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suggesting that it hire you to resolve it, the step can be interpreted as extortion. If you give the company notice of the problem, then post the problem and the patch—or worse, just the problem—in an open forum the very next day, you get wider recognition but can be criticized for spreading the tools of darkness.

At Asylum, Ritter set standard rules for the hackers that congregated there online: no gov, no mil, no money. In other words, don't hack government or military computers or try to profit from the activity. As they trolled for computers to infiltrate, Ritter and his band often looked first for systems that had already been compromised, leaving easier access. Sometimes they stumbled on other hackers still on the scene, be it a university computer in Illinois or a corporate machine in Sweden. Mini-wars would erupt for mutual entertainment, as each hacker sought to boot the other out of the system. Once, after bouncing through his customary three proxies to disguise where he was working from, Ritter engaged in such a dogfight with an unknown adversary inside a big computer network in China.

As Ritter honed his skills, he was invited to join w00w00, where he took the nickname “Nocarrier,” after the automated warning of a failed modem connection. At the time he was also working part-time at AMP, a computer firm not far from campus. He wasn't challenged much more there than he was at school, and Ritter woke up one day and realized he was getting fat. He quit college, moved to Chestnut Hill outside Boston, and took a job writing security software for Netect Inc., which had operations in the United States and Israel. Soon BindView bought Netect and its code, firing most of the employees other than Ritter. BindView left him alone to do research, giving him what he considered a dream job at the age of twenty. “I just hacked day and night,” Ritter said. At BindView, he excelled: One of Ritter's published articles revealed what became known as the Palmetto Bug, a vulnerability afflicting 60 percent of the world's Internet servers. BindView was publicly credited for the find by CERT, the top computer-security organization in the United States.

If both Shawn Fanning and Ritter had tough childhoods, financially and emotionally, Sean Parker's was a paragon of normality. Born in 1979,

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