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| MAX PHILLIPS on the growing menace deep in our society... | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Home galaxy, scot free. Flick the ship onto auto, check the course and switch off the monitors. Stagger slowly through the soft blue-lit corridors and tumble into the bunk you've not slept in for days. Listen to the silence, hear yourself breathing. Mouth the words slowly and carefully, "T.w-e-n-t-y-s-i-x b-i-l-l-i-o-n c-r-e-d-i-t-s". Moisten your parched lips, "T-w-e-n-t-y-s-i-x b-i-I-I-i-o-n c-r-e-d-i-t-s". No-one knows who did it. No-one can trace it. In and out, no problem. It's yours to keep. Hell, you've earned it. Close your eyes and sleep... Space is silent. Dark. Motionless. Yet sometimes you wake for no reason at all. Focus your eyes and sit up. There's an N-Forcer in your doorway, light pistol drawn and pointing at your head. The ship is crawling with them, locked by tractor beam to a battered police cruiser. Getting raided is an awful experience. They break the door locks, scatter your possessions and tip your cargo hold upside-down. Same old routine, same old damage. The N-Forcers know no law. You lean against the bridge wall, sipping a coffee to wake you up. The spotters are going through your tapes on the console. They'll probably wipe them as well. Just for a joke. 26 billion. They won't find it. They can't. Then a change from normal. Hushed voices and cross-checking on the communicators. They can't find the POKEs... The Sergeant draws his blaster; 440 lasbolt, it'll shoot a hole through a two-foot titanium wall. He points it in your face, two inches away, and switches it on. As the glowing barrel warms up, he flicks the safety catch to off. You can't see his face through the blast visor. But you can hear him breathing; he breathes slowly, calmly and deliberately. He gets a message via his helmet mike. You're dripping with sweat. There's a las-blade in your left boot they didn't find in the search. But you can't reach it now. He rests the barrel between your eyes. You can almost see him smile. It seems an age, nothing happens. Then he says three words, at once a charge, a judgement and a sentence. Of death. 'You've been hacking.' He pulls the trigger... There are two ways of reaching the Elite. Some do it through hard graft, by hook and by crook. But who knows how many step beyond the threshold, outside Firebird's reality and hack their way to the top, only to get caught? Dead hackers, they say, tell no tales. Some software houses think hacking is a crime of the highest order. By prising a program open, their theory is that, obviously, you're a software pirate and will force them all into bankruptcy. But there's no known connection between piracy and hacking. Any fool can see that the hassle of hacking a program in order to copy it is a waste of time. And most pirates are too flippin' stupid by definition to be able to crack a program in the first place. That's not the menace. And neither is the harmless breaking of their copyright (which, incidentally, you're doing) for the sake of adding a few POKEs. You won't get a summary execution if you're caught hacking just yet. But it's still wise to make sure no-one knows you do it. Wait till nightfall, draw the curtains and wedge a chair against your bedroom door. If your friends find out, you're ruined. You've achieved nothing; no score you ever make will be taken seriously. You'll be branded a cheat, a liar and a coward. There's no glory in hacking. The menace is that the only person you're cheating is yourself. You're saying 'I'm not good enough to play Speccy games, I can't win, I'm a failure'. Hardly the most healthy state of mind to be in. Hacking is cheating like never before. A game is a challenge, a small fictional world for you to show what a human being you are. And the hacker's response? To step outside that 48K universe and manipulate it. To toy with reality. To play God. And once you've bamboozled your way to the top of the high-score chart, where's the satisfaction? Any fool could have done it, just the way you did. And probably will. So why do people get hooked on hacking? Some say they do it because they see their friends doing it, because they want to be part of the in-crowd. But the crowd to be with is the one that plays games honestly and fairly and still manages to beat whatever their Speccy can throw at them. Others just think they'll try it once, for kicks. But hacking is instantly habit-forming. Once you've strolled through one game with infinite lives, you'll never want to enter a screen again where there's the possibility of dying. Hackers are bad losers - you'll never play properly again. Worst of all are those that hack out of boredom and frustration. Tired of never making it past the first thirty minutes of a game. Sick of a sixth screen they can't find a way past. Ill at the thought of a map that still fits on the back of an envelope. The temptation of a few POKEs is overwhelming on games where you just can't get anywhere. In those vital first hours of a new game, you can easily slip over the threshold and before you know it - you're a hacker. It's here that the software houses can help. By making their games easier to get into. By offering better rewards in the early stages. By making loading up a new game and learning to play it into a thrilling experience and not a horrific chore. Elite, hacked to pieces in this very issue, has the best anti-hacking protection available. No, not the damn awful Lenslok but the fact that it's playable and enjoyable right from the word go. It's a complex game that takes weeks to master. But learning to dock, shooting a few things, making your first inter-planetary hop and just watching the scenery are enough to get you started. When you're ready, you can start playing for real. Elite is a complete little universe - there's loads to do and the simple things are easy enough to let anyone get started on the road to stardom. It's only the sick minority, the hackers, that would ever dream of hacking it. For your part, you've got to stick to the straight and narrow. And that means making sure you buy the good games, and persevering with them when you do. That's the tough way, that's how you prove how good you are. And the software houses should work a bit harder on their gameplay. Some games, you get the feeling, have just been programmed in bits and never actually been played all the way through. Some get put out in an unplayable state because no-one left the time to fix any playing problems that came up on test. Some are unplayable because the people that wrote them are the only people who have ever tried them. And they, of course, know how to win in the first place. They're nightmares. They're no fun at all. They might as well be impossible, if indeed, they aren't already. Even so, don't fall for it. Remember... Hacking screws you up.
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