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• 04 Jul 09
  

  Oliver Mayor

  • So
    Darryl and I built one instead. You can buy laptop cases just like
    you can buy cases for desktop PCs, though they're a little more
    specialized than plain old PCs. I'd built a couple PCs with Darryl
    over the years, scavenging parts from Craigslist and garage sales and
    ordering stuff from cheap cheap Taiwanese vendors we found on the
    net. I figured that building a laptop would be the best way to get
    the power I wanted at the price I could afford.

    
    
    

    To
    build your own laptop, you start by ordering a "barebook"
    -- a machine with just a little hardware in it and all the right
    slots. The good news was, once I was done, I had a machine that was a
    whole pound lighter than the Dell I'd had my eye on, ran faster, and
    cost a third of what I would have paid Dell. The bad news was that
    assembling a laptop is like building one of those ships in a bottle.
    It's all finicky work with tweezers and magnifying glasses, trying to
    get everything to fit in that little case. Unlike a full-sized PC --
    which is mostly air -- every cubic millimeter of space in a laptop is
    spoken for. Every time I thought I had it, I'd go to screw the thing
    back together and find that something was keeping the case from
    closing all the way, and it'd be back to the drawing board.

• 25 Feb 09
  

  shee42 s

  little_brother cory_doctorow little_brother.htm online book

• 19 Nov 08
  

  Danny Thorne

  cory_doctorow little_brother csc350 hon170 sp09

  • The Man was always coming down on me, just
    because I go through school firewalls like wet kleenex, spoof the
    gait-recognition software, and nuke the snitch chips they track us
    with.
  • I checked the phone
    -- my home PC had sent it an email
  • 48 more annotations...
  • • It was the identity I used when I was posting on message-boards where
      I was making my contributions to the field of applied security
      research. You know, like sneaking out of school and disabling the
      minder-tracer on my phone.
    • snitch-tag killers
    • gait-recognition cameras
    • The SchoolBooks were the snitchiest technology
      of them all, logging every keystroke, watching all the network
      traffic for suspicious keywords, counting every click, keeping track
      of every fleeting thought you put out over the net.
    • Cracking
      my SchoolBook had been easy. The crack was online within a month of
      the machine showing up,
    • IMParanoid
    • those pesky
      gait-recognition cameras. Like I said, they'd started out as
      face-recognition cameras, but those had been ruled unconstitutional.
      As far as I know, no court has yet determined whether these gait-cams
      are any more legal, but until they do, we're stuck with them.
    • It's a
      biometric identifier, like fingerprints or retina-scans, but it's got
      a lot more "collisions" than either of those. A biometric
      "collision" is when a measurement matches more than one
      person. Only you have your fingerprint, but you share your gait with
      plenty other people.
    • locked-down spyware version
      of Internet Explorer
    • Any
      program whose name starts with $SYS$ is invisible to the operating
      system.
    • TOR -- The Onion Router. An
      onion router is an Internet site that takes requests for web-pages
      and passes them onto other onion routers, and on to other onion
      routers, until one of them finally decides to fetch the page and pass
      it back through the layers of the onion until it reaches you. The
      traffic to the onion-routers is encrypted, which means that the
      school can't see what you're asking for, and the layers of the onion
      don't know who they're working for. There are millions of nodes --
      the program was set up by the US Office of Naval Research to help
      their people get around the censorware in countries like Syria and
      China, which means that it's perfectly designed for operating in the
      confines of an average American high school.
    • We
      also had to evade physical surveillance, of course, but that gets
      easier every time they add a new layer of physical snoopery -- all
      the bells and whistles lull our beloved faculty into a totally false
      sense of security.
    • Library books are bad news. Every one of them has an arphid
      -- Radio Frequency ID tag -- glued into its binding, which makes it
      possible for the librarians to check out the books by waving them
      over a reader, and lets a library shelf tell you if any of the books
      on it are out of place.
    • But
      it also lets the school track where you are at all times. It was
      another of those legal loopholes: the courts wouldn't let the schools
      track us
      with arphids, but they could track library
      books,
      and use the school records to tell them who was likely to be carrying
      which library book.

    • I
      had a little Faraday pouch in my bag -- these are little wallets
      lined with a mesh of copper wires that effectively block radio
      energy, silencing arphids. But the pouches were made for neutralizing
      ID cards and toll-book transponders, not books like --

      
      
      

      "Introduction
      to Physics?" I groaned. The book was the size of a dictionary.

    • "Well,
      I can't hide it, so I'm going to have to nuke it." Killing
      arphids is a dark art. No merchant wants malicious customers going
      for a walk around the shop-floor and leaving behind a bunch of
      lobotomized merchandise that is missing its invisible bar-code, so
      the manufacturers have refused to implement a "kill signal"
      that you can radio to an arphid to get it to switch off. You can
      reprogram arphids with the right box, but I hate doing that to
      library books. It's not exactly tearing pages out of a book, but it's
      still bad, since a book with a reprogrammed arphid can't be shelved
      and can't be found. It just becomes a needle in a haystack.
    • That
      left me with only one option: nuking the thing. Literally. 30 seconds
      in a microwave will do in pretty much every arphid on the market. And
      because the arphid wouldn't answer at all when D checked it back in
      at the library, they'd just print a fresh one for it and recode it
      with the book's catalog info, and it would end up clean and neat back
      on its shelf.
    • The
      arphid died in a shower of sparks, which was really quite lovely
      (though not nearly as pretty as the effect you get when you nuke a
      frozen grape, which has to be seen to be believed).

    • "OK, time for emergency countermeasures." I got my
      phone out. I'd planned this well in advance. Charles would never get
      me again. I emailed my server at home, and it got into motion.

      
      
      

      A
      few seconds later, Charles's phone spazzed out spectacularly. I'd had
      tens of thousands of simultaneous random calls and text messages sent
      to it, causing every chirp and ring it had to go off and keep on
      going off. The attack was accomplished by means of a botnet, and for
      that I felt bad, but it was in the service of a good cause.

    • Botnets
      are where infected computers spend their afterlives. When you get a
      worm or a virus, your computer sends a message to a chat channel on
      IRC -- the Internet Relay Chat. That message tells the botmaster --
      the guy who deployed the worm -- that the computers are there ready to
      do his bidding. Botnets are supremely powerful, since they can
      comprise thousands, even hundreds of thousands of computers,
      scattered all over the Internet, connected to juicy high-speed
      connections and running on fast home PCs. Those PCs normally function
      on behalf of their owners, but when the botmaster calls them, they
      rise like zombies to do his bidding.
    • There
      are so many infected PCs on the Internet that the price of hiring an
      hour or two on a botnet has crashed. Mostly these things work for
      spammers as cheap, distributed spambots, filling your mailbox with
      come-ons for boner-pills or with new viruses that can infect you and
      recruit your machine to join the botnet.
    • I'd
      just rented 10 seconds' time on three thousand PCs and had each of
      them send a text message or voice-over-IP call to Charles's phone,
      whose number I'd extracted from a sticky note on Benson's desk during
      one fateful office-visit.
    • Needless
      to say, Charles's phone was not equipped to handle this. First the
      SMSes filled the memory on his phone, causing it to start choking on
      the routine operations it needed to do things like manage the ringer
      and log all those incoming calls' bogus return numbers (did you know
      that it's really
      easy
      to fake the return number on a caller ID? There are about fifty ways
      of doing it -- just google "spoof caller id").
    • It wasn't going to be easy to reboot that thing. Once the
      memory was totally filled, it would have a hard time loading the code
      it needed to delete the bogus messages -- and there was no bulk-erase
      for texts on his phone, so he'd have to manually delete all of the
      thousands of messages.
    • I fantasized that the
      wall opposite my bunk was a screen, that I could be hacking right
      now, opening the cell-door. I fantasized about my workbench and the
      projects there -- the old cans I was turning into a ghetto
      surround-sound rig, the aerial photography kite-cam I was building,
      my homebrew laptop.
    • They
      took my passwords for my USB keys next. Those held some interesting
      messages I'd downloaded from one online discussion group or another,
      some chat transcripts, things where people had helped me out with
      some of the knowledge I needed to do the things I did. There was
      nothing on there you couldn't find with Google, of course, but I
      didn't think that would count in my favor.
    • he
      cut his eyes toward the cameras mounted ominously in the corners of
      the yard
    • There
      was a voice blaring over the loudspeaker, shouting at us to stop
      talking, to walk, but we ignored it.
    • I gave them everything: server address, login,
      password. This didn't matter. I didn't keep any email on my server. I
      downloaded it all and kept it on my laptop at home, which downloaded
      and deleted my mail from the server every sixty seconds. They
      wouldn't get anything out of my mail -- it got cleared off the server
      and stored on my laptop at home.
    • "We've
      been reading your mail for a day now. We changed the password so that
      your home computer couldn't fetch it."

    • "We
      have enough on you now to put you away for a very long time, Marcus.
      Your possession of these articles --" she gestured at all my
      little gizmos -- "and the data we recovered from your phone and
      memory sticks, as well as the subversive material we'd no doubt find
      if we raided your house and took your computer. It's enough to put
      you away until you're an old man. Do you understand that?"

      
      
      

      I
      didn't believe it for a second. There's no way a judge would say that
      all this stuff constituted any kind of real crime. It was free
      speech, it was technological tinkering. It wasn't a crime.

    • In my mind, I stood and delivered, telling her
      that I was a citizen who loved my freedom, which made me the patriot
      and made her the traitor.
    • Our country has experienced the worst attack ever committed on
      its soil. How many 9/11s do you want us to suffer before you're
      willing to cooperate? The details of our investigation are secret. We
      won't stop at anything in our efforts to bring the perpetrators of
      these heinous crimes to justice.
    • We will be watching you. We'll be waiting for you to make a
      misstep. Do you understand that we can watch you closely, all the
      time?
    • national security
    • It was a
      nondescript white 18-wheeler.
    • It
      was because I wouldn't unlock my phone for them, that first night.
      That's why they singled me out.
    • "I'm right, aren't I? All this
      crap, all the X-rays and ID checks, they're all useless, aren't
      they?"
    • parked down the whole length of Market Street were big, nondescript
      18-wheelers like the one that had carried us
    • buzzed
      with activity as soldiers, people in suits, and cops went in and out
      of them. The suits wore little badges on their lapels and the
      soldiers scanned them as they went in and out -- wireless
      authorization badges.
    • Then I
      noticed the truck up the hill from me, a nondescript 18-wheeler
    • I felt the eyes watching me from all directions.
    • Meanwhile,
      millions of have-you-seen sites had popped up on the net. A couple of
      the sites were old MySpace clones that had run out of money and saw a
      new lease on life from all the attention. After all, some venture
      capitalists had missing family in the Bay Area. Maybe if they were
      recovered, the site would attract some new investment. I grabbed
      dad's laptop and looked through them. They were plastered with
      advertising, of course, and pictures of missing people, mostly grad
      photos, wedding pictures and that sort of thing.
    • There was a little form for marking people found and
      another one for writing up notes about other missing people.
    • scavenging parts from Craigslist and garage sales and
      ordering stuff from cheap cheap Taiwanese vendors we found on the
      net
    • So
      I knew exactly
      how the seam on my laptop was supposed to look when the thing was
      closed, and it was not
      supposed to look like this.

    • Luckily, the third time
      I'd had to open it up and struggle to close it again, I'd gotten
      smart: I'd taken a photo of the guts with everything in place. I
      hadn't been totally smart: at first, I'd just left that pic on my
      hard drive, and naturally I couldn't get to it when I had the laptop
      in parts. But then I'd printed it out and stuck it in my messy drawer
      of papers, the dead-tree graveyard where I kept all the warranty
      cards and pin-out diagrams. I shuffled them -- they seemed messier
      than I remembered -- and brought out my photo. I set it down next to
      the computer and kind of unfocused my eyes, trying to find things
      that looked out of place.

      
      
      

      Then
      I spotted it. The ribbon cable that connected the keyboard to the
      logic-board wasn't connected right. That was a weird one. There was
      no torque on that part, nothing to dislodge it in the course of
      normal operations. I tried to press it back down again and discovered
      that the plug wasn't just badly mounted -- there was something
      between it and the board. I tweezed it out and shone my light on it.

      
      
      

      There
      was something new in my keyboard. It was a little chunk of hardware,
      only a sixteenth of an inch thick, with no markings. The keyboard was
      plugged into it, and it was plugged into the board. It other words,
      it was perfectly situated to capture all the keystrokes I made while
      I typed on my machine.

      
      
      

      It
      was a bug.

    • There were eyes out there, eyes and ears,
      and they were watching me. Surveilling me. The surveillance I faced
      at school had followed me home, but this time, it wasn't just the
      Board of Education looking over my shoulder: the Department of
      Homeland Security had joined them.
• 29 Oct 08
  

  Peter Ruwoldt

  little_brother cory_doctorow ebook copyright

• 01 Oct 08
  

  Adam Skinner

  book novel

  • "You're
    being detained by the Department of Homeland Security," the
    woman snapped.

    
    
    

    "Am
    I under arrest?"

    
    
    

    "You're
    going to be more cooperative, Marcus, starting right now." She
    didn't say, "or else," but it was implied.

    
    
    

    "I
    would like to contact an attorney," I said. "I would like
    to know what I've been charged with. I would like to see some form of
    identification from both of you."

    
    
    

    The
    two agents exchanged looks.

    
    
    

    "I
    think you should really reconsider your approach to this situation,"
    Severe Haircut woman said. "I think you should do that right
    now. We found a number of suspicious devices on your person. We found
    you and your confederates near the site of the worst terrorist attack
    this country has ever seen. Put those two facts together and things
    don't look very good for you, Marcus. You can cooperate, or you can
    be very, very sorry. Now, what is this for?"

    
    
    

    "You
    think I'm a terrorist? I'm seventeen years old!"

    
    
    

    "Just
    the right age -- Al Qaeda loves recruiting impressionable, idealistic
    kids. We googled you, you know. You've posted a lot of very ugly
    stuff on the public Internet."

    
    
    

    "I
    would like to speak to an attorney," I said.

    
    
    

    Severe
    haircut lady looked at me like I was a bug. "You're under the
    mistaken impression that you've been picked up by the police for a
    crime. You need to get past that. You are being detained as a
    potential enemy combatant by the government of the United States. If
    I were you, I'd be thinking very hard about how to convince us that
    you are not an enemy combatant. Very hard. Because there are dark
    holes that enemy combatants can disappear into, very dark deep holes,
    holes where you can just vanish. Forever. Are you listening to me
    young man? I want you to unlock this phone and then decrypt the files
    in its memory. I want you to account for yourself: why were you out
    on the street? What do you know about the attack on this city?"

  • Sometimes
    I forget that all my friends don't know that Marcus and M1k3y are the
    same person. "Yeah, a little," I said.

    • 

      Adam Skinner on 2008-10-01

      How did she converse with him on Xnet IM if she didn't know he was M1k3y?
  • 2 more annotations...
  • • I sat down in the living room and switched on the TV. I
      never watched it, but I knew that my parents did. The TV and the
      radio and the newspapers were where they got all their ideas about
      the world.
    • I
      shook my head. "You can't get anything done by doing nothing.
      It's our country.
      They've taken it from us. The terrorists who attack us are still free
      -- but we're
      not.
      I can't go underground for a year, ten years, my whole life, waiting
      for freedom to be handed to me. Freedom is something you have to take
      for yourself."
• 22 Jun 08
  

  Clay Burell

  Entire book offered free CC.

  literature politics books activism creativecommons scifi seocho

• 21 May 08
  

  egonerwin

  Cory Doctorow doctorow@craphound.com READ THIS FIRST This book is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license. That means: You are free: * to Share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work

  Bookmarks books politics free ebooks fiction doctorow

• 05 May 08
  

  Matt Clausen

  little_brother creative_commons science_fiction distopia

• 

  C Carpo

  cory doctorow ebooks

Public Stiky Notes

• 
  Adam Skinner on 2008-10-01
  How did she converse with him on Xnet IM if she didn't know he was M1k3y?

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