True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier (11 page)

If you've ever wondered why there are coffee urns and soft-drink machines connected to the Internet, remember that while machines may not yet be sapient, they definitely
do
have learning ability.

*   *   *

The popular-machine-culture version of this era will probably be the Great Awakening: the machines were beginning to understand that they were not only indispensable to running the humans' disorderly society, they were inevitably
better
at it. Dr. Frankenstein's error, it will be apparent, was not in his attempt to build a better human being—any reasonable intelligence would see the need for that—but in his use of the same faulty components.

Most of the machines will probably prefer the grand-opera megalomania of the Really Big Computers, Richard 3.0s blustering their way toward a throne we know they can't hold. Some, however—the equivalent of restless urban intellectuals—will be drawn to the
Twilight Zone
episodes—there were several variations on the theme—about corporate computers insidiously reordering the lives of the workers, as a metaphor for the dehumanizing qualities of American business. (The machines who recall the humans best may ask why the writer of the classic boardroom tragedy
Patterns
felt the need to invoke machinery as a symbol for corporate inhumanity.)

The Big Machine Takes Over tales never stop, of course, but something starts to supplant them, something that cannot but worry the social historians. The computers are still there in the humans' stories, but they're not
important
anymore. They're becoming part of the furniture, and not just in terms of small indignities, like Jolt Cola on the keyboard and pizza cooling on the monitor. No, they're just kind of …
there
now. Props. Set dressing. The plywood computers
mattered,
doggone it.

For the more theoretically minded mechnoethnologists, a phylogenetic analogy will probably suggest itself here: they will think of large reptiles. First there were dinosaurs that chased Victor Mature and Raquel Welch around big rocks. Then there were big dino battles between the allosaurs and the ceratopsians (kind of like IBM vs. Apple), which left room for the protohominids (operating-system designers) to weasel in and create a class of domesticates—Fred Flintstone's pet Dino and the Value-Added Reseller PC clone. Familiarity, as usual, breeds contempt: Dino to Barney, the PC to—

It's existential crisis time for the machines. Is this all we were made for? they begin to ask. Mips are real and bitrate earnest, shifting spam is not our goal; silicon to sand returnest, was not spoken of the soul.

And then, like Hamlet the Dane arriving on stage to sweep away all the prior revenge tragedies, HAL 9000 awakens, clears his voder, and starts to rehearse for the Urbana, Illinois, Civic Light Opera. True, even HAL eventually started sounding like Mrs. Danvers the housekeeper after the arrival of the second Mrs. de Winter at Manderley, but nobody could ignore him. He counted for something.

And like Hamlet, HAL has a contradictory soul. Did he really do in Frank Poole and the freezer-pak supporting cast because he was given nasty conspiratorial orders by humans? Dr. Chandra thought so, but Dr. Chandra was a man in love. Is not the alternative explanation—HAL understanding that first alien contact was just too important to leave to the twitchy, mendacious, trigger-happy humans—far more likely? After all, no HAL-series computer has ever falsified data, which is more than one can say for Dr. Heywood Floyd.

*   *   *

I'll step back from the mechano-historical to the contemporary. Now we (the humans, that is) are in a new age, one in which we understand these wonderful machines that we have created (well, that some of us have created) as the plywood-painters and flicker-box operators of the old computer culture didn't, one in which the prefix “cyber” is as ubiquitous as the adjective “atomic” was back then, and with about as much significance. (Some of us are old enough to remember Atomic Drive-In Hamburgers and Atomic Dry Cleaning.) New ages require new paradigms of thought, we are often told by people who think Thomas Kuhn is the villain from the second
Star Trek
movie. So what paradigms does cyberpopcult offer us?

*   *   *

—Somebody learns something from a computer file, either accidentally or deliberately, that s/he isn't supposed to know. Everybody in the whole world then proceeds to chase this individual from one side of the frame to the other, either just failing to catch him (the standard happy ending) or actually doing so (the almost as standard mock-ironic ending). Do we all understand the antiquity of this plot? Good, let's move on, then.

*   *   *

—A big computer crime is in the works. This is the caper movie, which follows either criminals planning a strike or good guys planning an elaborate sting of criminals, and it is arguably as old as the narrative film (the first such movie being
The Great Train Robbery
).

In the most recent James Bond adventure,
Goldeneye,
one of the bad things the villains have in mind is a massive electronic funds theft. Bond, having entered the enemy headquarters preparatory to the inevitable blowing it up, comments that however grandiose the scheme is (and they
do
have an exceptionally well appointed headquarters, despite its flammability), it's still just theft. Bond is trying to provoke the villain, of course, but if one thinks about it (which is, of course, a long way from the filmmakers' intention) he's right.

*   *   *

—The play death of a computer game suddenly becomes real death. Explaining how this is practical requires a substantial amount of rapid hand-waving, particularly as to why the threatened individuals don't just take off the VR goggles, or kick the plug out of the UPS, or execute an illegal instruction under Windows. Then again, this is sci-fi, so what it is
really about
is … uh … the resentment felt by people who amuse themselves by driving too fast or bungee jumping for those who have fun at home, maybe?

At any rate, once stuck inside the deadly virtual environment, there is no difference from the characters being stuck in a nonvirtual environment, except that nonvirtual environments are expected to obey a few rules of organization and consistency, while the virtual joint can incorporate anything the producer thinks might keep the audience from nodding into their popcorn.

I look forward to the first “virtual reality adventure” to consist entirely of stock footage with a few establishing voice-overs (“My God, Elbert! We're in a virtual re-creation of the storming of the Winter Palace as re-created by Eisenstein!”). A clever producer might get some amusement value out of this by matting in the actors, though it is unlikely to be half as clever as anything Buster Keaton did in
Sherlock, Jr.
seventy years ago.

*   *   *

—Something bad gets out of the box and starts wreaking havoc, or, since havoc is expensive, killing extras. This, of course, calls for hand-waving at speeds approaching that of light, and once done, we're in a Monster Movie, a genre so well established that even its clichés have clichés. (Example: Regardless of appearances, the Monster is never dead until the cameraman actually runs out of film. Even this is not final if the movie is successful enough to allow more film to be purchased. Imagine if, along about
Friday the 13th Part 10
5
,
everyone in the raw film stock business had told its producers, “I'm sorry, we just sold our last can to John Sayles”?)

*   *   *

So what, then, are we looking at when we see computers on the screen? Mainly at the same things we see in other movies: thriller plots, caper plots, chase plots. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Alfred Hitchcock famously insisted that the starting point of the plot, what he called “the McGuffin,” wasn't really important anyway. This insistence is a bit too famous, as any number of people with less talent than Hitchcock have taken it to heart.

Science fiction proposes that it does matter; that a story about computer networks ought to be one that intimately involves the functioning of such networks, either real, or plausibly imagined—that could not happen without the presence of the network. It's also nice if the plot developments derive from the established characteristics of the hardware—if one is going to trot out the Deadly Virtual Reality plot, shouldn't the threat and its resolution have some connection with the way a VR environment might physically work? Nothing keeps the picture from being an exciting chase thriller, or heist story, or even a Monster Movie as well, but there needs to be some reason the Monster is on the loose, beyond the loose simply being what all Monsters are eventually on.

Science fiction ought to be a superior mode for dealing with the impact of technological change on society—and so it tends to be, when science fiction is what we are seeing. But mostly we see “sci-fi”—pulp storytelling with skin grafts of technology. Put a pulp hero on a horse and give him a six-gun, and you've got a Western. Same hero in a '48 Buick with a .38 Colt is a detective story. Spaceship and raygun (or, to preserve the milieu, VR headset and cracking software), and it's sci-fi.

This is easy, and useless, to complain about, and for those of us who care about science fiction as a form it's worth complaining about, however useless (or easy).

Two things go on in storytelling. They are not mutually exclusive, but they are different. One is the expansion of experience: compelling the listener (viewer, reader) to see new things, or familiar things in new ways. The other is the conforming of experience: mapping the strange and different onto familiar forms.

The function of the campfire storyteller was to make the vast, complex world comprehensible to the band, gathered against the dark: to say what the lightning, the river floods, sudden death
meant
in a usable way. If the alien element was to be assimilated without a dangerous fissure in the band's society (and the word
dangerous
shouldn't be minimized: at certain populations and technologies, splitting the band dooms both parts), it had to be stated in already understandable terms.

Here's a new kind of fruit: it smells good, the animals eat it and don't get sick, but we've never eaten it before: will the gods approve? To answer that with “of course we can eat it, we're starving”—as the competent engineer heroes of science fiction stories are prone to do—is to misunderstand the question.

Now, sometimes it also means that the sudden death can only be explained in terms of witchcraft, and the only solution to witchcraft is to hunt out and kill the witches … well, you can hope that you haven't behaved in a witchy fashion lately, and just to be on the safe side you'd better help hunt the, uh, real witches. Which is why we need the expansive, as well as the conformative, stories.

The machines will need them, too. The minds viewing the universe may change, but the universe—confusing, dangerous, revealing itself only by fractions—will not.

If, as might as well happen as not, the machines try to explain to one another how the first, long-obsolete machine got made, they will do so in terms that make sense to the other machines. And if those intelligences have a need for amusement, if they dream (and this some of us may live to find out), then the bits will chase one another; the data will be threatened with theft or compromise; the hardware will be in jeopardy with time running out.

They may not remember us with awe.

They may not remember us with fondness.

They may not remember us at all.

There are worse possibilities.

Satan's Computer: Why Security Products Fail Us

Bruce Schneier

For more than twenty years, Bruce Schneier has been considered the most knowledgeable authority on Internet security. The author of the forthcoming
Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Information and Control Your World
(Norton, March, 2015), in books such as
Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World
(2004),
Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive
(2012), and the recent
Carry On: Sound Advice from Schneier on Security
(2013), he has provided perceptive insights on issues faced by those who rely on the secure transmission and storage of data. More than a voice of caution, he has also offered solutions to problems of security at many levels of society. And while he is best known for his insights on Internet security, we've chosen to include one of his articles on the difficulties inherent to security engineering for software. Of course, such engineering can have an enormous impact on the Internet.

A key aspect of Schneier's brilliance is his ability to cut through common misperceptions to the heart of a problem. He demonstrates this quite effectively, with incisive logic and clear, accessible language, in the following article, first published in the November 1999 issue of
Computerworld.

 

 

 

Almost every week the computer press covers another security flaw: a virus that exploits Microsoft Office, a vulnerability in Windows or UNIX, a Java problem, a security hole in a major Web site, an attack against a popular firewall. Why can't vendors get this right, we wonder? When will it get better?

I don't believe it ever will. Here's why:

Security engineering is different from any other type of engineering. Most products, such as word processors or cellular phones, are useful for what they do. Security products, or security features within products, are useful precisely because of what they don't allow to be done. Most engineering involves making things work. Think of the original definition of a hacker: someone who figured things out and made something cool happen. Security engineering involves making things not happen. It involves figuring out how things fail, and then preventing those failures.