CHAPTER FOUR - Targets
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     Wherever hackers gather, talk soon moves from past achievements and adventures to speculation about what new territory might be explored. It says much about the compartmentalisation (RAD: 20 letter words!) of computer specialities in general and the isolation of micro-owners from mainstream activities in particular that a great deal of this discussion is like that of navigators in the days before Columbys: the charts are unreliable, full of blank spaces and confounded with myth.
     In this chapter I am attempting to provide a series of notes on the main types of services potentially available on dial-up, and to give some idea of the sorts of protocols and conventions employed. The idea is to give voyagers an outline atlas of what is interesting and possible, and what is not.
ON-LINE HOSTS
On-line services were the first form of electronic publishing: a series of big storage computers - and on occasion, associated dedicated networks - act as hosts to a group of individual databases by providing not only mass data storage and the approproate 'search language' to access it, but also the means for registering, loggind and billing users. Typically, users access the on-line hosts via a phone number which links into a public data network using packet switching (there's more on thse networks in chapter 7).
     The on-line business began almost by accident; large corporations and institutions involved in complicated technological developments found that their libraries simply couldn't keep track of the publications of relevant new scientific papers, and decided to maintain indices of the papers by name, author, subject-matter, and so on, on computer. One of the first of these was the araments and aircraft company, Lockheed Corporation.
     In time the scope of these indices expanded and development and outsiders - sub-contractors, research agencies, universities, government employees, etc were granted access. Other organisations with similar information-handling requirements asked if space could be found on the computer for their needs. Eventually Lockheed and others recognised the begginnings of a quite seperate business; in Lockheed's case it lead to the foundation of Dialog, which today acts as host and marketing agent for almost 300 seperate databases. Other on-line hosts include BRS (Bibliohraphic Retrieval Serives), Comshare (used for sophisticated financial modelling), Datastar, Blaise (British Library), I P Sharp and Euronet-Diane.
     On-line services, particularly the older ones, are not especially user-friendly by modern standards. They were set-up at a time when both core and storage memory was expensive, and the search langauges tended to be abbreviated and formal. Typically they are used, not by the eventual customer for the information, but by professional intermediaries - librarians and the like - who have undertakens special courses. Originally on-line hosts were accessed by dumd-terminals, usually teletypewriters like the Texas Whisperwriter portable with built-in acoustic modem, rather than than by VDUs. Today the trend is to use 'front-end' intelligent software on an IBM PC which allows the naive user to pose his/her questions informally while offline; the software then redefines the information request into the formal language of the on-line host (the user does not witness this process) and then goes on-line via an auto-dial modem to extract the information as swiftly and efficiently as possible.
     On-line services require the use of a whole series of passwords: the usual NUI and NUA for PSS (see chapter 7), another to reach the host, yet another for the specific information service required. Charges are either for connect-time or per record retrieved, or sometimes a combination.
     The categories of on-line service include bibliographics, which merely indexes the exsistence of an article or book - you must then find a physical copy to read; and source, which contains te article or extract thereof. Full-text services not only contain the complete article or book but will, if required, search the entire text (as opposed to mrere keywords) to locate the desired information. An example of this is LEXIS, a vast legal database which contains nealy all important US and English law judgements, as well as statutes.
NEWS SERVICES.
The vast majority of news services, even today, are not, in the strictest sense, computer-based, although computers play an important role in assembling the information and, depending on the nature of the newspaper or radio or tv station receiving it, its subsequent handling.
The world's big press agencies - United Press, Associated Press, Reuters, Agence France Presse, TASS, Xinhua, PAP,VoA - use telex techniques to broadcast their stories. Permanent leased telegraphy lines exist between agencies and customers, and the technology is pure telex: the 5-bit Bauddot code (rather than ASCII) is adopted, giving capital letters only, and 'mark' and 'space' are sent by changing the voltage on the line rather than audio tones. Speeds are 50 or 75 baud.
     The user cannot interrogate the agency in any way. The stories come in a single stream which is collected on rolls of paper and then used as per the contract between the agency and subscriber.
     To hack a news agency line you will need to get physically near the appropriate leased line, tap in by means of an inductive loop, and convert the changing voltage levels (+/- 80 volts) into something your RS-232 can handle. You will then need software to translate the Baudot code into the ASCII which your computer can handle internally, and display on screen or print to a file. The Baudot code is given in Appendix IV.
     None of this is easy and will probably involve breaches of several laws, including theft of copyright material! However a number of news agencies also transmit services by radio, in which case the signals can be hijacked with a short-wave receiver. Chaper 9 Explains.
     Historic news, as opposed to the current stuff from agencies, is now becoming available on-line. The New York Times, for example, has long help its stories in an electronic 'morgue' or clippings library. Initially this was for internal use, but for the last several years it has been sold to outsiders, chiefly broadcasting stations and large corporations. You can search for information by a combination of keyword and date-range. The New York Times Information Bank is available through several on-line hosts.
      As the world's great newspapers increasingly move to electronic means of production - journalists working at VDUs, sub-editors assembling pages and direct-input into photo-typesetters - the additional cost to each newspaper of creating its own morgue is relatively slight and we can expect to see many more commercial services.
     In the meantime, other publishing orgranisations have sought to make available articles, extracts or complete, from leading magazines also. Two UK examples are Finsbury Data Services' Textline and Datasolve's World Reporter, the later including material from the BBCs monitoring service, Associated Press, the Economist and the Guardian. Textline is an abstract service, but World Reporter gives the full text. In October 1984 it already held 500 million English words. In the US there is NEXIS, which chares resources with LEXIS; NEXIS help 16 million full text articles at the same date. All these services are expensive for casual use and are accessed by dial-up using ordinary asynchonous protocols. 
     Many electronic newsrooms also have dial-in ports for reporters out on the job; depending on the system these ports not only only the reporter to transmit his or her story from a portable computer, but may also (like Basys Newsfury used by Channel Four News) let them see news agency tapes, read headlines and send electronic mail. Such systems have ben the subject of considerable hacker speculation.
FINANCIAL SERVICES
The financial world can afford more computer aids than any other non-governmental sector. The vast potential profits that can be made by trading huge blocks of currency, securities or commodities - and the extraordinary advantages that a slight 'edge' in information can bring - have meant that the City, Wall Street and the equivilants in Hong Kong, Japan and major Eiropean capitals have been in the forefront of getting the most from high-speed comms.
     Ten year ago the sole form of instant financial information was the tiker tape - telegraphy technology delivering the latest share price movements in a highly abbreviated form. As with its news equivalents, these were broadcast services (and still are, for the services still exist) sent along leased telegraph lines. The user could only watch, and 'interrogation' consisted on back-tracking along the tape of paper. Extel (Exchange Telegraph) continues to use this technique, though it is gradually upgrading by using viewdata and intelligent terminals.
     However, just over ten years ago Reuters put together the first packages which gave some intelligence and 'questioning power' to the end user. Each Reuters' Monitor is intelligent, containing (usually) a DEC PDP-8 series mini and some firmware which accepts and selects the stream of data from the host at the far end of the leased line, marshalls interrogation requests and takes care of the local display. Information is formatted in 'pages' rather like viewdata frames, but without the colour. There is little point in eavesdropping into a Reuters line unless you know what the terminal software does. Reuters now face an agressive rival in  Telerate, and the fight is on to deliver not only fast conprehensive price services but international screen-based dealing as well. The growth of Reuters and its rivals is an illustraion of technology creating markets - especially in international currency - where none existed before.
     The first sophisticated Stock Exchange prices 'screens' used modified closed circuit television technology. London had a system called Market Price Display Service - MPDS - which consisted of a number of tv displays of current prices services on different 'channels' which could be selected by the user. But \ondon now uses TOPIC, a leased line variant on viewdata technology, though with its magazine-like arrangement and auto-screen refresh, it has as much in common with teletext as Prestel. TOPIC carries about 2,500 of the total 7,500 shares traded in London, plus selected analyitical material from brokers. Datastream represents a much higher level of sophistication: using in 40,000 pounds plus pa terminals you can compare historic data - price movements, movements against sector indices etc - and chart results.
     The hacker's reward for getting into such systems is that you can see share and other prices on the move. None of these prices is confidential; all could be obtained by ringing a stockbroker. However, this situation is likely to change; as the City makes the change from traditional broker/jobber method of dealing towards specialist market making, there will then be electronic prices services giving privileged information to specialist share dealers.
     All these services are only available via leased line; City professionals would not tolerate the delays and uncertainties of dial-up facilities. However dial-up ports exist for demonstrations, exhibitions, engineering and as back-up - and a lot of hacking efort has gone into tracking them down.
     In the United States, in addition to Reuters, Telerate and local equivilants of offical streams of stock exchange and over-the-counter data, tere is Dow Jones, best known internationally for its market indices similar to those produced by the Financial Times in London. Dow Jones is in fact the owner of the Wall Street Journal and some influencial business magazines. Its Dow Jones News/Retrieval Service is aimed at businesses and private investors. It features current chare prices, deliberately delayed by 15 minutes, historic price data, which can be charted by the user's own computer (typically an Apple or IBM PC) and historic 'morgure' type of company news and analysis. Extensions of the service enable customers to examine accounts of companies in which they are interested. The bulk  of the information is US-based, but can be obtained world-wide via packet-switching netowkrs. All you need are the passwords and special software.
BUSINESS INFORMATION
Business information is usually about the credit-worthiness of companies. company annual reports, trading opportunities and market research. The biggest electronic credit data resources is owned by the international company Dun & Bradstreet: during 1985-86 it is due to spend 25 million pounds of making its data available all over Europe, including the UK. The service, whichnd market research. The biggest electronic credit data resources is owned by the international company Dun & Bradstreet: during 1985-86 it is due to s