"Neal Stephenson - Simoleon Caper" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stephenson Neal)

The sloth takes another slug of Jolt, stifles a belch and says, "I am Codex, the
Crypto-Anarchist Sloth."
"Your equipment requires maintenance," Raster says. "Please contact the cable
company."
"Your equipment is fine," Codex says. "I'm encrypting your back channel. To the
cable company, it looks like noise. As you fig
ured out, that number is your personal encryption key. No government or
corporation on earth can eavesdrop on us now."
"Gosh, thanks," I say.
"You're welcome," Codex replies. "Now, let's get down to biz. We have something
you want. You have something we want."
"How did you know the answer to the Soldier Field jelly-bean question?"
"We've got all 27," Codex says. And he rattles off the secret numbers for
Candlestick Park, the Kingdome, the Meadowlands . . .
"Unless you've broken into the accounting firm's vault," I say, "there's only
one way you could have those numbers. You've been eavesdropping on my little
chats with Raster. You've tapped the line coming out of this set-top box,
haven't you?"
"Oh, that's typical. I suppose you think we're a bunch of socially inept,
acne-ridden, high-IQ teenage hackers who play sophomoric pranks on the
Establishment."
"The thought had crossed my mind," I say. But the fact that the cartoon sloth
can give me such a realistic withering look, as he is doing now, suggests a much
higher level of technical sophistication. Raster only has six facial expressions
and none of them is very good.
"Your brother runs an ad agency, no?"
"Correct."
"He recently signed up Simoleons Corp.?"
"Correct."
"As soon as he did, the government put your house under full-time surveillance."

Suddenly the glass eyeball in the front of the set-top box is looking very big
and beady to me. "They tapped our infotainment cable?"
"Didn't have to. The cable people are happy to do all the dirty work - after
all, they're beholden to the government for their monopoly. So all those
calculations you did using Raster were piped straight to the cable company and
from there to the government. We've got a mole in the government who cc'd us
everything through an anonymous remailer in Jyvaskyla, Finland."
"Why should the government care?"
"They care big-time," Codex says. "They're going to destroy Simoleons. And
they're going to step all over your family in the process."
"Why?"
"Because if they don't destroy E-money," Codex says, "E-money will destroy
them."
The next afternoon I show up at my brother's office, in a groovily refurbished
ex-power plant on the near West Side. He finishes rolling some calls and then
waves me into his office, a cavernous space with a giant steam turbine as a
conversation piece. I think it's supposed to be an irony thing.
"Aren't you supposed to be cruising the I-way for stalled motorists?" he says.
"Spare me the fraternal heckling," I say. "We crypto-anarchists don't have time