The Blue Nowhere

Started in 1979 to send messages between the University of North Carolina and Duke University, the Usenet was purely scientific at first and contained strict prohibitions against topics like hacking, sex and drugs. In the eighties, though, a number of users thought these limitations smacked of censorship. The “Great Rebellion” ensued which led to the creation of the Alternate category of newsgroups. From then on the Usenet was like a frontier town. You can now find messages on any subject on earth, from hard-core porn to literary criticism to Catholic theology to pro-Nazi politics to irreverent swipes at popular culture (such as alt.barney.the.dinosaur.must.die).
    Gillette’s bot had learned that someone had posted a message that included Phate’s name in one of these alternate newsgroups, alt. pictures.true.crime, and had alerted its master.
    The hacker loaded up his newsgroup reader and went online. He found the group and then examined the screen. Somebody with the screen name Vlast453 had posted a message that mentioned Phate’s name. He’d included a picture attachment.
    Mott, Miller and Nolan crowded around the screen.
    Gillette clicked on the message. He glanced at the header:
    From: “Vlast”
    Newsgroups: alt.pictures.true.crime
    Subject: A old one from Phate. Anyboddy have others.
    Date: 1 April 23:54:08 +0100
    Lines: 1323
    Message-ID: <[email protected]>
    References: <[email protected]>
    NNTP-Posting-Host: modem-76.flonase.dialup.pol.co.uk
    X-Trace: newsg3.svr.pdd.co.uk 960332345 11751 62.136.95.76
    X-Newsreader: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.00.2014.211
    X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2014.211
    Path:news.Alliance-news.com!traffic.Alliance-news.com!
    Budapest.usenetserver.com!News-out.usenetserver.com!diablo.
    theWorld.net!news.theWorld.net!newspost.theWorld.net!
    Then he read the message that Vlast had sent.
    To The Group:
    I am receved this from our friend Phate it was sixths months ago, I am not hearing from him after then. Can anyboddy post more like this.
    —Vlast
    Tony Mott observed, “Look at the grammar and spelling. He’s from overseas.”
    The language people used on the Net told a great deal about them. English was the most common choice but serious hackers mastered a number of languages—especially German, Dutch and French—so they could share information with as many fellow hackers as possible.
    Gillette downloaded the picture that accompanied Vlast’s message. It was an old crime scene photograph and showed a young woman’s naked body—stabbed a dozen times.
    Linda Sanchez, undoubtedly mindful of her own daughter and her fetal grandchild, looked at the picture once and then quickly away. “Disgusting,” she muttered.
    It was, Gillette agreed. But he forced himself to think past the image. “Let’s try to trace this guy,” he suggested. “If we can get to him maybe he can give us some leads to Phate.”
    There are two ways to trace someone on the Internet. If you have the authentic header of an e-mail or newsgroup posting you can examine the path notation, which will reveal where the message entered the Internet and the route it followed to get to the computer from which you have downloaded it. If presented with a court order, the sysadmin of that initial network might give the police the name and address of the user who sent the message.
    Usually, though, hackers use fake headers so that they can’t betraced. Vlast’s header, Gillette noted immediately, was bogus—real Internet routes contain only lowercase words and this one contained upper- and lowercase. He told the CCU team this then added, however, that he’d try to find Vlast with the second type of trace: through the man’s Internet address—[email protected]. Gillette loaded up HyperTrace. He typed in Vlast’s address and the program went to work. A map of the world appeared and a dotted line moved outward from San Jose—the location of CCU’s computer—across the Pacific. Every time it hit a new Internet router and changed direction the machine gave an electronic tone called a “ping”—named after a submarine’s sonar beep, which is just what it sounded like.
    Nolan said, “This is your program?”
    “Right.”
    “It’s brilliant.”
    “Yeah, it was a fun hack,” Gillette said, noting that his prowess had earned him a bit more adoration from the woman.
    The line representing the route from CCU to Vlast’s