"Charles Stross - Antibodies" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)

I was looking for Amin. Amin with the doctorate in discrete number theory, now
slumming it in this company of engineers: my other canary in a number-crunching
coal mine. I found him: feet propped up on the lidless hulk of a big Compaq server,
mousing away like mad at a big monitor. I squinted; it looked vaguely familiar . . .
"Quake? Or Golgotha?" I asked.

"Golgotha. We've got Marketing bottled up on the second floor."

"How's the network looking?"

He shrugged, then punched the hold button. "No crashes, no dropped packetsтАФthis
cut looks pretty solid. We've been playing for three days now. What can I do for
you?"

I shoved the printout under his nose. "This seem feasible to you?"

"Hold on a mo." He hit the pause key them scanned it rapidly. Did a double-take.
"You're not shitting?"

"Came out about two hours ago."

"Jesus Homeboy Christ riding into town at the head of a convoy of Hell's Angels
with a police escort. . ." he shook his head. Amin always swears by Jesus, a weird
side-effect of a westernized Islamic upbringing: take somebody else's prophet's
name in vain. "If it's true, I can think of at least three different ways we can make
money at it, and at least two more to end up in prison. You don't use PGP, do
you?"

"Why bother?" I asked, my heart pounding. "I've got nothing to hide."

"If this is trueтАФ" he tapped the papers "тАФ then every encryption algorithm except
the one-time pad has just fallen over. Take a while to be sure, but. . . that crunch you
heard in the distance was the sound of every secure commerce server on the internet
succumbing to a brute-force attack. The script kiddies will be creaming themselves.
Jesus Christ." He rubbed his moustache thoughtfully.

"Does it make sense to you?" I persisted.
"Come back in five minutes and I'll tell you."

"OK."

I wandered over to the coffee station, thinking very hard. People hung around and
generally behaved as if it was just another day; maybe it was. But then again, if that
paper was true, quite a lot of stones had just been turned over and if you were one
of the pale guys who lived underneath it was time to scurry for cover. And it had
looked good to me: by the prickling in my palms and the gibbering cackle in the
back of my skull, something very deep had recognized it. Amin's confirmation
would be just the icing on the cake confirmation that it was a workable proof.

CryptographyтАФthe science of encoding messages тАФ relies on certain findings in