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OPPORTUNITIES

cons. Kimi met with Max to present him with divorce papers. She was getting serious with the guy she'd met at Burning Man; it was time, she said, for Max to let her go. Max refused to sign.

Max's relative freedom at the halfway house was tenuous—the facility demanded that he obtain gainful employment or go back to prison, and telecommuting wasn't allowed. He reached out to his old contacts in Silicon Valley and found his employability had been shattered by his high-profile hacking conviction and over a year in prison.

Desperate, he borrowed a laptop from one of the Hungry Programmers and banged out a message to an employment list watched by the computer security experts who had once admired him. "I have been showing up at places that farm out manual labor, 5:30 am, and still haven't found any work," he wrote. "My situation is just ridiculous." He offered his services at fire-sale prices. "I am willing to work for minimum wage for the next few months. Surely there is some open position at a security company in the area....The last half dozen employers I have had paid me at least $100/hr for my time, now I am only asking for $6.75."

A consultant answered the plea, agreeing to let Max work out of his home office in Fremont, a short BART ride from the halfway house. He'd pay ten dollars an hour for Max to help build servers, a throwback to Max's first job for his father as a teen. Tim Spencer loaned Max a bike to pedal to the train station every day. Max was freed from the halfway house after two months, and the Hungry Programmers once again stepped up to provide him with shelter. He moved into an apartment in San Francisco shared by Chris Toshok, Seth Alves—a veteran of the Meridian master-key adventure—and Toshok's ex-girlfriend Charity Majors.

Despite the jailhouse fantasies he and Norminton had hatched, Max was determined to go straight. He resumed his search for work. But the job offers failed to pour in for the ex-con. Even the Honeynet Project, to which he'd donated his expertise just a couple of years earlier, shunned him.

His lot began improving in other ways: He started dating his housemate Charity Majors, a fellow Idaho refugee who designed herself like an