The November 8 issue of Maclean's magazine (Canada's counterpart to TIME and NewsWEEK) features a four-article cover story spread on Hotline, titled ominously: "Beware the Internet Underground."

I suspect that a fair proportion of Internet users are unaware of Hotline, which is not part of the World Wide Web, but which operates as a sort of parallel universe in Cyberspace -- a kind of online open city or Barbary Coast teeming with pirates and pornographers. Maclean's writers Danylo Hawaleshka And Robert Scott call Hotline "the underbelly of the digital revolution."

I'm not a Hotline denizen, but several close friends and relatives are, and I've been there enough to get a feel for it. I think Maclean's has chosen to somewhat unfairly emphasize and sensationalize the seamier aspects of Hotline, which are certainly there, but are not the whole story. I personally prefer email or ICQ for communication, but certain people of my acquaintance LOVE Hotline, and I don't think it's mainly for the "free" (ie: pirated) software or (Heaven forbid) for the porn.

Hotline is a sort of sub-culture, essentially lawless and anarchistic but also mutually supportive of its members. A lot of cyber-friendships are made and conducted on Hotline servers. "Hotline has changed my life more than anything else," said one Hotline aficionados I interviewed while preparing this article.

Hotline was invented in 1996 by a then 17 year old Australian named Adam Hinkley. In July, 1997, Hinkley teamed up with Jason Roks, the now 30-year-old vice-president of Hotline Communications Ltd., headquartered in Toronto, Canada, the company Hinkley and he started with Canadians Terrence Gregory, David Bordin, Bachir Rabbat and Austin Page.

Hinkley bailed mysteriously in March, 1998, taking with him the Hotline development software. His erstwhile partners successfully sued him to recover the company's property, and Hinkley is no longer involved with Hotline Communications Ltd.

Hotline Connect, the software application used to access Hotline (sort of a combination of a news, chat, and file-transfer client rolled into one, as well as being small and fast) was originally commercial software that sold for a fee, but in a pirate infested environment like Hotline, no protection code could stand up for long, so beginning last April Hotline Communications gave up trying and posted the Hotline client software free on its Website. The company's revenues now come from banner advertising, which is displayed in the latest versions of Hotline Connect -- much to the contempt and disgust of longtime, serious Hotline users, many of whom stubbornly continue to use older, ad-free versions, or a hacked version called "afterbirth.". Maclean's' Danylo Hawaleshka reports that Hotline Communications has yet to turn a profit, but revenues have increased at a rate of 20 to 30 per cent a month since Hotline shifted from software sales to advertising.

Hotline Communications is apparently trying to move the service "upmarket" as a vehicle to promote "academic collaboration, long-distance learning and corporate telecommuting," partly by establishing a company- operated network of 25 "tracker" communities whose members must undertake not to post pirated material or porn. However, the high-traffic areas on Hotline continue to be places where one can find the illicit stuff.

Indeed, you can't really talk about Hotline without talking about piracy -- it is the Spanish Main of the Internet. Once a user downloads Hotline Connect from the Hotline Website, they can browse through various "trackers" -- lists of hundreds Hotline servers mostly operated by individual users displaying their "warez," "gamez," pirated MP3s, and porn in the vast majority of cases.

There are few titles of commercial software, especially for the Macintosh, that can't be found on Hotline. Often new upgrades of popular software (including the Mac OS) are available on Hotline servers before they hit the legitimate market. Where does it come from? Employees of software firms and software beta testers are two routine sources.

Hotline Communications stresses that it does not condone illegal use of its product but insists that it has no power to prevent users from doing what they will on their Hotline servers. According to Maclean's, Hotline estimates that there are 2.5 million Hotline users worldwide, with 100,000 new downloads of Hotline Connect each month. Hotline is pretty much a young man's world -- 84 per cent Hotliners are male, and 22 per cent of users are under 18.

Perhaps it is appropriate that Hotline is based in Canada, since Maclean's reports that the Great White North is a hotbed of software piracy with an estimated whopping 40 per cent of business software in use in the country being pirated, compared with a more modest 25 per cent in the United States. While I doubt that there are very many private users' hard drives on either side of the world's longest undefended border that don't have at least a few pirated software titles loaded up, it seems that Canadians are particularly unconcerned about it.

Several software industry spokespersons quoted in the Maclean's piece imply -- perhaps hopefully -- that software piracy is a sport primarily engaged in by kids, to which I say a big fat "Ha!" My son operates a small Mac repair and consulting business, and I can't recall one computer he's worked on, including those belonging to clergymen, lawyers, and schoolteachers, that didn't have pirated software aboard.

Let he who is without sin cast the first stone. Come on; 'Fess up (at least to yourself). Have you paid the shareware fees on every one of those little utilities you downloaded from the Web?

How much Hotline is hurting software developers is highly debatable. I doubt that very many corporate users get their pirated office applications from Hotline servers. Most of the Hotline warez traders that I know don't ever use 5 percent of the productivity applications they download (games and MP3s are a different story of course). They are primarily collectors, burning CDs full of software titles that they will never install on their computers (although they might trade them on Hotline -- server operators tend to frown on users who only "take" and don't "give.")

The Maclean's article relates a humorous anecdote about a Hotline addict in New Zealand who goes by the pseudonym "Hitman," who collected just about every piece of Macintosh software imaginable, and then started squirrelling away Windows titles "in case I buy a PC." I think it's fair to say that people like "Hitman" (I know quite a few others like him) are no real threat of cash drain to the software industry in practical terms. While they may nominally have tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of pirated software in their collections, these do NOT represent lost software sales to the developers.

There is a somewhat rationalistic philosophy among those who fly the Jolly Roger in cyberspace, or in other venues of software piracy, that "all software ought to be free," which is easy to say when you aren't the one writing the code or paying big bucks for someone else to write it. And while it may soothe the pricks of one's conscience to mutter "How rich does Bill Gates need to be?" the fact is that 60 per cent of the Software & Information Industry Association's 1,400 members have yearly revenues under $3 million. Nevertheless, the informal panel of Hotline users I interviewed (see below) insist that piracy actually helps, rather than hurts the software and music industries.

Nor is everyone on Hotline a porn freak. I am told that a posse of Mac-user anti-porn vigilantes roams Hotline from time to time looking for Windows- based porn servers to hack into (very easy to do with Windows, reportedly) and trash the contents.

Given the generally negative tone of the Maclean's articles, I thought it might be interesting to get some perspectives from real Hotline users, so I downloaded the latest version 1.7.2 of Hotline Connect, and asked a Hotline person I know who goes by the handle MMMBop to introduce me to some of his friends.

I was invited to visit MMMBop's favorite Hotline server on condition of keeping the server's name anonymous. The server admin., bigdog, opened a private chat in which we were joined by other server regulars (the metaphor of a British pub or "Cheers"-type bar comes to mind) including Easy Bake Darwin, Mancow, Poetic Justice, eddie, and me under the Hotline nickname moonlight.

Our informal panel thus convened, I threw out some questions about Hotline, and here is what transpired -- well, most of it anyway. I've edited it a bit for readability and relevance. (Note: rated PG for occasional indelicate language)

We discussed software and music piracy, the relative absence of females on Hotline, pornography, and most important -- what Hotline means to each of them personally.

Charles W. Moore

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February 09, 2010