Month: May 2020

Hacking had its roots in the development of TouchTone dialing by Bell Labs. Because the system did not distinguish tones generated by the dialing telephone and tones generated by an external device placed near the handset’s microphone, it was possible to create a device that would enable a user to obtain free phone calls throughout the network. Although many of the original “phone phreakers” learned how to navigate this system by trial and error, it became vastly easier after an internal AT&T document was leaked (some said stolen, others said found discarded in a dumpster), becoming one of the first major examples of the perils of security by obscurity.

By the 1980’s and 90’s the rise of the Internet made hacking both more widespread and more publicly visible. However, as long as it was perceived as being mostly the actions of nerdy juvenile delinquents, concern about it was viewed largely as verging upon a moral panic.

Even the incidents of attempts to hack US military assets during the Energy Wars were not seen as a major threat, mostly because of the sheer ineptitude of many of the organizations involved. Yes, it was a threat, and security measures were quietly put in place to make it more difficult, but it was generally regarded as better to say nothing about it and leave the other side wondering whether they had been successful or were wasting their time.

However, it was during the Sharp Wars that cyberspace truly became a battlefield. The Sharp Wars were a civil war within an Information Age society heavily invested in technology, in which both the Administration and the Resistance were heavily dependent upon control of channels of information in their strategy. This was particularly true as the locus of resistance shifted towards the Moon. With the rise of Shepardsport Pirate Radio as one of the foremost information organs of the Resistance, the Flannigan Administration began to focus its cyber-warfare efforts on blocking its Internet radio streaming service, preventing US citizens on Earth from listening to Shepardsport commandant Reginald Waite’s dissenting views.

—- V. Taylor, “Cyber-war.” Battlefield Dynamics, Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2055.

Disasters are frightening enough when you are at home, among familiar faces, people who know you and whom you know. It’s even more frightening to have an emergency strike while you are traveling, and suddenly find yourself stranded among strangers, who may well view you as an unwelcome mouth to feed in a difficult time. If you have money to pay your way, they may well charge you ruinous prices for ordinary necessities. And if your money should run out, what help you get may be offered grudgingly, even with a side dish of cruelty, like disliked or inedible foods presented as saved “just for you.”

It is even worse when you are told to return to a “home” that is not safe, and the authorities refuse to take your word, or even what evidence you can offer, and insist that you are the problem, not the people you’re expected to live with. When the initial quarantine orders turned into general “stay at home” orders, there were many people who found themselves in just that sort of situation.

Victims of domestic violence were one obvious group. Because most people recognized the danger of returning a person to a home occupied and controlled by an abuser, accommodations were generally made for such individuals to shelter in a safe location.

However, there were also some less obvious groups who did not regard themselves as able to return safely to their nominal homes. Many of them were living in academic dormitories and various kinds of hostels, especially for work-study situations, when the orders came through to clear these group living situations. Everybody had to go home, immediately, often with barely enough time to pack their belongings and arrange transport or storage if those did not fit into the typical personal vehicle.

Most such individuals had reasonably safe homes. Those homes may not have been the most comfortable, but they were not torn by violence, and they generally belonged to reasonably flexible people who were willing to agree to disagree, even with their adult children.

However, there were some whose parents or parent-substitutes were not known for such flexibility. While they might not be physically abusive to their charges, they could make life a Very Special Hell for a young person who had been briefly independent and become accustomed to making their own decisions and forming their own opinions. In many cases these opinions were at variance with the narrow range considered acceptable by Adult Authority in the household.

One immediately thinks of persons of atypical sexuality, but on the whole most of them were sufficiently plugged in with the LGBTQI+ community that they were able to find temporary accommodations with an accepting friend or mentor. It was the others who often fell through the cracks: neurodivergent people who had found the freedom to embrace neurodiversity, only to be expected to return to a home where the only acceptable mode of living was Indistinguishable From Neurotypical. People with interests that parents derided, particularly in the arts, given how society has often regarded artists as unstable and therefore suspect.

But there were also those who had simply used this time apart from their parents to explore political or religious philosophies, and who had examined the ones they’d been brought up with and found them wanting. To go home would be to have to choose between continual conflict with the authority figures in the household and living a lie in order to keep the peace, with all the stress that is involved in preventing any leakage of information to the contrary.

The US had its own particular set of issues in that regard, and curiously enough, it was not just with students in in the liberal arts. Given that the US cloning program had focused on highly successful people — not just senior political and military leaders, but also business magnates, inventors, athletes, and all the early astronauts — many of their clones were active and even prominent in a multitude of fields of endeavor. Young people in college or internships often had reason to develop contacts with these individuals, generally via the Internet, and had come to see them as people, not monsters. In some cases they had established romantic entanglements, sufficient to consider emigrating to the Russian Empire or to the Moon.

Now they were suddenly being expected to return to homes were clones and other Sharps were viewed as monsters, where it was not sufficient to condemn cloning and human genetic engineering as Frankenstein science if one did not also condemn its products as the fruit of a poisoned tree, forever morally suspect. Homes where their Internet access was apt to be monitored, where their devices might have to be surrendered for examination at a moment’s notice. Suddenly they were faced with the choice of whether to be true to themselves and face an unlivable home situation, or to cut off all contact with these individuals for the duration, even erase every document that contradicted the approved orthodoxy.

But given that the authorities to whom they had to appeal if they were to find alternate housing were all supportive of the Administration’s position, trying to claim that their home situations were not safe was apt to net them not merely accusations that they were making their own problems, but that they were the problems.

—– Virgil Gadsen, “When Home is Not Safe: the Unseen Crisis of the Diablovirus Pandemic.” The Diablovirus Pandemic: A History. Carpenter Point, Tycho: Kennedy University Press, 2034.