The good news is that Internet sales are up, more than 30 percent for Q3 1997. The bad news is that most of the merchandise sold may have been shipped to vacant suburban houses in sunny San Carlos, California. In a major Net coup/snafu (depending on where you sit on the hacker/mogul continuum), four teenagers went on a nothing-but-Net shopping spree that started with stealing credit-card numbers and ended with US$20,000 worth of computer equipment.
The children of the damned in question, though putatively "sophisticated" in their hackmongering, clearly had a bit to learn. Why, if they'd aimed the File Upload bug at the site offering Pamela Anderson Lee and Tommy Lee's X-rated home-movie folder, they could have traded their spankings for banking, adding six figures minimum to this year's online commerce draw.
Then again, should the Lees demonstrate - in the pending lawsuit against the site selling their, um, personal footage - that digital streams of their poolside sexcapades are theirs and only theirs to distribute, it might suggest another tack altogether.
Perhaps the next generation of hackers might find profitability in detailed recordings of their own backdoor exploits, which could be marketed as training films for budding digital miscreants. If The X-Files and sex files continue to make headlines, why should increased news clicks be the only Net net? Imagine: If Tommy, Pamela, the San Carlos teens, and AlterNIC-founder-cum-alleged-felon Eugene Kashpureff were to team up and broadcast their travails for their own profit, they could probably buy Microsoft.
This article appeared originally in HotWired.
