We became telephone buddies, sometimes spending hours on the phone together over several days. After all, we shared similar interests: Neill loved finding security bugs, and I loved using them. He told me that the Finnish National Police had contacted him about my hacking into Nokia. He offered to teach me some of his clever bug-hunting techniques, though not until I acquired a better understanding of the "internals" of VMS—that is, the inner workings of the operating system, the details of what was "under the hood." He said I had spent too much time hacking into stuff instead of educating myself on the internals. Amazingly, he even gave me some exercises to work on, to learn more about this, and then he went over my efforts and critiqued them. The VMS bug hunter training the hacker—how ironic was that?