[ Spoiler ]
According to the novels (

), Thomas Roxborough was the owner of Acquisition Technologies, where Lucien Cross and David Gavilan were working, at the Investigative Research department (ie. they were corporate spies). Roxborough asked Gavilan to develop a virus that would destroy the computer system of Gossamer Threads, a competitor of Roxborough business, controlled by no other than Dunkelzahn.
The Gavilan virus went out of control, and got out of the Gossamer Threads system to affect the whole Internet. Later on, Dunkelzahn bought Acquisition Technologies, and discovered that Gavilan wrote the virus. The dragon then suggest him to return to the Air Force and join the US government efforts to fight the virus.
QUOTE (Ancient History @ Mar 1 2009, 06:30 AM)

Roxy, during the course of the novel, intimated that he, Damien Knight, and possibly Dunkelzahn were all responsible for the Crash of '29. Roxy is, of course, an unreliable source and novels aren't counted as canon.
QUOTE (HMHVV Hunter @ Mar 1 2009, 03:33 PM)

They're not? ?o_o?
I don't know what is Peter Taylor's policy about them. Previously, you could describe the novels as "canon unless proven otherwise." That is, if any of the freelancer, with at least the implicit agreement of the line developper, had the opportunity to contradict a novel, the novel would be ignored. It did not even require that it refered to a line said by a character with reasons to lie or whatever.
Or, from another point of view, inspiration drawn from the novels by freelancers and gamemasters had a slightly higher status than pure invention.