phrack/issue47/12.txt

                              ==Phrack Magazine==

                 Volume Six, Issue Forty-Seven, File 12 of 22

                                HoHoCon Miscellany

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                "HERTz vs Y"
                                   By Loq

  (for the uninformed, HERTz is the Hohocon Emergency
   Response Team, born to deal with pussy (err posse)-like
   hackers on the net)


OK, here it is...The complete story about hohocon.org, or at least as much as
I can piece together...I will try to restrict myself to hohocon.org
information, as I sure plenty of people have their own comments on what
happened at h0h0.

I arrived at hohocon Friday evening, and there was nobody around.  After
phoning fool's VMB, I headed up to room 518, the computer room, to see
what was up.  f0t0n, MiCRO^[[, fool and other people were scattered throughout
the room were supposedly working on getting the system up, but they were
having some "routing" problem...Hmm...  Nevertheless, they finally got it up
a short time later, working reasonably well.

hohocon.org consisted of a mass of computer equipment all kludged together,
which nevertheless worked remarkably well.  There was the main user machine,
hohocon.org, which handled all the user logins, the (supposedly dual) 28.8k PPP
gateway machine, photon.hohocon.org, the terminal server, oki900.hohocon.org,
and then micro^[['s box, lie.hohocon.org (lie didn't allow logins to most
people).  Additionally, a last minute machine was added onto the network as
sadie.hohocon.org.  That machine was graciously provided by mwe, a dfw.net
type who fool had hit up for terminal and had shown up with a mysterious
overclocked '66 with a shitload of neat stuff including multimedia
capabilities.  He also brought us several "classic" (some call them ancient =)
terminals that people were able to use to login.

At some point, dfx showed up and made use of America's capitalistic system by
offering various warez for sale, consisting mostly of those nifty red-type
armbands to let people in to the main event...he pointed his camera at
the systems..and then left.  he's tooo uber for us...

Friday night, everything was calm...Micro^[[, myself, and several other
people started working on bouncing between sites on the net...Several
people donated accounts to use for this task, and we ended up with a nice
list, until we hit utexas.edu, when the whole thing came to a screeching
halt...Must say something about University of Texas at Austin networking, eh?
Not wanting to escape through tons of telnets just to kill the final one
that went through utexas, we just killed the whole thing and decided that
we would do it the next day (although we never did get around to it again...
oh well)... For those interested, here is a list of some of the sites we were
able to bounce through:

 usis.com  (Houston, Texas)
 bell.cac.psu.edu  (State College, Pennsylvania)
 pip.shsu.edu  (Huntsville, Texas)
 dfw.net  (Dallas, Texas)
 deepthought.armory.com  (San Jose, California)
 falcon.cc.ukans.edu  (Lawrence, Kansas)
 dunx1.ocs.drexel.edu  (Philidelphia, Pennsylvania)
 solix.fiu.edu  (Miami, Florida)
 thetics.europa.com  (Portland, Oregon)
 yogi.utsa.edu  (San Antonio, Texas)
 thepoint.com  (Sellersburg, Indiana)
 aladdin.dataflux.bc.ca  (British Columbia, Canada)
 itesocci.gdl.iteso.mx  (Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico)
 tamvm1.tamu.edu  (College Station, Texas)
 Joyce-Perkins.tenet.edu (Austin, Texas)
 earth.cs.utexas.edu (Austin, Texas)

I left Friday night around 2 am because I had to work at 8 :(...I will
never do THAT again...Nothing very eventful happened in the computer room,
several people wandered by, ophie refused to say hi to me (j/k ophie)
and plenty of jokes and stories were passed around...

Saturday nite was when all the fun happened on the net.  fool decided it
would be a great idea to let everyone have accounts, and we finally got up to
about a 60 line password file...Much of this traffic was over a 28.8k
slip, which worked its way down to about 10bps by the time everyone started
(ab)using it, not to mention the wonderful speed-decreasing/error-overcoming
resolution tendencies of the v.fc protocol, which left us a bit...uhh...
llllaaaaaaaaaggggggggggggeeeeeeeeddddddd.  This was eventually switched down
to 14.4k after photon realized the problems the v.fc was causing.

The next problem was probably very predictable, apparently to everyone except
for one "fool" who broke down and decided to give y an account.  Everyone
familiar with y (Y-WiNDoZE), knows his general habits around systems,
and hohocon.org was no exception(ok,ok, so it wasn't completely fool's fault...
Still...:)

Apparently y next let x login under his account to look around.  The details
are a little sketchy, but the first thing X did was look around,
check out the password file, check out the remote hosts, went on irc for
a bit, and then he began his real attack.  He ran pico and suddenly there
was a copy of 8lgm's lprcp in his directory (presumably he ascii uploaded
it into the editor) with the name 'posse'...hmmm... How ingenious (bah)...He
then proceeded to copy the password file to his own directory, add a WWW
account, password bin, and use lprcp to put it back in /etc/passwd. (copies of
his .bash_history should be available on fool's ftp site by the time you read
this...see below)

DjRen and I, in the meantime, were out of the room having a small party for
ourselves, so I didn't get a chance to see all this happening.  Apparently
nobody discovered it until y started wall'ing message about his eliteness
and also started bragging to everyone on irc about it.  When Dj and I returned,
we discovered that X had managed to an account for himself on the system.
X installed his own backdoors into the system and started playing
around.  At this point, I wasn't really fully aware of what was going on
because of the buzz I had from that New-Years-Day bottle of champagne
graciously delivered to us by an interesting Australian writer at the
conference.

Finally, Dj and I returned to the computer room, where I sat down at a terminal
to IRC a little, and I heard a big commotion about how y had hacked root :)
About the same time, y was on irc attempting to play netgod because he hacked
hohocon.org :)

Apparently even Mike got access to the system at one point, but it is not
clear if he did anything once he was there.  The people sitting at the
hohocon.org consoles then began a massive scramble to kick them out of the
system.   Several times they were killed, but Y and X kept coming back.
fool managed to find some of the accounts they had created, and I managed to
hear the root password from among the commotion and I logged in to kill inetd
keep them from being able to connect in.  I then proceeded to do a find for
all the suid programs, where I found a couple of x and y's backdoors (the
oh-so-elite /usr/bin/time sure had me ph00led, y :)

After I removed the backdoors I could find, I looked at /etc/motd, and noticed
y's message:
================================================
Spock rules more than anyone

WE SWEAR


WELCOME SOUTH EASTERN POSSE TO HOHOCON!@#$
================================================
I don't think I really have to make any comment about this message, it is
clearly self-explanatory :)

Thinking I could be elite too, I replaced his message with
================================================


Loq has defeated X and Y :)


================================================

Photon came in the room, and started working on getting the systems back
together... That was the conversation where we coined the phrase the
"Hohocon Emergency Response Team (HERTz)".

About half-an-hour later, Eclipse ambled into the room telling me to
login again...I do and somehow Proff had managed to get root access and
add a line into the motd:

================================================


Loq has defeated X and Y :)
And proff has defeated Loq.


================================================

I started to look around a little and suddenly it looked like all the files
were missing... When I did an ls / I realized that Proff has replaced ls
with his own  copy that wouldn't show any files :)  So for awhile, I had
to do echo *'s just to get lists of files in the directories.  At that point,
I really didn't want to play the games anymore, as it was about 2am and I had
to work at 8am that morning, but I congratulate Proff in being
able to defeat all of us that one last time :)

The rest of the con, with respect to the network, was pretty quiet...
For those interested, most of the hohocon logs and information will be on
fool's ftp site: ftp://dfw.net/pub/stuff/FTP/Stuff/HoHoCon

The list of users that were finally on Hoho was pretty large, here is a copy
of all the accounts that existed on hohocon.org at the time it went down:

root bin daemon adm lp sync shutdown halt mail news uucp operator games
man postmaster ftp fool yle djren mthreat shaytan loq mindV klepto btomlin
nnightmare train patriot fonenerd joe630 plexor pmetheus vampyre phlux
windjammer nocturnus phreon spock phred room202 novonarq thorn davesob
f-christ gweeds cyboboy elrond onkeld octfest tdc mwe angeli Kream ljsilver
marauder landon proff hos fool cykoma dr_x el_jefe mwesucks iceman eric
z0rphix


Other miscellaneous notes....

Thanks to fool for organizing as much as he did in such limited time.
 It sucks that the first hotel had to cancel and that caused
 us to lose our ISDN link...Hopefully next year I will be able
 to provide the link for you.

Thanks to photon for getting the PPP link up and running...it disconnected
 many times and became really slow when the load finally came down
 on it, but overall it worked extremely well with few problems.

Thanks to micro^[[ for the idea of trying to bounce the telnets around the
 world in the normal hacker tradition...

Thanks to eclipse for the interesting conversations and for giving me a
 better understanding of Proff... :)
 A small note that Eclipse discovered:
  "To Root: (slang) To have sex..."

 ahh...no wonder all those people sit on the net on friday nites :)

Thanks to Proff for the extra entertainment at the end of the nite... I
 look forward to battling you in the future :)

Also thanks to X and Y for the entertainment as well :)

Finally, thanks to both fool and eclipse for helping me review this text and
 get it somewhat accurate at least :)

I am intentionally leaving everyone else's names off of here because I
know I would forget someone that I met at hohocon, and I wouldn't want to
cause hurt feelings or anything :)

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

                   Bits and Bytes Column by J. Barr
                     (From Austin Tech-Connected)


WaReZ <nOun>  1.  Stolen software available to 'elite' callers on
'elite' bulletin boards.  2.  Pirated or cracked commercial
software.

HoHoCon is Austin's annual celebration of the computer
underground.  Phreaks, phracks and geeks rub shoulders with
corporate security-types, law enforcement officials, and various
and assorted cyber-authors.  It's an in thing, a cult thing, an elite
thing. In many ways it reminds me of the drug-culture of the 60's
and 70's.  It has the same mentality:  paranoia and an abiding
disdain for the keepers of law and order. But after all, HoHoCon
honors the Robin Hoods of the computer era: stealing from the
rich, powerful, and evil prince (Microsoft, IBM, Lotus, et al) and
distributing to poor dweebs under the very nose of the sherrif.
A nose, by the way, that just begs to be tweaked. That's the
romantic notion, at least.  To others there is no nobility in
computer crime.  Whether it's a case of wholesome anarchy run
amok or youthful pranksterism subverted to common criminal
mischief: warez is warez, theft is theft.

A month or two ago I had an email conversation with a young
man and we discovered we both ran BBS's. He asked what my
board was about and I explained that The Red Wheelbarrow)
was for 'rascals, poets, and dweebs', and that it carried echos
from FidoNet, USENET, and elsewhere.  He replied that his was
a private board, one that dealt mainly in "WaRez and 'bOts" and
closed his note with an "eVil gRin."   Not being sure what he was
talking about, I asked him to spell it out for me.  I never heard
from him again.

I mention this because at HoHoCon you either knew these
things or you didn't; you were part of the elite or you were not.
Like my questions to my friend the pirate board operator, my
questions at HoHoCon went unanswered.

The hype in various  Austin newsgroups for this year's event
talked quite a bit about the party last year.  Cyberspace
luminaries shared top billing with the mention of teenage girls
stripping for dollars in a hotel room.  I decided then and there it
was the sort of function I should cover for Tech-Connected.

I asked at the door for a press pass and was directed towards a
rather small redheaded kid across the room. The guard at the
door said he (the kid) was running the show.  I expected to see
lots of people I knew there, but  I only saw one. John Foster is
the man who keeps the whole world (including Tech-
Connected) up-to-date as to what boards are up and what boards
are down in Central Texas. John is about my age.  He looked
normal.  Everyone else was strange.  I saw more jewelry in
pierced noses and ears walking across that room than I normally
see in a week. Lots of leather and metal, too.  HoHoCon '94
looked like where the tire met the (info) road: a cross between
neo-punk-Harley-rennaisance and cyber-boutique. Most of the
crowd was young.  Old gray-beards  like John and I really stuck
out in the crowd.

I found the redheaded kid. He was selling t-shirts at the table.
Next to him an "old hand" (who must have been nearly 30) was
reciting the genesis of personal computers to a younger dweeb.
They quibbled for a second about which came first, the Altos or
the Altair, then looked up to see if anyone was listening and
smiled when they saw that I was.  I waited respectfully for the
redheaded kid to finish hawking one of his shirts, then repeated
my request for a press pass.  He just looked at me kind of funny
and said he had given some out, but only to people he knew.  I
didn't know a secret handshake or any codewords I could blurt
out to prove I was cool, so I just stood there for a moment and
thought about what to do next.

Perhaps a change in costume would make me cool.  Maybe then
these kids could see that I was OK.  I picked up a black one, it
read NARC across the front and on the back had a list of the top-
ten NARC boards of 1994.  Not wanting to appear ignorant, I
didn't ask what NARC stood for.  I figured it would be easy
enough to find out later, so I bought the shirt and left.

I returned Sunday morning, wearing my new NARC t-shirt,
certain it would give me the sort of instant-approval I hadn't had
the day before.  It didn't.   As I was poking around the empty
meeting room, a long-haired dude in lots of leather came
clunking up in heavy-heeled motorcycle boots and asked what I
was doing.  I explained I was there to do a story. That shut him
up for a second so I decided to pursue my advantage.  "Anything
exciting happen last night?" I asked.  "Nothing I can tell YOU
about, SIR" he replied, then pivoted on one of those big heels
and clunked away.

Browsing the tables in the meeting room I found pamphlets left
over from the previous day's activities.  There was an old
'treasure map' of high-tech 'trash' locations in Denver. Northern
Telecom, AT&T and U.S.West locations seemed to be the focus.
There were flyers from Internet access providers (it seemed a
little like carrying coals to Newcastle, but then what do I know), a
catalog from an underground press with titles like "The Paper
Trail" (just in case you need to create a new identity for
yourself), "Fugitive: How to Run, Hide, and Survive" and
"Secrets of Methamphetamine Manufacture." Good family
reading, fer shure.

For the purists there were reprints of issues 1 to 91 of
"YIPL/TAP", the first phreak newsletter.  For the wannabe's like
me, there were more kewl t-shirts to be ordered.  I decided I
should have opted for the one with "Hacking for Jesus" across
the back. I appreciate the art of anthropology a little more after
trying to read the spoor left behind at HoHoCon.  It is definitely
a mixed bag.

To this day, I'm not certain what NARC stands for.  Someone
suggested it was any state or federal officer interested in busting
people, just like in the bad old days (or today, for that matter).
Maybe it's shorthand for aNARChist. The definition I like best
was given to me on an internet newsgroup,  alt.binary.warez.pc.
(Really, it exists right there in front of the Secret Service and
everyone.)  One reply actually had an answer. After a paragraph
or two of the requisite 'my gawd what a stupid question from a
know-nothing nerd',  the suggestion was made that it stood for
"Never At Rest Couriers."

I like that one because it suggests a purpose for those 'bots my
friend with the WaReZ board and the eViL gRiN mentioned in
our conversation.  Sitting in private channels on IRC servers,
'bots could be used to store and forward pirated goods across the
internet in almost untraceable ways.  Who knows for sure?  Not
I.  One thing I'm certain of, I'm real careful what part of town I
wear my NARC t-shirt in.  I would really hate getting shot by a
confused crack-cocaine dealer who thought my shirt was the
signal his deal had gone bad.

Because I had been excluded from the inner circle, because I
had tried and failed to become part of the elite during HoHoCon,
it was easy for me to work myself into a morally superior position
from which to write this column.  All I had really seen were a
bunch of kids: wannabe's, cyber-groupies and counterculture
alternatives to life-as-we-know-it, celebrating the triumph of
crooks and petty thieves over legitimate big business and big
government.  But something bothered me about that safe, smug
position, and the more I thought about it the more it irked.

For one thing, something was missing. If they were criminals,
where was the loot?  Where were the Benz and BMW's that
should have been in the parking lot?  Where were all the fancy
wimminz that follow fast money?  Software prices are high these
days, so even if they were only getting a dime on the dollar for
their WaReZ, there should have been some real high-rollers
strutting their stuff.

A reformed phreaker gave me some input on this.  He said it was
about collecting a complete set, like trading baseball cards, not
about making money.  The software itself wasn't  important.
Having it in your collection was the important thing. Tagging in
cyberspace.  Making a mark by having one of everything. But
still, it's illegal.  Against the law, whether for profit or not.

The news background as I write this story is about Microsoft,
king of the PC software hill.  The judge reviewing the Consent
Decree negotiated between the Department of Justice and
Microsoft is angry with the lawyers from Redmond.  He tells them
that he can't believe them any longer.  They testified in
September that Microsoft did not engage in marketing
vaporware, which is an old IBM tactic of hurting the sales of a
competitor's product by promising they would have one just like
it, and better, real soon now.

The judge has before him internal Microsoft documents which
indicate that the employee who came up with the idea of using
vaporware to combat new products from Borland was given the
highest possible ranking in his evaluation. The tactic apparently
worked to perfection. The suits have now told the judge it wasn't
vaporware, because Microsoft was actually working on such a
product.  The judge is not amused.  Are these crimes, this
dishonesty, somehow more acceptable because they are done
for profit by an industry giant?  Because they're done by
business men in suits instead of punk kids in jeans?

How about Ross Perot's old company, EDS.  Have the once
proud men and women of the red (tie), white (shirt), and blue
(suit) drifted astray since the days when 'the little guy' insisted
that not even a hint of impropriety was acceptable?  The state
employee that negotiated and signed the contract with EDS that
brought me to Austin in 1990 to install the statewide USAS
accounting system for the State Comptrollers Office was hired by
EDS as a 'special consultant' in 1992.  Hint of impropriety? This
was shouted from the roof-tops.  EDS bought a full-page ad in the
Austin American-Statesman to make sure that all the other
bureaucrats in state government got the message.

What about the cops?  The federal storm-troopers who
conducted the raids around town at the time of the Steve Jackson
affair.  The judge at that trial had dressed down the agent in
charge like he was talking to a teenage bully who had been
busted for taking candy from the other kids. No wonder the EFF
(Electronic Frontier Foundation) is so popular.  It's the ACLU of
the 90's and the uncharted terrain of cyber-space.

Finally, how about me.  I have the illegal software on my PC.  It's
a copy of Personal Editor II that I've had forever.  When I
worked at EDS I once had to code 250,000 lines of COBOL
using EDLIN. In those days, management didn't think PC's were
anything but toys and they would be damned before they spent
any money buying editors to write software for them.  Out of that
ordeal came an abiding disdain for EDLIN and my own copy of
PE II.  I'm not sure where I got it.  It was a legal copy at one
time, though I'm not sure whose it was. When I transferred to
Washington, D.C. in 1987, I took it with me.  I moved it from my
XT, to my AT, to my 386SX. Now it's own my 486DX2/50.  I had
a copy of it on every computer I used at work. I used it for
everything I coded, for all the notes I wrote.

These days I don't go into DOS unless I want to hear the guns
fire in Doom II. OS/2 comes with TEDIT, which looks enough
like an updated version of PE II to make me feel guilty every
time I see it.  But I haven't taken the time to learn how to use this
legal editor.  My taboo copy of PE II is much too comfortable.

So who are the good guys and who are the bad?  The suits who
steal and bribe and leverage from within the system?  The
arrogant thugs with badges?  The punks with body-piercings?
Or an old phart like me, with illegal software on my own PC?
Heady questions for sure.  I thought I knew the answer when I
started this column, now I'm not so sure. I can't condone the theft
of goods or services no matter how altruistic or noble the cause,
or how badly some noses need to be tweaked, or how ignoble
some agents of law enforcement.

I think it would be my style to point a finger first at the suits,
then at the kids.  But as long as I'm using stolen software, or
'evaluating' shareware long after the trial period is over, I don't
have to go very far should I get the urge to set something right.


-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

                         Ho Ho Con '94 Review

                by Onkel Dittmeyer (onkeld@netcom.com)


    " If I would arrest you, you would really be under arrest,
      as I am a real officer that can actually arrest people who
      are under arrest when I arrest them. "
                                   - Austin Cop, HoHoCon '94


    For those who missed it, dissed it or were afraid to go, here
comes my very personal impression on HoHoCon 1994...flames: /dev/null.

    Drunkfux did it again. K0de-kiddiez, WaReZ-whiners, UNIX-users,
DOS destroyers, linux lunatics - all of them found their way to the
Ramada South Inn in Austin, Texas to indulge in a weekend of excessive
abuse of information equipment and controlled substances under
supervision of the usual array of ph3dz, narqz, local authorities,
mall cops and this time - oh yes! - scantily clad Mexican nationals
without green cards in charge of hotel security. Tracy Lords, however,
did NOT show up.

                               (I want my money back.)

    Well.

    When I walked into the hotel, I noticed a large handwritten
poster that Novocaine put up in the lobby, marking his room as a
"hospitality suite" for those who already made it to Austin Thursday
night. I ditched my bags into my room and went up to the fifth floor to
see what was going on, and who was already there. Grayareas, Novocaine,
Eclipse, Dead Vegetable and a bunch of unidentified people were
lingering around a table that was cluttered with all kinds of
underground mags (from 2600 to Hack-Tic), some reading, some making up
new conspiracy theories. Everybody took a good whiff of Austin air and
prepared themselves for the action to come. Later that night, I took
Commander Crash for a walk around the hotel to see how well they did
their homework. The rumor was that the hotel had been notified, as well
as all local computer-oriented businesses, that the haqrz were in
the neighborhood.. and it looked like it was telling the truth. We
found not a single door unlocked, not one phone interface un-secured.
Somebody closed all the security h0lez in advance, therefore hacking
the hotel looked pointless and lame. Everybody crashed out,
eventually. For most, it was the last sleep they would get for the new
year's weekend.

    Noon the next day, I awoke to find the lobby crawling with
people, and ran into some familiar faces. Like last year, most of the
lobby-ists were playing with hand-held scanners. The National Weather
service was soon declared The Official HoHoConFrequency, and was - in
old fashion - blaring through all hallways and lounges of the site. At
least, nobody could claim they didn't know it was going to rain...

    Commander Crash approached me in the early afternoon. "Dude, "
he said, "I think I've got a bug on my scanner..". We went hunting
around the hotel with a signal-strength-indicator-equipped eleet
scanner to see if we could locate the little bastard. We couldn't.
Disappointed, we asked some cDc guys to help us look, and soon we
walked up and down the hallways in a mob of approximately fifteen to
twenty people. An "undercover" hotel security guard, clad in a "beefy
look" muscle-shirt that revealed some badly-sketched tattoos walked up
and advised us to "get our asses back to our rooms". "If there is a
bug in this hotel, it is there for a reason. Therefore, don't mess
with it." I asked him if we were grounded or something. He was kindly
ignored for the rest of the night. As the mob settled into the
check-in lounge, I noticed about half a dozen new security guards who
were hired to enforce Law & Order and just received an extra briefing
from the hotel manager in a back room. An Austin cop proceeded giving
each one of them an extra pair of handcuffs.  Somebody exclaimed "My
Lord, it's gonna be bondage-con!", which caused me to spray my soda
over an unsuspecting warez d00d. He called me a "LaMeR" and chased me
back to my room where I peacefully lost consciousness.

    The next morning, I awoke late while the actual con was already
in full swing. I pumped myself back into reality with a handful of
Maximum Strength Vivarine(TM) (thank god for small favors) and moved
my not-too-pleasant-smelling likeness into the con room, where
Douglas Barnes was in the middle of a rant on basic encryption. Very
basic, so to speak. Maybe because, like he said, he did not know "how
to address such a diverse audience consisting of hackers, security
professionals and federal agents". Hmpf! You fill in the blanks. Next
up was Jeremy Porter, going into the details of available digital cash
systems, and repeatedly pointing out how easy you can scam over
NetCash by faxing them a check and then cancelling it out after you
got your digicash string in the (e-) mail.  Up next, Jim McCoy gave a
talk on underground networking, a concept that enables you to run a
totally transparent and invisible network over an existing one like
the Internet. Very much like the firewall at whitehouse.gov..

    Damien Thorn was next, starting with some video footage he taped
off a news station where he is interviewed on cellular fraud through
cloning.  He also showed off a nice video clip that showed him playing
around with ESN grabbers an other quite k-rad equipment.  Ironically, he
chose "21st Century Digital Boy" from Bad Religion as the underlying
soundtrack.  That reeks of pure K-RaDiCaLnEsS, doesn't it? When dFx came
back to the mike, about 400 ranting and raving haqrz demanded for the
raffle to finally start, and the k-g0d (who wore a pair of weird,
green, pointed artfag boots) gave in. In the next thirty minutes or
so, a lot of eleet things found new owners like hard drives,
keyboards, twelve hour well-edited hotel porno videos, HoHoCon videos,
back issues of 2600 and TAP, a whole lot of HOPE t-shirts, a
Southwestern Bell payphone booth, CO manuals and other dumpster-diving
loot, AT&T Gift Certificates, an eleet 600 bps modem, and lots of
other more or less useful gadgets. Dead Vegetable repeatedly insisted
that he was not giving up the 35-pound "Mr. T." head he brought, which
was made of solid concrete and hand-painted. "No, it's a Mr-T-Phone,
you can pick up the mohawk and talk!"

    Back out in the lobby, I ran into erikb and chatted briefly
about some other Europeans we both knew (Hi 7up..)..  On the way
up to my room, I stopped at the 2nd floor lobby to mock somebody
for cigarettes. Well, see, I don't have anything against a huge
flock of ph3dz taking up the whole lobby, but if not a single one
of them smokes, let alone has a ciggy to spare, it pisses the fuck
out of me.  Back down, I crammed some fliers into my bag (Buy HoHoCon
videos/TAP issues/2600 subscriptions and other sellout), chatted with
Ophie and a couple of other IRC babes (a lot of females at the con
this year, if this trends keeps up, it will look like a Ricky Lake
show at next year's HoHoCon) and retreated back to my room to secure
all the nifty things I won at the raffle (a book of TAP issues,
a 2600 issue, two t- shirts, an acoustic coupler.. dFx looked
quite pissed).

    Back down, everybody that had something to sell had opened up
shop. dFx was selling last years "I LOVE FEDS/WAREZ" tee-shirts plus
a new stack of the elusive "I LOVE COPS" baseball caps, who came
in four different spanking colors this year. The embroidered logo is
the clincher. I can just recommend everyone who did not get one yet
to get their hands on one of these (no, I am not receiving any ca$h
for this). Netta Gilboa was auctioning off some back issues of
Gray Areas, and cDc sold everything from sizzling "Cult of the Dead C0w"
shirts and hats to "Please do not eat kids" stickers, cable TV descramblers
and DTMF decoders while happily zonking away on an old Atari 7800
video game.  While browsing through the merchandise, I ran into a guy
with a shirt that said "I quit hacking, phreaking, k0dez and
warez.....it was the worst 15 minutes of my life." Now THAT
would have been something to bring home! I blew my excess money on
some less original shirts and visited Room 518, where a bunch of
dedicated people had set up a Net connection and public-access
terminals. Some of the TTYs definitely looked like something you would
find if you decided to take a walk around the desolate offices of your
local CO at night..

    Midnight drew closer. When the new year came around, I was quite
shocked.  "Hey d00dZ! Happy New Year!" - "Shut Up!  I am about to get
op on #warez2!"  What a festive mood.  After midnight, everybody pretty
much retreated into a room with a fair quantity of their favorite
narcotic substance (the 4th floor was filled with an ubiquitous pot
smell, despite of the alarming presence of suits who were talking into
their jackets) and called it a day.