Remember, remember, the 5th of November..
So, I wrote this up a week or so ago, while drunk, and posted it here. Once it was pointed out how very close one paragraph was to the comic that I'd been reading prior to writing it - Doktor sleepless, which is awesome by the way - I took it down, with the intent of removing the close bits and reworking it a bit. Now I've done that, and removed the bits that weren't really mine, I'm left with some actual, real ideas, which came straight from me. Awesome.
And I thought, 'what better day to post it, than guy Fawkes night?'
I remember reading a joke once, somewhere on the Internet, a good ten years ago, when we all had dial-up modems. The scenario is this; some middle-aged guy is getting his computer fixed, and is impressed by the skill of the technician. He asks the technician how he amassed all his computer skillz; where he leared to think like a machine, how he learned to feel the pulse of a digital carrier using elecromagnets and intuition. And the geek kid says, 'you remember dating, like in high school?'. The guy says, yeah, I remember that. The tech kid grins, says 'Well, I don't', spins around on the office chair, and gets back on with massaging life back to the decrepit system.
I think this epitomises the divide that seems to have sprung up in the last couple of decades. Some of you kids, you were playing basketball, you were fucking sluts, you were doing whatever the fuck it is that you frenzied sexual
pirhana amuse yourself with. Some of us, some of us were learning. Some of us discovered 'computers'. Some of us felt the thrill of information - some of us felt at one with the datastream. Some of us screamed 8-bit noises, shedding our social lives like wasted skin, spending entire days poised in front of a glowing green-on-black CRT monitor, watching the cursor, wondering if we could increase the monitors cathode voltage via software, emitting x-rays from the screen.
Some of us, when we were in highschool, were aiming still higher. Some of us sat around in our Information Technology classes, bored out of our skulls, listening to our teacher try to remember the diferrence between RISC and CISC, and thought of something better. We thought of something more.
We were thinking in every minute of every day. When we were sat at the park, watching the trees, we were working out how to render them on an 8bit framebuffer. When we were in woodshop class, throwing all of our physical energy in to moving a blunt saw back and forth on a tired block of wood, we were mentally designing computer hardware that could do it for us. We dreamed and we schemed; we plotted and we devised. Some of us got to go around the 'cool kids' houses, and some of us got to watch while the 'cool kid' played the latest 8-bit platformer. Some of us, however, weren't paying attention to the screen. We were looking at the way the game was devised; how the bushes looked similar to the clouds, but in a different colour, at how all of the coins rotated in synchrony, at how well the hardware handled scrolling. We percieved on another level; we saw something powerful, something unimaginable, something taken for granted by your "nintendo generation".
Although no-one cared to ask, or even to see, we still saw through it all. While you drooling TV-dinner retards were rescuing the goddamn princess for the fourteenth time that day, we were realising that there were machines on the other side of the earth that we could break in to. While you were laughing at the film 'War Games', we were realising that, all this science fiction - altering our school results, taking control of traffic lights, arming nuclear explosives, you name it - it was all in our grasp. You ignorant fucking cattle didn't realise it, because you were so fucking sidetracked with what was coming next - 'the next generation', with your personal jetpacks and your 'interactive films'. Your tactile pornography.
Most of us broke a few machines, owned a couple .edus, and got bored. The world was at our fingertips - we just couldn't be arsed. We had no need for it. Some of us, of course, went further. Smashing the stack, owning the heap. Kept breaking. Set our sights on a .gov that we wanted. Some nice .mil. Hell, some porn site we knew our sister was posing for (after all, whose phone would you try tapping first but your own houses? We knew everything that went on, even down to which guy our dad fucked every Tuesday). After a few years, we got it. Haxed the phone system, owned a country. Mastrubated feverishly to images of our sisters' tits. You wouldn't imagine the amount of people that think their phone-connected system is secure because it is 'ex-directory'. Let me tell you - there are suprisingly few phone numbers that can be dialled. Six digits, but only three or four of those are actual lines - the first few address an exchange. Phone numbers are allocated in blocks, by the telco operators. Take these blocks, subtract the contents of the phone directoy, and what've you got? few tens of thousands of numbers. Take a walk to a local manhole, splice in, and you've got a few hundred lines. Some automated kit later - yes, some of us paid atttention in our electronics classes - and you've got a machine to try every one of them. Any ex-directory line that picks up? record it. Any ex-directory line that picks up and is on an exchange within 10m of a goverment building? Funky. Any ex-directory line that answers with a modem signal? Bingo.
The traffic control system is connected to the phone system, you know. Just for 'ease of maintainence' or some shit. Some outdated cost-saving mechanism from a time when systems didn't need passwords, and flowers and free love reigned. Do you know when the traffic light systems were installed? A long, long time ago. A time before Jihad, a time before kid hackers - and a time before strong cryptography. A time when systems needed 'a secret code' and that was it. didn't matter if the 'secret code' is six ones, because this was before 'hacking' as we know it today was practical. Nowadays, hacking a 20-year-old system is childs play for any the autistic hackers out there. Even the goddan emotionally functional ones could do it, if their girlfriends refused to put out until the system was hacked. Someday, some angry Jihad-fuelled rebel is going to do it, too. Some day, you'll look back and remember the day that the country 'went dark'. When the phone system became dysfunctional. When the power grid suddenly turned off. Of course, this is assuming a 'lone hacker' scenario. the kid breaks in to a telco switch, routes every line to his favourate transvestite dominatrix payline. Turns the power off, laughs his tits off the chaos. Then the dust will fall, the country will recover. SWAT teams will track him down, shoot that motherfucker, because they don't like kids having the country by the balls. It's a scary tale, but things will be much worse if it's a group of properly motivated 'terrorists'. Route every line to 999 (or 911 for the non-brits) and you've got a flooded emergency service. Cause power substations to be overloaded, and they'll arc power, the safety systems will cut in and fuses will be blown. Physcial fuses, which need removing and replacing. A ten-minute job, but have you ever imagined the logistics of getting an engineer to visit every power station in England, when you've got no telecom? No, you fucking haven't. You've never fucking thought what's on the other end of your power socket, have you? All taken care of, you just want to know who to address the cheque to. Believe me, it's some pretty scary shit. Time it with a few well-placed explosives - blow up some landmarks that are visible from afar, and the public will be scared. Very scared - terrified in fact. Who'll have the fucking power then? It sure as hell won't be all you 'the govt will take care of us' l4m0rZ. It won't be the hacker kids that can't do shit without a telecom infrastructure. It won't be you 'lone people' with shotguns. It will be the people with, if you know any of your history - think of the fucking printing press, you ignorant half-arsed futurists - the best propoganda. It'll be the people who prepared for this shit - the people that pulled it off.
You know where the best hackers are, these days? Russia. Remember Russia? big politcal powerhouse. Perhaps it realised that the cold war couldn't actually be won with nukes. Realised that all it needs is some well-placed 1's an 0's, and the world is unlocked. Instant access to decentralised systems. Information is power, and these people control the floodgates.
Have you ever examined the common hacker kid? He's mid-20s. No job. He 'chain hacks'. He's got a friend or three. They tag each other in. One goes to sleep, the other hacks. 24/7 system onslaught. And these kids are clever. They _know_ security. Sure, so do the Good Guys trying to keep the nation secure, but the Good guys have a million other things to do - meetings to attend, kids to feed, a wife to satisfy. The hackers don't. They see their goal. They know their prey. Eventually, they'll break the system. They'll wield the power. And at that point, the 'bad guys' will strike. They'll take the hacker kids, phsically. Break in to their houses. Tie them up, assrape one while the other watches, then ask the 'spared' one for the 'access codes' to the nation. You'll be suprised what one kid will do when you place a 10 inch steel cock gently at his ringpeice. Especiially the virgins. The bad guys will extract what the need, shoot the hacker kid, own a nation. What'll you do then, you stupid assholes? Pray to your fucking God?!
And how can we stop this? Heh. Same way you stop any catastrophe. Skilled people. And how do you attract them? How do you train them? Money. And given our current recession - we don't have any.
Welcome to the new world order; and trust me. The best is yet to come.
Feedback would be awesome, the more negative, the better. I think it doesn't flow as well as it should (which is probably because, when I first wrote it, I was quite rambly and drunk). The actual ideas behind it are all true, though I must confess that I haven't "played that game" for years now, and things may've changed.
And I thought, 'what better day to post it, than guy Fawkes night?'
I remember reading a joke once, somewhere on the Internet, a good ten years ago, when we all had dial-up modems. The scenario is this; some middle-aged guy is getting his computer fixed, and is impressed by the skill of the technician. He asks the technician how he amassed all his computer skillz; where he leared to think like a machine, how he learned to feel the pulse of a digital carrier using elecromagnets and intuition. And the geek kid says, 'you remember dating, like in high school?'. The guy says, yeah, I remember that. The tech kid grins, says 'Well, I don't', spins around on the office chair, and gets back on with massaging life back to the decrepit system.
I think this epitomises the divide that seems to have sprung up in the last couple of decades. Some of you kids, you were playing basketball, you were fucking sluts, you were doing whatever the fuck it is that you frenzied sexual
pirhana amuse yourself with. Some of us, some of us were learning. Some of us discovered 'computers'. Some of us felt the thrill of information - some of us felt at one with the datastream. Some of us screamed 8-bit noises, shedding our social lives like wasted skin, spending entire days poised in front of a glowing green-on-black CRT monitor, watching the cursor, wondering if we could increase the monitors cathode voltage via software, emitting x-rays from the screen.
Some of us, when we were in highschool, were aiming still higher. Some of us sat around in our Information Technology classes, bored out of our skulls, listening to our teacher try to remember the diferrence between RISC and CISC, and thought of something better. We thought of something more.
We were thinking in every minute of every day. When we were sat at the park, watching the trees, we were working out how to render them on an 8bit framebuffer. When we were in woodshop class, throwing all of our physical energy in to moving a blunt saw back and forth on a tired block of wood, we were mentally designing computer hardware that could do it for us. We dreamed and we schemed; we plotted and we devised. Some of us got to go around the 'cool kids' houses, and some of us got to watch while the 'cool kid' played the latest 8-bit platformer. Some of us, however, weren't paying attention to the screen. We were looking at the way the game was devised; how the bushes looked similar to the clouds, but in a different colour, at how all of the coins rotated in synchrony, at how well the hardware handled scrolling. We percieved on another level; we saw something powerful, something unimaginable, something taken for granted by your "nintendo generation".
Although no-one cared to ask, or even to see, we still saw through it all. While you drooling TV-dinner retards were rescuing the goddamn princess for the fourteenth time that day, we were realising that there were machines on the other side of the earth that we could break in to. While you were laughing at the film 'War Games', we were realising that, all this science fiction - altering our school results, taking control of traffic lights, arming nuclear explosives, you name it - it was all in our grasp. You ignorant fucking cattle didn't realise it, because you were so fucking sidetracked with what was coming next - 'the next generation', with your personal jetpacks and your 'interactive films'. Your tactile pornography.
Most of us broke a few machines, owned a couple .edus, and got bored. The world was at our fingertips - we just couldn't be arsed. We had no need for it. Some of us, of course, went further. Smashing the stack, owning the heap. Kept breaking. Set our sights on a .gov that we wanted. Some nice .mil. Hell, some porn site we knew our sister was posing for (after all, whose phone would you try tapping first but your own houses? We knew everything that went on, even down to which guy our dad fucked every Tuesday). After a few years, we got it. Haxed the phone system, owned a country. Mastrubated feverishly to images of our sisters' tits. You wouldn't imagine the amount of people that think their phone-connected system is secure because it is 'ex-directory'. Let me tell you - there are suprisingly few phone numbers that can be dialled. Six digits, but only three or four of those are actual lines - the first few address an exchange. Phone numbers are allocated in blocks, by the telco operators. Take these blocks, subtract the contents of the phone directoy, and what've you got? few tens of thousands of numbers. Take a walk to a local manhole, splice in, and you've got a few hundred lines. Some automated kit later - yes, some of us paid atttention in our electronics classes - and you've got a machine to try every one of them. Any ex-directory line that picks up? record it. Any ex-directory line that picks up and is on an exchange within 10m of a goverment building? Funky. Any ex-directory line that answers with a modem signal? Bingo.
The traffic control system is connected to the phone system, you know. Just for 'ease of maintainence' or some shit. Some outdated cost-saving mechanism from a time when systems didn't need passwords, and flowers and free love reigned. Do you know when the traffic light systems were installed? A long, long time ago. A time before Jihad, a time before kid hackers - and a time before strong cryptography. A time when systems needed 'a secret code' and that was it. didn't matter if the 'secret code' is six ones, because this was before 'hacking' as we know it today was practical. Nowadays, hacking a 20-year-old system is childs play for any the autistic hackers out there. Even the goddan emotionally functional ones could do it, if their girlfriends refused to put out until the system was hacked. Someday, some angry Jihad-fuelled rebel is going to do it, too. Some day, you'll look back and remember the day that the country 'went dark'. When the phone system became dysfunctional. When the power grid suddenly turned off. Of course, this is assuming a 'lone hacker' scenario. the kid breaks in to a telco switch, routes every line to his favourate transvestite dominatrix payline. Turns the power off, laughs his tits off the chaos. Then the dust will fall, the country will recover. SWAT teams will track him down, shoot that motherfucker, because they don't like kids having the country by the balls. It's a scary tale, but things will be much worse if it's a group of properly motivated 'terrorists'. Route every line to 999 (or 911 for the non-brits) and you've got a flooded emergency service. Cause power substations to be overloaded, and they'll arc power, the safety systems will cut in and fuses will be blown. Physcial fuses, which need removing and replacing. A ten-minute job, but have you ever imagined the logistics of getting an engineer to visit every power station in England, when you've got no telecom? No, you fucking haven't. You've never fucking thought what's on the other end of your power socket, have you? All taken care of, you just want to know who to address the cheque to. Believe me, it's some pretty scary shit. Time it with a few well-placed explosives - blow up some landmarks that are visible from afar, and the public will be scared. Very scared - terrified in fact. Who'll have the fucking power then? It sure as hell won't be all you 'the govt will take care of us' l4m0rZ. It won't be the hacker kids that can't do shit without a telecom infrastructure. It won't be you 'lone people' with shotguns. It will be the people with, if you know any of your history - think of the fucking printing press, you ignorant half-arsed futurists - the best propoganda. It'll be the people who prepared for this shit - the people that pulled it off.
You know where the best hackers are, these days? Russia. Remember Russia? big politcal powerhouse. Perhaps it realised that the cold war couldn't actually be won with nukes. Realised that all it needs is some well-placed 1's an 0's, and the world is unlocked. Instant access to decentralised systems. Information is power, and these people control the floodgates.
Have you ever examined the common hacker kid? He's mid-20s. No job. He 'chain hacks'. He's got a friend or three. They tag each other in. One goes to sleep, the other hacks. 24/7 system onslaught. And these kids are clever. They _know_ security. Sure, so do the Good Guys trying to keep the nation secure, but the Good guys have a million other things to do - meetings to attend, kids to feed, a wife to satisfy. The hackers don't. They see their goal. They know their prey. Eventually, they'll break the system. They'll wield the power. And at that point, the 'bad guys' will strike. They'll take the hacker kids, phsically. Break in to their houses. Tie them up, assrape one while the other watches, then ask the 'spared' one for the 'access codes' to the nation. You'll be suprised what one kid will do when you place a 10 inch steel cock gently at his ringpeice. Especiially the virgins. The bad guys will extract what the need, shoot the hacker kid, own a nation. What'll you do then, you stupid assholes? Pray to your fucking God?!
And how can we stop this? Heh. Same way you stop any catastrophe. Skilled people. And how do you attract them? How do you train them? Money. And given our current recession - we don't have any.
Welcome to the new world order; and trust me. The best is yet to come.
Feedback would be awesome, the more negative, the better. I think it doesn't flow as well as it should (which is probably because, when I first wrote it, I was quite rambly and drunk). The actual ideas behind it are all true, though I must confess that I haven't "played that game" for years now, and things may've changed.