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This afternoon. How did you know about that?

Bitchan told me.

She a cheating slut?

Yeah. Something like that.

But, you'll never guess with who.

Does it matter?

Sam Novak.

Don't know him.

CTO of Emergent See.

No sh*t!?

I rooted his office computer this afternoon. I'm searching their network right now, as we speak.

Oh, no. Will, no, no.

I told you I wasn't.

It's too heavy for Backdoor.

I'm not using your network.

Yeah. And Hash told you what Emergent See does.

Large-scale data-mining. That means NSA. They'll find the intrusion.

If anyone sees anything, they're just going to think that Novak has his own botnet.

Fine. I think you can do it.

And I think you can get away with it. But, not here.

What is your problem?

Not. Here.

I don't go on dates. I don't go clubbing.

I don't care about celebrity hookups or which sports team just won.

My universe exists entirely within computers.

The moment we come up with a way to not have to eat, or sleep

or any of the other things required to stay alive... I'll be the first in line.

And by in line, I mean online, breaking in and reading about it.

Then, Bitchan and I will get together and bootstrap a homebrew version for ourselves.

Because copyrights, patents, trademarks, and all the other

ephemeral concepts of ownership are a time-bomb.

Animal trainers teach a dog by giving the dog some treat it likes.

They call this paying the dog.

I do what I do for love. Anything else is a form of slavery

a reduction of my humanity.

Which is why I feel the moral liberty to search through Emergent See's

network and download all of their recently developed programs.

After all, they are a government contractor. In this country, that means they work for me.

Ownership is an illusion. I don't value money.

I acquiesce to social norms only in so much as it's required

to keep myself alive... and connected.

Take a look at the world around you.

You get in your car, which is run by a computer.

You watch TV, which is run by computers.

Any concept you have a world that doesn't involve electronics is naive.

Of course, you can manufacture a reality to suit your delusions if you like.

What difference does that make to me?

It's just one less person I have to deal with.

Because, if that's your choice, then you are irrelevant.

You cease to exist in any meaningful way

except as extremely low-hanging fruit.

That is, until you get a seat on the senate and make idiotic laws

like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Copyright hinges on two interrelated ideas:

One, scarcity.

Two, if we want a section of our society dedicated to making cool stuff

then we've got to keep the people who create that stuff alive

and doing what they do best

like Emergent See's program called Shepherd.

I open it up, read a few lines of hex, and quickly recognize none of it.

But Hash... he codes like stream-of-consciousness poetry.

Maybe he can make sense of Shepherd.

I slurped a bunch of programs from a network I hacked into.

Any cool ones?

One's interesting.

Where did you get it?

Emergent See.

That's some serious sh*t, man. Did you disable Wi-Fi?

Yeah. But, I don't know what it did.

Okay. To hell with it. Let's take a look.

Okay. So, type shepherd.

Shepherd? They called it Shepherd?

Pride comes before a fall.

I know, right?

Okay. It's a bit sparse.

This part looks like a standard terminal...

But, this code here looks like it's trying to start an SSH tunnel.

Where's it calling?

It's calling? I don't... I don't know.

Do you think it's government?

Who knows? We need to give it access to find out.

Well... they'll know where we are.

And that's why, my friend, we're so close to the neighbors.

It'll buy us a couple minutes.

Any preferences?

Ah... I love the communal nature of San Francisco.

So caring. So sharing.

So love-ed.

Best Mike Myers movie ever!

Okay. Well, that's as far as I go.

Whatever it is, they don't want company.

Be careful, Will. Sudonym was right.

Emergent See's nasty... like Orwellian and sh*t.

Maybe Decimate can hack in.

Well, meanwhile, I'm going to stream So I Married an Axe Murderer.

She stole my heart and my cat.

We know two things about Shepherd:

One, it's calling something outside itself.

Two, it leads to a login screen.

Doing that in public was not smart.

I've got to go someplace where Wi-Fi signals can't escape.

You know those crazy people who wear aluminum foil hats

to protect themselves from the brainwashing space-rays?

The space-rays don't exist. But the foil?

That reflects almost all radio signals in existence.

It's similar to what the CIA uses to make their black-rooms.

And yes, the do call them black-rooms.

Of course, if you don't ground it, the reflective metal becomes a giant antenna.

So, the crazies, with the foil hats are actually amplifying

the fictitious space-rays, if they wear rubber-soled shoes.

Today's questions are: what is Shepherd doing; and who is it built for.

Whoever wrote Shepherd spent a long time doing it.

The entire thing is written in a proprietary language.

And, since my debugger only understands standard languages

there's just too much code to know what it's doing.

On to question two.

Who is Shepherd built for.

Time for some Cartesian logic: any system can be understood

if you break it down to its component parts.

Study the parts, figure out what they do

then you'll have a pretty good idea of what the whole thing is doing.

But, like I said, it would take weeks to figure out all of Shepherd.

So, I look for one very specific part.

I only need to find out who it's trying to talk to.

That will be a single ingredient... one number.

The IP address of the server it's calling.

In the late 1950s, MIT hackers believed as I do

that information should be free.

This ideology leads people to call us crypto-anarchists

an oversimplification to the point of error.

Just because I don't hold to the tenets of a government

quickly devolving into fascism doesn't make me an anarchist.

I don't have a label for what I do... beyond "hacker".

You could just as easily call me a libertarian.

Except, I'm not sure government has a place at all

or what it might look like in a future without conventional trade.

Or, maybe communist is right... except that means that all are community property

as opposed to no one owning anything, which is closer to how I feel.

Godwin's Law states that as online discussions grow longer

the probability of comparisons involving Nazis or Hitler approaches certainty.

The reason for this is because we, as a species, don't like vagaries.

It's because we come from people who needed to know

whether or not there was a tiger in the woods. Their lives depended on it.

My neighbor Brian bakes meth for the Oakland chapter of an infamous biker gang.

Walter White, he's not.

The idiot must have blown himself up.

The sentence for manufacturing an illegal controlled substance in the

state of California is usually up to 7 years.

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