He had to tease out the details from his friend, NDA or not.
True hackers take great pride in being completely unpredictable.
Of the signal qualities of digital wizards, this fundamental perversity stands out most prominently. They took glee in thwarting expectation. That unpredictability had attained epic proportions of late. As a conflux of greedy industrial programmers poured into Silicon Valley to scramble for the winnings, the business-wary hacker underground was busy subverting and reinventing the very roots of digital commerce. In particular, they had been collectivizing their efforts in loosely structured, electronically networked federations, neatly segmenting and conquering sticky computing problems.