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Technology Stocks : COMS & the Ghost of USRX w/ other STUFF -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: drmorgan who wrote (17248)	9/9/1998 11:00:00 PM
From: W.F.Rakecky	Respond to of 22053

Scrapps has it also....

To: drmorgan who wrote (17248)	9/16/1998 3:32:00 PM
From: Moonray	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 22053

Man Seeks New Prime Number With 2,500 US West PCs NewsBytes - September 16, 1998: 2:35 p.m. ET DENVER, COLORADO, U.S.A. (NB) -- By Steve Gold, Newsbytes. A 28-year-old computer contractor has been charged by the FBI with unauthorized access to US West's [NYSE:USW] computer network and the diversion of more than 2,500 PCs to work on his own program. According to documents files in a federal court, Aaron Blosser is alleged to have obtained the passwords to 15,000 workstations on the US West network in his quest to discover a new prime number. Blosser, who worked for a computer contractor firm that was hired by US West, so allowing him access to the US West computer system, is alleged to have run a background computer task on the telecommunication carrier's computer network that caused the entire system to slow down. According to a report in the Denver Post, directory assistance inquiries that should have taken a few seconds to complete, were starting to take up to five minutes. Investigators tracking down the source of the problem in May of this year found it was Blosser's programs to search for a new prime number that were hogging system resources, and so slowing down the computer system markedly with their number-crunching activities. According to the Denver Post, in a telephone interview with Blosser, he said that he had made no money from his unauthorized use of the US West computer system. He is also reported to have failed in his search -- so far -- to find a new prime number. "I've worked on this (math) problem for a long time. When I started working at US West, all that computational power was just too tempting for me," he told the paper. According to US West, Blosser harnessed the power of almost 2,600 workstations on the company's network, racking up 10.63 computer years of processing time in the search for a new prime number. Blosser has admitted to being fascinated by numbers. US West's Web site is at uswest.com . o~~~ O