Or was the inability of the IBM to unscramble the data something else entirely?
Nathan had an idea of where to start.
“You’ve been gone a long time,” Emily commented, looking up at Nathan who she presumed had been in the Cube this entire time.
“And you look pissed,” he said, unconcerned that he’d missed lunch.
“You know that graphics special interest group I subscribed to a few months ago,” she said. “It turned out to be a lot of crap. No useful info at all, just tons of emails from individuals drawing attention to themselves. I set up a rule a few days ago to redirect those mails to my junk folder.”
“I’d have done the same,” he agreed.
“Problem is that my junk folder is filling up rapidly,” she said. “So I opened one of the mails and clicked on the ‘Unsubscribe’ link.”
“Good idea.”
“Bad idea,” Emily said, with frustration. “I was getting ten to twenty emails a day from them. Since I’ve unsubscribed, I now get double that.”
“How about designating them as spam and let the email server take care of it?”
“Then I’d have to do that with each new sender,” she fumed. “It makes me so angry.” Emily appreciated that Nathan was trying to help, but she was just venting and wanted someone to listen. She didn’t always expect an instant solution from him to all her problems. His way of caring, she guessed, so didn’t mind too much.
“I may be able to help with that,” Sven said, joining in the conversation. “What’s common to all those emails, Emily?”
“Just the user group’s graphic signature,” she responded. “But I can’t set an incoming email rule on an embedded image, only words, subject lines, that sort of thing.”
Sven looked at her with a conniving smile. “Give me a few minutes.”
“You have that twinkle in your eyes,” Emily said. “What do you have in mind?”
“You’ll see.”
“I’ll leave you two to get on with whatever devious schemes you’re concocting,” Nathan said. He didn’t need to inquire about any change in status with the decryption. Sven would have informed him without having to be asked.
Through no fault of her own, Nathan thought, as he walked into his office, Emily seemed to be the butt-end of all the junk out there on the internet. She commented on this regularly when she was shopping online; something Nathan loathed. Each time Emily entered her phone number into a website claiming that her personal information would only be used for quality assurance purposes, she was inundated with calls from duct-cleaning services. Personal data collection and analysis by private enterprise was indeed a very profitable business. Collection by the government on the other hand… Well, that was another story.
Seated in front of his computer screen, Nathan looked at the problematic data. Its filename and extension◦– NAFB_C08B12.mp3◦– suggested it was a regular audio file. He had used voice commands to open it with a specialised binary editor.
A few months ago, Nathan decided to activate the IBM’s voice and speech modules. Although the super-computer could deal with thousands, even millions, of voice commands concurrently, Nathan and his team agreed that it should only converse through one workstation’s speakers at a time. Having an office full of developers giving commands and getting verbal feedback would have been no better than trying to concentrate in a schoolyard at recess. To preserve the serenity of the open-plan office, developers were quite content carrying on as they were; using keyboards and touchpads.
If any of them did want to use voice simultaneously, it would only work at their station with a headset/microphone combination plugged in. It could be independently set to accept spoken commands, keyboard, or both, and respond verbally or visually. Further, the computer voice’s pitch, tempo, bass, treble and echo could be adjusted to suit personal preference.
Nathan got accustomed to this new way of working and wondered why he hadn’t thought of using speech recognition earlier. This particular piece of software was created by Warren Ellison, JW’s lifelong friend, part-time lover and expert in artificial intelligence. Enunciation wasn’t required and Nathan, or anyone else for that matter, could talk to the IBM in much the same way as speaking to a person.
Although mostly active in Nathan’s office, primary voice dialog could be switched to any other workstation on the thirty-first floor on request.
After the first week, in a moment of playful boredom, Sven made a few adjustments to the module. The IBM argued with every command Nathan gave it. If he told the computer to do something, it would respond with, “NO”, “WHY?”, “WON’T” or “DON’T FEEL LIKE IT”. Everyone in the open-plan office was privy to what Sven had done. Emily had to duck behind her monitor, she was laughing so hard watching the going’s on in Nathan’s office. Waving his arms about, he started arguing back, to which the IBM responded, “I’M ON LUNCH”. What was even funnier, to Sven at least, was that he had modified the voice and speech mannerisms such that it mimicked Emily.
It took Nathan about five minutes quarrelling with the IBM before he realised he’d been had. “Sven!” he shouted, marching out of his office.
“Having trouble with your computer?” Sven asked calmly.
Emily couldn’t believe how Sven managed to keep such a straight face, but after a few seconds, the entire office, Nathan included, burst out in raucous laughter.
“Oh, Nate,” Emily said. “You should have seen yourself.”
“What?” Sven said, looking at Emily. “You don’t think I went to all this trouble without also turning on Nate’s camera, did you?”
Emily just loved being a part of this family of computer geeks.
Rolling his chair closer to the screen, Nathan examined the metadata of file NAFB_C08B12.mp3. No surprises; Linear Pulse Code Modulation, or LPCM, a standard configuration for uncompressed sound was used as the encoding scheme. Digging further into the file’s internals, Nathan detected no unusual program code, nor were there any loop instructions.
“Hang on…” Nathan said to himself, and leaned closer toward the screen. “That’s odd?” He unexpectedly spotted something that he recognised immediately◦– the binary signature for Lempel–Ziv–Markov, or LZMA, compression.
“Damn it!” he shouted to himself, slapping his hand on the desk and walking out his office. Just about every computer user on the planet knew about these particular file types. “Sven, you can cancel the decipher process.”
“What?” Sven asked, looking up with a puzzled expression.
Chapter Nine
“I said that you can cancel the decipher process,” Nathan repeated to Sven. “That file is nothing but a normal ZIP file. Change the extension from MP3 to ZIP and decompress it. Then we can have another look at it.”
Sven attempted to follow Nathan’s instruction. “I can’t,” he said. “You still have it open.”
“One sec,” Nathan said, marching back into his office. He instructed the system to close the file. “Try now.”
“Okay, renamed,” Sven said. “Decompressing now.”
Nathan understood why the NSA’s deciphering software was having such difficulty. As complex as these programs are, they weren’t designed to recognise this specific bit-pattern. SkyTech’s internet facing firewall scanned the internals of all incoming ZIP files, and if deemed safe, unzipped them and forwarded the decompressed version to the IBM for threat analysis.
Emily, now intrigued, interrupted what she was doing and wheeled her chair closer to Sven’s desk so that she could see what was going on.
“You’ve cracked it?” she asked.