For it was now like walking among matrices of a great digital computer, the zeroes and ones twinned above, hanging like balanced mobiles right and left, ahead, thick, maybe endless. Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth. In the songs Miles, Dean, Serge and Leonard sang was either some fraction of the truth's numinous beauty (as Mucho now believed) or only a power spectrum. Tremaine the Swastika Salesman's reprieve from holocaust was either an injustice, or the absence of a wind; the bones of the GI's at the bottom of Lake In-verarity were there either for a reason that mattered to the world, or for skin divers and cigarette smokers. Ones and zeroes. So did the couples arrange themselves. At Vesperhaven House either an accommodation reached, in some kind of dignity, with the Angel of Death, or only death and the daily, tedious preparations for it. Another mode of meaning behind the obvious, or none. Either Oedipa in the orbiting ecstasy of a true paranoia, or a real Tristero. For there either was some Tristero beyond the appearance of the legacy America, or there was just America and if there was just America then it seemed the only way she could continue, and manage to be at all relevant to it, was as an alien, unfurrowed, assumed full circle into some paranoia.
[Thomas Pynchon. The Crying of Lot 49]
Fiction as conspiracy theory par excellence. Language and betrayal/treason to the codes.
Again taking inspiration from Pynchon's first novel for its title, W.A.S.T.E will examine the acronym-laden domain of so-called Darknets, hidden means of modern electronic communication, in relation to technology and fiction.
Potentially also investigating here hardware random number generation [RNG].
Post Peenemüende findings are being gathered here and here.
W.A.S.T.E as “a hoax that counterfeits such a conspiracy” [http://www.notbored.org/crying.html]
Either (1) you [Oedipa] have stumbled […] onto a network by which X number of Americans are truly communicating whilst reserving their lies, recitation of routine, arid betrayals of spiritual poverty, for the official government delivery system […] Or (2) you are hallucinating it. Or (3) a plot has been mounted against you, so expense and elaborate […] that it must have meaning beyond a practical joke. Or (4) you are fantasying some such plot, in which case you are a nut, Oedipa, out of your skull. (Numbers added in above citation)
Reference also LifeLog project - fits here or at least somewhere in PM
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2003/05/58909
The establishment of a temporary local underground network relying on some kind of paranoia/submarine protocol.
Also throwing into the mix some of the no signal ideas from Nice presentation: http://1010.co.uk/nicepresentation.html , but this maybe gets a bit abstract (the idea of an island within a vacuum//surrounded by nothing - this kind of magic island where, for example exotic protocols could be invented. Also the sub-route, sub-marine trafficking of DIY submarine entitities from vacuum-island to vacuum-island). So there are perhaps ideas which could become concretised or even literalised within software.
On the other hand we do have some kind of pairing with the digital forensics working group which is concerned with an idea of discovery, decoding, and detection. The W.A.S.T.E is some kind of flipside occupied with the generation of potentially fake/decoy signals (the submarine as decoy) which hide an unmasked or obvious signal. This hide and seek play. So within the no-signal space (history) of Peenemuende we can play off W.A.S.T.E against paranoiac discovery/digital forensics.
Arriving at the island/vacuum protocol after:
What if there is no Vacuum? Or if there is—what if They're using it on you? What if They find it convenient to preach an island of life surrounded by a void? Not just the Earth in space, but your own individual life in time? What if it's in Their interest to have you believing that?
“He won't bother us for a while,” They tell each other. “I just put him on the Dark Dream.” They drink together, shoot very very synthetic drugs into skin or blood, run incredible electronic waveforms into Their skulls, directly into the brainstem, and backhand each other, playfully, with openmouth laugh—-you know, don't you is in those ageless eyes . . . They speak of taking So-and-So and “putting him on the Dream.” They use the phrase for each other too, in sterile tenderness, when bad news is passed, at the annual Roasts, when the endless mind-gaming catches a colleague unprepared—”Boy, did we put him on the Dream.” You know, don't you?
[Gravity's Rainbow. Thomas Pynchon 1973 p697]
[ http://1010.co.uk/nicepresentation.html#sec-14 ]
And:
p486:
Islands: clotted islands in the sea. Sometimes even the topographic lines, nested on a common point. 'It is the map of my Ur-Heimat,' imagine a shriek so quiet it's almost a whisper, 'the Kingdom of Lord Blicero. A white land.' I had a sudden understanding: he was seeing the world now in mythical regions: they had their maps, real mountains, rivers, and colors. It was not Germany he moved through. It was his own space…
We sailed Lower Saxony, island to island. Each firing-site was another island, in a white sea. Each island had its peak in the center … was it the position of the Rocket itself? the moment of liftoff? A German Odyssey. Which one would be the last, the home island?
WASTE: http://waste.sourceforge.net/
Freenet: http://freenetproject.org/
also: http://cl49.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Making_sense_of_The_Courier%27s_Tragedy
= OBB Data =
“Using OOB data to bypass IDS OOB data is an obscure feature of TCP. Although there are RFC's describing how this should be handled, the implementations of it vary, and it makes for an excellent candidate to hide data from IDS'. The most common case with OOB data is that applications don't have any measures in place to handle them, and it's up to the OS to decide what to do with it. The RFC says to just queue it up till the next OOB you get and then discard it, but not all operating systems do this. Another case is where an application does handle OOB data, and it's delivered to the application, which'll deal with it in its application specific way, there is _NO_ way an IDS can predict how the application deals with it.” CCC 2008
= Intermud-3 =
Intermud-3, more commonly referred to as I3, uses TCP connections in order to connect each MUD to a central server, where most messages are routed through the server to other MUDs. In addition, I3 permits OOB (out-of-band) connections between MUDs, which temporarily results in direct communication between two participating MUDs. One of the primary benefits of I3 is that it allows MUDs to connect to I3 networks without server admin intervention. wikipedia