"Many times," Waldo said proudly. "For my clients who were being screwed, sometimes I am asked to help. It's all part of the job," he said of his beloved avocation. "How many systems have you cracked?" Asked Scott, visibly im- pressed. "I am," Waldo said modestly, "the best. I have cracked 1187 systems in 3 years. 1040 was my personal goal for a while, then 1099, but it's kind of open ended now." "That's almost one a day?" "You could look at it like that, but sometimes you can get into 10 or twenty in one day. You gotta remember," Waldo said with pride, "a lot of homework goes into this. You just don't decide one day to crack a system. You have to plan it." "So how do you do it?" "O.K., it's really pretty simple. D'you speak software?" "Listen, you make it real simple, and I won't interrupt. OK?" "Interrupt. Hah! That's a good one. Here, let me show you on the computer," Waldo said as he leaned over to peck at the keyboard. "The first step to getting into computers is to find where they are located, electronically speaking, O.K.?" Scott agreed that you needed the address of the bank before you could rob it. "So what we do is search for computers by running a program, like an exchange autodialer. Here, look here," Waldo said pointing at the computer screen. "We select the area code here, let's say 203, that's Connecticut. Then we pick the prefix, the first three numbers, that's the local exchange. So let's choose 968," he entered the numbers carefully. "That's Stamford. By the way, I wrote this software myself." Waldo spoke of his software as a proud father would of his first born son. Scott patted him on the back, urging him to continue. "So we ask the computer to call every number in the 203-968 area sequentially. When the number is answered, my computer records whether a voice, a live person answered, or a computer answered or if it was a fax machine." Scott never had imagined that hacking was so systematic. "Then, the computer records its findings and we have a complete list of every computer in that area," Waldo concluded. "That's 10,000 phone calls," Scott realized. "It must cost a fortune and take forever?" "Nah, not a dime. The phone company has a hole. It takes my program less than a second to record the response and we're off to the next call. It's all free, courtesy of TPC," Waldo bragged. "TPC?" Questioned Scott. "The Phone Company," Waldo chuckled. "I don't see how you can do the entire country that way, 10,000 calls at a shot. In New York there must be ten million phones."