drawing of terry child in front of judgeTerry Childs, the 43-ear-old disgruntled San Francisco network administrator who hijacked the city’s network by withholding the its pass codes, has given them to San Francisco’s mayor, Gavin Newsom, after having refused to reveal them for more than a week. Without the codes, city administrators would have had to reconfigure the network, a time-consuming and costly process.

The codes gave Childs exclusive access to the City’s FiberWAN network, which carries around 60 percent of the government’s network, including the law enforcement, payroll, officials’ e-mails, and jail-booking records; the network could still run, but only Childs could configure it. He also apparently “booby trapped” the system, so that key files would have been destroyed had the system been shut down or lost power. A system shutdown had been scheduled for Saturday, July 19, for routine maintenance.

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