"Big U, The" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stephenson Neal)

show me parts of his secret world, and eventually allowed me to sit
in on one of these computer sessions. Nothing at all made sense until
he explained the Worm to me, and the story of Paul Bennett.
"Paul Bennett was one of these computer geniuses. When he
was a sophomore here he waltzed through most of the secret codes
and keys the Computing Center uses to protect valuable data. Well,
he really had the University by the short hairs then. At any time he
could have erased everything in the computer—financial records,
scientific data, expensive software, you name it. He could have
devastated this university just sitting there at his computer
terminal—that's how vulnerable computers are. Eventually the
Center fOund out who he was, and reprimanded him. Bennett was
obviously a genius, and he wasn't malicious, so the Center then went
ahead and hired him to design better security locks. That happens
fairly often—the best lock-designers are people who have a talent for
picking locks."
"They hired him right out of his sophomore year?" I asked.
"Why not? He had nothing more to learn. The people who were
teaching his classes were the same ones whose security programs he
was defeating! What's the point of keeping someone like that in
school? Anyway, Bennett did very well at the Center, but he was still
a kid with some big problems, and no one got along with him.
Finally they fired him.
"When they fire a major Computing Center employee, they have
to be sneaky. If they give him two weeks' notice he might play
havoc with the computer during those two weeks, out of spite. So
when they fire these people, it happens overnight. They show up at
work and all the locks have been changed, and they have to empty
out their desks while the senior staff watch them. That's what they
did to Paul Bennett, because they knew he was just screwed up
enough to frag the System for revenge."
"So much for his career, then."
"No. He was immediately hired by a firm in Massachusetts for
four times his old salary. And CC was happy, because they'd gotten
good work out of him and thought they were safe from reprisals.
About a week later, though, the Worm showed up."
"And that is—?"
"Paul Bennett's sabotage program. He put it into the computer
before he was fired, you see, and activated it, but every morning
when he came to work he entered a secret command that would put
it on hold for another twenty-four hours. As soon as he stopped
giving the command, the Worm came out of hiding and began to
play hell with things."
"But what good did it do him? It didn't prevent his being fired,"
"Who the hell knows? I think he put it in to blackmail the CC
staff and hold on to his job. That must have been his original plan.
But when you make a really beautiful, brilliant program, the
temptation to see it work is just overwhelming. He must have been
dying to see the Worm in action. So when he was fired, he decided,
what the hell, they deserve it, I'll unleash the Worm. That was in the