This sounds pretty similar to my experience. Confiscated modems rang a bell! I've also dreaded the day the phone bill came. A friend and me used all kinds of workarounds: Free AOL CDs, Toll Free Dailup numbers where the banking data was not validated in time... got serious trouble (rightly so) for that. Not much later I got a small job and we had 64k ISDN there, later at that time insanely fast DSL 384k. Learned Linux at age 13, Debian 1.3, Redhat 5, I now make a living of that... The addiction is still there, through.