This Blue Ball | Page 2

and various forms of
intimidation: identity theft, surveillance by investigators for who knows what imputed
crime, and plain old threatening phone calls. This strategy, heavy-handed as it was,
succeeded in isolating the Blue Ball doctrine, quarantined in the coffins of society
members and in archived disks of a frightened few. And this effort would probably have
succeeded without the dogged pursuit of one last blueballer. This gentleman was not a
live friend of Mr. Phissure, but he, too, found his way to Phissure's material and
Phissure's point of view, and one might say that he became a friend of Phissure, despite
the fact that his friend was ash in a vase, languishing on a shelf until the day that
sub-orbital spreading of ashes across the atmosphere becomes affordable for a mere
mortal.
Our neo-blueballer, a not-so-gentle soul by the name of Gary Corinth, became a believer
not through his own gumption as much as through someone else's plight. I will be telling
their tale in due time. For now, let me clarify a few things for those joining my audience:
your usual tricks won't work. You won't be able to hack in and find out who I am, and
denounce me with your accustomed puerile bravado in your favorite Yahoo or Netnews
group. For those of you who don't know what I'm referring to, let me explain. Since my
postings are anonymous, some netizens will Pavlov-style decide that my anonymity must

be torn asunder, ripped from me like the delusions of a Nero fiddling among his own
smoldering ruins. They will apply the usual bag of tricks to try to uncover my identity,
most of which involve a standard set of network searching tools -- quite useless in this
case. For the more incorrigible, the bag of tricks will include efforts to hack into the
server that should hold my identity.
Hacking is a much oversold activity. In its simplest form, it's usually nothing more than
the rote application of a small set of principles, a cookbook of possibilities. The whole
field of hacking was created by a tempting loophole in John von Neumann's insight into
computer design: that computer memory need not be divided between operation and data,
between program and information. This created the universal computer -- the device able
to adapt to any computational task -- but it also created a perfectly agnostic tool, as
susceptible to the service of perversion as to that of good. I rely upon the rings of security
built into the weblog server to protect elements of my identity. But these rings are an
illusion built upon illusions. Just as the principles of computational order coexist with the
chaos of information, security exists in a musical round with collapse.
We attempt to build principles of security that will control access to the other algorithmic
building blocks within the computer, but this intervention is a block of code like any
other block of code. If you, the would-be hacker, can derail the transition into the security
code, you can disable any security safely, confidently, without the slightest alarm going
off. If you require an example: a highly successful approach in the case of Web servers
has been, for years actually, to send a URL that causes a block of code with security
principles to fail utterly, perhaps by sending an extra long URL, and then appending a
command that the fail-over code executes. That execution, in turn, gives the hacker an
opportunity to assume control of the execution queue in the CPU, and he's on his way.
There's no inherent reason why this approach should work, but equally no inherent reason
why security should work. It's all just code, amoral algorithms, manipulable instructions
piled one upon the other in memory or on a disc.
Script kiddies use the cookbook put together by more studied hackers to break into
someone's computer, and suddenly they're masters of cyberspace. Some of these juveniles
are no doubt already busy trying to break into the server that this weblog runs on. Sorry,
boys, the sys admins have been thoroughly warned, every possible entrée has been
carefully closed and sealed. Even the easiest way to overcome security -- the frail human
interface to the code -- has been carefully pruned and cleaned up; almost nothing else
runs on the box. The box itself runs in a foreign land that is decidedly uninterested in
governmental intervention from the West.
Most importantly for our zealots, the staff of the hosting service doesn't know who I am.
They have agreed to some compromises in their usual demands for accountability, this
time in exchange for heftier billings. All transactions have been small and untraceable
international transfers. Even the best source of contact -- my logins to the machine -- is
carefully cloaked through an