Hacker claims he has ‘Potter’ finale

To click or not to click.

That is the question this week as Harry Potter fans hover over their computer mouses, debating whether to read a message posted by a hacker who said he broke into a publisher’s e-mail system and obtained the ending of one of the most anticipated books in history.

The hacker, who calls himself Gabriel, said he had religious reasons for revealing the names of two key characters who allegedly die in the final pages of J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.” Calling the tale of wizards and sorcery a form of “neo-paganism,” he said he wanted to make reading the seventh and final book “useless and boring” for its young fans when it is released next month.

His message, first posted on a hackers’ mailing list Tuesday, has rocketed around the world via blogs, Web sites and gossiping co-workers and friends.

Bloomsbury, the London-based publisher of the Harry Potter series, deepened the mystery by refusing to say whether the ending described was a hoax, as did Scholastic, the book’s American publisher.

“There is a lot of material on the Internet. … You can’t believe everything you see,” said Kyle Good, a Scholastic spokeswoman. “The only way we’ll know for sure what happens is to read the book July 21st.”

Rowling, the author, had previously revealed that at least two characters will die in the final book. The main page of her Web site ( www.jkrowling.com) included a message dated last month in which the author said she hoped readers who had grown up with the series could go on their “last adventure” with Harry without knowing the ending.

“Spoilers won’t stop people from buying the book, they never have – all it will do is diminish their pleasure in the book,” wrote Rowling.

The hacker’s message originally was posted on insecure.org, a computer security Web site, which since has added a warning not to read further if visitors don’t want to know Potter’s fate.

In addition to naming the two characters who allegedly die in the finale, “Gabriel” identifies who killed them and the circumstances. He details a curse allegedly used and says one character fights “for more than 6 pages” before dying.

The hacker, who writes in broken English, said he obtained the ending by getting someone at the British publisher’s office to click on an e-mail attachment, allowing him to remotely access the publisher’s system.

Fan blogs and Harry Potter sites are filled with debates over whether the hacker was a hoax and laments from readers who couldn’t resist peeking at the spoilers or who heard them by accident.

“I feel like the years of waiting to see what happens in the end have been wasted,” one fan wrote on a blog called Magic of Eden after her husband called and revealed the alleged ending.

Others vowed to cocoon themselves.

“I’m staying off the Internet until the book comes out,” said Marley Ghizzone, 13, of Middlesex Borrough, N.J.

Not everyone is worried. Emerson Spartz of Mugglenet.com suspects the Web posting that shook Harry Potter fandom is nothing more than one in a long line of fakes. Spartz, whose popular site is devoted to all things Potter, has become something of a wizarding-world sleuth, dissecting the scores of purported spoilers that appear each time a new Rowling book comes out.

“We get lots and lots of claims, and I don’t buy this one at all,” said Spartz, 20, a junior at the University of Notre Dame.