Everything is wired insanely to a single ISDN line. A metal shelf unit contains a rack of monitors, some video equipment, spare keyboards. It looks like a mad, bad bedroom - shiny desktops and derelict ones, disemboweled minitowers and battered servers, every last expansion slot distended with DAT machines, CD-ROM burners, extra hard drives.
Inside Novell UK's glossy five-story headquarters, he lets himself into his office. Monday morning, 9 a.m., Greenwich Mean Time: Phil arrives for work in Bracknell, England, in a suit and tie, just back from a few days in Switzerland.
By the end of the day Mad Hatter, a ringleader of the software piracy group called the Inner Circle, will have poured 300 Mbytes of illegal "warez" onto the Internet. A steady stream of bytes departs his machine 128 Kbps and vanishes into the ether.
After breakfast with the family, another wave of automated scripts kicks in. After a quick espresso and another cigarette, he surveys the contents of a few private FTP sites, filters through a bunch of new files, and then reroutes the good stuff to his newsreader. He has 30 messages from all over the world: some fan mail, a couple of flames, a few snippets of interesting information, three or four requests - some clear, some PGP-encoded. He looks for errors and then reads his email. Sunday morning, 7 a.m., somewhere in US Eastern Standard Time: Mad Hatter gets up, has a glass of Seagram's Ginger Ale and a cigarette, and checks his machine, which has been running automated scripts all night. For the software industry, it's a billion-dollar nightmare. For the wannabe underground, collecting it is an obsession. For the Inner Circle, cracking software is a challenge.