Word: modems
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...years ago, using an ordinary modem and telephone, a young software saboteur penetrated the system at Manhattan's Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center with another kind of subversive programming, called a "trap door." The program collected users' passwords as they logged on. No matter how often legitimate users changed their sign-on codes, the hacker was able to gain unauthorized access to the hospital's records by summoning the intervening trapdoor and reading off the newly accumulated list of passwords. The culprit was later apprehended. He pleaded guilty and faced a maximum penalty of six months in jail...
Until quite recently it was painfully difficult for ordinary computer users to reach the Internet. Not only did they need a PC, a modem to connect it to the phone line and a passing familiarity with something called Unix, but they could get on only with the cooperation of a university or government research...
...result was a verbal conflagration that dominated the newsgroups for weeks and is still smoldering four months later. "It looks like Beavis and Butt-head finally bought themselves a cheap modem," wrote an Internet regular, in one of the gentler messages. Things deteriorated when the AOL crowd began to give as good as they got, hinting that the old-timers ought to make way for people who actually paid for their Internet services. Feelings are still raw on both sides and are not likely to be salved until the next wave of newbies arrives -- probably from CompuServe, as early...
...true, as A.J. Liebling once wrote, that "freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one," then the Internet may represent journalism's ultimate liberation. On the Net, anyone with a computer and a modem can be his own reporter, editor and publisher -- spreading news and views to millions of readers around the world. Adam Curry, a former MTV announcer, uses the Internet to publish Cyber Sleaze Report, a music-industry gossip sheet that tells readers which rock stars are pregnant, which have had breast surgery, which are drying out at the Betty Ford Clinic. Brad Templeton...
...everybody has the peculiar neurons needed to link a laptop to a wireless modem with ease, least of all Charlene Monzo. "I haven't made much progress with computers," she admits. "I'm paper generation." That's why Geek Squad double agent Cyrus Tavadia, decked out in his black-and-white uniform, with white socks and clip-on black tie, has dropped by her 35th-floor Manhattan apartment--to connect the technophobe wirelessly to the hyperlinked labyrinth of the World Wide Web. Under his polite tutelage, Monzo, 55, learns in a couple of hours how to use the computer mouse...