I know a fair bit about tech, if I do say so myself. Taught myself to edit, taught myself to set up dual-boots and secure proxies to dodge the snoops. But I’d never really got down into the guts of the machine, the electronics and other gubbins. They were a complete mystery to me. Being around so many dismembered and eviscerated computers made me feel like I was getting out of my depth. I liked the feeling.
“What is this place?” I said.
“Aziz’s place,” Jem said. Aziz looked back over his shoulder at us and grinned like a pirate. “Aziz is the best scrounger in all of bloody London. He’s got the good stuff, mate.”
We came to our destination, a cleared-away space with some long trestle-tables that served as workbenches, cluttered with semiassembled (or disassembled?) computers. In one corner was a big four-poster bed, unlikely as a sofa in the middle of the motorway. It was piled high with grimy pillows and bedding and even more computers. Beside it was a rolling clothes rack, the kind I’d seen in big department stores, crowded with clothes on hangers and even more clothes draped over the top.
“Right,” Aziz said. “What you after? Gaming? I bet it’s gaming. You look like a twitchy sod.” He seemed to be enjoying himself—there was nothing threatening or hostile in his gruff bearing. I guessed that he didn’t get much company and was glad to have it.
“I do video editing,” I said, feeling slightly awkward about it. It was one thing to upload a mashup and show people how hot you were, another thing to expect them to believe it.
“Right,” he said. “No problems. How much you looking to spend?”
Jem grinned. “Nuffink,” he said. “Whatcha got?”
He made a fake-sour face. “Jem, boy, you’re taking liberties again.”
“Come off it, Aziz,” he said. “You’ve got more junk here than you can ever flog. And haven’t I found you some of your best kit?”
He made his face again. “Oh, you’re a chancer. Right, okay. How’s this sound, then: Twelves gigahertz, sixteen gigs of RAM, four terabyte raid, two gigs of VRAM, twenty-five-inch display?”
My jaw dropped. I was literally drooling, in danger of having dribble slosh down my chin. “That sounds pretty amazing,” I stammered.
“One thing,” Aziz said, “before we start. You planning on doing anything dodgy in the copyright department? No offense, but you’re a mate of Jem’s, so I assume you’re a depraved pirate.”
I looked at Jem, wondering what to make of this. He was grinning and holding up two fingers behind Aziz’s back, but in a friendly way. So I said, “You got me. I’m a depraved pirate. Incorrigible.” I put on a medieval, dramatic voice. “Don’t blame me: blame society, for it made me the sorry soul what you see before you.”
Aziz smiled broadly. “You’re overdoing it. You were doing okay until you got to ‘what you see before you.’”
“Everyone’s a critic.”
“There’s a reason I ask,” Aziz said. “And that’s because I figure that you’d like to keep your skinny white butt out of prison.”
“Good assumption.”
“Right. Well, if you’re going to attain that objective, you’ll need to be careful about the kind of kit you use. The rubbish you buy in the high street, it’s got all kinds of little snitches built in that’ll finger you if you ever get nicked. So what you want is to be highly selective when you assemble the gear.”
I shook my head. “I’m not following you,” I said.
“He’s talking about trusted computing,” Jem said.
“Oh,” I said. “That.” I’d heard about TC, a little. All the bits in your computer had small, secure chips on them that users couldn’t alter. Your computer and operating system could use those to know which components were installed and to make sure they weren’t counterfeit. Some operating systems would refuse to use dodgy parts. But like I say, I was a video editor, not a boffin. I could google up a recipe to get my computer to do something and follow it, but it wasn’t like I was paying much attention. Needed to get back to my video editing, didn’t I?
“You probably think that trusted computing is there to stop you from accidentally using fake cards and that in your computer, right?” Aziz said.
“Yeah,” I said. “I get the feeling you’re about to tell me there’s more to it.”
“Top pupil,” Aziz said. “Have a seat, I’m going to tell you something that might just save your arse.”
I pulled a rolling chair up to Aziz’s workbench. Jem waved at us. “I’ve heard this already. Going to go have a shufty around the shelves, all right?”
“Don’t mess up my filing system,” Aziz said.
Jem looked pointedly at the overflowing, madcap shelves and shook his head. “Naturally,” he said. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”
Aziz sat down opposite me and grabbed a video card from the workbench. It was a big, fat thing, with two additional fans and a huge heat-sink. He grabbed an anglepoise lamp with a built-in magnifier and shone it on the card, lowering it so that I could peer through the lens. With the tip of a screwdriver, he pointed at a spot on the board.
“See that?” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. It looked like any of the other surface-mounted components on the circuit board: flat, black, smaller than my little fingernail. I looked closer. There was something odd about it. It didn’t have any markings silk-screened on it. It wasn’t just soldered onto the board, either—there was something covering the places where the pins entered the board, clear and hard-looking, like it had been dipped in plastic. “Something weird about that one, yeah?”
“Oh yes,” he said. “That’s the Trusted Computing snitch. It’s a nice bit of engineering: triple thickness of epoxy alternating with corrosive acids that will destroy the chip if you try to remove it. Got its own little on-board processor, too, and some memory it uses to store a cryptographic certificate.”
I shook my head. “Sounds like spy stuff,” I said. “I had no idea.”
He set the board down, pushed away the lamp. “Here’s the thing no one really gets. Ten years ago, a bunch of big companies and governments decided it would be handy if computers could be redesigned to disobey their owners, keep secrets from them. If there were secrets stored in computers that owners couldn’t see, you could get up to all sorts of mischief. You could make sure that computers never copied when they weren’t supposed to. You could spy on peoples’ private communications. You could embed hidden codes in the video and photos and network packets they made and trace them back to individual computers.
“But keeping secrets from a computer’s owner is a pretty improbable idea: imagine that I wanted to sell you a chest of drawers but I wanted to fill one of the drawers with a bunch of secret papers. I could glue and nail and cement that drawer shut, but at the end of the day, once it’s at your house, you’re going to be able to drill it, saw it, burn it—you’re going to get into that drawer!
“So we’ve been having this invisible arms race for the past decade, users versus manufacturers, trying to hide and recover secrets from electronics. Sometimes—a lot of the time—users win. This chip”—he gestured at the video card—“is practically impregnable to physical attack. But there’s a bug in its on-board software, and if you know the bug, you can get it to barf up its secret certificate. Once you’ve got that, you can forge the secret numbers it embeds in the video it processes. You can get it to pretend to be a different model of card. You can get it to save video you’re not supposed to be able to save.
“When a card like this is cracked, the manufacturer has to stop selling it, has to go back to the drawing board and find a way to fix the flaw. New versions of the operating systems are released that try to block using insecure cards in the future, but that doesn’t work so well, since someone with a cracked card can always get it to impersonate a more secure, later model. Still, manufacturers regularly have to pitch out mountains of junk that some clever dick has worked out how to compromise.”
I shook my head. “You’re joking. They ju
st throw it away because someone’s figured out how to get through that stupid little chip?”
He nodded. “It’s true. Weird, but true. You see, to get your gear certified for use with the big Hollywood studios’ copyrights, you have to sign an agreement saying that your kit won’t leak films onto the Internet. Once it does—and it always does—you have to fix it. But since the chip is soldered onto the board with self-destructing superglue, you can’t really take it off, fix it, and put it back. So you have to bin it. Bad for the planet.” He winked. “But good for us.”
A light went on. “You get it all out of the bin when they chuck it?”
“Oh, I wish. No, most of this stuff gets chucked out in China and Vietnam and that. But whatever the local distributor has, I get. Which means that I’ve got the world’s biggest supply of gear whose spy-chips are known to be hackable. This card here—” he picked it up again. It was lovely and huge, the kind of graphics card that’s meant to look good in the shop, all hot colors and fans that looked like they belonged on a military hovercraft. “This card is fast as blazes. Fantastic for gaming, fantastic for cutting video and doing your own effects generation.
“And what’s more, the clever people who designed it forgot to take out their testing suite before they shipped it. So there’s a mountain of code in here that lets you go around the security measures, hijack the snitch-chip, and get it to give up its secrets, left over from when they were prototyping it and getting it to work. It’s a dumb mistake, but you’d be surprised at how common it is. Anyway, a month ago this thing was worth eight hundred quid and now I’m finding them by the dozen in bins all over the place.”
It was too weird to be true. “I don’t get it: why would a store or a distributor throw it away? Wouldn’t people want to buy a card that they can hack to do more? Wouldn’t that make it more valuable?”
“Oh,” he said. “Right—no, sorry, I’ve explained it badly. Here’s what happens: you find a crack for a card and put it on the net. The entertainment bosses find out about it and have kittens. So they add something called a ‘secure revocation message’ to all the films and telly and that, and the next time you try to load a film or show on your box, it refuses to play, and you get an error saying that your video card is not capable of displaying this film. You take it down to the shop and they swap the card out, and the manufacturer foots the bill and chucks out your old card.”
“But I thought you said you could hack the card so that they couldn’t tell what model you’re using?”
“Oh, I can do this. I can show you how to do it, too. But the average person doesn’t know or care how to hack their card. So your villains and pirates and that get to go on merrily using their cards in ways that make Hollywood furious, but the punters and honest cits have their gear deactivated. It’s a mad world, but there you have it.”
I could remember times that Mum and Dad had had to replace their gear because of technical problems, but I’d always assumed that this was because they didn’t really understand technology. Turns out it was me who didn’t understand. Of course, everything I watched was pirated, which meant that it wasn’t going to be sending any of these “revocation messages.”
“Christ,” I said. “Why aren’t people spitting about this?”
“Plenty of people are. But it’s so easy to defeat if you know what you’re doing that everyone who gets angry just solves the problem and stops being angry. Like I said, it’s only the honest cits who don’t even know they’re getting screwed who really get hurt by this.”
I wondered how many snitchy secret numbers my computer had snuck into the videos I’d released. Maybe it wasn’t so bad that someone had stolen my lappie. It made me feel violated and claustrophobic to think that for years I’d been practically living inside a computer that was taking orders from somewhere else, doing things behind my back that could get me in trouble.
“Right,” I said. “Let’s build a computer.”
* * *
It didn’t work at first. Using junk parts and weird, off-brand operating systems was a lot harder than just getting a machine from the library that’d been rebuilt for giveaway to local kids. But as the hours wore on, I found that I was understanding things I’d never really understood, getting under the bonnet of the machine that I used every day of my life, all day long, stripping away layers of artifice and metaphor to actually touch the bare metal and feel the electricity coursing through it.
There was something liberating about working with kit that was fundamentally worthless—stuff that had started out as rubbish. Several times, I misconnected a wire and blew out a component, making eye-watering curls of smoke and melting plastic smells. But Aziz never seemed to get upset, just took anything that looked melted and tossed it into a huge steel barrel at the end of his workbench, then got replacement parts from his infinite shelves.
“It’s just junk, lad, don’t sweat it.”
Jem helped out, too, though he didn’t know much more about computers than I did. But he had a good sense of space, and had lots of helpful suggestions for cramming all the bits and pieces we decided on into the laptop shell that Aziz had chosen for me. It was a little bigger and bulkier than I would have liked, but that meant that there was room for more gubbins inside, which meant that I could shop longer and harder for the choicest morsels to power my new deck.
Once I had all the pieces assembled and could get the computer to switch on without bursting into flames or exploding, it was time to get an operating system built and configured for it.
Aziz said, “You say you’re cool with Linux, yeah?”
I nodded. There were a million operating systems that were called something like “Linux” and if you googled too deeply, you’d find massive holy wars over which ones were and weren’t Linux and what we should be calling them. I didn’t pay that any attention, though. I’d been dual-booting my computers into Linux since I was a little kid. Mostly it just worked—you took any old computer, stuck a Linux thumbdrive into it, turned it on, and let it do its thing. Sometimes it’d act weird and I’d have to look up some arcane incantation to type in to get it running again, so I knew that there was a lot going on under the bonnet that I wasn’t anything like an expert in. But then again, I didn’t know much about the hardware stuff, either, but it hadn’t been as hard as I’d feared. It had just gone together, like Lego.
But the software stuff eluded me. I had built a frankencomputer of surpassing strangeness. What’s more, I wanted my operating system to work in concert with illegal, compromised drivers for all the cards and components that would get them to lie about which cards they were, to leak protected video out the back doors I’d rudely hacked into them, to pretend to insert watermarks while doing no such thing. This wasn’t about sticking in the drive and pressing GO.
“Want a bit of advice?” Aziz asked, round about midnight, as I cursed and rubbed my eyes and rebooted the computer for the millionth time.
I slumped. Jem was even less of a software guy than I was, and had taken over Aziz’s bed, taking off his shoes and curling up and snoring loudly.
“Yeah,” I said. “Advice would be good.”
“Your problem is, you’re trying to understand it. You need to just do it.”
“Well, thank you, Buddha, for the zen riddle. You should consider putting that on an inspirational poster. Maybe with a little Yoda: ‘There is no try, there is only do.’”
“Oh, ungrateful child. I’m not talking in metaphor—I’m being literal. You’re sitting there with all those tabs open in your browser, trying to work out every aspect of Linux microkernel messaging, binary compatibility between distributions, and look at that, you’re trying to read up about compilers at the same time? Mate, you are trying to get a four-year computer science degree, on your own, in one evening. You will not succeed at this.
“It’s not because you’re not a smart and quick young man. I can see that you are. It’s because this is impossible.
“What you’re trying to d
o now, you’re trying to learn something about as complicated as a language. You’ve learned one language so far, the one we’re speaking in. But you didn’t wait until you’d memorized all the rules of grammar and a twenty-thousand-word vocabulary before you opened your gob, did you? No, you learned to talk by saying ‘goo-goo’ and ‘da-da’ and ‘I done a pee-poo.’ You made mistakes, you backtracked, went down blind alleys. You mispronounced words and got the grammar wrong. But people around you understood, and when they didn’t understand what you meant, you got better at that part of speech. You let the world tell you where you needed to focus your attention, and in little and big pieces you became an expert talker, fluent in English as she is spoke the world round.
“So that’s what I mean when I say you need to stop trying to understand it and just do it. Look, what you trying to do with that network card?”
“Well, I googled its part number here to see why they had to stop making it. I figured, whatever it wasn’t supposed to be doing, that’s what I wanted it to do. It looks like the reason Cisco had to pull this one was because you can open a raw socket and change a MAC address. I don’t really know what either of those things are, so I’ve been reading up on them over here, and that’s got me reading up on IP chaining and—”
“Stop, stop! Okay. Raw sockets—that just means that you can run programs that do their own network stuff without talking to the OS. Very useful if you want to try to, say, inject spoof traffic into a wireless network. And it’s great for disguising your operating system: every OS has its own little idiosyncrasies in the way it does networks, so it’s possible for someone you’re talking to to tell if you’re running Linux or Windows Scribble or a phone or whatever. So if there’s something that won’t talk to you unless you’re on a locked-down phone, you can use raw sockets to pretend to be a crippled-up iPhone instead of a gloriously free frankenbox like this one.
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