"Hacker Crackdown.Part 4.THE CIVIL LIBERTARIANS" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

He (or she, or they) then put those illicit floppy disks into
envelopes and mailed them to people all over America:
people in the computer industry who were associated with,
but not directly employed by, Apple Computer.

The NuPrometheus caper was a complex, highly
ideological, and very hacker-like crime. Prometheus, it
will be recalled, stole the fire of the Gods and gave this
potent gift to the general ranks of downtrodden mankind.
A similar god-in-the-manger attitude was implied for the
corporate elite of Apple Computer, while the "Nu"
Prometheus had himself cast in the role of rebel demigod.
The illicitly copied data was given away for free.

The new Prometheus, whoever he was, escaped the
fate of the ancient Greek Prometheus, who was chained to
a rock for centuries by the vengeful gods while an eagle
tore and ate his liver. On the other hand, NuPrometheus
chickened out somewhat by comparison with his role
model. The small chunk of Color QuickDraw code he had
filched and replicated was more or less useless to Apple's
industrial rivals (or, in fact, to anyone else). Instead of
giving fire to mankind, it was more as if NuPrometheus
had photocopied the schematics for part of a Bic lighter.
The act was not a genuine work of industrial espionage. It
was best interpreted as a symbolic, deliberate slap in the
face for the Apple corporate heirarchy.

Apple's internal struggles were well-known in the
industry. Apple's founders, Jobs and Wozniak, had both
taken their leave long since. Their raucous core of senior
employees had been a barnstorming crew of 1960s
Californians, many of them markedly less than happy with
the new button-down multimillion dollar regime at Apple.
Many of the programmers and developers who had
invented the Macintosh model in the early 1980s had also
taken their leave of the company. It was they, not the
current masters of Apple's corporate fate, who had
invented the stolen Color QuickDraw code. The
NuPrometheus stunt was well-calculated to wound
company morale.

Apple called the FBI. The Bureau takes an interest in
high-profile intellectual-property theft cases, industrial
espionage and theft of trade secrets. These were likely
the right people to call, and rumor has it that the entities
responsible were in fact discovered by the FBI, and then
quietly squelched by Apple management. NuPrometheus
was never publicly charged with a crime, or prosecuted, or
jailed. But there were no further illicit releases of