Doctor Who_ Blue Box - Kate Orman [8]
Sarah was gripped by the idea of borrowing the power of a machine that didn’t just let you talk to other people – it let you change the way they lived their lives. She found ways into other people’s phone records and school records, all from a four-hundred-dollar Altair 8800 in her bedroom. College gave her access to bigger and better computers. Finally, TLA unwittingly let her get her hands not just on a VAX
mainframe, but to computers all over the country: as a defence contractor, TLA was eligible for connection to the ARPAnet.
You did not cross Swan. You did not argue with her on the computer bulletin boards where hackers discussed their adventures. You did not flame her on the new-born discussion networks, Usenet and BITnet. Because if you did, Swan would do something to your phone. She might change its listing in Ma Bell’s database to a payphone, so that when you tried to make a call from your own living room your phone demanded a quarter. She might forward your home number to her own phone (and heap abuse on your callers), or to the weather recording, or to a pizza parlour. Or maybe she would break into your school’s computer and change all your grades to an F. These were not the negative power trips of a mere vandal; Swan’s bullying was calculated and precise, tit for tat. Just how many of these horror stories actually happened, and how many were awed speculation about Swan’s magical powers, I’m still not sure. But:
A PDP-11 at a certain pharmaceuticals company was wrecked in 1978 by a simple program that created one subdirectory after another until it filled the entire disk drive, forcing every program, every researcher’s work to grind to a halt. The wrench in the computer’s machinery was a mindlessly simple three-line program – nothing any daring computer criminal would be proud of sneaking onto an enemy system. The punchline was that there was a second program, this one only two lines long, which had been disguised as the system’s own “list files” command. When the technical staff tried to find out what had gone wrong with their computer, naturally they tried to list the files, setting off the second bomb. This one filled the computer’s RAM, its working memory, with dozens of “background processes”, programs all demanding a slice of the computer’s memory; and each of those background processes started up more background processes of its own, and each of those...
Swan was widely credited with the attack, supposedly because a juicy job at the company had gone to someone else.
I don’t know if it was her work, but I was able to confirm that it really happened. Repeated attacks rendered the Unix machine useless for days, costing the company thousands of dollars in lost time. No-one was ever able to prove that Swan was behind anything. She never denied anything. The reputation of power, after all, is power. And in the computer world, no-one can know who you really are; your reputation is all you have.
Bob’s car was a pea green ’79 Pontiac Grand LeMans. The back seat was burled in junk, mostly books and empty plastic milk bottles. He and Peri sat in the car in a Crystal City parking lot across from the TLA building: a two-storey cube in brushed concrete and grey brick flanked by a public library and a small park. Somewhere inside was the component the Doctor wanted. The first step was to find out exactly where: was there a high-security lab, a top-secret office?
‘Couldn’t we just break into their computers and find out?’
said Peri. ‘You’re an expert on that, right?’
Bob scrunched down in the driver’s seat. ‘No.’ he said.
‘We can forget about hacking their systems. Swan is poison. If we mess with he we can forget about ever making a phone call again, unless we want to talk to an operator in Djibouti.’
‘Reporters.’ said Peri. ‘We could pretend we