`Thinking …' Phoenix said. `Gotta be some place with room—how big is it?'
`It's 900 k compressed—probably 3 meg when we uncompress it. Come on, hurry up! How about a university?'
`Princeton, Yale could do either of those.' Electron suggested. `What about MIT—you hacked an account there recently, Gand?'
`No.'
All four hackers racked their minds for a safe haven. The world was their oyster, as British and Australian hackers held a real-time conversation in Germany about whether to hide their treasure in Austin, Texas; Princeton, New Jersey; Boston, Massachusetts; or New Haven, Connecticut.
`We only need somewhere to stash it for a little while, until we can download it,' Gandalf said. `Got to be some machine where we've got root. And it's got to have anon FTP.'
Anon FTP, or anonymous file transfer protocol, on a host machine would allow Gandalf to shoot the file from his JANET machine across the Internet into the host. Most importantly, Gandalf could do so without an account on the target machine. He could simply login as `anonymous', a method of access which had more limitations than simply logging in with a normal account. He would, however, still be able to upload the file.
`OK. OK, I have an idea,' Phoenix said. `Lemme go check it out.'
Phoenix dropped out of Altos and connected to the University of Texas. The physical location of a site didn't matter. His head was spinning and it was the only place he could think of. But he didn't try to connect to Happy, the machine he often used which Erik had told him about. He headed to one of the other university computers, called Walt.
The network was overloaded. Phoenix was left dangling, waiting to connect for minutes on end. The lines were congested. He logged back into Altos and told Pad and Electron. Gandalf was nowhere to be seen.