Our protagonist is at a company meeting in meatspace. The company he works for doesn’t have meetings like this often. While most of the employees are in the region, some are out-of-province or even out-of-country. The company chatroom is usually good enough. Every 180 days or so, however, they get together. The higher bandwidth available when conversing face-to-face allows them to work through many issues rapidly.

Since very little actual coding is done at these meetings, Nicnus gets bored easily. He can get interested in abstract design or discussion about features, but much of the time — too, much in his opinion — is spent discussing little details. He’d rather leave those up to whoever does the work, or at least leave the discussion to what is necessary at that time. Still, this meeting is going well. Patricia, who is the closest thing they have to a boss, is laying out her ideas on the direction they should take the product. A new direction.

Their product, in case you’re interested, is a kind of network hardware. That means it is used to get computers talking to each other. The important feature of their product is that it can use any existing means of connection and automatically configure itself for the situation. They have a component that plugs into phone lines, one that plugs into power lines, one that uses wireless, one for old serial connectors, one that transmits using sound, and really one for anything else you can think of. If a client comes up with a connector they want that the company doesn’t yet make, then usually the company will develop it. The software installed on the devices finds all other devices connected, and gets them all talking to each other. All of this could be done without the product, but it takes more effort.

Patricia wants to bake strong, general-purpose encryption into the product and capitalize on the privacy craze recent events have created with some groups. She also wants devices using the same encryption keys to be able to discover each other in a peer-to-peer way over the Internet. This would provide a push-button solution for worldwide secure communications between members of a small group, such as the company itself.

Of course, her description of this vision does not come out as smoothly as this description. Her coworkers are interrupting her constantly to make little points.

“If each network is locked with only one key, then all someone has to do is steal that one key to break an entire network.”

“How are the devices going to know which other devices on the Internet belong to their network? Won’t we need to manage some central server?”

“Can’t clients already do this by setting up VPNs on their routers?”

While the discussion around these and other questions may not be of interest to many readers, our protagonist is in many cases not without an opinion, and as soon as he is expressing an opinion, he is no longer bored.

Bill is quickly finding that being “in charge” of a small part of the RCMP’s operations actually gives him less freedom than working near the bottom of a private investigative firm. As a large public organisation, one the people ostensibly trust to keep them safe, they are bound by layers of accountability structure. He is in a meeting with his team and several of his superiors now.

“Why? Why can’t we go after this guy?” Bill is waving a paper file.

One of his superiors leans back. Bill has been out of law enforcement for a long time. Perhaps they brought him in a little bit quickly. “I thought you understood how things work. If we go after everyone we’re just wasting our resources. We run things down until we find something significant.”

Bill is furious, “You keep saying that! Every time I bring you a bigger fish you remind me that we only go after big fish.”

One of Bill’s team members pipes up, “Besides, while that policy makes sense for petty situations like drug users, how does it apply here? This is child pornography! There aren’t hordes of these guys, and they’re all very bad, in my opinion.”

Another one of the higher-ups raises his eyebrows, “I’m sorry, your opinion?”

The first higher-up who spoke breaks in before those two can start a serious conflict, “The point, Bill, is that you’ve still only got a man who is likely uploading pornographic images to public websites. You have no evidence that he is producing these images himself, or even that he derives financial gain from it.” Bill starts to reply but doesn’t get the chance, “I realise you’re going to second the argument that there just aren’t many child pornographers, but if the data coming out of your team is any indication, there are more people who could be classified that way by the law than we would like to consider.”

Bill is silent. It’s true. He’d expected that with this kind of data, they could shut down all child pornography in Canada. Unfortunately, a lot of the data was marked as outside of Canada, and it was difficult to tell sometimes if data was being posted by the same person or not. They could send notices to web hosts that their Terms of Service were likely being violated, but so far they hadn’t found a lot of single major sources of the pornography.

“Now, Bill, I realise that this sort of data mining is a bit new. The United States and Japan have both started it as well. Someone is working on setting up a meeting soon with all three countries to see if we can’t share resources a bit. Maybe something will come of that.”

03:00 <acklas> So, your company is building a privacy tool anyone can use?
03:02 <nicnus> … Well, these days there’s a lot of privacy concerns this won’t solve.
03:03 <acklas> Sure… the spyware and stuff. Is there a solution to that, really? Things like MusicBox people are installing on purpose.
03:07 <nicnus> True enough.
03:07 <acklas> It’s suprising to me that they’re catching anyone that way. Wouldn’t people who were breaking the law not leave something activated that they know will get them caught?
03:08 <nicnus> These aren’t the mafia, grifters, or crackers. They don’t have lots of avoiding-the-police experience.
03:10 <acklas> Fair. What about the kiddie porn stuff?
03:11 <nicnus> You’ll note nothing major has come of that yet.
03:20 <acklas> What are you working on?
03:25 <nicnus> I’m reading through the MusicBox spyware protocol “crack” again.
03:25 <acklas> What are you thinking?
03:26 <nicnus> Could maybe write something that blocks MusicBox outgoing data.
03:27 <acklas> Interesting… would many people use it, though?
03:38 <nicnus> Probably not. People just don’t care that much about their privacy 😛
03:55 <nicnus> So… it’s possible, but not easy. Maybe I can make our product automatically “fix” computers that connect to the network 🙂
04:00 <acklas> A “good” virus? Don’t those make zombies? 😉
04:00 <nicnus> heh. MusicBox will probably just update their tracking if too many people block it out.

To: chan4watch@rcmp.gc.ca
From: bill.thompson@rcmp.gc.ca
Subject: Crackdown / Roundup

Listen all,

They won’t let us get anything done until we give them a substantial player. Pull the web browsing history of all identified offenders and search for a pattern. Maybe we can nail an imageboard or file host that these guys are using for their content. We don’t make policy, but we can make a media splash. The guys who **do** make policy are watching the media.

Next week they’re meeting with the FBI and someone from Japan. If they are willing to cooperate, we may be able to trace the international movement of this stuff. Too bad we can’t get the DHS to check internet packets at the border leaving the US, then we wouldn’t have this problem.

— Bill.

Maybe something will break soon. Bill is hoping it does. If the media makes a big deal out of this, maybe the public will be afraid enough that something can really get done. He is beginning to realise that data coming in from people who //know// they’re being spied on is only so useful. If only they weren’t so bound by policy and privacy concerns. After all, which is more important: privacy, or stopping criminals?

Our protagonist is winding down for the evening. Or midmorning. Whatever time it is now. He sets his IM to “away: sleeping” and turns off the monitor. Sometimes all this concern for the public’s interests gives him a headache. All Nicnus wants is to sleep, eat, debate, and hack. Or something like that. If people would care about their own rights, maybe he wouldn’t have to care so much.

That’s not going to happen. Nicnus is quite aware that the average human doesn’t give much thought to issues larger than the security of their homes.

All the lights are off in his house. He opens the fridge and stares into it.

“I’m tired, not hungry,” now he’s talking to himself. Sleep now. Tomorrow will be a work day. Maybe he can bury himself in code and forget for awhile about the outside world.

Our protagonist is skimming headlines. Most news these days makes it to him by way of messages from individuals, but he still follows a handful of sites just in case there’s something he misses. There is a story about the kiddie porn issue.

Privacy Commissioner’s Report on Spyware

The Privacy Commissioner released a report today on the proposed use of personal information gathering software, such as MusicBox, in the fight against child pornography. The report makes several good arguments in favour of giving the information to police, citing similarities to existing police information sources, such as access to security camera footage.

The report, however, stood strongly against giving private investigation firms access to this information, saying, “Private investigators are really just private citizens. They should not get access to such potentially personal information.”

UPDATE: the RCMP have begun collecting <link> information from MusicBox and others. The Commissioner has issued a statement, saying, “We are not going to wait for a decision on this. It seems legal. Let anyone in favour of child abuse sue us.”

Bill is leaving private investigation. He used to be a cop, long ago, and he switched for one reason: to get things done. He had been sick of having his hands tied as a cop, and wanted the freedom to bend the rules that came from acting as a private citizen. Now, however, the situation has changed. The information that will be instrumental in helping him eradicate child abuse is only available to the RCMP, so to the RCMP he applies. He has no fears that this new information source will be cut off from him. The Privacy Commissioner seems mostly in favour of letting the RCMP use the data, the RCMP themselves are using the data, and who is going to sue the RCMP for trying to stop child abuse? He knows some hackers are upset, but in his mind that’s only because hackers are criminals, they have something to hide. Only criminals have anything to hide.

Now, you must understand, it is not a lack of intelligence that leads Bill to think this way, but it is only ignorance. He has been misinformed as to the nature of hacking and the motives of most hackers. In his mind, hackers and crackers and the Russian mob are all one and the same. The differences between tinkering and experimenting, breaking for personal gain, and controlling botnets have not been explained to him, at least not in a way that he can relate to. Privacy, similarly, is not something he has ever been taught to value for its own sake. Since this data is being used be an organisation he trusts, he cannot fathom its abuse.

The phone is ringing. It is the call. He’s in. Really, it is no surprise. He found the data: it was his idea. They’re putting him in charge. Good.

Jack (jjdavis) is in town for the week. He and some others have been organising a keysigning. Our protagonist is perfectly happy to go along with this plan. It should be some geeky fun, at the very least. Jack seems convinced that the hammer is going to fall on crypto pretty soon, but even if his motives are paranoid he hasn’t gone crazy yet.

As Nicnus arrives he sees the following written on a whiteboard:

UserIDs, Fingerprints: ssh://anonymous@jjdavis.name/~jjdavis/Public/keysign23.txt
SSH Fingerprint: rodeo window crater. precise mailbox benny. apple brazil angel. decade danube cake
SHA256: split wisdom vortex. water mile love. castle cafe magenta. cola quick critic. norway victor ivory. symbol charter apollo. ozone basic option. animal reunion africa

Nicnus pulls out his laptop and taps a key to bring it out of suspend mode. He opens a terminal and soon has verified that the jjdavis.name he is connecting to is the real one, pulled down the file, and verified that said file has not been tampered with since the message went up on the whiteboard.

Jack waves at him, and he smiles back. He opens the text file and makes sure that his information is correct. Everything seems to be in order.

The room is quickly filling up. Many of the geeks are coming in with laptops, a few with only their smartphones, and some old-school paranoids with moleskin notebooks and fountain pens. There are also a few obvious non-geeks with lined or even regular printer paper and dollar-store pens.

One of the paranoids is complaining to Jack that the fingerprints and other security information being written down as a string of words instead of in hexadecimal makes it impossible to do the signing without a computer. Jack is pointing out that the file has been up for two whole days and the paranoid could have checked his information at home. He’ll need a computer for some parts of the process anyway.

Nicnus steps in to the conversation, interrupting, “How were you planning to verify your information in a text file without a computer?”

The paranoid waves a printout under our protagonist’s nose. “I shouldn’t need to carry around my secure information on portable hardware as part of the system whereby I protect my privacy.”

“Of course,” Jack rushes, “but the words are much easier for normals—”

“Do you have evidence of that? Pictures, I could see, but words?”

“Well, maybe. I certainly find them easier to rememb—”

“You can remember it either way. It’s not like you attracted a large number of mortals this way.”

Nicnus tries to shoulder back into the conversation, “You could just write down—”

“I could just do a lot of things. The organiser should have been more organised.”

“Pointing this out ahead of time—”

“That may be my fault,” Jack is trying to stop a full-fledged geekfight now, “This whole thing was put together quickly.”

Someone else has come into the discussion, “Just write down the information, and verify it later at home.”

Nicnus is happy. That’s exactly what he had been trying to suggest.

The paranoid is not happy, but this solution will have to do.

At this point, some readers may want to know what this event is all about. It seems like a number of geeks of varying levels of paranoia are getting together and… verifying things? What things? What is a keysigning?

It’s like this: some people (especially paranoid geeks) want to know who they’re talking to when they send someone a message. Especially if they are going to encrypt the message. It’s no good encrypting a message (which keeps anyone but the recipient from reading it) if you’re not sure the recipient is even the right person! There is encryption-related technology, called cryptographic signatures, that allows one to be certain that a message was signed by (and therefore from, or at least approved of by) a certain cryptographic key. Unfortunately, cryptographic keys are just really big random numbers. There is no way to tell, just by looking at a key, whose key it is. Enter keysigning. If you know who someone is, and you know which key is theirs, you can sign their key (along with a statement about whose it is) with your key. Then, anyone who knows which key is yours will see that you claim that key is theirs. Eventually, if enough people do this to enough keys, network effects make it so that everyone can know who owns every key. This is called the web of trust.

So, as this meeting progresses, Nicnus and everyone else in attendance stands up to verify that the keys noted in keysign23.txt are indeed correct. Then, photo identification, handwritten signatures, and other means of verifying identity are exchanged. Finally, everyone in the room knows who everyone else really is (to the extend that you trust their ID), and which key they own. Afterwards, people sign the keys that belong to the other attendees, encrypt the signature, and email this encrypted signature to the key owner. That way, only the key owner can publish the signature to the world, and they only receive it if they did not lie about their email address (which is usually included with the key).

During the meeting, our protagonist and Acklas hang out with Jack. He’s a friend, but he’s been living in Atlanta lately. Acklas is the first to bring up the incongruity of their friend being so security conscious as to run this event, yet choosing to live south of the border.

“It’s like this,” Jack says, “It’s more dangerous, privacy wise, right now, but that could change.”

“So go somewhere safer if you don’t like Canada either. Hole up in Switzerland, or the third world.” Acklas points out.

“Maybe. But situations anywhere can change. Better to know how to protect yourself.”

“Agreed, yes,” Nicnus breaks in, “but also a good part of protecting yourself is not living in the most dangerous of places.”

“To be fair, there are more dangerous places. China, for example.” Jack is trying to get around the issue, but they are not going to let him.

“Just because there are places that respect your rights less than the USA, that doesn’t—”

“Sure, fine, yes.” Jack is a bit agitated, “I like my job, and I’m close to friends. It works well, and the government only occasionally causes me problems. I keep a low profile, and anything that needs to be private is invisible.”

“What about going across the border?” Acklas.

“Or walking down the street looking as Middle Eastern as you do?” Nicnus.

Jack makes a face, “Racism is a big problem everywhere. The police have surprisingly not been a big bother. They hate black citizens more than me still. Border crossings are a pain, but my papers are in order and I don’t keep anything encrypted on the laptop when I take it with me. Everything goes up to the cloud,” by which he means, the Internet, “and I shred those portions of the drive. It looks to most anyone like there was never any private or encrypted data there.”

“Well…” Acklas is not convinced, but he can’t win this one.

“Do you have a plan to get out?” Nicnus has given in on the “staying there for now” argument.

“Yes. I live close to the airport, and I have a geek friend with a minivan. I keep Canadian, US, and Euro cash on me at all times. In the event that I need to jump, I order a plane ticket or ride out with my friend. My data syncs to the cloud constantly. Destroy the hard drive contents and run. Pretty simple.”

Bill is a private investigator. He has been for many years. He has had little experience with computer systems or the operations of the Internet.

That is, until recently.

Now, while he still does not have a great understanding of the systems, he is working with computers almost exclusively. Ever since that first bust on the two kids with downloaded movies, the media industry has kept him busy. Lots of evidence to sift through. Lots of people to sue.

Copyright infringement and related acts the industry was interested in were not criminal. That meant the police would not, could not, be involved. The evidence was all here, all being collected, but someone had to find actionable content and report it to the lawyers. The lawyers could then sue.
Bill is thinking about his life. It isn’t as glamorous as finding lost loved ones or ending underground operations, but it pays. Every private investigation firm is involved at least in part with the industry. It pays.

He pages aimlessly through some data. Surely there had to be something better he could be doing than this!

Now he notices it. Right there in the data stream all this time! He is looking at what amounts to a log of all digital footprints left by a particular system. If he had been looking for infringement instead of just paging around he never would have noticed the part of the stream he is noticing now.

Bill flips quickly through the data streams looking for more evidence on another system. After quite some searching he finds it again.

Child porn.

jjdavis: Police and PIs are asking gov’t to let them use spyware to find kiddie porn.

Our protagonist is exhausted. The poor guy who reverse engineered the media industry’s spyware is free. Free after the community raised over one million dollars in fines. Somehow Nicnus got pretty directly involved in that effort. An effort that now stands in his mind as a testament to the power of mass organisation online.

Stopping kiddie porn, though, now *there* is a use for spyware tech he can be in favour of! He replies to jjdavis.

@jjdavis that sounds like a good thing.

An IM pops up:

<jjdavis> Maybe. Basing it on spoofable data, though?
<nicnus> Hmm. But all data is spoofable.
<jjdavis> Somewhat, but not like this.

A tweet comes in, a reply from Acklas:

acklas: @nicnus it’s a privacy violation. #kiddiespyware

Nicnus isn’t worried too much about that, he types out a reply:

@acklas But it’s data that’s being collected anyway. #kiddiespyware

jjdavis is clearly following the tweets:

<jjdavis> It’s being collected for a different purpose, though. Media guys don’t have time to go over all the data… this gives another group access to look for something different.
<nicnus> If you want your privacy protected, just encrypt everything.

Another message from Acklas, replying to someone else:

acklas: @lucy2 everyone who cares about privacy is not a perv. That’s the reasoning I fear #kiddiespyware

Nicnus creates a chatroom and invites both Acklas and jjdavis. He pastes in a link to a webpage containing the log of his conversation with jjdavis so that Acklas is up to speed.

<acklas> Sure, we can encrypt everything, but a lot of people won’t.
<nicnus> those sorts of people have their privacy violated all the time without knowing.
<acklas> Not this much.
<jjdavis> I keep thinking about the French Revolution guillotines. What if anyone could accuse anyone of a crime and easily fabricate the necessary evidence.
<acklas> To be fair, not just anyone could.
<jjdavis> For a fee…
<nicnus> Oh…
<acklas> Oh…

Dinner with his family: that’s what faces our protagonist this evening.

It’s not that he doesn’t like his family, or that he doesn’t like dinner. The problem is more one of timing than anything else. His brother is back with the girl. The not-too-bright girl. He himself has his head far more firmly fixed in geek land than usual. What are they possibly going to talk about when all he can think of is crypto and politics, and all his brother can think of is how to avoid another emotional meltdown with what’s-her-face.

It’s time to go. Phone in his pocket, laptop in his backpack, Nicnus catches the bus. He sits somewhere near the back and pulls out his phone. His feeds and messages from mailing lists he’s on have been piling up. His finger flicks across the screen, his eyes scanning the headlines and subjects.

Something jostles his leg and his head snaps up. The bus is crowded and someone has sat down next to him. He squishes over to make room, and his mind returns to his phone. Companies dying and raising money, features being requested and built, and everywhere a little more worry about privacy and copyright than in the past.

Nicnus gets off the bus in front of his parents’ house. It’s quite nice that they live right on a major bus route. From the sound inside he can tell his brother has already arrived, and that his brother brought the girl. He takes a deep breath before entering. He never knocks here: he grew up in this house.

The girl is telling some story about what happened to her walking home from the mall. From the apparent emotion in her voice you’d think that almost tripping over a dog because you pay no attention to the world around you is the most exciting thing that can happen.

Nicnus can smell the dinner cooking. His mother makes amazing food, or at least he thinks she does. Certainly better than the toast, canned soup, and pizza he eats much of the rest of the time. His mother calls and soon they’re all seated in the kitchen saying grace, after which there is no need to converse for awhile, except to comment on how hungry one is and how good the food smells and tastes.

Nicnus is happy. Good food, good family, his worry was certainly unfounded. He’ll have to put up with some stupidity from the girl, no doubt, but that’s not so bad. He is munching along happily when his mother, of all people, asks him if he’s heard about the new measures being proposed to finally crack down on child pornography on the Internet.

He thinks for a moment, weighing out what he should say. He’s not sure what she wants to hear, nor is he completely sure of his own opinion. Finally he speaks. “I think it could be dangerous.”

The girl speaks up quickly. “How can stopping child abuse be dangerous?”

He glares at her, biting out his reply, “I said the measures in question could be dangerous.”

His mother can smell trouble while it is far off, and she steps in to attempt a course correction now. “I was just curious, no need to get upset.”

“But there is need,” the girl has no intention of being helpful, “the Internet has been a problem for years.”

“Hold on,” says the brother, “I don’t think you mean to say the Internet is a problem–”

Now she is quite visibly upset, “But I do! What good has technology brought? Wars, pollution, porn, abuse, theft, money laundering, no good at all!”

Nicnus’ brain is confused. She hates all technology? What does that even mean? She watches movies, and probably doesn’t mind handplows…

Some time later the discussion has fizzled out around him. The girl is signalling strongly to his brother that they should leave. He recalls his father speaking in favour of the Internet, getting the discussion back on track a little. Ultimately, however, the girl was very unreasonable. His brother finally picks up on his girlfriend’s hints and they take their leave.

Nicnus is left for awhile making small-talk with his parents until the next bus. Normally he would suck at this, but he’s had such conversations with his parents all his life. Finally, he is walking to the bus: head awhirl, and a little upset. How could anyone hate the Internet?

His phone is in his hand, earphones in his ears, his finger spinning through his music for something to restore order. He punches up some Technical Death Metal and Power Metal and hits random. The wall of powerful sound reaches deep into him, slowly restoring order as he rides home.

22:01 <acklas> http://openparliament.ca/bills/ << parliament has tabled a bill to deal with the volume of court cases.

Our protagonist is doodling on his arm with a pen. One of the few things meatspace (as opposed to cyperspace) has going for it: absent minded doodling. Not that the Internet hasn’t given him all kinds of things to occupy his mind. Sometimes he just needs to doodle and think about nothing.

22:05 <acklas> I guess if we’re going to have so many court cases being brought by one entity, we might as well reduce the cost to the taxpayers.

Bouncy jazz flows from the sound system in his room. The happiness in the music doesn’t match his emotions at all, but he isn’t really listening. He spins idly in his chair, mind occupied by the geometry appearing on his arm as the pen leaves its trail of blue.

fakepm: Why try court cases when obviously the pirates are guilty? #C63
acklas: @doctorow taxpayers’ $$ are going into the suits. Maybe limits are good.
m0rty: So cute. My daughter sleeping with puppy http://twitpic.com/12_g
jjdavis: Hitler upset about C63 youtu.be/a80c

His pen runs out of ink. Now he’s chewing on the cap. He hits a key combination so that he can post to his microblog:

Drawing on my arm. #bored

He ought to be doing work. He telecommutes, and as long as he delivers the boss will leave him alone. He just doesn’t feel motivated today.

22:15 <acklas> What do you think?
22:15 <nicnus> mi na se raktu
22:17 <acklas> lojban?
22:17 <nicnus> u’inai
22:19 <acklas> If you’re so bored, then do something.
22:19 <nicnus> darsygau mi ma
22:24 <acklas> What audaciousness do you bring about? ??
22:24 <nicnus> Dictionary says darsygau = encourages
22:24 <acklas> Oh.

Less bored. Mental exercise, however small, wakes him up a little bit.

The doorbell is ringing. Why is the doorbell ringing? He sets himself to away and reflexively locks his screen. The music is still playing. He’ll probably be coming back right away anyway.

His brother is at the door. Something irrational has happened in his relationship with his girlfriend. She is his girlfriend now, they finally decided to call it that a week or so ago. His brother comes in and sits down. Now there’s a torrent of emotion and confusion. It seems pretty trivial. The situation is a misunderstanding. Those usually clear themselves up, and when they don’t, making sure all sides know what really happened is often sufficient.

His brother is really upset. He has grown very attached to the girl. He’s afraid something bad will happen to their relationship because of the situation. Of course, he doesn’t say all of this. He has come to his older brother to vent, and perhaps for advice, but the depth of his emotion is not communicated.

Our protagonist listens, and then reaches around in his mind for the culturally acceptable response to this. What would he want said to him? Whatever that would be, it’s not what he should say. His brother does not want to hear that the problem is of his own making and will probably go away in time.

“That sucks. She’s being so unreasonable.” That’s the statement he finally lands.

“I know, right?” His brother seems to have accepted this direction for the conversation.

Our protagonist is lost deep in a chunk of code. This bug has taken precedence over everything else today. IMs and other incoming communications are queued up in some window that he is not looking at. He hasn’t eaten all day. Not that he notices any of this, his mind is bent on the problem.

Someone nearby starts a lawnmower, temporarily breaking his concentration. The sound is mostly white noise, however, and he quickly filters it out. There’s a developers’ meetup tonight, and he wants to have this code done by then.

This is as good a time as any to describe his living situation. As you may have gathered, he lives alone and telecommutes to work. His home is a small house near downtown with easy access to public transit. Most of his time is spent in his office, which is more like a den. When he does go out, it is usually to attend some event where a large number of attendees will be geeks.

While it may seem strange that he spends much of his day conversing with geeks on the Internet, only to go out once or twice a week to converse with many of the same geeks in meatspace, this is similar to the pattern lived out by many such people. Periodic meatspace meetups provide a very high-bandwidth platform to communicate to many at once, and also give some semblance of a traditional social life.

This particular event is made up primarily of presentations by attendees. One guy presents about designing a new metalanguage that could be translated so that programming could be done without knowing any English. Another presentation is about something to do with a Microsoft product. Still another is about an application whose primary selling point seems to be that it has a pretty interface. Probably a Mac application.

One presentation in particular, however, interests our protagonist and his friends. This developer has all kinds of data about the spyware that the media industry has installed on computers belonging to the majority of consumers. The spyware that is fuelling the lawsuits.

He first demonstrates that the spyware is sending back way more data than just filesharing usage and what songs are on the hard drive. It is monitoring emails and IMs for certain keywords, logging passwords and private keys, and all of it tagged with as much personally identifying information about the user as possible: name, email address, even telephone number if it is to be found on the system.

This sort of behaviour does not surprise anyone, but has the potential to be pretty scary.

Next, however, is the really interesting part. The data being sent back to the media industry is all digitally signed so that it cannot be spoofed. That makes sense, since if someone could just send in any data the entire system could be compromised.

The key used to do the signing, however, was not being rotated. In fact, even if it were being rotated, anyone could monitor the spyware getting the new key. This means that, in practise, anyone who has the spyware has the key. This is fundamentally the same problem that plagues all DRM systems, and in effect renders the entire system vulnerable.

Anyone could submit any data to the media industry, and sign it with their own key! Nicnus pulls down the source code to the utility that the presenter has written as an example of how one might do just that, and begins to peruse.

He waves his hand up in the air and the presenter stops to take his question. “Doesn’t this mean that any of the so-called pirates being railroaded through the courts could be completely innocent?”

The gathering snickers as one, and the presenter responds, “Yes, but we already knew that.”

“No, I know,” Nicnus hops up, “but doesn’t this mean that there’s a potential legal defence here? Reasonable doubt can exist that any given data from the software actually came from the software.”

“Since no one is exploiting it right now, I doubt any judge would consider it reasonable to doubt the validity of the evidence.”

Another hand goes up, “Just pointing out, that using this software is probably not legal.”

“Oh, yes,” the presenter apologizes, “I thought that was obvious. I’ve proved this *can* be done, but I’m certain that actually doing it would be in violation of the IP treaty.”

Our protagonist awoke the next morning to find a number of microblog messages waiting for him:

jjdavis: Spoof tool casts doubt on accuracy of media industry spyware: http://is.gd/c9a5j
acklas: RT @eff github.com taken down for hosting illegal software. http://j.mp/ol5z
jjdavis: Woah! The code is gone already! #mediacrack
acklas: Github back up. They took down the exploit example code. #mediacrack
m0rty: I hate Thursdays. Neeeed cofffeeeee.
piratepartyca: RT @doctorow #mediacrack author taken in by police for questioning http://tinyurl.com/xsb6
acklas: @lucy2 It’s important because he’s been arrested for *writing code*.
acklas: Is anyone raising money for legal defence? #mediacrack

Today will probably not be boring.