But there was still a way to find the hacker’s distance. After the hacker left, I called a friend in Los Angeles and told him to connect to my computer through AT&T and Tymnet. He started Kermit running, and I timed his echoes. Real short, maybe a tenth of a second. Another friend, this time in Houston, Texas. His echoes were around 0.15 seconds. Three other people from Baltimore, New York, and Chicago each had echo delays of less than a second. New York to Berkeley is about two thousand miles. It had a delay of around a second. So a three-second delay means six thousand miles. Give or take a
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