Word: eyestraining
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...leans toward his crisp, new 19-inch monitor and gets down to business. He surfs to the archive of an online florist and peruses someone's recent order for roses, complete with a mushy love letter. But this man, a hacker who uses the online handle Eyestrain, isn't interested in the saccharine prose. He is focused instead on swiping the buyer's credit card details. "See? It's that simple," he says, as he cuts and pastes the number onto his desktop. Eyestrain, who doesn't want his real name revealed, says he paid for all of his computer...
...Eyestrain is a far cry from the black-garbed, straggly haired hacker that has become a pop culture clichE. His short, black hair is gelled carefully in place and his fashion sense is more eager-intern than Neuromancer. But Eyestrain is as crafty as the iconic hacker when he jacks in as a dark-side programmer jamming code. The Philippines has a vast underworld of hackers, rooting through the Internet's depths while typical Web users surf the surface. But most of them, like Eyestrain, aren't so much malicious as stifled. They have skills, some creative flair...
Born to a poor family in Lucena City in the southern Philippines, Eyestrain first tapped a keyboard when he was 12. His school had just received its first computer, and it was love at first byte. "I couldn't get enough," he says. "As soon as I sat down at it, I got it." He skipped lunch hours and stayed late after school to get a turn at the terminal. Neither of his parents?his dad is a machinist, his mom a store clerk?had even used a typewriter. Hungry for more than he could learn in his small hometown...
Chatting online with some Manila friends in 1999, Eyestrain decided to return to the capital. He got off the bus with $150 in his pocket and hopes of finding work as a programmer or system administrator. But without a degree, finding computer work has been impossible. Ieta Chi, general manager at Trend Microsystems, an antivirus company that employs more than 280 people at its Manila office, says his desk is flooded with applicants like Eyestrain. "We can't really afford to waste time seeing people who haven't even finished school," Chi says...
Instead of returning to his backward hometown, however, Eyestrain stayed in Manila and became a cyberthief. By hacking into several e-commerce websites, he has built up a database of hundreds of credit card numbers. To use them without risking arrest, he set up a mailing system through a chat room, a kind of Net Bandits Clearing House. It works like this: "I order two monitors, they get sent to an address in Tacoma, Washington, that the guy I met in the chat room has access to, and then he forwards me one monitor and keeps the other for himself...