Crime & Puzzlement [6/8]
- From
- Max Belankov (2:5054/2.31)
- To
- All ()
- Date
- 1996-08-29T23:11Z
- Area
- PERM.LANGUAGE
Hello All!
=== Cut ===
********
In Search of NuPrometheus
"I pity the poor immigrant..."
-- Bob Dylan
Sometime last June, an angry hacker got hold of a chunk of the highly
secret source code which drives the Apple Macintosh. He then
distributed it to a variety of addresses, claiming responsibility for this
act of information terrorism in the name of the Nu Prometheus
League.
Apple freaked. NuPrometheus had stolen, if not the Apple crown
jewels, at least a stone from them. Worse, NuPrometheus had then
given this prize away. Repeatedly.
All Apple really has to offer the world is the software which lies
encoded in silicon on the ROM chip of every Macintosh. This set of
instructions is the cyber-DNA which makes a Macintosh a Macintosh.
Worse, much of the magic in this code was put there by people who
not only do not work for Apple any longer, but might only do so
again if encouraged with cattle prods. Apple's attitude toward its
ROM code is a little like that of a rich kid toward his inheritance. Not
actually knowing how to create wealth himself, he guards what he
has with hysterical fervor.
Time passed, and I forgot about the incident. But one recent May
morning, I leaned that others had not. The tireless search for the
spectral heart of NuPrometheus finally reached Pinedale, Wyoming,
where I was the object of a two hour interview by Special Agent
Richard Baxter, Jr. of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Poor Agent Baxter didn't know a ROM chip from a Vise-grip when
he arrived, so much of that time was spent trying to educate him on
the nature of the thing which had been stolen. Or whether "stolen"
was the right term for what had happened to it.
You know things have rather jumped the groove when potential
suspects must explain to law enforcers the nature of their alleged
perpetrations.
I wouldn't swear Agent Baxter ever got it quite right. After I showed
him some actual source code, gave a demonstration of e-mail in
action, and downloaded a file from the WELL, he took to rubbing his
face with both hands, peering up over his finger tips and saying, "It
sure is something, isn't it" Or, "Whooo-ee."
Or "my eight year-old knows more about these things than I do." He
didn't say this with a father's pride so much as an immigrant's fear of
a strange new land into which he will be forcibly moved and in
which his own child is a native. He looked across my keyboard into
Cyberspace and didn't like what he saw.
We could have made it harder for one another, but I think we each
sensed that the other occupied a world which was as bizarre and
nonsensical as it could be. We did our mutual best to suppress
immune response at the border.
You'd have thought his world might have been a little more
recognizable to me. Not so, it turns out. Because in his world, I
found several unfamiliar features, including these:
1. The Hacker's Conference is an underground organization of
computer outlaws with likely connections to, and almost certainly
sympathy with, the NuPrometheus League. (Or as Agent Baxter
repeatedly put it, the "New Prosthesis League.")
2. John Draper, the affore-mentioned Cap'n Crunch, in addition to
being a known member of the Hacker's Conference, is also CEO
and president of Autodesk, Inc. This is of particular concern to
the FBI because Autodesk has many top-secret contracts with the
government to supply Star Wars graphics imaging and
"hyperspace" technology. Worse, Draper is thought to have
Soviet contacts.
He wasn't making this up. He had lengthy documents from the San
Francisco office to prove it. And in which Autodesk's address was
certainly correct.
On the other hand, I know John Draper. While, as I say, he may have
once distinguished himself as a cracker during the Pleistocene, he is
not now, never has been, and never will be CEO of Autodesk. He did
work there for awhile last year, but he was let go long before he got
in a position to take over.
Nor is Autodesk, in my experience with it, the Star Wars skunk
works which Agent Baxter's documents indicated. One could hang
out there a long time without ever seeing any gold braid.
Their primary product is something called AutoCAD, by far the most
popular computer-aided design software but generally lacking in
lethal potential. They do have a small development program in
Cyberspace, which is what they call Virtual Reality. (This, I assume is
the "hyperspace" to which Agent Baxter's documents referred.)
However, Autodesk had reduced its Cyberspace program to a couple
of programmers. I imagined Randy Walser and Carl Tollander toiling
away in the dark and lonely service of their country. Didn't work.
Then I tried to describe Virtual Reality to Agent Baxter, but that
didn't work either. In fact, he tilted. I took several runs at it, but I
could tell I was violating our border agreements. These seemed to
include a requirement that neither of us try to drag the other across
into his conceptual zone.
I fared a little better on the Hacker's Conference. Hardly a
conspiracy, the Hacker's Conference is an annual convention
originated in 1984 by the Point Foundation and the editors of Whole
Earth Review. Each year it invites about a hundred of the most gifted
and accomplished of digital creators. Indeed, they are the very people
who have conducted the personal computer revolution. Agent Baxter
looked at my list of Hacker's Conference attendees and read their
bios.
"These are the people who actually design this stuff, aren't they?" He
was incredulous. Their corporate addresses didn't fit his model of
outlaws at all well.
Why had he come all the way to Pinedale to investigate a crime he
didn't understand which had taken place (sort of) in 5 different
places, none of which was within 500 miles?
Well, it seems Apple has told the FBI that they can expect little
cooperation from Hackers in and around the Silicon Valley, owing to
virulent anti-Apple sentiment there. They claim this is due to the
Hacker belief that software should be free combined with festering
resentment of Apple's commercial success. They advised the FBI to
question only those Hackers who were as far as possible from the
twisted heart of the subculture.
They did have their eye on some local people though. These
included a couple of former Apple employees, Grady Ward and
Water Horat, Chuck Farnham (who has made a living out of
harassing Apple), Glenn Tenney (the purported leader of the
Hackers), and, of course, the purported CEO of Autodesk.
Other folks Agent Baxter asked me about included Mitch Kapor, who
wrote Lotus 1-2-3 and was known to have received some this
mysterious source code. Or whatever. But I had also met Mitch
Kapor, both on the WELL and in person. A less likely computer
terrorist would be hard to come by.
Actually, the question of the source code was another area where
worlds but shadow-boxed. Although Agent Baxter didn't know
source code from Tuesday, he did know that Apple Computer had
told his agency that what had been stolen and disseminated was the
complete recipe for a Macintosh computer. The distribution of this
secret formula might result in the creation of millions of Macintoshes
not made by Apple. And, of course, the ruination of Apple
Computer.
In my world, NuPrometheus (whoever they, or more likely, he might
be) had distributed a small portion of the code which related
specifically to Color QuickDraw. QuickDraw is Apple's name for the
software which controls the Mac's on-screen graphics. But this was
another detail which Agent Baxter could not capture. For all he
knew, you could grow Macintoshes from floppy disks.
I explained to him that Apple was alleging something like the ability
to assemble an entire human being from the recipe for a foot, but
even he know the analogy was inexact. And trying to get him to
accept the idea that a corporation could go mad with suspicion was
quite futile. He had a far different perception of the emotional
reliability of institutions.
When he finally left, we were both dazzled and disturbed. I spent
some time thinking about Lewis Carroll and tried to return to writing
about the legal persecution of the Legion of Doom. But my heart
wasn't in it. I found myself suddenly too much in sympathy with
Agent Baxter and his struggling colleagues from Operation Sun Devil
to get back into a proper sort of pig-bashing mode.
Given what had happened to other innocent bystanders like Steve
Jackson, I gave some thought to getting scared. But this was Kafka in
a clown suit. It wasn't precisely frightening. I also took some
comfort in a phrase once applied to the administration of Frederick
the Great: "Despotism tempered by incompetence."
Of course, incompetence is a double-edged banana. While we may
know this new territory better than the authorities, they have us
literally out-gunned. One should pause before making well-armed
paranoids feel foolish, no matter how foolish they seem.
=== Cut ===
With best wishes,
Max
Kime: На деньги нужно смотpеть свеpху вниз, не теpяя их пpи этом из поля зpения.
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