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Shok. Among Conover’s real jobs were stints at the RSI security firm and later, aided by Jordan Ritter, at BindView. A mix of white-, black-, and gray-hatted hackers, w00w00 kept its IRC conversations limited to members. But the group also maintained a public website. There it published some exploits and patches on a range of systems. In June 1999, the word “w00w00” was one of the top twenty most-searched-for terms on the Internet search engine Google. (Google was more of a search engine for Internet experts at the time, only later developing a mainstream following.)

Shawn was a regular on w00w00, and so was Ritter. Ritter was on the channel in early 1999 when the hacker he knew as Napster sent him and the others an application, telling them to check it out. It was the first version of the program, and Ritter wasn’t blown away. “What are you going to do with it?” he typed. “Is it free?” The reactions of others in the channel varied. Seth McGann, known as Minus, was amazed. “I was pretty impressed. But a lot of people I showed it to didn’t really get it,” he said.

Members of w00w00 often traded pieces of code. They also swapped security exploits and the patches that would fix them, exchanged digital pictures of their girlfriends, and generally gave each other a hard time. While they made fun of it, the group frequently used the “elite” slang of IRC-speak, designed in part to outwit security programs that search for red-flag words like “hacker” but kept alive mostly because of the sense of in-group cool it promoted. As “halflife” once opined to the group: “napster is a darks1de mp3 warez hqr.” “Warez” refers to pirated software: Thus, “Napster is a dark-side MP3 pirated software hacker.”

SHAWN KEPT W00W00 APPRISED of what he was doing, eventually sending out an improved “beta” version of his software every few days. Ritter and other senior w00w00 members like Dug Song helped by giving advice on the state of the art and steering Shawn to where he could learn more. Song, for example, pointed Shawn to prior work on ad hoc networking and routing. “He took it and ran with it,” Song said. The Napster program came to dominate the w00w00 discussion after each improvement, so much so that a new “Napster” IRC channel launched

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