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point in a channel chat he defended the man who was facing prison for writing and releasing the wildly destructive Melissa virus. “I don’t see what’s so bad about writing viral code,” Brewer wrote under his nickname “dmess0r,” short for “digital messiah.” Shok gave a balanced rejoinder, writing: “It’s fine until I’m victimized.”

Another member was Seth McGann, who was brought into w00w00 while a computer-science freshman at Worcester Polytechnic in Massachusetts. Pale and shy, McGann was a stereotypical computer nerd from Hamden, Connecticut. “I was a hard-core Unix geek,” he said. McGann had been playing around with vulnerabilities in instant-messaging systems, coming up with a way to make messages appear to have been sent by someone else. After he posted some additional exploits, including detailed instructions for cracking the Solaris operating system from Sun Microsystems Inc. with a common technique called a buffer overflow, McGann got an e-mail message from Brewer. Brewer praised his work, but suggested that it might be better to keep it out of the public eye. Toward the end of 1998, Brewer brought McGann into w00w00.

McGann wasn’t much of a positive thinker, taking the nickname “Minus.” But he was in awe of some of the people in w00w00 and ADM. He also appreciated the collaborative culture. Unlike seasoned engineers, who have solid grounding in theory and many different parts of the computer world, hackers are often brilliant and knowledgeable about one or two things, with huge gaps in the rest of their understanding. An IRC group like w00w00 allowed them to reach out for help when trying to write code in an unfamiliar area. In structure, w00w00 was the polar opposite of profit-driven Silicon Valley, where equity was all. It was a loose network of confederates who grouped together on projects, with leadership determined by charisma, the amount of work put in, and the quality of the contributor’s ideas.

For most, the unifying interest was computer security, or the lack of it. Searching for open ports on computers was one of the key areas of the trade. Not coincidentally, it would also be a crucial part of the Napster service, which could attach itself to company systems in unfamiliar ways, tunneling through corporate firewalls to allow bankers, brokers, and even military personnel to use the program at work. “My main interest in computers, what really sucked me into it, was some of the security stuff,”

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