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"SF looks towards an imaginary future, while fantasy, by and large, looks towards an imaginary past."
- Frederik Pohl
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| Piggyback-Slurp Terminal | ||
| Interception of a live data stream using an interposed terminal. |
I can't think of an earlier description of this idea in science fiction.
| But now the potential drawbacks loomed large before Travis; his worst fears were confirmed. Once you put a line over two thousand miles from Houston to Greenbelt, you begged for a piggyback data slurp. Somewhere between Texas and Maryland someone had inserted a terminal linkup-probably in the carrier telephone lines-and had begun to slurp out data on a piggyback terminal. This was the form of industrial espionage they most feared.
A piggyback-slurp terminal tapped in between two legitimate terminals, monitoring the back and forth transmissions. After a time, the piggyback operator knew enough to begin making transmissions on line, slurping out data from both ends, pretending to be GSFC to Houston, and Houston to GSFC. The piggyback terminal could continue to function until one or both legitimate terminals realized that they were being slurped. Now the question was: how much data had been slurped out in the last seventy-two hours? |
| Technovelgy from Congo,
by Michael Crichton. Published by Vintage Books in 1980 Additional resources -
|
The first big-time computer security breach that I remember was probably the 1986–1987 KGB-related hacking incident known as the "Hanover Hackers".
Compare to the computer virus from The Scarred Man (1970) by Gregory Benford, the computer tapeworm from The Shockwave Rider (1975) by John Brunner and the network monitoring detection in The Dosadi Experiment (1977) by Frank Herbert.
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'He had travelled the space-lanes of the solar system for the greater part of his life...'
'The dinner was excellent. It was completely vegetarian — grown in specially prepared gardens in this Moon base...'
'Telepaths had their sensitiveness enlarged to an immense range by the pin-sets, which were telepathic amplifiers adapted to the mammal mind.'
'It was a relief to enter one of the comfortable autos, whisper a direction down the tube, and just know that you would be taken to your destination in the quickest, safest, and cheapest manner.'
'But he didn't get very far with it before another noise in his ear radio scattered his thoughts. George winced...'
'The vast spinning sphere of Factory in the Sky loomed above and ahead of us, gleaming white against the unfathomable jet depths of surrounding space.'
'And if it doesn’t work,' inquired Lazarus, 'what does that make us? Sunspots?'
'The Dillard people had performed a miracle and put all the works in a girl-modeled case.'
'Our study of your race has convinced us that you are not fitted to leave your planet in the present state of your civilization.'
