Consider money, that hot commodity which comes in increasingly sublimated form, embodied by nothing more than the digits we scrutinise via internet banking.
Ask how much it matters to you. Are you the kind who coughs up for products irrespective of their uselessness without hesitation, saying: 'It's only money'? Or do you mourn the loss of every cent, secretly seeing every beneficiary as a shark plotting to make you hungry and homeless?
If you fall into the latter category then you are probably a cutthroat file-swapper, using Crookster, Heister and Shyster constantly to acquire virtual loot, with the result that your hard drive holds more music and film files than you could play in a lifetime. Almost certainly you do not feel susceptible to the charge of piracy - after all, a pirate is a man with a parrot, an eye patch and a cutlass. Only abnormally deranged RPG (role-playing game) aficionados will feel they answer to that description.
But there is a line which few free-for-all devotees are happy to cross: the phone line. Somehow the idea of hacking into a voice network feels as nefarious as cheating on your significant other. Hence the ugly nature of the word used to designate the act: 'phreak'. You don't need to be Noam Chomsky to work out that this is a mix of the first two letters of the word meaning the gadget permanently attached to the heads of most Hongkongers coupled with an American teen insult for misfits.
Hooked up to someone else's line and dialling promiscuously, one of these monstrous misfits can theoretically make tens of thousands of dollars worth of calls without paying a penny. If particularly enterprising, the phreak may boost funds by establishing a small business selling long-distance call access via the hijacked switch: a naughty but nice little earner.
In Pirate Trek Systems' Phreaking Tutorial, a phreak known as The Magician protests that he and his kin are much more than mere cyberscum out to rip off their phone company.
'Granted, there are some who get their kicks by making free calls. However, they are not true phone phreaks,' he says, adding, 'Real phone phreaks are 'telecommunications hobbyists' who experiment, play with and learn from the phone system.