"Never ignore the little people, the big people generally have big hearts, the little people don't, and the little people usually give you a big revenge." 」
--Susan
As a well-known hacker, Susan was computer blind before she met Rothko.
Every night at seven o'clock, Susan shows up on time in Seattle's red light district, wearing heavy makeup and ready to smile. She was a street woman.
Susan is a standard beauty billet. Her blonde hair and six feet three inches tall were enough to attract a lot of attention. Although the business was not good every night, she still felt strapped for money because she was faced with a high telephone bill every month.
Her sixty-one-year-old mother, in Altona, Illinois, would soak milk every morning and sit by the window until she waited for her daughter's call.
Susan's mother was blind, and when she was eight years old, her drunken father slapped her mother's ear so hard that she could no longer hear a sound in one of her ears, so Susan had to argue every time she called.
At the age of seventeen, Susan came to Seattle, but she had little capital other than a beautiful face, and could not even pay for her to set up a food stall on the side of the street. She worked as a billing clerk, trying to avoid the malicious glances of diners, unwarranted insults and boss reprimands every day in small restaurants, until one day after she put a whole plate of roast beef on a bald "salty pig hand" with a big belly, she finally had the courage to stand on the side of the street and wave at every man who passed by. Her sixty-year-old wife was waiting for her to earn money to eat.
For Susan, there were only two wishes, one was to make more money, and the other was to have a free phone for her to use.
In the United States in the 1980s, BBS has blossomed everywhere and is very popular. On BBS, people can form social groups at will and speak freely about a topic. This way of getting together through thousands of miles was immediately and strongly sought after, and soon some hackers consciously formed relatively fixed groups to exchange hacking techniques on BBS. At the time, phone hacking was in the ascendant, and hackers were devoting themselves to researching technology for a very realistic purpose: toll-free numbers.
Susan had the same purpose. She borrowed a friend's computer and awkwardly typed out a friend message on the BBS:
"I was a new friend, someone who didn't know anything about computers or hackers, but I knew there was something I needed, so I came. I'd love to meet some of our friends who are helpful to each other, and spend the weekends between the two of you, especially if you can talk about computer technology. By the way, I'm six feet three inches tall, blonde, weigh 140 pounds, love to walk around, who knows some fresh places to go may wish to tell me that I am a good travel companion and free tour guide. ”
Just the two keywords "six feet three inches" and "blonde" are enough. Within minutes of the post, someone had reported to his home that the visitor called himself Rothko, a chattering young man who "excelled at cutting into the phone system with technology and easily getting free calls, free plane tickets, and even free breakfast."
Rothko technology is indeed not ordinary, in the entire Seattle area of the hacker circle has a little fame, in the United States in 1980, the real can not rely on hardware and only software technology intrusion can get benefits of hackers is very rare, and Rothko is one of them, in the field of toll-free calls more people are with the help of an electronic hardware device called "Smurfs" access to the telecommunications bureau's operating lines to achieve free calls, he never looked down on these idiots who only use tools and do not use their brains, "Smurfs" It is easy to be tracked, and the real master in Rothko's eyes should be like a magician, and he himself is such a master.
The incident that made him famous overnight is said to have occurred about half a year ago, when he made a bet with a friend that he would get the phone company to give him a handsome sum of money, and he actually did: Rothko hacked into Seattle's telephone system, first modified his call logs on the electronic bill, and the system mistakenly thought that he had used a total of nearly five hundred dollars of phone calls this month and paid the corresponding money, and then he ran to the bank and printed out the paper bill. The next day, he went into the system to change the electronic information to a very small value, then went to the telecommunications department with the phone bill, and after a big fight, he took four hundred dollars in a high-spirited apology from the manager. The authorities quickly locked rothko, and there was no provision in the law at the time that rothko had violated the criminal law, and Rothko escaped punishment and became a famous figure. Shortly thereafter, a reporter prepared to interview him and conveyed his intentions to Roscoe through a hacker friend. The next day, a phone call came to the reporter's home, and the poor reporter's name, address, bank card information and the amount of the deposit, as well as the results of the middle school, were all reported one by one, and finally smiled triumphantly and reported to the door: "I am Rothko." ”
Such a highly skilled hacker, who could get in and out of the phone system at will, was exactly what Susan needed. Within days, she was in a heated fight with Rothko, who gave her a free-call technical guide, and she gave him "six feet three inches of beauty and the thrill of a blonde hair."
Taking what you need is always the most appropriate excuse and reason to embrace warmth. In the following days, Susan still pushed the door with a charming face at night, and returned in the middle of the night to nestle in a room of less than twenty square meters in Rothko, fiddling with the computer all night, in addition to seducing men to bed, Susan was even more comfortable with such a seduction telephone system, and soon Susan could independently enter the telecommunications system, change the phone number at will, and transfer a certain line that was talking in the United States to a small Australian cottage that even she did not know. Or, prank some families who don't have phones installed, inexplicably receive high bill lists, and occasionally interrupt other people's calls with interest, interjecting a "Sorry to bother!" Your phone number has been changed to 8-3-7-1/2 due to the line modification, will you dial that 1/2?", and then laughed and described to Rothko the appearance of the owner's mouth on the phone. More importantly, she could chat with her mother for a morning at any time instead of always staring at the clock on the wall to calculate time and phone bills.
At this time, Rothko was not only interested in toll-free calls, the small telephone system was just a pediatric in his eyes, and he could not mention his desire to challenge and sense of victory, and the top hackers always felt sorry for each other, so it was not surprising that Rothko and the famous world's first hacker Kevin Mitnick met, and two people who also had in-depth research on hacking decided to join forces and extend their tentacles to the CIA, NASA and other sensitive, confidential, and more technical systems And Susan also ended the skin and meat business of going out to stand on the street every night, working as an operator in a small telecommunications company, occasionally going to Rothko's cabin for a seat, and naturally began her first love, which made her fall in love with Rothko, who was tall and handsome and a grandmaster in the hacker circle.
Every girl values her first love more than Tarzan, and she devotes herself and dedication to it, but in fact she is wrong, as if every first love story in this world is a beautiful and heartbreaking mistake.
At this time, Susan has not been very interested in money, although the operator is hard but still stable, the income is still satisfactory to her, after all, the free phone with her mother has saved her a lot of financial burden, she even wants to wait for the marriage with Rothko to bring her lonely mother to Seattle to live a few years of moist days, every time she gets free time, she will pull Rothko to sit in the coffee house on the street for a few hours, listen to music or just walk arm in arm, watch the sunset, But at this time, Rothko in addition to the wanderings in his mouth to talk about those hacker-specific terms is to calculate the order of cracking a certain password, it is really annoying, from time to time will pull on Kevin whose waist is longer than the length of his pants, Susan is interested, but the two people crouched aside with great interest to score the difficulty of the invasion of the major websites they encountered.
Gradually, Rothko stopped showing up every day, on the grounds that college was about to graduate and he was busy with his thesis. Roscoe often came back in the middle of the night, drunk, and even had lipstick on his neckline.
"Is that how I am so excited to marry a drunkard who picks flowers and weeds?" Susan's questioning was often replaced with only a sneer.
Faintly, Susan felt a doomsday-like fear, and in Rothko's red-lined eyes she felt that the supreme love she regarded as innocence was about to wither.
to be continued