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rest of his life. He dated more. He actually took vacations. He looked after his teenage half brother, Raymond Verrier Jr., who had problems back on Cape Cod. Shawn had matured so much that his mother signed custody of the youngster over to him. And as another part of his new attention to loved ones, Shawn kept up the four-year-old relationship he had developed with his biological father, Joe Rando. Rando was amazed that the fame hadn't affected his son, other than to make him more polished. “I'm completely impressed with Shawn, but not because of the public reasons—because of the person he is,” Rando said. “It didn't go to his head, which is pretty amazing.”

Late in 2001, Shawn returned to playing with computer-security issues, the things that had interested him as a young hacker. He discovered a probable vulnerability in AOL Instant Messenger, the most popular instant-messaging system in the world. Believing the discovery might bring the wrong sort of attention to Napster, Shawn quietly passed the tip along to Matt Conover, the founder of Shawn's old hacking group, w00w00. “I don't mind the fact that I can't talk about it on a wide scale,” Shawn said. “I just really do enjoy the process of securing things and finding security problems.” Conover analyzed the AOL hole and made national news by writing and releasing the code to exploit it, parlaying the find into a security job in Silicon Valley.

Well before the end of Napster, Shawn was thinking about what might come next, about finding something that would keep him from being remembered as a one-hit wonder. “Technically, I understand Windows programming, and I learned a lot about architectures. And I'm not bored with computers, but in terms of some of the basic computing concepts and networking and some of those things, I feel like I'm at the point where if I want to build something, I know I can build it or find the right people to build it. I've been able to meet so many talented engineers that technology-wise, I'm really comfortable and actually looking forward to new projects in the future,” he said. But none of that was the most important part of his growth. “The stuff I've learned the most about is definitely related to interacting with people,” he said. “I had a chance to see some of the world, to interact with people on many different levels, and I'm a lot less intimidated by that stuff than before, when I was scared to death.”

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