Jolt Country

I did a lot of - for lack of a better term - sneaky things when I was first learning about and using computers back at college. Some of the stunts I pulled in college, were not illegal then; today if I did them now I'd probably be looking at a few years at Club Fed. Or more likely state-supported free housing. Nothing damaging, just fun.

That's one thing I've never found to be understandable. I have way too much - hard earned - respect for computers and what I could do with them to have any sympathy for script kiddies who destroy things ala vandals who smash up houses for no other reason than to destroy.

By the time I was, oh, maybe 18 - maybe even earlier - I realized I did know enough that I could design stuff that could cause damage or erase things, but I also understood my own love for what I was capable of producing made me incapable of engaging in wanton destruction.

I have come to realize something which I didn't know about others until much later: I tend to have real reasons for almost everything I do. I never knew that other people did things and often just did them because of tradition or historical precedent. And maybe that's why I never got into wanting to do destructive things; I don't find fun in it.

OK, shut up and let's all take a break from murdering cats (the Commander) and English (Knuckles) for a second. Here's some goddamn computer crime for you.

http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/library/C ... ES/ALESHE/

In Indianapolis, he was Robert Paul Hoquim, a successful computer-saavy businessman who started an Internet provider company. But after he died of a heart attack, police learned he was a fugitive named John Paul Aleshe who had been on the run for 14 years charged with the attempted murder of an Irving, Texas, police officer. Aleshe, as far as investigators know, used more than 10 aliases. Aleshe died May 23 in the bedroom of his $300,000 home in Noblesville, about 20 miles north of Indianapolis. Noblesville police were trying to track down relatives when they noticed Hoquim's driver's license was a fake and his Social Security number belonged to a woman in St. Louis.

And this guy was on FidoNet as well.

John Paul Aleshe's story intersects with that of BBSes because among the scams he ran before settling down in Indianapolis was running a major Fidonet Hub in Minneapolis, MN in 1988. This hub, which came to be the major point of traffic for the Fidonet network there, unceremoniously came down when "John Richard" (the alias Aleshe was using) suddenly disappeared on a "trip to Boston". One of the defrauded parties, Steve Sherwick, wrote a file which explained their knowledge of John Aleshe, and asked for help in tracking him down:

Read the rest of the article at the link, it deserves your clicks!