Little Brother Technology and Modernization Quotes

The answer is something ingenious called TOR ­­ The Onion Router. An onion router is an Internet site that takes requests for web­pages and passes them onto other onion routers, and on to other onion routers, until one of them finally decides to fetch the page and pass it back through the layers of the onion until it reaches you. The traffic to the onion routers is encrypted, which means that the school can't see what you're asking for, and the layers of the onion don't know who they're working for. (1.81)

Thirty seconds in a microwave will do in pretty much every arphid on the market. And because the arphid wouldn't answer at all when D checked it back in at the library, they'd just print a fresh one for it and recode it with the book's catalog info, and it would end up clean and neat back on its shelf.

I'd had tens of thousands of simultaneous random calls and text messages sent to [Charles's phone], causing every chirp and ring it had to go off and keep on going off. The attack was accomplished by means of a botnet, and for that I felt bad, but it was in the service of a good cause.

Botnets are where infected computers spend their afterlives. When you get a worm or a virus, your computer sends a message to a chat channel on IRC ­­ the Internet Relay Chat. That message tells the botmaster ­­ the guy who deployed the worm ­­ that the computers are there ready to do his bidding. […] Those PCs normally function on behalf of their owners, but when the botmaster calls them, they rise like zombies to do his bidding.

There are so many infected PCs on the Internet that the price of hiring an hour or two on a botnet has crashed. […]

I'd just rented ten seconds' time on three thousand PCs and had each of them send a text message or voice­over­IP call to Charles's phone, whose number I'd extracted from a sticky note on Benson's desk during one fateful office­visit.

Needless to say, Charles's phone was not equipped to handle this. (2.29-33)