MASTERS OF DECEPTION

Term Paper Title	MASTERS OF DECEPTION
# of Words	1211
# of Pages (250 words per page double spaced)	4.84

MASTERS OF DECEPTION

RUSSELL MEEK
BOOK ANALYSES
10TH

SUMMARY

     Paul lived in New York City. He had his first encounter with a computer
when he was about nine of ten. He was at his dad's office Christmas party. One of his father's colleagues turned one on for him and he became emideatly obsessed. From then on he read every kind of books, magazine, or panflets he could find.  He mastered the skill of the computer language "BASIC."  Then he learned machine language, which is communicating with the computer with zeros and one's.By the time he was fifteen he could talk to a computer better than to a human. On his sixteenth birthday he got his first computer.  It was a commodore 64. It was the "affordable computer." It was more than what he could ever ask for.
     This was how Paul, a middle class boy from New York, got started with computers.  Almost the same story goes for Mark, Eli, John, Julio, and Allen.  These are the boys who would come to be known as the "MOD BOYS" (Masters of Deception). They were the hacker gang who dominated the hacking underworld back in the late 1980s.
     They all met through the phone lines. Back then there was no Internet or AOL yet people could still communicate through computers. All they needed was a modem and some phone #'s of other modems and they were in business.
     Paul met Eli first. They learned to hack together. After a while they started looking for bigger and better haqs.  They came across a famous hacker named Phiber Optic (Mark). He taught them all he knew about the telephone company.  Then they were able to break into the New York phone company. This was only the beginning of their hacking endeavors. Paul, Mark, Eli became best friends, and not just through the computer but they also had a regular friendship because they all lived around the same area in New York.  They spent most of their time at Eli's house hacking from there because it was the fastest modem. One day Eli thought he would start calling his little group the MOD. And since they were now getting into important computers then this meant that they would need some more people with specific specialties.
     By July of 1989 John, a black kid from the Bronx, and Julio, a Mexican kid from the Bronx were integrated into the MOD.
     By now all the member of the Mod had free phone service and they could manipulate the phone company pretty much any way that they wanted, but they didn't. At the beginning of the Mod they all got together and decided to write the Hacker Ethics, which was a list of laws that a hacker must follow, and if they didn't then the MOD would turn against them and they really didn't want that because they were pretty powerful.
      Somehow the phone company had pinpointed them and had the Secret Service (they take care of all computer crimes) raid the houses of Eli, Paul, and Mark since they had been breaking into the phone company the longest. They weren't arrested but their computer were taken away.  Paul swore not to hack ever again.  Eli and Mark decided that if they didn't arrest them then they could keep doing it. Eli never had the money to get another computer but would hack from the laptop that Mark bought.
     John was speaking to Chris Goggans who was the unofficial leader of the "Legond of Doom" (lod). They were sort of the rivals of the Mod which was by now more powerful.  They got into a feud and Chris called John a "nigger." John was so offended that he ...

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