The following is an excerpt from Mafiaboy: How I cracked the Internet and why it's still broken. It is reprinted with permission from Penguin Group Canada.

From Chapter Five, "Portrait of the Hacker as a Young Man"

I CAN STILL SEE THE PACKAGE. It was a flat, square envelope with a CD inside. The message printed on the front made it clear it had something to do with computers. It was 1993, I was nine years old, and my perspective on computers was about to undergo a major shift.

The package, which sat on top of a pile of mail at my dad's house, was from a company called America Online--AOL. I'd never heard of it. It promised free access to the internet--games! chat!--for thirty days. All I needed was a modem.

I had to ask myself, what's a modem and where do I get one? These were new terms to me: internet, online, modem. The concepts were fuzzy, yet exciting. I could download and play games online with other people? I could converse with someone thousands of miles away? I wanted in. I wanted a modem. And, like any nine year old who wants something, there was only one way to get it. I started begging my father.

"You want a fax machine?"

That was my dad's response when I asked him to buy me a modem. He didn't know what one was. But things were still tense between him and my mom, and if getting me a modem would make me happy, he didn't see why not. As far as he was concerned, if it had to do with computers, it was educational. I got my modem, installed it, and immediately loaded the AOL CD. Suddenly, it was no longer about only me and my box. I had a sense that there were others like me out there. I wanted to find them. AOL appeared to offer that opportunity.

AOL made its name, and a lot of money, by making the internet easy and friendly for millions of people, even if its target demographic wasn't exactly nine year old kids. Within a few minutes of registering for my free thirty days of access, I was online. Staring at the computer screen, I was bursting with excitement. There was a whole world out there for me to discover! And yet I just kept staring, because I had no idea how to start. What should I search for?

My first thought was games. I started looking for games I could play online or download. Then I tested out AOL's chat function. I began flowing in and out of chat rooms dedicated to different topics. The most popular by far were the dating chat rooms. Men looking for women, women looking for men, men looking for men ... everybody seemed to be there, looking for somebody, flirting with each other. It struck me as pretty ridiculous.

I wanted games to download onto my computer and play on my own time. I had heard you could download versions of even the most popular games for free. This was a type of "warez"--pirated software. I started looking for warez chat channels and managed to find some. From that point on, I would go online and hunt for games I could download. I didn't care about much else until one day I was in a chat room hanging out and asking about warez. I usually pretended to be someone other than me--an adult--and guess I was being annoying because the next thing I knew I was kicked out of the chat room and my AOL connection was lost. What the hell was that?

I logged back on and began paying closer attention. I realized it was a common occurrence and that it was called punting. Someone knocked me offline by hitting me with so much data that my connection was severed. These punters seemed to have a huge amount of power over others on AOL. I was intrigued that an individual was able to "attack" someone else, regardless of the distance between them, using the internet. It seemed like harmless fun, almost a practical joke. The people punted off could simply sign on again and rejoin the chat room. Nobody got hurt.

I wanted to punt someone. Badly.

... That's when my real hunt for AOL hacking tools started. Once I found that first application, I stumbled across more and more. They were each brilliant in their own subversive way. I came across one site that had a huge list of applications. I decided to download all of them and browse their various functions. With these tools in hand, I began to feel like I was in control of the internet, rather than the other way around. The sense of power and possibility was intoxicating.

***

At that time, I didn't know what a hacker was, let alone understand that I was a kiddie, the lowest of the low. But by using other people's applications, I slowly learned how things worked. I eventually began to modify the applications to meet my needs. This is how kiddies become hackers. Everybody has to start somewhere. You can't just know everything right away.

The more I used the tools and learned how they worked, the more I became fixated with the people creating them. There were lots of kiddies on AOL doing the same things as me, but I didn't have any interaction with the people who actually wrote the programs. They seemed like the best players in a computer game, the people who know all the tricks and secrets. The ones who control everyone else. After spending years trying to learn everything about how my PC worked, and enjoying every second of learning DOS commands and other technical information, I felt a strange kinship with these nameless, faceless programmers and online rebels. How did they create these programs? How many more of them were out there? How could I learn to write programs? To me, they were the coolest kids in cyberspace. I wanted to hang with them.

I wanted to be a hacker.