More Awesome Than Money by Jim Dwyer Read Free Book Online Page B

discovery? One day, as a prank, a classmate set up a Facebook account in Ilya’s name and friended everyone in their circle, including other students and the graduate teaching assistants. When he discovered the trick, it was the only time most people saw him truly angry. He confronted another student, Stephanie Lewkiewicz, with whom he had developed a romantic relationship. She conceded knowing that the scheme was afoot, but swore that she had not instigated it or taken part. Another student had.
    â€œThat guy friended all my TAs,” Ilya sputtered. He was shutting down the account. “What are they going to think? Everyone is going to be offended thinking I just defriended them.”
    â€œBut honestly,” Stephanie said, “I didn’t actually do it.”
    â€œI believe you that you didn’t do it. You probably just thought it was hysterical,” Ilya said.
    â€œI did,” she said.
    He hunted for the Facebook account cancellation procedure, but had no faith that it would actually work. Somewhere, he was certain, his personal data was going to be stashed on a server.
    â€œThey’re not going to let me really delete it,” he told Stephanie. “It’s going to be stored on the Internet. It’s never going to go away.”
    That single episode aside, he was a bright spirit among the muted tones of the math program. He often wore a shirt designed as an American flag and neon blue pants; he sat near the front, hand up, more with questions than with answers. His wandering curiosity brought him to Max’s heuristics class, and then to the computer club room, which had a much livelier hangout scene than the math lounge.
    As it happened, Max and another senior, Dan Grippi, were officers of the ACM, and they had an intuitively subversive approach to computing. Or perhaps they saw it as unmapped land, mostly ungoverned. They turned the club office into a hangout through a satisfying series of small hacks. Until their administration at the start of the senior year, it was hard for anyone to just drop in because only the club officers had keys, but Max and Dan fixed that. Not by going to a locksmith for more keys. One night, they put a little radio frequency identification chip on the door. The chip, known as an RFID, is a simple gadget that sends signals a few yards; it’s what lets an identification card swipe open a turnstile, or lets a driver pay a highway toll without cash. Max and Dan set up their RFID to indicate when the door was opened or closed. The signal was strong enough to reach the computers in the room. Then the computer would send out a tweet under a Twitter account registered as @acmroom.
    So the door had its own Twitter account. It tweeted simple messages.
    The ACM Room is open.
    Or:
    The ACM Room is locked.
    To accomplish that, however, Dan and Max had to make changes on one of the computers in the room, which ordinarily could be done only by people with the master password privileges, like the university’ssystems administrators. The proper way to do it would have been to file a work request ticket through channels. Or they could just hack into it.
    With everyone gone for the night, Dan read out the serial numbers from the back of the computer, and Max pulled up the manual from the Dell website. It explained how to reset the administrative password. You open the computer casing and unplug a jumper that supplies power to the motherboard, then waited a few minutes. Then you can put in any master password. Easy.
    The door’s first tweet had said:
    if a door opens and no one is there to see it, is it really open?
    Message number 2:
    the ACM room door is now closed!
    On his own Twitter account, Max had announced:
    sweet, now all of you people can know when I am in the acmroom because i made this door tweet.
    Even with glitches, it was a cool stunt that won new fans for the room and the club.
    â€”
    For a partner in a minor black bag operation, Max