Geek kids come out to play at hacker central

[mea culpa <jericho () DIMENSIONAL COM>]

http://www.now.com/issues/current/News/tech.html

Geek kids come out to play at hacker central
They drop names of fave computer warez and diss pals' moms
By SARAH ELTON

It's Wednesday evening, around dinnertime, and the computer hackers have
come out to play. Some of them, anyway.

Meet the babies of the community. They trade their own versions of
tampering secrets on the Hackerz channel on the Internet Relay Chat
server.

"Does anyone know serials or good cracking sites?" someone named Wink
types, the question simultaneously leaping across the screens of every
newbie hacker fantasist in the chat room.

The query gets ignored. Perhaps Wink is too embarrassingly a novice to
warrant a response.

Welcome to teenage central. A place where young geeks kick some time
around between dinner and bed.  It feels like a high school hallway packed
with guys calling themselves Skuzz, Phearless and DataKiller.

"What grade you in?" types one in the midst of a discussion on how best to
break into school computers.

"I'm in 11th," reads the reply.

"Kool."

It's so high school that when they start to diss their cyberfriends'
mothers, you can almost hear them slamming each other against the lockers.

They drop names of computer warez (read software) like most drop names of
favourite athletes, musicians or pretty girls.

[snip..]

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