There are distracting writing failures--technical stuff.
The phrase "[he] connected the battery to an antenna" breaks the flow of the story because it leads the reader to the wrong idea, then the reader has to backtrack...
An IRC channel with 100k users in 1996? Look, freenode has 85k users today, spread across 40k channels... Even worse, the Wikipedia page for securax indicates that it was an online community that had newsletter with 90k subscribers.
I was a regular at that IRC channel back then (for a long time - when it was run from a member's home pc, on EFNet, and the new channel names later on), and was at several of the meets that came from it. The channel had 10-20 regular at most, few enough that I knew all of them by handle and their real names (but I haven't seen any of them for almost 15 years). The whole 'security' angle was a joke, yes it was fun to root some boxes when a sploit hit bugtraq or attrition, but I don't remember anyone got much further than some DoS 'advisories' (at that time). Already then there was more money in scaremongering than there was in actual work...
The phrase "[he] connected the battery to an antenna" breaks the flow of the story because it leads the reader to the wrong idea, then the reader has to backtrack...
An IRC channel with 100k users in 1996? Look, freenode has 85k users today, spread across 40k channels... Even worse, the Wikipedia page for securax indicates that it was an online community that had newsletter with 90k subscribers.