Who To Connect To
Who can you expect to connect to, calling from home? Lots of places. There are other home com-puters,
mainframes, minicomputers, companies, government offices, clubs - you will be able to call any organization or individual who owns a computer, and has need to communicate via computer with other entities.
You might also find yourself calling on-line databases and pay-for-play services.
Paying For The Pleasure
A hacker named Rebel was recently telling me how enthralled he was with CompuServe, except for one aspect - the stiff price one pays for using the service. For this reason, CompuServe is often known as Compu$erve, with an oversized dollar sign replacing the S. CompuServe is not the only vendor charging the public a fortune to pay back their huge advertising budget. There are literally hundreds of on-line services to which one may sub-scribe, or hack one's way in if that's more your style.
Databases are available to look up any sort of data: census data, news, stock market information, results of government research, science and tech-nology reports, books, personal information, his-tory, and popular culture. There have been times late at night when I needed one crucial piece of in-formation for something I was writing, or just to satisfy my curiosity. Anybody can access one of these databases and find what he or she needs any time of the day or night. Of course, we must be prepared to pay through the nose. There is usually a charge to subscribe to the service, then there may be any number of the following charges:
A display charge for each piece of data pre-sented on the screen, or a search charge for each query made to the database. Minute-by-minute charges as long as you stay connected to their computers. High-speed surcharge for using a faster modem (thus gaining the ability to grab more info per minute).
Long distance phone charges if the service doesn't have an access number in your local-dialing area.
Many hackers refuse to pay the inflated bills these services can run up, though they also refuse to give up the service, particularly when so many special and useful features can be gained by dialing in. On-line gaming, electronic mail, multiple-user chatting, bulletin boards<Many of the fee-based services which offer bulletin boards even have a message base or two devoted to hacking.>and a plethora of other goodies make the services attractive to the hacker. The many ways to get past paying for them are also very attractive.
You will find many ideas through-out this book.
You'll be interested to hear about one trick a pair of high-school-age New Jersey crackers used to get some service for free. One brand of personal computer was being sold in a special package that included several pieces of software, along with a trial membership to one of the on-line services. They hacked the system of one of the stores that sold the computers and obtained a list of customers who had bought it. Many of those customers were individual people or families, but a good number of the computers had been bought by stores and busi-nesses. They went to these businesses and snuck around in their back rooms and offices. Sure
enough, pushed aside on bookshelves, unopened and untouched, lay the envelope that included the "Getting Started With StarBase On-line" manual and trial access codes that had been included with the computer. They helped themselves.
