"Noel K Hannan - Divide By Zero" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hannan Noel K)

break in with a length of fibrewire and an optical clamp, rather than pay
the nominal fifty euro monthly fee. They were supposed to be free,
introduced as the turn of the century under the Information For All
Initiative, but like everything else had either been privatised or run
down. I remember where I saw that nugget of info now - a security
consultancy web page, where a little animated app showed a tracer program
lighting up the network map like a neon spider, illegal nodes in red, good
little fee-paying citizens in blue. Better red than in the red, I say.
Safely connected - no marauding hunter-killer programs on the loose, my
Sentinel tells me - I collected Dickens' instructions.
Ten minutes later, I was deeply enmeshed in multiple layers of challenging
security routines, firing off Dickens' passwords from my fingertips like a
fighter pilot ejects chaff to decoy missiles, and sending the simpler
security software agents off on meaningless tangents into
password-interrogation subroutines that mimicked the legitimate attentions
of the network analyst or sysop. The task that night, as had been the norm
for a number of previous weeks, was to divert tiny amounts of currency
away from the data flow of micropayments, fractions of euros for web page
access, software updates, pay-for-view teevee, data subscriptions,
mainframe processing time, or any one of the other million things you
could buy and sell and sample digitally. Someone might pay 0.75 of a euro
pfennig to view a pornographic picture (probably artificially generated,
but who cared?) of this evening's short shelf-life teevee starlet, but
would they notice 0.76 on the streams and streams of itemised billing that
such commerce threw up? Most people requested not to receive such bills,
many others had given up the mammoth task of checking them. Enter Dickens
and his freelance team of young bucks - myself included. Dickens,
apparently, was never one to miss the opportunity of exploiting a niche in
the marketplace. Like a vulture, he spotted weaknesses from ten miles out.
I operated almost exclusively at the codeface, in text-based systems, and
as such was deemed much in demand by Dickens because I was so much faster
than the other guys - no diss meant, each to their own - who relied on
eyecups and datagloves and graphical manipulation devices. In my opinion,
interfaces devoured processor time and RAM that was far better spent
cracking code. The Graficals, as I called 'em, attracted gamers and teevee
addicts and VR jockeys who were used to interacting with data as great
polygons of colour, texture and shape, towers and monoliths of things
meant to represent data warehouses, stock control, corporate mainframes
and the fairy-light matrix of the ubiquitous and poorly secured municipal
LANs. Fine and dandy, but I got just as much of an adrenaline rush from my
reversed black-on-white screen and my slashes and colons and asterisks. I
got what I wanted faster too. And I never, ever got caught. Until that
night.
I was close to my target for the evening when the Sentinel icon in the
corner of the emulation window lit up like Bonfire Night. I exited the
BankNet quickly and carefully, rolling up my audit trail just as Dickens
would have liked, and examined the Sentinel's status panel. It revealed
that a tracer had been tripped somewhere in the BankNet and was currently
cruising the municipal LAN, looking for the culprit. Tracers could be
killed or diverted easily enough but they left messy evidence in the net,