And with that, Johnny was sure he'd officially stuck his neck out, and all but asked for someone to hack away at it.
Little did he suspect that the months of uncertainty and doubt would soon lead him to a dusty and desperate Ugandan village and a spiritual renewal unlike anything he'd ever experienced.
On the outside
Hackers are a mixed lot.
There are good guys (a k a "white hats") who use their tech talents to expose security flaws so that they can be fixed. There are bad guys ("black hats") who expose security flaws so they can be exploited. And there are the other guys, who just like showing off.
But there's one thing that's true of most of them: They're all pretty much outsiders. Outside establishment, outside mainstream, outside average. Oh, and their egos are overactive.
"The overwhelming tendency is to have a very idealistic and libertarian outlook and to be anti-government," said Avi Rubin, the technical director of the Johns Hopkins Information Security Institute. He's never met Johnny, though he's heard of him and bets Long fits the mold.
"Sounds right," Johnny later agrees, "except for the idealistic part."
He can talk for days about himself and isn't at all shy about recounting his fame. He likes to dye his hair to stand out at conferences, and he wears a thumb ring because he thinks it's cool (something he picked up from a former colleague).
For the record, he's also funny, self-effacing and a hands-on dad to his three kids. He takes in stray cats, houses a Korean exchange student, mentors dozens and wants to be a ninja (he has a brown belt in Bujinkan Budo Taijutsu).
His mother, Sharon Long, fills out the profile of the hacker as a youth. "He was a terrible student; he was bored in school," she recalls. "But he would test through the ceiling."
When Johnny was about 10, he got his first computer, a Texas Instruments 99/4A that Bill Cosby was hawking on television.
Initially, it was tough to see the hacker in the boy, whose first interactions with the machine included cutting out construction paper shapes and taping them to its television-screen monitor in an unsuccessful attempt to create a video game.
But soon, something in him switched on. He began checking out library books and - being a kid - taught himself the code to repeat the words "You suck" indefinitely on a monitor. When he graduated to more complex programming than his computer could handle, he tested his creations on high-powered Commodore 64s on display at Kmart and RadioShack.
