I checked in on my little trick of getting onto the open Internet from those LinkNYC kiosks, and I found that it is no longer possible. I’ll check again later from other kiosks to see if it was just the one unit at which I made the attempt, but based on the error message I don’t think that’s likely since I am certain this particular kiosk allowed access before.

What is somewhat amazing about that is just how obscure the glitch was. It is possible they could have found out about it by monitoring network activity either in real time or in summary, which is something they say they do not do. But they more likely plugged the hole as part of a routine upgrade of the software that is supposed to filter and whitelist access to content. I’d say more but I still do not want to give any clues about how I did this until I’m certain I cannot do it anymore.

I can’t say I’m mourning the loss but it was fun being what I assume to be the only person in town who knew how to do this. There may be other routes but it was too cold out today to spend much time standing there poking around.

There is a new device at 37th Avenue & 35th Street. It’s been there about three weeks and already it doesn’t work. Another one up on Northern also does not work, and I don’t think it ever did.

Well, who really cares, right?

Yesterday I called in 5 or 6 times from payphones while on a 9-mile ramble through Woodside and Elmhurst. For some reason not a single one of those calls landed in my voicemail account. The payphones themselves are often to blame for such things but I cannot point the finger at them here, since all but one of the calls connected, or at least they sounded like they did. It’s too bad because I thought I had some interesting stuff for once, though I have that thought many a time only to listen back and find my ramblings to be turgid squalor.

I’ve been debating whether or not to reach out to someone who is among the most well-known figures in the hacking world. I’ve never had a genuine interest in that stuff, but more to the point I conspicuously avoided the scene after the troubles I and others got into all those years ago. But finding the indictment and other paperwork seems to have stoked a desire to come clean on all that so I could contact those people for the sake of knowing exactly what the hell happened that night, and who might have been involved.

I just found additional paperwork that I forgot about, including a type-written letter from the probation officer and a hand-written note from my mother telling me to send restitution payments to the company whose voicemail system we breached. That’s some hairy detail.

I also just did something I never did. I looked up the company headquarters on Streetview. That is where it all went down. It is a modest but elegant looking one story structure that appears to be located on a secluded driveway.

I am also trying to find evidence of the phone number we called, which would have been a number that spelled out the six letters of the company name, preceded by a digit that I thought was 4 but now I’m not so sure. I made up the number in honor of a certain woman singer who I had a crush on at the time. I think she is still performing on Broadway.

There is paperwork missing from my coffers, including the letter from the District Attorney in which he announced, in substance, “This is to inform you that we intend to prosecute this matter.” At that I pounded my fist on the kitchen counter. I also find that the amount of restitution, which I thought was $5,000, was actually $3,500. Seeing that now reminds me that the attorney negotiated down the amount of that restitution payment, a little maneuver of which he did not inform me directly. I don’t think I learned of the lowered amount until I started reporting to the probation officer.

The initial amount of $5,000 was to be paid by each of us involved, and could have thus amounted to as much as $50,000. That figure was produced by the company as an estimate of how much money they lost in having their toll-free number and voicemail system wiped out for however long it was trashed. Everybody involved on my end thought that was bullshit, and I suspect the people at the company itself thought so too. I think only 4 of us made restitution payments, including one unfortunate kid who called in one time and one time only on that fateful night in November, 1988.

$3,500 was still a lot of money for someone fresh out of college making $5 an hour working at the record store and also drowning under what I think was about $12,000 in student loans. I don’t remember how much I actually paid but I remember writing those checks and verifying them with the officer.

The amount of restitution might have been negotiable but the legal fees were not.

Also not mentioned anywhere in the papers is the period of 5 years in which the company affected had the option to reopen the prosecution. The attorney made that sound unlikely but I was never so confident. People at that company were really angry at us, at least in the early stages of the investigation. I never had any direct contact with them so I’ll never know if they fully accepted the conclusions of the FBI, which essentially decided there was no way we could have done the destructive things the hackers did.

Why am I carrying on for so long about this?