claimed a room on the opposite end of the shag-carpeted hall from mine, struck me as another kindred spirit like Sam, though at first I had no idea why. Tall and lanky, he didn’t have any visible muscle, just long boyish limbs. His face was pale and his hair paler, his eyes close together and set far back, hidden by a coy bowl of dishwater blond hair. I felt strangely, incongruously sure of him, having the unbidden thought as we talked by the pool on our first night in the house that he had a good heart.
My sense was that he brought a mysterious form of light, some spirit that we were all seeking, to the house. His name was Thrax.
A few months earlier, I was working at the office when someone sitting at a nearby desk said, “We’ve been hacked.” I looked over his shoulder at a Facebook account they were eyeing.It looked like a MySpace page. That is, all the profile owner’s information was perfectly arrayed as they had entered it on Face-book, but the formatting had been tricked into rendering like MySpace, with shouting features of gaudy colors, floating text, and smarmy profile fields like “Mood” and “Who I’d Like to Meet.”
Dustin worked quickly to trace the hack to its source while the rest of us looked on at our screens in puzzlement. When he found the hack, or perhaps when it had found him (the whole point of hacking is not so much to break something as to get attention for breaking something, and so a hacker is not likely to rest long without telling someone, often the hacked, about the exploit), he told us the hacker’s name. Curious, I looked up his profile.
My first reaction to Thrax’s profile picture, of a bony college kid in an American Apparel T-shirt and a mop of emo hair, with red paint Photoshopped over his lips for effect, was that this kid wants attention so bad it’s painful. He looked like the kind of wiseass who wants to make you pay. For what, it didn’t matter.
At the time of the hack, Thrax lived in Georgia, attending a Southern college most of us had never heard of. However, he wouldn’t live in obscurity for much longer: Dustin hired him a few weeks later, on the theory that you want to keep your enemies close, especially when they can break your site. So, a few days later, Thrax showed up in the office, wearing the same skinny T-shirt and baggy jeans he had worn on his Facebook profile.
From the minute he arrived, despite or maybe in part because of his cagey, impudent gaze beneath his long bangs, therewas an almost preternatural aura of celebrity and inevitability about Thrax: The Harvard guys, who had made careers doing everything by the book, had been looking for this boy, long before they knew that this hacker savant from Georgia actually existed. At happy hour on Thrax’s first day in the office, everyone swarmed him, asking questions about the hack and about his strange provenance in a state far from all of our own. A few of the Harvard engineers, perhaps miffed that they would now have to share the spotlight, wondered if Thrax was just a script kiddie, a derogatory term for an unschooled kid who copies code from the Internet rather than composing it himself. From my vantage point in the office, watching, I felt a sense of bemused relief. Things are finally going to get interesting. The Harvard boys have some competition, and Thrax seemed to understand, if nothing else, how to create a mysterious, compelling character out of the bits of the Internet that he mastered with his oddly long, ghostly white fingers.
Facebook was waiting for Thrax and brethren to arrive because, unlike startups that build computer chips or enterprise software, the network is about two things: personality and stories. People and stories are what keep us coming to the site. Whether out of an instinctive need to keep tabs on our surroundings or as a way of fostering social bonds, it is human nature to want to know what is happening to the people in our circle and, with Facebook, we don’t
My sense was that he brought a mysterious form of light, some spirit that we were all seeking, to the house. His name was Thrax.
A few months earlier, I was working at the office when someone sitting at a nearby desk said, “We’ve been hacked.” I looked over his shoulder at a Facebook account they were eyeing.It looked like a MySpace page. That is, all the profile owner’s information was perfectly arrayed as they had entered it on Face-book, but the formatting had been tricked into rendering like MySpace, with shouting features of gaudy colors, floating text, and smarmy profile fields like “Mood” and “Who I’d Like to Meet.”
Dustin worked quickly to trace the hack to its source while the rest of us looked on at our screens in puzzlement. When he found the hack, or perhaps when it had found him (the whole point of hacking is not so much to break something as to get attention for breaking something, and so a hacker is not likely to rest long without telling someone, often the hacked, about the exploit), he told us the hacker’s name. Curious, I looked up his profile.
My first reaction to Thrax’s profile picture, of a bony college kid in an American Apparel T-shirt and a mop of emo hair, with red paint Photoshopped over his lips for effect, was that this kid wants attention so bad it’s painful. He looked like the kind of wiseass who wants to make you pay. For what, it didn’t matter.
At the time of the hack, Thrax lived in Georgia, attending a Southern college most of us had never heard of. However, he wouldn’t live in obscurity for much longer: Dustin hired him a few weeks later, on the theory that you want to keep your enemies close, especially when they can break your site. So, a few days later, Thrax showed up in the office, wearing the same skinny T-shirt and baggy jeans he had worn on his Facebook profile.
From the minute he arrived, despite or maybe in part because of his cagey, impudent gaze beneath his long bangs, therewas an almost preternatural aura of celebrity and inevitability about Thrax: The Harvard guys, who had made careers doing everything by the book, had been looking for this boy, long before they knew that this hacker savant from Georgia actually existed. At happy hour on Thrax’s first day in the office, everyone swarmed him, asking questions about the hack and about his strange provenance in a state far from all of our own. A few of the Harvard engineers, perhaps miffed that they would now have to share the spotlight, wondered if Thrax was just a script kiddie, a derogatory term for an unschooled kid who copies code from the Internet rather than composing it himself. From my vantage point in the office, watching, I felt a sense of bemused relief. Things are finally going to get interesting. The Harvard boys have some competition, and Thrax seemed to understand, if nothing else, how to create a mysterious, compelling character out of the bits of the Internet that he mastered with his oddly long, ghostly white fingers.
Facebook was waiting for Thrax and brethren to arrive because, unlike startups that build computer chips or enterprise software, the network is about two things: personality and stories. People and stories are what keep us coming to the site. Whether out of an instinctive need to keep tabs on our surroundings or as a way of fostering social bonds, it is human nature to want to know what is happening to the people in our circle and, with Facebook, we don’t
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