They seemed to take great joy in sniffing the password to his own
account on Altos. Then, when he had logged off, they logged in and
changed his password so he couldn't get back under the name Electron.
Nothing was more annoying. Phoenix typed, `Hey, Pad. How's it going?'
Pad wrote back, `Feeny! Heya.'
`Do you and Gand still have that encrypted copy of Deszip we gave you
a few months ago?'
`Encrypted copy ... hmm. Thinking.' Pad paused. He and Gandalf hacked
dozens of computer systems regularly. Sometimes it was difficult to
recall just where they had stored things.
`Yeah, I know what you mean. I don't know. It was on a system on
JANET,' Pad said. Britain's Joint Academic Network was the equivalent
of Australia's AARNET, an early Internet based largely on a backbone
of universities and research centres.
`I can't remember which system it was on,' Pad continued.
If the Brits couldn't recall the institution, let alone the machine
where they had hidden Deszip, it was time to give up
all hope. JANET comprised hundreds, maybe thousands, of machines. It
was far too big a place to randomly hunt around for a file which
Gandalf would no doubt have tried to disguise in the first place.
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