Word: quittner
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When TIME hired Joshua Quittner to write about information technology, we knew we were getting a savvy reporter. What we didn't realize was that we were also getting a corporate raider. For an article in Wired magazine late last year, Quittner found out that McDonald's was one of several big corporations that had not registered their company names as domain names on the Internet (those letters that follow the @ symbol, identifying the sender). After trying in vain to find a company executive who could tell him why, Quittner simply registered the McDonald's name for himself...
When the article appeared, McDonald's realized it had to try to get its name back. Quittner offered to relinquish the name if McDonald's would pay to have P.S. 308, a New York public school with a special curriculum designed to attract all sectors of society, wired to the Internet on a high-speed connection. The company agreed. ``I took two information have-nots,'' says Josh, ``and turned them into information haves...
...gets stranger. In order to send Quittner that mail bomb -- the electronic equivalent of dumping a truckload of garbage on a neighbor's front lawn -- someone, operating by remote control, had broken into computers at IBM, Sprint and a small Internet service provider called the Pipeline, seized command of the machines at the supervisory -- or "root" -- level, and installed a program that fired off E-mail messages every few seconds. Adding intrigue to insult, the message turned out to be a manifesto that railed against "capitalist pig" corporations and accused those companies of turning the Internet into an "overflowing cesspool...
...their dread firewalls, the group's targets include a pair of journalists and a small, regional Internet provider. "It doesn't make any sense to me," says Gene Spafford, a computer-security expert at Purdue University. "I'm more inclined to think it's a grudge against Josh Quittner...
That is probably what it was. Quittner and Slatalla had just finished a book , about the rivalry between a gang of computer hackers called the Masters of Deception and their archenemies, the Legion of Doom -- an excerpt of which appears in the current issue of Wired magazine. And as it turns out, Wired was mail-bombed the same day Quittner was -- with some 3,000 copies of the same nasty message from the I.L.F. Speculation on the Net at week's end was that the attacks may have been the work of the Masters of Deception -- some of whom have...