AN EX--CON LOGS ON.(convicted computer hacker Kevin Mitnick can use computers again)

The last time Kevin Mitnick surfed the Web . . . oops. Until last week, Mitnick, who is usually described as the world's most notorious hacker, and who was considered such a profound threat to American society when he was arrested, in 1995, that he wasn't even granted a bail hearing, had never actually surfed on the Internet. "You have to have some speed to surf,'' he said the other day. "When I went away, there was no such thing. I had rigged a special modem to keep me ahead of the feds during the years I was a fugitive. Most of the time I was connecting at 300 baud"--the average cable modem these days works five thousand times as fast. "Even then you couldn't surf on that.''

Mitnick, who broke into countless computers to steal trade secrets and proprietary software, was convicted of computer and wire fraud. The sentence was harsh, in part because he had vanished while on probation and taunted the F.B.I. for two years, but it was also intended as a deterrent to anyone who might try to emulate him. Last Tues- day, after five yearsin jail and three more on parole, during which hewas prohibited from even connecting to the Internet, the self-described "Osama bin Mitnick of cyberspace" finally got back online. He celebrated his first day of computer freedom on an Internet tele- vision show called "TechTV." Because he had no idea how to navigate from one Web site to another (and wondered, by the way, what this thing called In- ternet Explorer was all about), he was assisted by two other hackers, Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple Computers, and Emmanuel Goldstein, the publisher of the hacker quarterly 2600. Both were outspoken supporters of the "Free Kevin'' campaign, which became a sort of religion among computer geeks around the world.

"Don't be freaked out by adver- tising,'' Goldstein told Mitnick. "It's everywhere. So is pornography." Mit- nick looked dazed by the concept of a pop-up ad.

"I had no idea even where to begin,'' Mitnick said later. "To finally have it all there, right in front of me, was a little bit daunting.'' So he did just what you might expecta cyberian version of Rip Van Winkle to do: he Googled himself. His maiden vanity search turned up more than forty-three thousand references to his name.

Mitnick's first ...