The Holy Grail

a medical doctor with a master's degree in computer science, but he had forgotten to check the temporary directory, one of the few places a hacker could store files on a Unix system if he didn't have root privileges.

At exactly 3.30 a.m. Phoenix logged into DITMELA from the University of Texas. He quickly looked in the temporary directory. The .t file was there, just as Electron had said it would be. The hacker quickly began transferring it back to the University of Texas.

He was feeling good. It looked like the Australians were going to get the entire Zardoz collection after all. Everything was going extremely well - until the transfer suddenly died. Phoenix had forgotten to check that there was enough disk space available on the University of Texas account to download the sizeable Zardoz bundle. Now, as he was logged into a very hot machine, a machine where the admin could well be watching his every move, he discovered there wasn't enough room for the Zardoz file.

Aware that every second spent on-line to DITMELA posed a serious risk, Phoenix logged off the CSIRO machine immedi- ately. Still connected to the Texas computer, he fiddled around with it, deleting other files and making enough room to pull the whole 500 k Zardoz file across.

At 3.37 a.m. Phoenix entered DITMELA again. This time, he vowed, nothing would go wrong. He started up the file transfer and waited. Less than ten minutes later, he logged off the CSIRO computer and nervously checked the University of Texas system. It was there. Zardoz, in all its glory. And it was his! Phoenix was ecstatic.

He wasn't done yet and there was no time for complacency. Swiftly, he began compressing and encrypting Zardoz. He com- pressed it because a smaller file was less obvious on the Texas machine and was faster to send to a back-up machine. He encrypted it so no-one nosing around the file would be able to see what was in it. He wasn't just worried about system admins; the Texas system was riddled with hackers, in part because it