Mad Worlds Collide

All rights reserved © 2002 Tony Teora

Mad Worlds Collide

By Tony Teora

WELCOME TO THE NEWS

December 11, 2001

By Dan Verton

Feds boost online surveillance activity

(IDG)

FBI officials are reportedly developing a combination computer worm/Trojan horse called "Magic Lantern" that is designed to capture keystrokes on a target computer and encryption keys used to conceal data.

"The availability of new surveillance technologies and the government's eagerness to employ them certainly do pose a challenge to traditional civil liberties," said Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists in Washington. "There is some danger that the surveillance impulse will take on a life of its own, producing an unwholesome mutation of our political system."

December 11, 2001

By David Stout

WASHINGTON

FEDS conduct software piracy raids

(
NY-TIMES)

Agents seized computers and hard drives in at least 27 cities in 21 states in raids on businesses, university computer centers, Internet service providers and many residences. Foreign law enforcement people staged about 20 similar raids in Australia, Britain, Finland and Norway.

The target of the raids was the "Warez" group, a loosely affiliated network of software-piracy gangs that duplicate and reproduce copyrighted software over the Internet. Of special interest today was a Warez unit known as "DrinkOrDie," probably the oldest and best known in the Warez network, officials said, adding that DrinkOrDie members take special pride in having cracked and pirated the Windows 95 operating system three days before its release to the public.

The Customs Service said today that members of Warez include corporate executives, computer-network administrators and students at major universities, government workers and employees of technology and computer firms. The agency said insiders aid the piracy ring in stealing the software and that the ring relies on elaborate computer-security devices to minimize the risk of detection.

A few years pass…

November 11, 2021

By John Birkman

NY-TIMES

Bush Dynasty continues as Newton Bush wins another contested election

(CMM-News)

Republican Newton W. Bush, son of retired President George W. Bush (2001-2009), yesterday won the presidential election over incumbent Democrat Tom Cruise. President Cruise, the first actor since Ronald Reagan to occupy the White House, conceded the presidency once Texas brought in the swing electoral votes. Initially the state’s electors went to Cruise but two polling booths missed a stack of ballots, bringing back memories of his father’s contested election in Florida.

Texas is the only state that has not moved to the new computer- based voting.

Although California’s 65 electoral votes eventually went to Cruise, Bush already had the magic number of 270. Cruise conceded, saying, "We achieved a lot for the working man in the last four years and although we concede to Mr. Bush, the mission will continue. For now, I pass the torch to Mr. Bush. Godspeed."

President Cruise, criticized by the Bush campaign for starring in two movies while in office, had trouble convincing the electorate of his seriousness. Bush focused on the issue of toughness, casting himself in the image of his father, George W. Bush.  A non-profit organization called Truth in Politics ran advertisements showing how Bush’s father won World War III.  President Cruise’s campaign countered saying that Bush’s father had
started
World War III.

Recent computer terrorist activities swayed the voting public to Bush’s favor.

Date:             January 14, 2021

Place:             Earth

Location:        MicroIntel, Seattle, Washington State

"Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning."
--Rich Cook

"I never think of the future - it comes soon enough." 
--Albert Einstein

As a programmer, they didn’t make ’em much better than Robert Davichi. As a developer of super-intelligent computers Robert was the shit---number one in the world. When it came to everyday life that was a different story. And when it came to his marriage, well that was a story best not discussed. To say that Robert’s marriage to Susan wasn’t going well was like saying the Titanic had a fender bender with an iceberg.  

The funny thing was, Robert never really noticed.

Robert focused his whole life on working to make it to the top.

Robert’s favorite phrase was
"
it’s a crock of shit
".
When he finally made it to the head of R&D, and
Time
asked how it felt to be the highest ranked engineer in America, working with Gill Applebee, the richest guy in the world, Robert’s answer was the same: "This job’s a crock of shit
".

Many said Robert had cooked his marbles making it to the top.

The world economy didn’t help.  Most countries could not pay they their national debt, let alone software licensing fees to MicroIntel. Everyone pirated MicroIntel software. MicroIntel could not stop the hackers on its own, so it worked with an organization despised by Gill Applebee, the US Government.

To stay on top, MicroIntel worked employees long and hard. A forty-hour workweek was considered a vacation.

Robert’s job seemed impossible, but Robert kept his cool. He’d say stuff like: "I’ve seen worse than that", or "that ain’t shit", or "they don’t know shit,
"
or even "it won’t work, not in a million years"!

When Robert thought that things at work couldn’t get any worse, an e-mail arrived that fixed Robert’s life.  It fixed his life as one might use a stick of dynamite to fix a clogged toilet.

Shit exploded and Robert’s life changed.

This is the story of one man’s struggle to fix his life and his world after discovering a dirty little secret about the Internet and computer evolution.

The Day the E-mail Came

It was a typical day at MicroIntel, people going nuts, tight schedules, and meetings about deadlines slowing everything down even more. As the top dog in the neural computing division and head of R&D, Robert cut through the shit and got everyone to work together. Right before the Friday afternoon Project Status Meeting, Robert received an encrypted e-mail. Maybe from Gill? thought Robert, though this one looked different. It was missing the MicroIntel President’s return address. Impossible, thought Robert, as only MicroIntel employees or the National Security Agency had access to the special encryption system. In order to get an encrypted system login ID at MicroIntel you needed Robert’s permission and his access code, which made the e-mail even stranger.  Robert logged on and read the following:

LOGIN:               robertdavichi&alpha346

Password:            ****************

>Login accepted to MicroIntel Mail System

>connect to encrypted

Ø      Connecting…connected

Ø      ENCRYPT CODE? ****************

Ø      Login

OPENING NEW E-MAIL—MESSAGE 1 of 1

To:                    Robert Davichi

From:                 PIT

Subject:             Private

YOUR LIFE IS IN DANGER! TAKE TWO-WEEK VACATION STARTING TOMORROW AND GET OUT OF TOWN. IF YOU TELL ANYONE YOU WILL BE AT GREATER RISK. TRUST NO-ONE.

DEFENDING…DEFENDING…DEFENDING…

********END OF MESSAGE

What a crock of shit,thought Robert. He looked at the e-mail aware of things most wouldn’t realize, like you could never know a return e-mail address for sure.  Anyone could send regular e-mail with a phony return address. Simple shit any fifteen-year-old could cook up. And with regular e-mail there is no privacy, most of it goes on the net and gets stored on some government fish net for review at some later date, and oh, don’t forget to use the right words or you’ll be filtered out by some terrorist-tracking-snooper-pooper-scooper server. If you matched all the right criteria you would pop a Christmas bell in some alphabet agency’s server that would require some alphabet agent to actually read your e-mail, then you might get on a government list
if
you were lucky. If not, someone might knock on your door. Most folks never even suspected this, but Robert knew it because he helped the government build some of those snooper systems.

What irked him most about the e-mail was that this was an encrypted and data secure company-wide network mail system. Robert had built the project.  If there’d been trouble in the system they would have contacted
him
to fix it
.
  An e-mail like this at MicroIntel meant the main server was hacked; that the silicon encryption CPU was changed. To do that was virtually impossible,
had to be
since MicroIntel marketed that server to the NSA who used the system for super sensitive work.  Hacking a server like this by changing the encryption CPU in the most powerful and secure system in the world meant big trouble.

Robert tried to trace the source---untraceable. Whoever did this was good, really good
.
  That unnerved Robert more than the message, and the message was unnerving enough. Maybe it was time for a vacation. Susan wanted to go away and it had been almost three years since Robert had taken off two weeks. Two weeks might be nice but the message’s contents started to hit home. No explanation, just: "Life in Danger"! What the fuck! Not a good situation. Tell the cops? But it said if you told someone there would be greater risk. Not a good situation---goddamn crock of shit!  Maybe a good time to take the kids and wife away for a little trip thought Robert. Yeah, get out the old fishing pole, or maybe a nice trip to the mountains. Could always bring a notebook computer and log in via wireless. Fuck!
 
People work too goddamn much on stuff that really has no meaning.  Vacation, here I come!

 
Two weeks later, back at the MicroIntel Campus…

MicroIntel dug its headquarters into the green woods of Seattle Washington, creating the world capital of software development. Forty-five thousand programmers crammed into cubicles at the eighty-story Quad Crystal Towers, which rose high above the two-story MicroIntel College Campus. Surrounding the campus stood Oak Forest and HeiwaZuki’s meditation park next to Frog Lake. A razor wire electrified fence surrounded the compound. Fifteen feet from the razor fence stood an outside perimeter fence. The area between these two fences housed four hundred –(give or take a few) slightly inbred female Doberman guard dogs that lazily circled the three hundred-acre enterprise of MicroIntel.

Robert Davichi just returned from two weeks of vacation and made his early morning walk through Oak Forest outside the perimeter fence with Buddy, his English Bull Mastiff dog. Robert and his family had spent two weeks resting in a friend’s cabin in a Washington State forest with Buddy; two weeks of trying to figure out how someone could have hacked into the main server. The death threat or warning had to be a scam, but some things in life are better not tested.  Life is nothing but a crock of shit too, thought Robert as he walked his best friend, Buddy.  Buddy reminded Robert of a small bear he’d once seen in the mountains of Oregon.