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Because I was 16 and because I was angry, too readily bored and too easily lonely, and because I wanted very badly to be accepted by anyone at all, I once spent the better part of an October weekend doing nitrous oxide in a San Diego hotel suite with a dozen or so hackers and internet trolls.

My presence wasn't some freak happening. It was the result of some two years I'd spent running in trolling circles: an affiliate of Bantown, a sometimes-member of 4chan, and an early contributor to Encyclopedia Dramatica, the Wiki site where we documented our exploits (that is: where we documented every time we made somebody cry or scream for our own amusement). I wasn't a hacker. I didn't have the technical know-how for much of that. But I compensated for this deficiency with an over-abundance of juvenile sociopathic impulse. I was one of them, or at least I had the company t-shirt (bright yellow; red, MS-Paint style star with a missing pixel; ‘LOL DONGS' printed across the front).

I was in San Diego for 2006's ToorCon, a "hacker convention" of the gray-hat kind that is still held there today, still somewhere between a legitimate security conference and a gathering of criminals. The main event was a talk by two fellow trolls: Mischa Spiegelmock ("Rev. Mischa&quot , who worked for SixApart, the company behind LiveJournal, and Andrew Auernheimer ("weev&quot . Auernheimer was relatively obscure then, but six years later would become considerably more famous after he was convicted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act for exposing the email addresses of tens of thousands of AT&T iPad customers, served a year in federal prison, was released on a technicality, and promptly expatriated to Lebanon. He was the one who invited me to San Diego. He was also the one standing over me with the nitrous and telling me to take it while I pretended to know why anybody would want to inhale freezing gas from a balloon.

Among the topics on offering during the speech: how floating servers of the near-future will allow untraceable black-market arms sales; how the Chinese internet could be brought down from inside with a fairly simple package overload if a brave troll didn't mind "being disappeared"; how the revolution — still ill-defined in the nascent days of digital libertarianism — was nigh.



All of this built up to the announcement that Auernheimer and Mischa had discovered a flaw in how Mozilla Firefox handles JavaScript. They said that it would allow them to surreptitiously access the computer of every Firefox user, useful for data storage, script-running, or any other function they might not want attached to their own PC. They would not, despite the pleas of a Mozilla employee in the audience, turn the secret over in exchange for a petty cash reward. There is, they explained, quite a lot more money in covertly using tens of thousands of home computers as server hosts for illicit, for-profit websites than there is in letting Mozilla sweep it under the rug. Their intent, though, was not profit — only the amusement of seeing the representative of a powerful company unable to respond.