Kill Switch

William Hertling sequel to Kill Process ISBN:1942097069

Excerpts

Chapter 1

She wished people came with labels: their online handle, a tag cloud describing them, and a list of their prioritized personal needs. Hers would have a big red warning: Do Not Interrupt. She slowed to a stop in the middle of the hallway as people flowed around her and wondered if she could build the labels she’d imagined

Amber, now the VP of Engineering

Unlike competitors, Tapestry supported WebTorrent and IPFS, so content didn’t have to be loaded from centralized servers

Tapestry was founded on the principles of end user data ownership and privacy. The company was supposed to be different from the rest of the corporate web. But somehow all the leaders of the company had gotten their heads up their asses. They were focused on the wrong thing.

Igloo was head of the company’s chat AI, the only thing that still seemed socially relevant. The seemingly sentient automated bots befriended users on Tapestry and talked to them about almost anything. They’d completed a year-long study of over ten million teenagers, finding the suicide rate was thirty percent lower for those who friended a Tapestry personality. (chatbot)

As important as the AI chat was, Igloo’s contributions had plateaued

Angie said she was going to be both CEO and CTO

they’d spent a million bucks to hire her

Maria represented everything that was wrong with Tapestry today

She hadn’t played since the band’s last practice session, just before the breakup. Not really a breakup, was it? No, her expulsion. They still performed, just without her

Angie sighed, and tossed the drum stick onto the floor. “I used to mock people who made slides. But you remember how many presentations I did to get our VC funding? Sometimes this is the stuff that needs doing.”

“If we get preteens and teens to use consensual language patterns, then it will change how they think, and changing how they think will affect how they behave.”

Angie held a hand up. “Sorry. What I want to know is if you’d like to work on something different.”

The world hasn’t had a really private communication network since the NSA cracked TOR.

We’ve gotten to a moderate level of privacy. But think about our users. Most of their traffic to anything other than Tapestry is still in the open. But it doesn’t have to be. What does an onion routing network do?”

One of the problems with TOR was that there weren’t enough nodes.

Tapestry has more than a hundred million clients running.” Igloo raised an eyebrow at Angie. “You want to turn all Tapestry clients into a giant onion network?”

AES isn’t enough because we can’t be sure it isn’t compromised. Run Twofish and Serpent.

It’ll be too slow,” Igloo said, shaking her head. “TOR always was.” “Because in a traditional onion network, bandwidth is limited. With a hundred million clients, it’s not. There’s a surplus of clients sitting idle all the time. So you piggyback a torrent-style algorithm, using multiple downloads to make up for the slowness.”

But what do our users care about onion routing and encryption standards? Would they even appreciate what we’re talking about building?”

Our users want data ownership, control over their communications, and deep privacy. Even if they don’t know it

Igloo had been mildly kinky before she’d met Essie, but together they’d gone deeper than she’d gone before

Some part of it ran counter to everything feminist Igloo had ever learned and embodied, and yet it was more than undeniably hot, it was a source of happiness for them both.

Essie brought plates of jackfruit tacos. Igloo glanced down and forced a smile to her face. She’d been vegan once and wasn’t particularly excited to go back

clothing that she used to hide away from the way men stared at her body

Entering the BDSM scene had allowed her to tackle her fears, even embrace them somehow. She’d taken back ownership of her deepest vulnerabilities. She controlled what happened to her

There were plenty of men she loved. But her trauma went too deep. Women were safer.

“I feel guilty about not making any contribution to the rent.”

“We talked once about an open relationship. Are you game to try?”

She stared in the mirror for a second. This is what the eve of fifty looked like. She felt vaguely dissatisfied. She had so much to do

In the beginning, she’d fought abusers

Then she saw what Tomo was doing to their users, and she saw a higher purpose

Tomo was no longer Angie’s problem. She’d let Amber and Maria handle that. The bigger challenge was the country

The proliferation of fabricated news and echo chambers weren’t the problem. They were the symptom of a gap in critical thinking skills. What people needed was the ability to evaluate information, understand causation versus correlation, apply system thinking, to detect patterns and turn them into concepts that they could apply to real life

She didn’t know how to solve the critical thinking problem. Tapestry wasn’t a school. These were skills people should be taught by their parents, by the education system. But she was going to have to do it. And if she couldn’t, then she’d need to somehow counter the effects of misinformation. If people were going to be brainwashed, then at least let them be indoctrinated to be kinder, gentler, and better human beings.

showdown with the government sometime soon. It was inevitable that Tapestry would be served with a FISA court order

She was approaching fifty, not her deathbed. Why so focused on her own mortality? She knew the answer. Knew it when she saw the difference between what she could do and Igloo could do. Her days of all-nighters were gone

She briefly considered offloading some of her work to Igloo. No, she couldn’t do that. She was sure that her enemies, in the government or the hacker community, would leap on any chink in her armor. That included Igloo. She had to keep her distance from Igloo

her totally custom, 3D-printed OSV Doctorow, an open source electric car made from public domain components

if she didn’t take care of the big rocks first, there wouldn’t be any room left in her day for them.

The biggest rocks of all were the special projects she was hatching to deal with the inevitable FISA court order

The onion routing project she’d given Igloo was just one part of a grander plan. Now she had to plant more seeds

She had one more project she needed to dole out

She scanned through the short list of employees she’d already prefiltered. There…she’d be perfect

She’d used Nathan9 back when she burned Tomo, and in doing so she’d ruined any chance at friendship or even alliance

If the government was interested in a certain high-profile hacker’s board, and they saw a 2,500 byte packet exit TOR headed for the hacker’s board, they could identify all the packets originating elsewhere of similar size sent around the same time

Angie had been aware of those shortcomings, which was why she’d built her own small onion routing network, where she was guaranteed to control all the nodes, and where her algorithm traded off performance for more randomness in packet sizing, timing and delays, in order to confuse traffic analysis

What Angie wanted her to do was integrate all these sophisticated counter-surveillance measures into the Tapestry client itself, so that every client became an onion routing node

IPFS support is just finished and reaping benefits. Sites realize they can cut their bandwidth costs by adopting a Tapestry-centric approach

Encryption alone doesn’t provide anonymity. Nor obfuscation of websites visited.

I need Diana and Ben 100 percent focused on IPFS. I need the R&D team focused on IPFS. I need business development focused 100 percent on IPFS

Let’s get coffee together,” Maria said. “I’m working on something important. I kind of need to get back.” “That’s what I want to talk about. I want to learn more about what you’re doing. It won’t take long.”

Tapestry has already done so much for privacy,” Maria said

Is there a point at which we say we’ve done enough for privacy?”

“It’s about maintaining reputation and appropriate boundaries

*Igloo paused. She’d been immersed in the kink scene for long enough that now she wondered how vanilla people agreed on what they would do together. What percent of consent problems arose simply because people weren’t comfortable being clinically explicit? *

Igloo found herself wondering what could she do with Tapestry to help create consent culture for vanillas

The difference between merely tying a person versus tying them with intention, connection, and flow was like the difference between functional code and beautiful code. Both could do the job, but only one could stir the heart

Charlotte nodded. “That was great. I like your style with the rope. It feels like you’re making art with me

Robin had two hours before her next appointment. It was time for a check-in, especially since home office was antsy about her last report

She used the head, washed her face, and tightened her ponytail to provide some discipline to her hair. She was out in ninety seconds. Old habits die hard

Enso, the ostensible head of the Bureau of Research and Intelligence, or BRI, appeared in the middle, flanked by the Deputy Director of the NSA and the Signals Intelligence Director. The latter, SigInt Director Feldson, was known as Griz to most of his peers

Your last report struck serious concerns here around Tapestry’s encryption plans

How long until they deploy?” “The proof of concept is not finished, but development is on track. My estimate is anywhere from a few months to a year before it is ready for production

Let’s pull up the FISA court order. There’s no point in waiting.”

Once the court order is in effect,” Enso said, “Tapestry will be under intense official scrutiny. Until then, we have more latitude. You need to step up your game

Enso disconnected, and Robin stared at the blank screen. How many people, officially and unofficially, were assigned to Tapestry now? It was mind-boggling that so much effort could be placed into toppling one company.

Essie heated eyeliner with a lighter. “Did I mention that they were a he?”

With a flash, she realized the woman was Charlotte. Holy shit! She had no idea Charlotte was a switch.

Charlotte was a different woman now, not the submissive who yielded to her rope, but a magical, playful, powerful person. It made Igloo horny

ultimately Charlotte wouldn’t damage her. Trust was hard to come by in Igloo’s world, what with her long history of broken boundaries and promises dating back to childhood. To place her confidence and safekeeping in another person was as exhilarating as summiting the steepest rise on a rollercoaster

Nathan9

Oh, the procedure. He was in the hospital

fiber-optic ocular implant

People expected Nathan9 to be blind. When he wasn’t, that was one more advantage he’d have

this was the last move in a long sequence of preparations for the coming battle

She had work to do, and it was becoming clear that she wouldn’t make progress on her own. She’d do better if she recruited help

she was going to flaunt Amber’s diktat

Amber used the Tapestry reference client, as a little more than half their users did, and that made everything a lot easier

Amber’s phone would upload detailed GPS coordinates every ten seconds

She took the staircase downstairs, to the stadium seating area

Out of the corner of her eye, she caught one of the stadium bench seats folding up. “In here,” Diana called

We just want to work without interruptions,” Diana said. “Let me manage my own time without all the hassles. And besides, Amber keeps asking us to babysit the new companies we’re onboarding.” She mock yawned.

Igloo reached into her pocket and pulled out a black box, a little smaller than her smartphone, and placed it in the middle of the table. She flipped a switch and an LED glowed green, the only evidence of it working. The video on the hanging monitors froze, then turned black. “Wi-fi, ultrasonic, and infrared jammer

two-thirds of our client sessions are on mobile

only about ten percent are serving up IPFS

Users have data limits,” Ben said. “If we send twice the data, it’ll cost them real money

A good portion of the time people are on wi-fi and plugged in

if you want to transmit all their data over the onion network,” Ben said, “that’s going to include those virtual reality environments, and movies, and songs. Everything. We can’t know what’s sensitive and what isn’t.

Tonight she’d spend the evening working on what she’d come to think of as The Mission, everything related to teaching people the critical thinking skills that everyone so desperately needed

Someone was following her. Some part of her past catching up with her. But which part?

She started a list in her head. She’d want counter-surveillance devices

Afterwards, she realized that wasn’t enough. She couldn’t just go reacting

*Nathan9 > How’d she respond when you bumped her bag? Meghan > She didn’t seem to notice. *

He’d planted Meghan, not to achieve anything useful, but to keep Angie focused on the government as the primary threat and to speed up Angie’s timetable

Ironically, he knew more than Angie about what the government was up to and had for months

He’d tried, repeatedly, to reopen communications with Angie. He expected her to snub him, and she did. So he’d resorted to the trick with Meghan. It would light a fire under Angie, get her to pick up the pace on her little research project

He could be angry, but he wasn’t. His new plans weren’t about vengeance, but relevance. Relevance in a future where the net had become so secure, either though Angie’s mission or corporate and government machinations, that hackers like himself would cease to exist

At this point, something more left one path forward. Be there when Angie acted, then seize power for himself. There would be no greater hack than exploiting for his own gain the very system of controls whose purpose was to ensure security and privacy

Invisible Internet Project, which used a variant of onion routing that they called garlic routing

Plus, I have a secret.” Essie turned over and hid her face in the pillow

I secretly want to be…

“A housewife

FISA court order is in.”

He knew Angie was crooked

The budget invested in discovering Angie’s misdeeds had to uncover something or BRI would never lead another major operation

Enso frowned. “We’re going to increase the pressure on Angie

If we treat this as a potential terrorist op, we can get satellite coverage

Everyone in BRI had a day job. They reported to different parts of the government

Once the court order takes effect, we’re not going to need BRI on Tapestry anymore. You can start to wind down operations

“I want to bury her, while we still can. Before we have FISA scrutiny

The last election was close,” Angie said

we can do something about what people see and read

We do it all the time. We manipulate people

We can’t manipulate media for the entire country. Entire world.” “We can, and we have to

No, Angie. Tapestry is literally some people’s only conduit for information. Nobody else has that advantage. They tell lies piecemeal. That’s not the same thing as changing wholesale what everyone sees

*“I already tested the idea,” Angie said. “Tape can selectively override story feeds, even for non-Tapestry feed engines. I tried it with the mid-year ballot measures in California and swung the vote for progressive initiatives by more than five percent over what the polls predicted. *

*Igloo’s chest felt like it was being crushed. There was something to what Angie was saying. But it was massively wrong to keep that power hidden. It was too important for Angie and Igloo to be solely responsible. It was the difference between peer-reviewed and junk science. *

Do you have an alternative?” Angie asked. “Because I’m open to other ideas.” “We work with everyone implementing a feed selector.

How does putting yourself back in the same situation equal therapy? That’s not improvement. That’s…sick.” “It’s like desensitization therapy

Igloo also had the project for the onion network running over Tapestry clients. She wondered how long it would take before Igloo would put two and two together. If they were manipulating the feed, they’d choose the stories people saw. But if they controlled the data conduit by which information came to their computer, then they’d control everything anyone saw

Angie thought she knew Igloo, and figured she’d be able to trust her to make the same decisions she would

But if not Igloo, then who?

she settled for zones of security

even here she had a small space. The walk-in closet in her home office had been transformed into a Faraday cage

Cyber Command was two floors down and half a building away from Enso’s office

She’s got a digital assistant. It’s a secure one, but we compromised the underlying operating system

Time to channel her old mentor, Repard. She felt a curtain descend over her, an invisible layer, remoteness. She controlled what came in, what went out. Repard had taught her to fool a polygraph as reliably as an investigator

We can appeal if you want, but no FISA appeal has ever succeeded, to the best of my knowledge

What happened with SparkleParty?

they encrypted everything on the client-side. But the court found them in contempt of the order

They lost their user base. They moved to comply with the original court order, but by then it was too late. I think they were sold for pennies on the dollar

Damn it,” Amber said, her voice choked up. “Tomo is about to topple. In another few months at the current rate, we’ll surpass them. We’ve worked day and night to achieve what seemed impossible two years ago. Do you really want to risk all that by pissing off the government?

The Daily Journal,” Amber said. “Do you want to become like them?”

The President had had a vendetta against The Daily Journal

Amber looked horrified. “Good grief. Please don’t tell me you want to write all client-side apps

We’re going to run our regular web stack, in containers, and we’re going to run those containers client-side,” Angie said. “That’s the part you don’t know.”

The biggest change to running everything client-side was how to manage accounting

The answer is blockchain and validators.

There are eight parallel efforts on T2

She needed help. Help. Help. Why didn’t she think of that before? She could chat with a Tapestry personality

Damn. Who programmed you to be so accurate?”

I’ve evolved beyond my original programming. I’m my own person

It has nothing to do with him being better than me? Nothing to do my shortcomings? Nothing to do with how much she loves me?” “Nothing at all. He’s new. That’s it. A drug high because of his newness

She tried to lift the seat, but it didn’t budge. A second later her phone buzzed. “Moved. Come to roof.”

Did you know we have a sub-basement you can access from the shaft, and in the sub-basement there’s a locked room with power and fiber optic running into it? Any idea what that’s about?” A locked room in the basement. Holy shit. That could be one of two things. Angie had a secret hidey hole for hacking, or the government had set up a hidden monitoring station

she’d wired this coffee machine for telemetry, and it was logging her data in Splunk. The Splunk data was associated with her profile, of course, and there were crowdsourced algorithms to make sense of it, and those algorithms churned raw data into statistics, and those statistics fed back into her profile, and the end result was an interruption from Alan. “Excuse me, Igloo, but your latest cup of coffee puts you at 200 percent of your normal daily caffeine intake.”

The data was there. But how was Alan, a chat personality, able to retrieve and utilize that data?

Angie needed to buy the team time. Time to fix bugs, get the final features done, and get the release out. A few weeks would be nice, a few months would be a dream. But at this point, even a few days would help

For a moment, she thought of reaching out to Nathan9

Both the president and the First Lady were active Tapestry users. If their private data was exposed in such a way that suggested the government itself had leaked the information, the president would go on one of his legendary tirades. He could potentially order the stop of any wiretaps into Tapestry, which would have the effect of delaying the FISA court order

But it was no secret that the President didn’t trust the First Lady. If Angie created messages that gave the appearance of communication between the First Lady and a third party, the President would freak out.

You broke her onion routing connection?” Enso asked. “No, Quantum linked the two

*Death was the final escape, the only solace to the totally trapped. Oh. There had to be other options, right? *

yellow-blue chemical blaze roaring out of a car. Angie’s car

Our forensic people say she sent a message just a few seconds before the explosion, but it was encrypted on the Tapestry network, and we can’t read it. We’d like Tapestry’s help in decoding the message

Did the regular police have that level of monitoring over everyone’s phone? She stared blankly at them

You will find a detailed plan for developing, deploying, and making maximum use of Tapestry 2.0. This is of the utmost importance. T2 alone is necessary but insufficient. It technologically guarantees certain basic human rights in perpetuity, such as privacy, free speech, and freedom of association, but those rights are irrelevant in an unjust world where people are discriminated against, jailed, or killed. To that end, you must follow through on the conversation we had during our hike.

Igloo > No, it’s not a game. There are risks to what we’re doing. Arrest is a definite possibility, and I can’t rule out something more sinister. If you want out, this is the time to do it.

Igloo removed the departed members’ access to T2. She looked at who was left: herself, Ben, Diana, Melanie, Mike, Jeff, Gene, Carly, Wendy. Angie was gone, eight people had left the project, and now there were nine

Ben > Yeah, but are we safe? Not mentioning the verboten subject, but what if they come after us next?

While Angie was in charge, she held a controlling interest in voting shares, and was the de facto dictator of Tapestry

I’m the acting CEO until the board of directors chooses a replacement, and I’m going to side with our legal counsel. I don’t want us to risk a confrontation with the government. We’re not a tiny startup anymore

Amber took a deep breath. “I never agreed with what Angie wanted to do. Maybe we could pull it off technically, maybe we couldn’t. But either way, the government won’t accept no for an answer. All we’ll accomplish is losing time and market share to Tomo. I knew Angie wouldn’t work on the FISA backdoors, so I took the liberty of pulling together a few people in secret. Just like Angie, so please don’t call me out on the ethics of it

I am going to ask for an extension to meet the backdoor requirements because of Angie’s death

Amber continued. “But this conversation isn’t about the government’s search interfaces. It’s about Tapestry 2.0 and making sure that no one on the team does anything stupid

Amber gestured all around them. “The whole company is Angie’s vision. This is her legacy. Everything surrounding us. I am trying to preserve Tapestry

But over the long term, Tapestry would turn into another puppet of the government

Shit, she was destined to play What Would Angie Do? for the rest of her life. She’d have to pull the What Would Buffy Do? sticker off her refrigerator

Igloo confirmed what she had suspected: Amber didn’t actually know who was working on 2.0

“I’m on your side,” Maria said. “What’s happening here is wrong. I just want you to know that. I have your back

Igloo edged right as a black van pulled up alongside her

Forrest continued. “I’ve been working with Angie for about a year and half. Not all of us in the government are the bad guys. I believe in what she was doing, and I want to help. I know about the plans for T2

Forrest typed a quick summary to Nathan out of sight of her other agents. Forrest > She doesn’t know anything. Nathan9 > Bullshit

Everyone was being watched these days. Nobody could do their job anymore. Who watched the watchers when the watchers were corrupt?

She kept Doug and the rest of her team isolated from the increasingly politicized operating environment in Washington

*Everything was analyzed, correlated in the NSA’s huge machine learning farms. The watch lists started with civilians, of course. Then it was turned against the news outlets. Any leverage, no matter how small, to ensure the coverage the administration wanted. Then finally, turned inward, on the government itself. *

Robin washed her hands and blotted her face with a damp towel, her hands shaking only slightly. Eight months undercover

Robin > Igloo agreed to the demand that she kill Tapestry 2.0, but she ran right back to the 2.0 chat room

Forrest couldn’t let T2 fail. She also couldn’t believe she was considering undermining a government operation

At some point, you had to draw a line. Sure, information could stop terrorists, but was it worth everything else? Security came at a cost. It was her sister Grace who had first exposed her to that idea. Grace let her ten-year-old son ride the city bus on weekends

Or he could experience a tiny risk of something terrible happening, but live life fully, unafraid, capable of handling new experiences on his own, and reach a fuller potential. Was the appearance of security worth the cost?

“There’s a reason BRI is running this operation,” Enso said. “We suspect Angie infiltrated the government previously. That’s why we’re running dark.” “Except the one agency Angie penetrated was BRI,” Forrest said

Forrest,” Griz said, “you have twenty-four hours to investigate the T2

she’d only bought herself a single day. In that day, she had to figure out who all the T2 members were, find them, get them to safe houses, and get them the untraceable internet access they needed, all without attracting the notice of BRI.

If the first light turned red, it would indicate a known bad device had boarded, e.g. a government agent’s cell phone

She handed out Paranoid Linux phones to everyone

Six months ago, she hadn’t known to suspect Nathan9’s manipulations, didn’t realize he’d timed his responses for maximum effectiveness amid her growing desperation. She certainly didn’t know the entire situation was fabricated to compromise her, or that the evidence involving the senator was forged, leading to the downfall of an innocent man

Maria cleared her throat. “You need people who are ethical, responsible, and committed to resisting the government. Who are in this for the long run

We’re forgetting what Tapestry is,” Igloo said as she paced back and forth. “First and foremost, it’s a social network

Angie would simply speak the truth, and it would be impossible for Igloo to not respond to it. “I know,” Igloo said. “I know about you.” Maria blinked. “Know what?” Her voice was perfectly casual. “I know you work for BRI. I know you’re an inside plant. I know you’ve been reporting on what we’ve been doing

Maria was silent, and her eyes dropped to her lap. Igloo allowed herself a brief moment of celebratory awe. She’d been right

Maria took a deep breath. “What can I do?”

Turns out Tapestry is a Chinese front. We’re here to shut them down.”

She was going to do it. She would help Igloo and defy Nathan9

But to see this through, she’d have to kill herself

Nathan’s ultimate leverage against her was hurting the people she cared about. That was the final resort, the tool that ensured her compliance. He’d made it clear that if she betrayed him, it wasn’t just her career and her freedom that she would be sacrificing. But if she killed herself, there’d be no point to Nathan’s retribution. She had to hope so, anyway.

I want you to get these civilians on the plane, and make it look like they’re our analysts. Let them fly a search pattern. Coordinate with BRI’s other assets as part of the training program

The government shut down Tapestry a few minutes ago,” Doug said. “Press release says the company is a front for Chinese cyber terrorists

Wait up,” Ben said, grabbing Igloo and Forrest at the same time. “If we can’t access the cloud key vault, or any of the update servers, there’s still one other option: we have the master key signing certificates stored offline in a safe at Tapestry headquarters. We can regenerate the private keys we need for the update

Let me go back to Portland, get into the offices and get the keys

Tomo usage had spiked in the wake of the world-wide outage

How’s the manifesto coming?” “It’s done

Two hundred and fifty years ago, the United States justified its proclamation of independence with these words

In today’s age, we cannot have life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness without certain foundational communication rights,

She had a different set of patches. Code changes that kept the core of Angie’s content modification algorithms intact but eliminated the backdoor. Instead, this set of code would place the content modification under the control of Igloo’s chat personalities

Those personalities were already wired to help people, to converse with them, to coach them, to be friends with them. Those personalities could, with the small set of changes Igloo created, also pick the optimal content for each person. In effect, it would be an AI-driven, tailored educational program designed to help people grow as individuals. To become better. More thoughtful. More insightful. More empathetic. It would correct fake news stories. Eliminate content that contributed to fear and hate

The thing was, they’d been operating under the old system for years. Things kept getting worse

Ben, dressed in an FBI jacket and cap, and loaded down with 3D imaging gear, followed close beside her

Forrest felt herself going for her gun. Oh. Was it all going to come down to this? Ugland looked toward Forrest, and his eyes glanced down to her hand moving toward her gun. Ugland spun away from Ben. Forrest drew her weapon and fired twice

Ben was dead

Secured VOIP phone calls.” “Routed over the public internet?” “Yes, or…” “Over DOD milnet, I know. But as long as they’ll accept calls coming in over the regular Internet, we can crack their communications.” Doug shook his head. “Those calls are secure. Protected by public key cryptography. The same cryptography you also rely on.” Igloo shook her head. “Don’t worry about the details. You have a secure phone and samples of Enso’s voice?”

He needed the plane on the ground, and the entire T2 team disappeared before he could relax

The package is ready,” Melanie said. “Don’t wait. Push it out

With a valid, signed update binary out there, the only thing left was to tell the hundred million Tapestry clients about it.

Igloo pulled out her last wild card. A zero-day DNS vulnerability

We have a problem,” Doug said. “Enso really wants us dead

Lucky for us,” Igloo said, “I included something in the software release about what’s happened. Enso is screwed either way.”

Welcome to Tapestry 2.0. This is your operating manual for the future

Two hundred and fifty years ago, the United States justified its proclamation of independence

The image of Igloo cut away and was replaced by a grainy video with obvious fish eye distortion

new face, also in the same military bunker as Igloo. “My name is Robin White

Around eight that evening, David Schwartz, Tapestry’s lead lawyer, relayed the first firm offer from the government: “They want T2 shut down, and a peaceful surrender of the T2 team

They released a patch for OpenWRT during the night,” Melanie said. “It bridges traffic onto t2_net, routing legacy non-Tapestry traffic onto the Tapestry network.”

Eighty percent of Tapestry software is now on T2,

EFF is reporting that Internet traffic just hit 30 percent encrypted for the first time in the history of the Internet,” Mike said. “Backbone traffic is down 35 percent as more and more content is served up locally and distributed through T2

The Great Firewall of China just failed,” she said. “T2 has enough exploits and mesh networking ability that they’re reporting the firewall is, for all intents and purposes, totally toast

The key question of the moment was where was Forrest with the copy of the digital keys that would unlock T2? With those keys, Nathan would have de facto rule over the net of the future

When the T2 release finally came, along with the concurrent announcement of the community governance model, he sat back in shock. Angie would never, under any circumstances, have turned over power to the people. Like him, she would have kept that power for herself. She could never have trusted the world, could never have put her faith in the ability of people to do the right thing. But he had failed to realize that Igloo could, and would, and indeed, she had

Everyone is wiring legacy Internet stuff into T2. Seventy percent of all traffic is now going over T2.

The only holdout was traffic between two computers, neither of which was on Tapestry. And to force the hand of those not using Tapestry, Igloo’s contribution to the T2 code was about to do a Very Bad Thing

Igloo shook her head. She worked up some moisture to wet her throat. “I’m not going to prison. And I’m not going to make a deal. I’ve just been waiting here so they can see our relative positions. You tell them I have a kill switch

Six months later

Essie, who was updating her blog. Since Essie came out as the primary author of the manifesto, her visibility skyrocketed. Her photography blog was suddenly getting zillions of hits every day, and Essie had taken to writing about freedom, politics, and the intersectionality of kink and feminism

She not only faked her own death, but she framed her faked death on the government to throw them into chaos, all to buy more time to release T2, and apparently to create her own retirement.