The Watch in the Sand: Part 12

May 29, 2034

Per capita use of Nanocule Browsing outpaces the use of every other method of board browsing combined. Economists and Market Analysts claim this is the tipping point for Nanocules as the status quo of board browsers.

July 4, 2034

The UVote program is released to the Boards. This experiment in democracy displays all the bills and laws currently in committee, or up for a vote in representative countries across the world. In addition, the program displays a real-time representation of public opinion, sortable in any number of ways, including eligible voters, political affiliations, and economic status. The Amend option allows users to suggest amendments to bills, discuss them, and then informally vote on them.

The History dialogue in the program details the complicated back story of UVote’s creation, and the documented evidence of several first-world government’s attempts to prevent the program’s release to the Boards, including intimidation, blackmail, bribery, and unconstitutional search-and-seizures.

November 3, 2034

The mutated virus M1-K52, colloquially known as Parrot Pox, infects its first human. With no data, the Nanocules have no cure, and seven people die within hours. After the last confirmed death, the Banks have enough data on the new disease collected to combat the virus, and no further infections or deaths occur. For the two hundred who are still infected, the inflamed throat remains chronic.

9:32 pm, December 12, 2034

Hugh (UB3RJacker_004 on the Boards) opened his eyes. The dim light of the evening pierced his vision, stabbing needles of pain into his head. He moved slowly, shifting his body on the cold hard floor as the pain began to ease. His Nanocules were reacting to his hangover, deadening the sharp pangs to dull aches. Gradually, the queasiness subsided, and his vision began to clear as he glanced around the small room. It seemed that none of them had made it to bed last night. Carefully pulling himself out from under someone’s sleeping form, he staggered out to find the library’s bathroom.

To most, it was a slum. A freezing garbage pit with mattresses shoved against one wall, and a cluster of desks with large wireless monitors occupying the rest of the room. Old cardboard boxes and empty soda cans littered the floor, hiding dirty laundry, and empty tubes of toothpaste. To Hugh this old condemned Library was an oasis, a haven.

There was no heating anymore, and the lights were dim, charged by an ancient cracking solar panel on the roof. The important power — the power that Hugh and his hacker friends used to keep working — came through the hard-lines. Not many people knew that power still flowed through the old hard-lines that libraries used before they lost their funding, and Hugh’s friends knew exactly how much energy they could use before the Smart-Grid realized a condemned building was pulling current, and cut them off and possibly send a police crew. Each of his friends had a power meter on their computers, and with the extra power from their own small personal solar generators, they were able to set up a rotating schedule of sleeping and working that kept the power use low.

They called themselves the Nonnies. Some of Hugh’s friends said they used to be called Anonymous, before the FBI cracked down on most of the major leaders of the movement. They changed their name to vanish into the Boards to continue their crusade.

A crusade that now might have an end.

Hugh shoved the bathroom door open, and leaned against the wall as he emptied his bladder into the cracked and yellowed urinal. As he pissed, his swimming thoughts began to coalesce. It was hard to imagine it all ending. Hugh had joined the Nonnies along with his friend Justin (D00mzer_4456) after their first year of college. Iana (B00mshakeitbaby) had met them that year, and convinced them to drop out of school and join up. She had painted a picture of noble and dashing pirates on the turbulent seas of the Boards, valiantly taking from the rich and wicked and giving to the whole world; benefiting humanity as a force of nature, like evolution.

It wasn’t a hard sell. Both Hugh and Jason had not enjoyed their first year. Colleges and universities were slowly dying out. In the ancient times, Colleges were where the laborers and lower class broadened their horizons and learned trades, or prepared for advanced jobs. Recently, it had become clear that the education these institutions offered was nothing that could not be acquired cheaper from the Boards. Desperately, the centers for higher learning were claiming the social and networking educations acquired from living with groups of peers could not be duplicated so easily, but with the ubiquity of users on the Boards, they were wrong there too.

And so, Hugh and Jason left school and joined the ranks of the Nonnies. Their days were spent sleeping, their nights peeling back the layers of security that restrained the free flow of information though the Line. Passwords were cracked, accounts were raided, and Boards were vandalized, all in the name of abolishing the establishment lies that oppressed the public.

Hugh flushed the toilet, and at the urging of his gut, dragged his body towards the stairs that led to the basement. Since the library had long ago lost its heating, in the cold northern months the basement served as a viable freezer, and there was bound to be some leftover pizza down there.

He shivered as he went down the concrete steps into the tomb-like basement. Several pizza delivery boxes had been stacked by the stairs, a monument to the dedication of the Nonnies. He grabbed and shook each box in turn, searching for a wayward slice. Most of them were empty; they would have to take out the trash soon.

He smiled as one of the boxes rattled. He flipped it open, and pulled out an old slice. The pizza was hard and flaked when he bit down on the cold mealy cheese. Of course, they wouldn’t split up when it was over. They were more than co-workers or friends, they were a family united behind a common view of the world. Besides, the Powers that Be would push back, of course. There was a war being waged behind the veil of the Boards. The Nonnies would win, of course. They were fighting for freedom with right on their side — and the Nonnies would probably become the new world’s police, once everything was done.

Hugh was still impressed at how simple it would be. Tina had been working with him on it for five months, coding long into the night. Most of it had just involved polishing a few programs that other Nonnies had already coded, and then stitching everything together.

First, there was Pickaxe, written by Kali (Jumpspider) half a year ago. It was a fiendish little program, designed to hack into the Line — the signals that covered the city, linking everyone to the Boards. The Line was based on a rapidly rotating algorithm, so that in any one millisecond, the signal might have any one of seven trillion possible pass-codes, each 1020 characters long. First Kali had tried a brute-force hack, simply trying the same pass-code every millisecond. After a few months, she realized the Banks were locking her out of the Line after the same code was used more than a few times. After seven more months of trial and error, she found that if she rotated between two hundred and fifty six million pass-codes, the Banks would not lock her out. Apparently, the Banks were only tracking one hundred megabytes worth of failed attempts from any one location, or, as Justin had put it, incredibly shitty security programming. A bit more polish, and the program could hack into the Line, and from there, the Boards. It was still fairly slow, taking almost an hour to successfully access the Line, but it worked.

Then, there was Crawler, Tina’s pet project. Crawler was wonderful in its simplicity — based on a simple program Tina and Iana wrote together several years ago, it could access the Boards and gather tetra-bytes of information on any one subject. Ask Crawler for information on Tennis, and every event, article, definition, archived website, and conversation about tennis from the last five years would be at your disposal. Give it a filter, and you could pipe any specific piece of information to any other program you wanted.

SHolms was Hugh’s baby. It had taken almost two years to get right, but SHolms was now the strongest pattern finder Hugh had ever seen. Based on stolen AI code that NASA had used for their Curiosity Rover missions, it was incredibly robust; able to find visual patterns in pictures, subject patterns in conversations, or even spending patterns in sales data. Hugh had wanted to use it to find patterns in the stock-market, but he had better plans for it now.

And last, there was LockPick. Like it’s namesake, LockPick was a simple tool, designed to analyze the security of a Board, and grant access to any amount of sensitive information. And after Hugh and Tina had linked these programs together, they were going to change the Boards forever. Pickaxe would hack into the Banks, and Crawler would gather all the public information on every Login it could find — twenty billion or more. Then Crawler would use LockPick to hack into the Boards of advertising businesses and marketing researchers to find advertising information, purchasing histories, and credit-card numbers; all perfectly anonymous and therefore useless. So far.

Then SHolms would get to work, finding patterns and parallels. Shipping orders would be connected to credit cards and purchases. Card numbers would be linked to social security numbers and logins. Names and addresses would be found. And then, just add a simple copy-paste, and in the morning every login, alias, user-name, and password on every Board in the world would be replaced with the owner’s real name.

They had spent almost the whole of yesterday drinking. A few of the Nonnies had run off to have sex in private, or used their hacked Nanocules to simulate drugs, but most of them sat around talking, laying out their visions for the new world they would create. It was Iana who had said it best.

“No more secrets,” she had said, holding her beer bottle in a mock toast. “No hiding your shames, no fake porcelain dolls. No more lying politicians, phony superstars, or false heroes. That’s what we’ve done here. Politicians get elected because they start running in middle-school. Get groomed for it, and make everyone think they’re perfect, when they’re so wrapped up in spinning themselves they can’t see their own sins. We live in a society where a picture of you having a drink when you’re twenty can ruin your career — hell, I know five people who would lose their jobs right now if I told their bosses what they did in college, and I bet their bosses did the same things. We keep secrets even from ourselves. No more. Finally, we can show the world that everyone has skeletons, and yours aren’t any worse than mine. We can stop people thinking they need to walk on eggshells just to fit in and be normal. No secret shames, no messiahs, just humans doing our best!”

They had fallen asleep soon afterward, her words still ringing in Hugh’s ears. Now, awake and staring into the darkened basement of a derelict library, he rubbed his chin as he thought. His chewing slowed as he shifted his slice of pizza into his other hand, and fished his old phone out of his pocket. He had gutted its insides long ago, tearing out the GPS tracking signal, boosting the CPU, and limiting its range to a few yards. Kari had laughed at him, but he liked it. He had turned an old symbol of corporate surveillance into his own off-the-grid programming box. It was locked off from the old phone networks, and if anything went wrong, he could just pick up the phone and run, keeping all his data with him.

He turned on his phone and stared at the huge program he had helped code. It was hard to not feel pleased with himself. This was where he lived. The mattress, the cold Library walls, that was his home, but here, looking at the lines of letters and numbers that represented years of effort — breaking locks and abolishing the walls of the Boards — this is where he felt truly alive.

There was only one flaw, really. It couldn’t be aimed.

Once they let the program loose, all of their code names would be erased as well. All of their aliases would vanish, and their anonymity would be lost forever. Hugh knew there was at least one forum where he had seven aliases, some of whom argued with each other to get the rabble squabbling. It was fun to make the sheep dance and fight each other, like shaking an ant-farm. His secret would be out.

Ign002321 would vanish too. That had made him pause. Ign002321 was the alternate login Iana had created to loose the CutEmUp virus onto the Boards when they first went live. It had caused incredible havoc, and the statute of limitations had not yet run out. And it wasn’t the only one — there were hundreds of other fake names, addresses, and logins that would no longer serve as a shield between his fellows and the world. Everything they had ever said, done, or posted on the Boards would now proudly bare their names, and from there it would be a short step to an address finder, and the police knocking on their doors.

Tina hadn’t mentioned it. Nor had anyone else who looked at the code. He knew they were all smart, so he knew they had seen it, but still they hadn’t said anything, so they must have wanted it that way. They were willing to sacrifice themselves to create a better world. A world without whispers. A planet with no secrets.

He probably should wait. He should wake up everyone else so they could watch, or ask if Tina wanted to press the button. But for some reason, he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Maybe he just wasn’t in the mood for another celebration, or he wanted the others to enjoy their rest. Or maybe some small part of him thought the others had missed that their lives would be affected too, and if they knew, they might have second thoughts.

It wouldn’t matter in the end. Whatever the reason, it was in his hands right now, and it was his decision. Swallowing the last bite of his pizza slice, he wiped his fingers on his pants, and began packaging the program. Within hours, his name — along with everyone else’s — would be on the Boards, for everyone to see.

Janurary 20, 2035

After half a month of chaos following the WhoRU? hack, a governmental panel forces the Boards to be reset, removing all logins, passwords, browsing histories, and saved preferences. The Boards see two full days of reduced speed as millions of people re-update their profiles from backups. Officials assure the public that all major holes in the Line have been patched.

Fourteen separate class-action lawsuits are filed against Banks across the country for punitive damages, while some eighteen thousand citizens are charged with crimes for illegal activity under assumed names, ranging from terrorism and vandalism to libel and copyright infringement. Because of the surge of arrests, most are only given a fine. Few bother to comply, and none are arrested.

January 25, 2035

The WhoRUAgain? hack strikes the Boards. All logins are once again replaced with the owners real names.

December 19, 2035

After a full year of political fighting and social chaos, the Supreme Court rules the Anonymous Line Interaction And Stability act, or ALIAS is constitutional. In a consenting opinion, Justice Jobe writes: “More and more the Boards have become analogous to real life. We should therefore treat suspicious behavior in a similar fashion. Using a fake name or alias on the Boards has become akin to wearing a ski-mask as you walk down the street. The use of fake or alternate names on the Boards is easily definable, in our modern age, as probable cause.”