| >I don't think it takes a math genius to see how this is a bad idea. I agree, it has long been a key trope of sci-fi; >We've crashed her gates disguised as an audit and three subpoenas, but her defenses are specifically geared to cope with that kind of official intrusion. Her most sophisticated ice is structured to fend off warrants, writs, subpoenas. When we breached the first gate, the bulk of her data vanished behind core-command ice, these walls we see as leagues of corridor, mazes of shadow. Five separate landlines spurted May Day signals to law firms, but the virus had already taken over the parameter ice. The glitch systems gobble the distress calls as our mimetic subprograms scan anything that hasn't been blanked by core command. >The Russian program lifts a Tokyo number from the unscreened data, choosing it for frequency of calls, average length of calls, the speed with which Chrome returned those calls. >"Okay," says Bobby, "we're an incoming scrambler call from a pal of hers in Japan. That should help." from Burning Chrome, by William Gibson. You could even argue that it is one of science fiction's founding tropes, as it can be traced back to the stories regarding golem. |