospitality suite" for those who already made it to Austin Thursday night. I ditched my bags into my room and went up to the fifth floor to see what was going on, and who was already there. Grayareas, Novocaine, Eclipse, Dead Vegetable and a bunch of unidentified people were lingering around a table that was cluttered with all kinds of underground mags (from 2600 to Hack-Tic), some reading, some making up new conspiracy theories. Everybody took a good whiff of Austin air and prepared themselves for the action to come. Later that night, I took Commander Crash for a walk around the hotel to see how well they did their homework. The rumor was that the hotel had been notified, as well as all local computer-oriented businesses, that the haqrz were in the neighborhood.. and it looked like it was telling the truth. We found not a single door unlocked, not one phone interface un-secured. Somebody closed all the security h0lez in advance, therefore hacking the hotel looked pointless and lame. Everybody crashed out, eventually. For most, it was the last sleep they would get for the new year's weekend. Noon the next day, I awoke to find the lobby crawling with people, and ran into some familiar faces. Like last year, most of the lobby-ists were playing with hand-held scanners. The National Weather service was soon declared The Official HoHoConFrequency, and was - in old fashion - blaring through all hallways and lounges of the site. At least, nobody could claim they didn't know it was going to rain... Commander Crash approached me in the early afternoon. "Dude, " he said, "I think I've got a bug on my scanner..". We went hunting around the hotel with a signal-strength-indicator-equipped eleet scanner to see if we could locate the little bastard. We couldn't. Disappointed, we asked some cDc guys to help us look, and soon we walked up and down the hallways in a mob of approximately fifteen to twenty people. An "undercover" hotel security guard, clad in a "beefy look" muscle-shirt that revealed some badly-sketched tattoos walked up and advised us to "get our asses back to our rooms". "If there is a bug in this hotel, it is there for a reason. Therefore, don't mess with it." I asked him if we were grounded or something. He was kindly ignored for the rest of the night. As the mob settled into the check-in lounge, I noticed about half a dozen new security guards who were hired to enforce Law & Order and just received an extra briefing from the hotel manager in a back room. An Austin cop proceeded giving each one of them an extra pair of handcuffs. Somebody exclaimed "My Lord, it's gonna be bondage-con!", which caused me to spray my soda over an unsuspecting warez d00d. He called me a "LaMeR" and chased me back to my room where I peacefully lost consciousness. The next morning, I awoke late while the actual con was already in full swing. I pumped myself back into reality with a handful of Maximum Strength Vivarine(TM) (thank god for small favors) and moved my not-too-pleasant-smelling likeness into the con room, where Douglas Barnes was in the middle of a rant on basic encryption. Very basic, so to speak. Maybe because, like he said, he did not know "how to address such a diverse audience consisting of hackers, security professionals and federal agents". Hmpf! You fill in the blanks. Next up was Jeremy Porter, going into the details of available digital cash systems, and repeatedly pointing out how easy you can scam over NetCash by faxing them a check and then cancelling it out after you got your digicash string in the (e-) mail. Up next, Jim McCoy gave a talk on underground networking, a concept that enables you to run a totally transparent and invisible network over an existing one like the Internet. Very much like the firewall at whitehouse.gov.. Damien Thorn was next, starting with some video footage he taped off a news station where he is interviewed on cellular fraud through cloning. He also showed off a nice video clip that showed him playing around with ESN grabbers an other quite k-rad equipment. Ironically, he chose "21st Century Digital Boy" from Bad Religion as the underlying soundtrack. That reeks of pure K-RaDiCaLnEsS, doesn't it? When dFx came back to the mike, about 400 ranting and raving haqrz demanded for the raffle to finally start, and the k-g0d (who wore a pair of weird, green, pointed artfag boots) gave in. In the next thirty minutes or so, a lot of eleet things found new owners like hard drives, keyboards, twelve hour well-edited hotel porno videos, HoHoCon videos, back issues of 2600 and TAP, a whole lot of HOPE t-shirts, a Southwestern Bell payphone booth, CO manuals and other dumpster-diving loot, AT&T Gift Certificates, an eleet 600 bps modem, and lots of other more or less useful gadgets. Dead Vegetable repeatedly insisted that he was not giving up the 35-pound "Mr. T." head he brought, which was made of solid concrete and hand-painted. "No, it's a Mr-T-Phone, you can pick up the mohawk and talk!" Back out in the lobby, I ran into erikb and chatted briefly about some other Europeans we both knew (Hi 7up..).. On the way up to my room, I stopped at the 2nd floor lobby to mock somebody for cigarettes. Well, see, I don't have anything against a huge flock of ph3dz taking up the whole lobby, but if not a single one of them smokes, let alone has a ciggy to spare, it pisses the fuck out of me. Back down, I crammed some fliers into my bag (Buy HoHoCon videos/TAP issues/2600 subscriptions and other sellout), chatted with Ophie and a couple of other IRC babes (a lot of females at the con this year, if this trends keeps up, it will look like a Ricky Lake show at next year's HoHoCon) and retreated back to my room to secure all the nifty things I won at the raffle (a book of TAP issues, a 2600 issue, two t- shirts, an acoustic coupler.. dFx looked quite pissed). Back down, everybody that had something to sell had opened up shop. dFx was selling last years "I LOVE FEDS/WAREZ" tee-shirts plus a new stack of the elusive "I LOVE COPS" baseball caps, who came in four different spanking colors this year. The embroidered logo is the clincher. I can just recommend everyone who did not get one yet to get their hands on one of these (no, I am not receiving any ca$h for this). Netta Gilboa was auctioning off some back issues of Gray Areas, and cDc sold everything from sizzling "Cult of the Dead C0w" shirts and hats to "Please do not eat kids" stickers, cable TV descramblers and DTMF decoders while happily zonking away on an old Atari 7800 video game. While browsing through the merchandise, I ran into a guy with a shirt that said "I quit hacking, phreaking, k0dez and warez.....it was the worst 15 minutes of my life." Now THAT would have been something to bring home! I blew my excess money on some less original shirts and visited Room 518, where a bunch of dedicated people had set up a Net connection and public-access terminals. Some of the TTYs definitely looked like something you would find if you decided to take a walk around the desolate offices of your local CO at night.. Midnight drew closer. When the new year came around, I was quite shocked. "Hey d00dZ! Happy New Year!" - "Shut Up! I am about to get op on #warez2!" What a festive mood. After midnight, everybody pretty much retreated into a room with a fair quantity of their favorite narcotic substance (the 4th floor was filled with an ubiquitous pot smell, despite of the alarming presence of suits who were talking into their jackets) and called it a day.