Since last August, users who launched the latest versions of AIM also launched an informational "AIM Today" window -- but as late as 4 pm PST Saturday, if users clicked on the "entertainment" link on AIM Today, followed by a click on any of the following three links advertising the chance to "Meet New People" who wanted to discuss the categories of "Celebrities," "Soap Operas" or "Comedy," they would pull up pages displaying pornography, as well as sound files apparently containing messages from the two crackers ("Yeah, fuck you, Sirk owns this shit" -- "This is Neon, fuck you Sirk").

No matter which of the top three "Meet New People" categories are chosen, the content appears to have gone haywire. At the Celebrities link, a series of four pornographic images cycles in an animated GIF. On the Soap Operas link, a Prodigy song plays in the background as a MIDI file. On the Comedy link, below a fifth pornographic image, are pointers to the Aryan group National Alliance.

Continue Reading...

On April 10, I had the chance to attend one of Adams' last appearances, when he gave the keynote address for an embedded systems conference at San Francisco's Moscone Center. He was clearly chosen because he knew how to appeal to geek sympathies, and he didn't disappoint. Addressing a packed audience of more than 1,000 while standing in front of a black curtain speckled with twinkling white lights and models of Earth and Saturn, he delivered a speech filled with visions for the future, as well as eloquent defenses of both micropayments and peer-to-peer networking.

Continue Reading...

Someone called "Danzo" tried to auction "Metallica's integrity" on eBay. (The auction has since been canceled -- but a screen shot of the hoax endures.)

Continue Reading...

Within hours, the smart alecks behind the parody were engaged in a legal tiff with officials from the Associated Press, who forced them to take the site down. Now, however, the satirists appear to be winning concessions from a "chastened" AP.

On Tuesday night Sean Bonner, a 25-year-old Web designer for Playboy.com, and Chris Lathrop, a 33-year-old copywriter for the site, created the animation -- on their own time. It features a host of characters in the Elian saga -- including Elian, Fidel Castro, Janet Reno, second cousin Marisleysis Gonzalez and fisherman Donato Dalrymple -- greeting each other in the convivial, if guttural, slang ("So what's up, B.?" "Wazzup!") recognizable by Budweiser fans across the nation. (Other lighthearted online Elian parodies include a satirical Elian Web log and fake movie reviews "penned" by Elian Gonzalez.)

Continue Reading...

LaCarte, creator of the wildly successful Web page filled with animated dancing rodents, recently unveiled her new "interactive" hamsters. At HampsterDance2.com, viewers can speed up and slow down both the music and the dancers. Individual hamsters can even be dragged to different locations on the screen; clicking on them pauses their motion so the dance steps can be started at different times.

The hamsters have also learned to rap. The familiar "Dee dee dee, doo doo, do-do doo" now burbles over a thrumming synthesizer and electronic percussion -- part of a longer track you'll soon be able to purchase on the "Official and Authorized" HampsterDance CD. Over a driving techno beat, the speeded up voices shout: "All right everybody, now here we go. It's a brand new version of a dosey-do!" Several rhymes later, it culminates with a speedy "Yi-ha!" and an announcer's voice saying "Let's try it" before the familiar yodeled refrain ...

Continue Reading...

"I suddenly got a message saying my screen name was being logged off of AOL Instant Messenger because I'd logged in elsewhere," he says. Two weeks had passed since AOL said it had plugged a security hole which allowed unauthorized access to AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) accounts, but someone was demonstrating that the hole was still open -- and had claimed Dihu's account.

For the next 17 days, Dihu, a senior principal at Diamond Technology Partners, confronted this fraudulent "MacGyver," who identified himself as a teenage hacker. Dihu opened another AIM account and messaged his own MacGyver screen name, only to receive a reply moments later, which he says included the screen name of a friend whose messages the account thief had apparently received.

Continue Reading...

The Charles M. Schulz Tribute Quilt now includes nearly 100 squares, including a red-haired girl penned by Greg Evans, creator of "Luann," which says "From all the red-haired girls, we'll miss you Sparky!" And Bill Holbrook, creator of "Kevin and Kell" and "On the Fastrack," drew one of his own characters lying on top of Snoopy's doghouse.

Continue Reading...

In a demonstration performed for Salon Technology, someone describing himself as a teenage hacker changed the password on our account in less than three minutes.

The AIM software -- which allows real-time screen-to-screen communication -- is used by more than 40 million people, including millions who are not also fee-paying members of AOL's service.

The security hole is simple: AOL's online service can be used to change the passwords on AIM accounts. So pranksters open new AOL accounts using the name of the AIM user they're targeting.

AOL does ask for the AIM password -- but there are ways around this check. More experienced mischief-makers know how to issue keyboard commands to open a password-changing screen before the password check; less-experienced ones know that after the correct series of responses, the AOL account will still be created, but they won't be able to log onto it -- a problem that can be remedied with a call to AOL, which will enable access if the caller supplies the correct credit card information used to create the account.

Continue Reading...

"When you bought Time Warner we were all impressed.

How come you didn't buy your Web address?

You may be a big-shot down at AOL,

but I'm the one that got your URL!"

The song -- titled "Steve Case Lost His Cyber Parking Space" -- features Alan's soft, insinuating vibrato, with an occasional Hank Williams yodel, over a slow "Johnny B. Goode" style guitar line. It even includes a mocking spoken passage mulling ignominious plans for the site: "Maybe I'll sell duck decoys. 'Quack, quack ...!'"

Of course, most of us know him as Steve, not Stephen, Case but www.stevecase.com was taken -- and not by the AOL chief. It is registered to someone named Dave Davidson, according to the WHOIS database at Network Solutions.

Continue Reading...

Users of the World, a Brookline, Mass., Internet service provider, found its home page replaced by a newspaper with headlines from 1900 (Women Jailed For Exposing Ankles On Beach) and, of course, the big Roman numeral date change: from MDCCC to MCM. The "World Banner" also included a tongue-in-cheek look back at "the grandest century there shall ever be," with delightful morsels like this: "Food safety has been perfected thanks to waxen paper which does not stick to even the gamiest horse meat."

Fake problems came in all shapes: Webmasters at Massachusetts Institute of Technology substituted a new Error Message 1900 -- "Web Not Invented Yet" -- for their original page-not-found haiku. And a Web log at the University of Washington appeared, impossibly, upside-down on visitors' screens, while Web pages around the world dallied in the 1900 motif.

Continue Reading...

Even before the film was released, fans began begging George Lucas to delete the "computer-generated homunculus." Why does this jive-talking, subservient character whip up such fury? For one thing, "Star Wars" fans find Jar Jar's contrived clumsiness stupid. And combined with his pidgin English, Jar Jar's idiot-clowning comes across to many as racist.

Continue Reading...

It's rare, Crowley says -- but it does happen. Ed Hansen faced a similar situation in the spring of 1995 when he was doing technical support for MindSpring. Back when the company had just 20 employees -- all working in the same room -- he took a call about a MindSpring customer who had been playing a game of chess using Internet chat facilities. "He began to suffer chest pains and he noted that to the person he was playing with -- and he stopped typing." Hansen, who now works as MindSpring's public relations manager, says, "We determined it was probably a good thing to contact emergency services in the town the gentleman lived in."

Continue Reading...

At this point, only a district judge has prevented the Navy from completing the discharge. After a firestorm of press coverage, AOL CEO Steve Case issued a special "Community Update" to try to mollify anger. "We have always recognized that privacy was an absolutely central building block for this medium," Case argued, "so from day one we've taken steps to build a secure environment that our members can trust."

But Case's words rang hollow. The McVeigh affair wasn't an isolated incident. In the ensuing coverage, other subscribers also came forward with stories about AOL's loose lips. And only days after that controversy arose came the latest in a long sequence of disturbing AOL security breaches, undermining AOL's claim that it provides a "secure environment."

Around midnight Jan. 26, I received a mysterious e-mail message: "Before you miss the whole thing, you should really try and check out keyword: TA."

Continue Reading...

In Feb. 1989, she wrote Schaefer a letter in prison, asking if he remembered her. "How could I not?" he immediately replied. They decided to collaborate on a book. In 1995 Schaefer died in his cell. London published their book, "Killer Fiction," posthumously, and created a Web site displaying an excerpt -- "The Serial Killer Who Loved Me," which was carried on America Online.

Continue Reading...

I stumbled across it by accident July 16, and mentioned it in an AOL newsletter I send out to more than 12,000 e-mail subscribers. Last Tuesday -- nine days before the changes were to go into effect -- Bloomberg picked up the story, followed by CNET, the Wall Street Journal and CNN. Two days later, according to the Wall Street Journal, New York Attorney General Dennis Vacco, who has been something of a thorn in AOL's side, contacted the Virginia-based company. Thursday afternoon, reportedly minutes before Vacco took to the airwaves on CNBC, and with a firestorm of criticism raging, AOL withdrew the telemarketing scheme and has since spent considerable time attending to damage control.

Continue Reading...