The Flames.

'Cookie Monster': A good hack is a technological tour de force, to its perpetrators wittier than Woody Allen and more powerful than a Mack truck. "The prize in this sort of game is evidence of cleverness," says John Kender, assistant professor of computer science at Columbia University. "What [hackers] are after is showing they have the technological mastery to do some very surprising and powerful things." One famous hack at MIT was the classic "Cookie Monster" program, which hackers surreptitiously planted in the computer. When someone working on the computer least expected it, the screen would suddenly flash the word "cookie." If the startled programmer didn't respond, the cookie monster would go berserk, writing "cookie" over and over, obliterating whatever was on the screen and eventually demanding "gimme cookie." The only way to stop the monster was to feed it by typing in the word "cookie." A "good hack" at Columbia followed one student's discovery that another student had only a two-digit password; he had overheard the clicks on the keyboard. Finding the password was a simple matter of trial and error, and the discoverer proceeded to send obscene messages to female hackers in his victim's name.