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"Cyberspace is a metaphor that allows us to grasp this place where since about the time of the second world war we've increasingly done so many of the things that we think of as civilization."
- William Gibson
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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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'Once in the very first weeks of the war, before everyone had been evacuated from the surface...'
'For a while your colonists will have to come up to the [orbital] Hospital...'
'...it raised its front end off the ground and waved its antennae at them, then raised one armoured claw as if to snip them out of the sky.'
'Henry... assumed the curious absent look of a robot talking on the TBR circuits.'
'The king, an old hand in the running of tyrannies, instantly grasped the directions...'
'...a hemispherical force field enclosing his head.'
