My Son’s Gamble
ust past dawn one morning last August, I pulled myself from bed, bleary from ragged sleep. I headed downstairs to make coffee and settle at my computer. There, I booted up Firefox and accessed an online card room, Full Tilt Poker, from which I downloaded a program to play Texas Hold ‘Em and other games. Once the program was open, I tried to log on with the screen name my 18-year-old son, Dan, had shown me on a different site called PokerStars. Full Tilt Poker, unsurprisingly, rejected the name.
Following the plan I outlined as I lay awake in the wee hours, I opened up Dan’s college e-mail account. Weeks before, he read his e-mail via my computer and asked Firefox to save the password. I clicked “Enter.” There before me were all the e-mail messages from university officials, from his tennis coach, from teachers. Most prevalent were e-mail messages from Full Tilt Poker, addressed to a screen name I did not recognize. Grimly satisfied, I read none of these. I simply returned to Full Tilt, entered the screen name from the e-mail and clicked “Forgot my password.” I expected the program to ask me the name of my favorite rock band, at which point my foray into the role of Internet spy would cease. To my surprise, the window on the screen read, “We have sent your new password to the e-mail address on record.” I re-entered Dan’s e-mail account, fetched the new password and entered it into the Full Tilt log-in window.
