The Death Vegetable, "Veggie" took me to the L0pht after we visited the Computer Museum. The L0Pht is the place the elite hackers of the United States hang out. The birth of the L0pht is based on the wife of Brian Oblivion, a very famous computer hacker. One day, she blew up over her situation with Brian Oblivion.

There are more than 10 universities in Boston and the Cambridge area and it is possible to find junk computers that are still (at least partially) functional inside university dumpsters. For example, you can find Intel 80386 or antiquated Unix machines (Unix is a time sharing operating system invented by AT&T Bell Labs). You also might find black and white monitors. Dumpsters are full of these things. Brian Oblivion visits these dumpsters, collects the junk computer parts, and used to keep them in his apartment (which was at that point expanding through the kitchen area). As the junk accumulated, so did his wife's anger to the point of her explosion. "Honey, can't you do something with this junk? I can't even cook anymore".

Because of this, Brian Oblivion came up with the idea of renting a warehouse and moved all his hardware there. Then, a fellow hacker, moved all his hardware in too. Other hackers followed. Now, there are 25 computers with access to the Internet, 32 stand alone computers (stands alone or does not have access to the Internet) and more than 50 decorative(?) computers. The early VAX model computers, which seem to weigh about 700kg each, were moved up the stairs by 7 people, step by step.

Where there are machines, there are people.

The warehouse has become a hackers paradise, complete with ISDN Internet access and an Internet domain. The domain name is L0pht.com (L0pht is spelled with a zero, not the letter "o"). This elite domain is like phantom.com, which is owned by the Legion Of Doom (L.O.D.), a group of elite hackers based on the west coast and in Texas. Having an email address at phantom.com means you must be a very elite hacker. This might be called domainism.

L0pht.com and phantom.com email addresses are like Shonan registration numbers [ed. that means cool, read on...] whereas compuserve.com, AOL.com (by America Online), and other major BBS services are like Nerima registration numbers [ed. sucks/geeky; This is a reference to being able to identify a car owner's area of residence by the licence plate on their car].

Off their home page, www.L0pht.com, you can see an introduction to the members of the l0pht, and an ad. for the Wacked Mac Archives, which is a group of hacking programs for the Macintosh. You can also get the individual home page or email address services if you want. But, there is no tech. support and there are no manuals. To differentiate their service, the L0pht, as a policy, guarantees the anonimity of the user.

The day I visited the L0pht, one of the members was creating a rainbow box. Making a free phone call by hacking is called "phreaking". This word, "phreaking", is a combination of "phone", "free" and "freaking". Boxing is , as I explained earlier, using red and blue boxes to access the people you want to talk to but the long distance phone company doesn't know about it or bill you. When you make a long distance phone call these boxes create phony sounds to cheat the long distance phone company system. A rainbow box can create the sounds of all the different boxes.

The famous story goes that the founders of Apple Computer, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak financed the startup of Apple Computers by manufacturing blue boxes. I was so supprised there was the blue box displayed at the Computer Museum. I was supprised that it was approved as an exhibit, even though this is a milestone of computer history.

I enjoyed our conversation and hanging out and eating pizza with the L0pht guys. No matter how elite you are, you can still eat pizza and coke. That is really funny and cute.