they are heavy. MoD's "Phiber Optik" has almost
completed his public-service sentence, too... "Phoenix"
and his crowd down in Australia used to be heavy, but
nobody's heard much out of "Nom" and "Electron" since the
Australian heat came down on them.
The people in Holland are very active, but somehow
the Dutch hackers don't quite qualify as "heavy."
Probably because computer-hacking is legal in Holland,
and therefore nobody ever gets busted for it. The Dutch
lack the proper bad attitude, somehow.
America's answer to the Dutch menace began arriving
in a steady confusion of airport shuttle buses and
college-kid decaying junkers. A software pirate, one of
the more prosperous attendees, flaunted a radar-detecting
black muscle-car. In some dim era before the jet age,
this section of St Louis had been a mellow, fertile
Samuel Clemens landscape. Waist-high summer weeds still
flourished beside the four-lane highway and the airport
feeder roads.
The graceless CyberView hotel had been slammed
down onto this landscape as if dropped from a B-52. A
small office-tower loomed in one corner beside a large
parking garage. The rest was a rambling mess of long,
narrow, dimly lit corridors, with a small swimming pool,
a glass-fronted souvenir shop and a cheerless dining
room. The hotel was clean enough, and the staff, despite
provocation, proved adept at minding their own business.
For their part, the hackers seemed quite fond of the
place.
The term "hacker" has had a spotted history. Real
"hackers," traditional "hackers," like to write software
programs. They like to "grind code," plunging into its
densest abstractions until the world outside the computer
terminal bleaches away. Hackers tend to be portly white
techies with thick fuzzy beards who talk entirely in
jargon, stare into space a lot, and laugh briefly for no
apparent reason. The CyberView crowd, though they call
themselves "hackers," are better identified as computer
intruders. They don't look, talk or act like 60s M.I.T.-
style hackers.
Computer intruders of the 90s aren't stone pocket-
protector techies. They're young white suburban males,
and look harmless enough, but sneaky. They're much the
kind of kid you might find skinny-dipping at 2AM in a
backyard suburban swimming pool. The kind of kid who
