By Jon Roig (jonathar@gas.uug.arizona.edu)

Sometimes I realize that we truly live in an incredible world. CD- ROM is no longer the realm of the big boys with major corporate resources at their fingertips. In fact, pressing CDs has become so cost effective that even the smaller organizations can afford it as an alternative to underground book publishing. The punk do-it-yourself ethic has finally come to the desktop.

Enter Group 42, an organization out on the fringes of cyberspace. It has a lot of weird information in its archives - sensitive information, stuff your Mom and The Man probably wouldn't want you to see. And on the CD-ROM, thee group has room for all of it.

Its spokesman, a mysterious figure calling himself "Nickle," took the time to chat via e-mail about the creation of "Group 42 Sells Out - The Information Archive."

"The guys at Group 42 are a varied bunch, computer science, electrical engineering, physical science, math, marketing and physics are our backgrounds," he wrote. "We are excited about computers, technology and forward- thinking culture. We hope to help kick start a whole new generation of explorers with this release (and make a buck or two besides)."

Among the 250 megabytes of text and graphics, you'll find instructions on bomb making, lock-picking tutorials and information on pirate radio and TV, viruses, drugs and programming. There are, of course, other places to locate this sort of data, such as the infamous Anarchist Cookbook, but none have ever been so complete. The Book of Mormon and schematics for a Theremin are even nestled in there somewhere.

"The idea for the disc was formed last summer," he wrote. "The guys and I had seen a few H/P/A discs like 'Forbidden Subjects' and the 'Hacker Chronicles' and thought they left a lot to be desired with their DOS based interfaces and zipped files. We had created and obtained a lot of information that was not in the public pool of H/P/A information and thought it would be nice to do a better presentation. We also didn't like the idea of requiring the user to be on a particular computer platform."

For those of you not hip to that crazy cyber-lingo, H/P/A stands for Hacking/Phreaking (phone phraud)/Anarchy - fun stuff. The disk, based on the ISO 9660 standard, runs on any machine that can support a Web browser.

"Since the WWWeb had become a de facto standard in Internet publishing we thought it would be nice to use this technology in a H/P/A disc. We started to catalog and arrange our information and contacted those in the underground about using their material. It slowly came together into the product you have in your CD-ROM drive now."

This information is, for the most part, not new and veteran Internet and BBS geeks will recognize much of it. For the record, I learned all about the inner workings of the phone system from documents like the ones found on the disk, even though I never bothered doing anything with it (I could never figure out who to call). Presented "For Educational Purposes" only, it seems doubtful that the veritable cavalcade of information could serve as inspiration for a terrorist, but rather that dumb kid who doesn't know any better. I asked Nickle if he was worried about the info falling into the wrong hands.

"When you say 'wrong hands' what do you mean? Some terrorist org?

"They already have this information, only better," he wrote. "Some young kid? We only sell to those over 18. Someone like the unib0mber? He'd got to the government and get better 'free' b0mb plans (you just have to know where to ask.) I assume the information you are asking about is the anarchy/b0mb stuph. As for the other stuff on the disc hacking/phreaking, yes it could get you in trouble, but you can also learn a lot of practical stuff by studying it. You might find yourself a talented software or hardware engineer after getting involved in figuring out how computer/cable/phone system work. You don't even have to break the law to play with most of the stuff.

"There is nothing unique about this information, if you dug around long enough you could find all of it. It is the collection itself that might tweak a few people. It is only information, and to some people information can be frightening (along with education and even the actual process of thinking for yourself.) Information can't think, only you can."

"Group 42 Sells Out" can be previewed at http://www.sonic.net/~group42.