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

for such things."
"Crypto-anarchists?"
"The word panarchist is also frequently used."
"Cute," he says, rolling the word around in his head. He's already working up a
mental ad campaign for it.
"You're looking flushed and satisfied this afternoon," I say. "Must have been
those two imperial pints of Hog City Porter you had with your baby-back ribs at
Divane's Lakeview Grill."
Suddenly he sits up straight and gets an edgy look about him, as if a practical
joke is in progress, and he's determined not to play the fool.
"So how'd you know what I had for lunch?"
"Same way I know you've been cheating on your taxes."
"What!?"
"Last year you put a new tax-deductible sofa in your home office. But that sofa
is a hide-a-bed model, which is a no-no."
"Hackers," he says. "Your buddies hacked into my records, didn't they?"
"You win the Stratolounger."
"I thought they had safeguards on these things now."
"The files are harder to break into. But every time information gets sent across
the wires - like, when Anne uses Raster to do the taxes - it can be captured and
decrypted. Because, my brother, you bought the default data-security agreement
with your box, and the default agreement sucks."
"So what are you getting at?"
"For that," I say, "we'll have to go someplace that isn't under surveillance."
"Surveillance!? What the . . . " he begins. But then I nod at the TV in the
corner of his office, with its beady glass eye staring out at us from the
set-top box.
We end up walking along the lakeshore, which, in Chicago in January, is madness.
But we hail from North Dakota, and we have all the cold-weather gear it takes to
do this. I tell him about Raster and the cable company.
"Oh, Jesus!" he says. "You mean those numbers aren't secret?"
"Not even close. They've been put in the hands of 27 stooges hired by the the
government. The stooges have already FedEx'd their entry forms with the correct
numbers. So, as of now, all of your Simoleons - $27 million worth - are going
straight into the hands of the stooges on Super Bowl Sunday. And they will turn
out to be your worst public-relations nightmare. They will cash in their
Simoleons for comic books and baseball cards and claim it's safer. They will
intentionally go bankrupt and blame it on you. They will show up in twos and
threes on tawdry talk shows to report mysterious disappearances of their
Simoleons during Metaverse transactions. They will, in short, destroy the image
- and the business - of your client. The result: victory for the government,
which hates and fears private currencies. And bankruptcy for you, and for Mom
and Dad."
"How do you figure?"
"Your agency is responsible for screwing up this sweepstakes. Soon as the
debacle hits, your stock plummets. Mom and Dad lose millions in paper profits
they've never had a chance to enjoy. Then your big shareholders will sue your
ass, my brother, and you will lose. You gambled the value of the company on the
faulty data-security built into your set-top box, and you as a corporate officer
are personally responsible for the losses."