You see back when I was pre-KiDDiE, before I had even gotten into this whole unix thing, back when I was known for my 1337 config.sys hacking skills; my friend Carl was sent a small beige coloured box containing a bunch of circuits by one of his friends who explained that it was used to prevent people who phoned you from having to pay for their call (it was technically a black box in phreaking terms). We were too scared to try it.

I heard that this friend had been arrested for hacking and scentenced to a few hundred hours of community service.

One evening at Carl's dad's 50^th birthday I met this friend. Now I had watched hackers and wanted to know what this whole hacking this was. He told me to telnet into a few mail servers on port 25 and 110 as it was a great place to start learning. He told me most of the servers have their help disabled except IS where you could learn about the commands. Later than night I killed the phonebill running around on mail servers playing with POP and SMTP command. That's where I first learnt to forge e-mail and we had great fun sending people mail from <name>@sucks.com. This was before I knew how to rtfm so we had to figure it all out ourselves. It was like a Sierra quest, but cooler. That pretty much launched me into the internet and figuring out how it worked. I remember being shocked at how easy it was to connect to a port and make it do things.

Good times.