Dr. Pragasu, having developed a friendly relationship with these California hackers, is pimping them to his big money contacts. That's what gives.
This is very interesting from a business standpoint. But Randy finds it a bit irksome and threatening, this one-way flow of information. By the time they go home, this assemblage of shady gmokes is going to know everything about Epiphyte Corp., but Epiphyte will still be in the dark. No doubt that's exactly how they want it.
It occurs to Randy to look over at the Dentist. Dr. Hubert Kepler is sitting on the same side of the table as he is, and so it's hard to read his face. But it's clear he's not listening to John Cantrell. He's covering his mouth with one hand and staring into space. His Valkyries are furiously passing notes back and forth, like naughty cheerleaders.
Kepler's just as surprised as Randy. He doesn't seem like the kind of guy who delights in surprises.
What can Randy do right now to enhance shareholder value? Intrigue is not his specialty; he'll leave that to Avi. Instead, he tunes out the meeting, opens up his laptop, and begins to hack.
Hacking is an overly glorious word for this. Everyone in Epiphyte Corp. has a laptop with a tiny built-in video camera, so that they can do long-distance videoconferencing. Avi insisted on it. The camera is almost invisible: just an orifice a couple of millimeters across, mounted in the top center of the frame that surrounds the screen. It doesn't have a lens as such-it's a camera in the oldest sense, a camera obscura. One wall contains the pinhole and the opposite wall is a silicon retina.
Randy has the source code-the original program-for the videoconferencing software. It is reasonably clever in its use of bandwidth. It looks at the stream of frames (individual still images) coming from the pinhole camera and notices that, although the total amount of data in those frames is rather large, the difference from one frame to the next is tiny. It would be altogether different if Frame 1 were a talking head and Frame 2, a fraction of a second later, were a postcard shot of a Hawaiian beach and Frame 3 a diagram of a printed circuit and Frame 4 a closeup of a dragonfly's head. But in fact, each frame is a talking head-the same person's head, with minor changes in position and expression. The software can save on precious bandwidth by mathematically subtracting each new frame from the previous one (since, to the computer, each image is just a long number) and then transmitting only the difference.
What it all means is that this software has a lot of built-in capabilities for comparing one image with another, and gauging the magnitude of the difference from one frame to the next. Randy doesn't have to write that stuff. He just has to familiarize himself with these already-existing routines, learn their names and how to use them, which takes about fifteen minutes of clicking around.
Then he writes a little program called Mugshot that will take a snap shot from the pinhole camera every five seconds or so, and compare it to the previous snapshot, and, if the difference is large enough, save it to a file. An encrypted file with a meaningless, random name. Mugshot opens no windows and produces no output of its own, so the only way you can tell it's running is by typing the UNIX command
ps
and hitting the return key. Then the system will spew out a long list of running processes, and Mugshot will show up somewhere in that list.
Just in case someone thinks of this, Randy gives the program a fake name: VirusScanner. He starts it running, then checks its directory and verifies that it has just saved an image file: one mug shot of Randy. As long as he sits fairly still, it won't save any more mug shots; the pattern of light that represents Randy's face striking the far wall of the camera obscura won't change very much.
In the technology world, no meeting is complete without a demo. Cantrell and Fohr have developed a prototype of the electronic cash system, just to demonstrate the user interface and the built-in security features. 'A year from now, instead of going to the bank and talking to a human being, you will simply launch this piece of software from any where in the world,' Cantrell says, 'and communicate with the Crypt.' He blushes as this word seeps through the translators and into the ears of the others. 'Which is what we're calling the system that Tom Howard has been putting together.'
Avi's on his feet, coolly managing the crisis.
The Chinese guys look relieved, and a couple of them actually crack smiles when they hear Avi speaking Mandarin. Avi holds up a sheet of paper bearing the Chinese characters[13] :
Painfully aware that he has just dodged a bullet, John Cantrell continues with a thick tongue. 'We thought you might want to see the software in action. I'm going to demo it on the screen now, and during the lunch break you should feel free to come around and try it out yourselves.'
Randy fires up the software. He's got his laptop plugged into a video jack on the underside of the table so that the sultan's lurking media geeks can project a duplicate of what Randy's seeing onto a large projection screen at the end of the room. It is running the front end to the cash demo, but his mug shot program is still running in the background. Randy slides the computer over to John, who runs through the demo (there should be a mug shot of John Cantrell stored on the hard disk now).
'I can write the best cryptographic code possible, but it's all worthless unless there is a good system for verifying the user's identity,' John begins, regaining some poise now. 'How does the computer know that you are you? Passwords are too easy to guess, steal, or forget. The computer needs to know something about you that is as unique to you as your fingerprint. Basically it has to look at some part of your body, such as the blood vessels in your retina or the distinctive sound of your voice, and compare it against known values stored in its memory. This kind of technology is called biometrics. Epiphyte Corp. boasts one of the top biometrics experts in the world: Dr. Eberhard Fohr, who wrote what's considered to be the best handwriting-recognition system in the world.' John rushes through this encomium. Eb and everyone else in the room look bored by it-they've all seen Eb's resume. 'Right now we're going with voice recognition, but the code is entirely modular, so we could swap in some other system, such as a hand geometry reader. That's up to the customer.'
John runs the demo, and unlike most demos, it actually works and does not crash. He even tries to fake it out by recording his own voice on a pretty good portable digital tape recorder and then playing it back. But the software is not fooled. This actually makes an impression on the Chinese guys, who, up to the point, have looked like the contents of Madame Tussaud's Dumpster after an exhibit on the Cultural Revolution.
Not everyone is such a tough sell. Harvard Li is a committed Cantrell supporter, and the Filipino heavyweight looks like he can hardly wait to deposit his cash reserves in the Crypt.
Lunchtime! Doors are hauled open to reveal a dining room with a buffet along the far wall, redolent of curry, garlic, cayenne, and bergamot. The Dentist makes a point of sitting at the same table with Epiphyte Corp., but doesn't say very much-just sits there with a dreadfully choleric expression on his face, staring and chewing and thinking. When Avi finally asks him what he thinks, Kepler says, levelly: 'It's been informative.'
The Three Graces cringe epileptically. Informative is evidently an extremely bad word in the Dentist's lexicon. It means that Kepler has learned something at this meeting, which means that he did not know absolutely everything going into it, which would certainly rate as an unforgivable intelligence failure on his scale of values.
There is an agonizing silence. Then Kepler says, 'But not devoid of interest.'
Deep sighs of relief ventilate the blindingly white, plaque-free dentition of the Hygienists. Randy tries to imagine which is worse: that Kepler suspects that the wool was pulled over his eyes, or that he sees a new opportunity here. Which is more terrible, the paranoia or the avarice of the Dentist? They are about to find out. Randy, with his sappy, romantic instinct for ingratiation, almost says something like,
Randy has chosen his seat tactically, so that he can look straight through the door into the conference room and keep an eye on his laptop. One by one, members of the other delegations excuse themselves, go into the room, and run the demo, imprinting their own voices into the computer's memory and then letting it recognize them. Some of the nerds even type commands on Randy's keyboard; probably that ps command, snooping. Despite the fact that Randy's got it set up so it can't be meddled with too much, it bothers him at a deep level to see the
