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dance music. The Oakland party gave him something to be excited about that didn't turn him into a wheezing ball of stress.

There were thousands of kids inside the warehouse, and Parker had an all-access pass that came with Napster’s sponsorship. The best part came when Parker stuck his head out a side door, where a hundred or more kids were clamoring to get past the guards, many claiming they knew someone inside. "They were all screaming. It was like slaves baking in the hot sun, all wanting water," he said. Scanning the crowd, Parker recognized the old school friend he had invited down from California State University, Chico, now a committed raver with his own friends in tow. Like a reigning rock star at an exclusive club, Parker let his acolytes in.

The third member of the original Napster troupe was in his element as well. Sporting spiky, dyed-blond hair and a pierced tongue, Jordan Ritter was older than Shawn and Parker, at the advanced age of twenty-one. Unlike them, Ritter had given up a real job and a real life to join Napster out West. Ritter had been a computer-security researcher in Boston, a dream assignment for a hacker who spent long nights breaking into networks just to see if he could do it. Coming from a trailer home in Florida, Ritter made it most of the way through to a computer-science degree at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania before joining online groups of hackers that straddled the line between taking advantage of security loopholes and issuing public warnings about them. It was in one of those groups, called w00w00 and pronounced "woo woo," that he met Shawn.

Shawn turned to that collective of young hackers, academics, and security pros for help in writing and improving the Napster program. Several w00w00 members served as testers, and Ritter took an especially active role. He kept pestering Shawn with questions about the workings of the server side of the system, the back end that connected one personal computer and its available songs to others. Eventually Shawn turned the server over to Ritter, who used his greater expertise to redesign it, allowing Napster to handle the traffic that surged when word leaked out and Napster started taking off. The first time they met in person was when Shawn stopped by Ritter’s bachelor pad overlooking Boston's Christian Science Center headquarters and asked him to move to California. Ritter hesitated, reluctant to leave Boston and his job at BindView Corp. After

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