Sat around poking through the internet over the weekend? Then you’ve probably got time to write a nanostory!
There’s a Twitter fiction contest running at Book View Cafe this weekend, so why not enter? 126 characters shoudn’t be too great a challenge… but the deadline is 9pm Sunday EST, so don’t take too long thinking about it.
So, the big red-hot knee-jerk story of the week is surely the suggestion that there’s a possibility that maybe some foreign countries are thinking about whether it would be worth hacking the poorly-secured United States power grid infrastructure with computer intrusion techniques. Maybe.
… multiple countries are believed to be behind the attacks, including both the Russians and the Chinese. Some of these were apparently detected and stopped before any damage could be done, while the remains of others (and tools designed to trigger failures) have been found in other areas. The article doesn’t give specific information on where issues were and weren’t detected, or which infrastructures were contaminated, but the list of “at-risk” institutions include electric plants (particularly nuclear ones), financial networks, and water management/treatment facilities.
Credit where it’s due, Ars Technica isn’t going to flap its arms and panic like some other news sources:
The Internet is merely the latest—and by most measures, the most benign—means by which one country could attack another. Personally, given the choice between ICBMs, chemical weapons, “the bomb”, or V-2 rockets, I’ll take the Internet.
Amen. Bruce Schneier agrees:
Honestly, I am much more worried about random errors and undirected worms in the computers running our infrastructure than I am about the Chinese military. I am much more worried about criminal hackers than I am about government hackers.
Right. And why worry about complex hacks when a crew with some industrial tools can wipe out the data grid for a whole region?
Ten fiber-optic cables carrying were cut at four locations in the predawn darkness. Residential and business customers quickly found that telephone service was perhaps more laced into their everyday needs than they thought. Suddenly they couldn’t draw out money, send text messages, check e-mail or Web sites, call anyone for help, or even check on friends or relatives down the road.
Several people had to be driven to hospitals because they were unable to summon ambulances. Many businesses lapsed into idleness for hours, without the ability to contact associates or customers.
The dogs in your own backyard are more likely to bite you than your neighbour’s. [image by jonbell]
Reading this may take you half an hour, but it’ll be half an hour well spent. Johann Hari of The Independent goes to Dubai and unearths a slice of desert dressed as utopia, full of half-finished buildings, jaded over-moneyed ex-pats and a colossal underclass of what are essentially indentured slaves. I knew the place was bent, but not this badly.
Time doesn’t seem to pass in the malls. Days blur with the same electric light, the same shined floors, the same brands I know from home. Here, Dubai is reduced to its component sounds: do-buy. In the most expensive malls I am almost alone, the shops empty and echoing. On the record, everybody tells me business is going fine. Off the record, they look panicky. There is a hat exhibition ahead of the Dubai races, selling elaborate headgear for £1,000 a pop. “Last year, we were packed. Now look,” a hat designer tells me. She swoops her arm over a vacant space.
I approach a blonde 17-year-old Dutch girl wandering around in hotpants, oblivious to the swarms of men gaping at her. “I love it here!” she says. “The heat, the malls, the beach!” Does it ever bother you that it’s a slave society? She puts her head down, just as Sohinal did. “I try not to see,” she says. Even at 17, she has learned not to look, and not to ask; that, she senses, is a transgression too far.
Between the malls, there is nothing but the connecting tissue of asphalt. Every road has at least four lanes; Dubai feels like a motorway punctuated by shopping centres. You only walk anywhere if you are suicidal. The residents of Dubai flit from mall to mall by car or taxis.
It gets weirder and bleaker as you read through, making you realise that until recently the public veneer of Dubai was very effective in keeping us from seeing what was really happening… that and the complicity of our own willingness to accept what we’re told, of course. To paraphrase Mark Twain, the truth’s always stranger than fiction, because fiction is required to make sense. [image by chorcel]
It’s Easter weekend! Even if the religious significance does nothing for you, the potential for a long weekend off is something to shout about. Because time off means time for reading stories…. and if you’ve not got anything specific in your reading queue, we’ve got your back right here with this week’s Friday Free Fiction round-up. Let’s go!
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A couple from ManyBooks:
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And a few from FeedBooks:
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Paolo Bacigalupi and Night Shade Books have made three of Paolo’s stories from his collection Pump Six – “The Calorie Man”, “Pop Squad” and “Yellow Card Man” – available as a free pdf for a reading group called Think Galactic. Bacigalupi’s one of the writers I fully expect to get very big very fast; go read these tales and find out why.
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Shadow Unit‘s latest episode is called “Sugar”
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HUB Magazine presents “Under a Bridge” by Paul Fairburn
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Apex Online has its monthly trio of fresh stories up:
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COSMOS Magazine presents “Fuel” by Matthew S Rotundo
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Subterranean Online starts off its spring edition with “A Tulip for Lucretius” by Ken MacLeod
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Strange Horizons presents “Husbandry” by Eugene Fischer
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Three new pieces at Lone Star Stories:
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As always, SF Signal has round-ups of its own, and a few scattered miscellania:
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Most of the Friday Flash Fictioneers are at EasterCon right now (and I wish I was there also); that means just a few offerings of microfiction for this week:
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And that’s pretty much it! Don’t forget to get in touch with recommendations and tip-offs (fictional or non-fictional; in the meantime, enjoy your weekend!
Courtesy of Jamais Cascio, here’s just another reminder of the fact that we live in a very strange world that gets stranger by the day. Point in case: the wrecked economy of Iceland is less real that that of the online space RPG EVE Online:
The in-game currency of EVE Online is the ISK. That’s right, the Icelandic króna. And where most multiplayer games have attempted to ban the translation of in-game assets to and from real-world money, EVE Online has not only permitted it but actively embraced it – so much so that daily speculation on world/game financial leverage is conducted openly on the official game web boards. As a result, the EVE Online ISK has remained fairly stable against virtually all the real currencies of the world for a few years now, fluctuating but not spiking, not crashing. There are people out there making an income, a real-life income, just handling the trades on the “floor”.
All of which is to say: Iceland has collapsed so thoroughly that at this point, it’s only economically viable export may very well be an internet spaceship game, and that internet spaceship game’s króna is for all intents and purposes a more real and valid and valuable currency than the actual country’s actual money.
Strange stuff is afoot in the Global Village, no? [image by Psycho Al]