`Cactus, Cad, Cadaver, Caddis, Cadence, Cadet, Caesura. What the fuck is a Caesura?' Phoenix kept ploughing through the Cs. `Dunno. Kill that,' Electron answered, distracted. `Caesura. Well, fuck. I know I'd wanna use that as a password.' Phoenix laughed. `What the hell kind of word is Caduceus?' `A dead one. Kill all those. Who makes up these dictionaries?' Electron said. `Yeah.' `Caisson, Calabash. Kill those. Kill, kill, kill,' Electron said gleefully. `Hang on. How come I don't have Calabash in my list?' Phoenix feigned indignation. Electron laughed. `Hey,' Phoenix said, `we should put in words like "Qwerty" and "ABCDEF" and "ASDFGH".' `Did that already.' Electron had already put together a list of other common passwords, such as the `words' made when a user typed the six letters in the first alphabet row on a keyboard. Phoenix started on the list again. `OK the COs. Commend, Comment, Commerce, Commercial, Commercialism, Commercially. Kill those last three.' `Huh? Why kill Commercial?' `Let's just kill all the words with more than eight characters,' Phoenix said. `No. That's not a good idea.' `How come? The computer's only going to read the first eight characters and encrypt those. So we should kill all the rest.' Sometimes Phoenix just didn't get it. But Electron didn't rub it in. He kept it low-key, so as not to bruise Phoenix's ego. Often Electron sensed Phoenix sought approval from the older hacker, but it was a subtle, perhaps even unconscious search. `Nah,' Electron began, `See, someone might use the whole word, Commerce or Commercial. The first eight letters of these words are not the same. The eighth character in Commerce is "e", but in Commercial it's "i".' There was a short silence. `Yeah,' Electron went on, `but you could kill all the words like Commercially, and Commercialism, that come after Commercial. See?' `Yeah. OK. I see,' Phoenix said. `But don't just kill every word longer than eight characters,' Electron added. `Hmm. OK. Yeah, all right.' Phoenix seemed a bit out of sorts. `Hey,' he brightened a bit, `it's been a whole ten minutes since my machine crashed.' `Yeah?' Electron tried to sound interested. `Yeah. You know,' Phoenix changed the subject to his favourite topic, `what we really need is Deszip. Gotta get that.' Deszip was a computer program which could be used for password cracking. `And Zardoz. We need Zardoz,' Electron added. Zardoz was a restricted electronic publication detailing computer security holes. `Yeah. Gotta try to get into Spaf's machine. Spaf'll have it for sure.' Eugene Spafford, Associate Professor of Computer Science at Purdue University in the US, was one of the best known computer security experts on the Internet in 1990. `Yeah.' And so began their hunt for the holy grail. Deszip and Zardoz glittered side by side as the most coveted prizes in the world of the international Unix hacker.