Attack Surface

by Cory Doctorow

There are a lot of decades in which it would suck to have your telcoms run by an incompetent, greedy kleptocrat, but the 1990s represented a particularly poorly chosen decade to have sat out the normal cycle of telcoms upgrades. Because internet.

I was religious about updating the forward, even though (or because) it meant my mom could reach me whenever she wanted to, which was both more often than I wanted to speak to her and less often than I wanted her to want to speak to me.

(for “basically impossible” think of all the hydrogen atoms being turned into computers that worked until the universe’s heat-death to guess the answer, and still running out of both space and time).

Now let’s talk about software updates and backdoors: all the software running on all the computers you rely on is, approximately speaking, total shit.

I am pretty good at sitting still and waiting. It’s an important skill in my line of work. Impatience, not fear, is the mind-killer. I used to calculate Fibonaccis in my head, but eventually I found a way to get into that same no-thought space without the useless math.

The guys who closed deals for spyware were inevitably the kinds of colossal assholes you found in sales, but with even less conscience, if you can imagine such a thing.

But you technical people have a disease: it’s called ‘solutionism.’ You see every challenge as a problem and every problem as having a solution and every solution as being a piece of technology.

Any data you collect will probably leak, any data you retain will definitely leak, and we’re putting data-collection capability into fucking lightbulbs now. It’s way too late to decarbonize the surveillance economy.

The reality is, there was a kind of blip when a minority of working stiffs—white dudes, mostly—held a little more political power, that lasted for less than a century. Now, humanity was returning to its baseline: all or nothing, with a tiny super-rich minority able to control everyone and everything else. The smarter your device, the harder it would be for you to outsmart it. Technology didn’t create the brief democratic blip, and it didn’t kill it, but now that it’s dead, technology will sure as shit make sure it never comes back. Those days are done.

She scolded me in Russian for being drunk, which is practically what Russian was invented for.

All the world hates a girl, in special and vicious ways that goes way beyond even the mountain of shit we shovel onto young dudes. They get toxic masculinity and we get “you throw like a girl” and “scream like a girl” and “you’re such a pretty girl.” Mansplaining and creepers on BART and whistling out of car windows.

Send a device a specific bad instruction and it would open up like a Hoberman sphere, allowing the attacker full access to its mysterious interior.

Security is a team sport, and your data is only as secure as the sloppiest person in your group.”

The plural of anecdote isn’t fact.”

Normal Greek heroes who had to sail through siren-infested waters had an opsec protocol to keep themselves from being lured to their watery graves by the sirens’ irresistible songs: they would fill their ears with wax to create a firewall that was impenetrable by the sirens’ freespace acoustic network infiltration attempts.

Economists call this a “Ulysses pact”—the bargain your strong, present-day self makes with your weak, future self.

The time to act is when you still have privilege and power, not when you’ve had it stripped from you.”

“I have given this offer more consideration than it is due already. Now, fuck off. Then keep fucking off. Fuck off until you come up to a gate with a sign saying ‘You Can’t Fuck Off Past Here.’ Climb over the gate, dream the impossible dream, and keep fucking off forever.”

This is probably my favourite line in the whole book....

Carrie Johnstone lived in a feudal world, where everyone had to align themselves with a lord for cover—even court sorcerers like me. I would have to become a creature of Xoth, to save myself from Zyz.

A train pulled onto the platform and you put your hand in mine and said, ‘Come on, Mama.’ “Your hand in mine, it pulled me back from the edge. I was ready to go over but instead, I was pulled back. By you.”

Other people are never the problem. Sometimes, though, they’re the solution.”

The world was going through a phase-shift, what had been a smooth grade from poor to rich, with plenty in the middle, was becoming a cliff.

She never tried to disguise her age, wore it in a kind of mannish way, the way the old Borises in Slovstakia did. I am very old, and that means I survived this long. Ask yourself: What must I have done for that to be true?

The thing is, I’d always known that compartments weren’t a good thing. They were just the least terrible thing I had.

The thing about being a compartmentalizer is it makes you good at realistically assessing situations. Compartmentalizing isn’t about kidding yourself: it’s about knowing exactly how terrible things are, so you know whether or not to stuff it in a box and never look at it again.

People use technology to make themselves free, by using it to share and organize and connect. Freedom isn’t something technology gives you, technology is something you use to get freedom.”

the point of fake news isn’t just to make it so that no one can tell what’s true, it’s to make it so that no one cares anymore, so that when you try to get all your friends to go out and march about something that they should already be thinking about, they’re all like, ‘Eh, is that even real?’ Your enemies don’t need people to disagree with you, they just need people not to care.”

No one would vote for that shit, never, and that’s why they have to keep it a secret. I promise you, it’s not a secret because they know you’ll be delighted by it and they don’t want to ruin the surprise.”

So the A-team was off drinking bulletproof coffee in Mountain View and the B-team was building liquidity-provision algorithms in the City of London and the C-team was working for US military contractors and the D-team was working for the US military and the E-team was doing startups and the F-team was writing cryptojacking scripts and injecting them into ad networks and so on. The Z-team who’d worked for the Slovstakian presidents? They didn’t even know well enough to encrypt their hard drives.

We’ve been experimenting with mindful device use.” Thankfully, the line quality was poor enough that he didn’t hear my eyes rolling so hard they fell out of my face and bounced all over the old wooden floors of my Berlin flat.