#cyberpunk

A long while back I had an idea to hack a WiFi smart light bulb to do something more useful to me. Actually, I had a few different ideas of things to do with them. One of these ideas was to modify the device to have an open WiFi access point and a web server hosting banned books. The idea was that if you lived somewhere that banned books you thought were important, you could theoretically stick a digital copy of the book on one of these light bulbs. Then you could go install it somewhere in your community. As long as the light bulb is switched on, then anyone in the vicinity can still access the banned material assuming they have an electronic device with WiFi. Since the device is a light bulb, it would be difficult to detect and likely to go unnoticed. A cyberpunk digital dead drop. These devices are also fairly inexpensive, so leaving them around town as is hopefully not very cost prohibitive.

Finally, an online ‘cyberpunk’ game that comes close to portraying computing as depicted in classic cyberpunk works like Neuromancer by William Gibson. In this game the player is a NetRunner, an arrogant and bold futuristic hacker. Armed with his cyberdeck and an arsenal of offensive, defensive and analysis software he’s ready to invade corporate systems in the grid and raid their credits, for fame and fortune! It’s no cakewalk though! Waiting for the unwary are Intrusion Counter-measures (IC). Machine controlled defenses that can inflict damage to hardware and software, steal the players own credits and even cause… death.

When you have a top-of-the-line hacking deck armed with a 56.6k modem and a staggering 256k RAM, it means just one thing: you answer only to the highest bidder.

When you have a top-of-the-line hacking deck armed with a 56.6k modem and a staggering 256k RAM, it means just one thing: you answer only to the highest bidder.

He goes on to explain that science fiction, in the twentieth century, was too triumphalist and focused on a white American future, and lacked real details to go with its shiny ideas. "I wanted to see dirt in the corners," says Gibson.

"Fed was 18 when Tony got roo'd. He'd been prepping for early college admission with late-night com-classes, goggled in and finger-cramped over nasty circa-2009 C++ code examples while longing to toss it in for time to scan some flashy Java virii. Tony had been gone from his life for at least a couple years, five years his senior and a failure, as far as their folks saw it. Bailing out of a prestigious single-course curriculum at MIT, the rumor was that he'd crashed and burned on Pakistani kraft; carefully engineered cold cells delivering a prolonged payload of top-flight methamphetamines directly to the spongy flanges of his right hemisphere."

"A lot of transhumanist types focus on replacing perfectly good body parts with even better ones, ..., but it seems to me we ought to start by dropping some of our vestigial organs in favor of something more useful, or at least more classy."

"some readers evidently invision as (gack) German camera lenses, there was a "really". I assumed they were vat-grown, genetically optically perfect organs, perhaps further tweaked to maximize them as, in effect, video cameras."