Month: June 2023

Rex Tarkington was a genius. A certified, bona fide, Mensa-verified egghead. He was also extremely paranoid, and very indignant about that character trait. He believed, strongly, that anyone living in a surveillance state has an absolute right to privacy, and if there was anything he could do to advance the right to privacy, he would do it without a second thought. He spent decades in IT Security, where his mindset and perseverance made him very successful. Enough success that he could retire at age 27 and pursue his real goals. He sunk countless hours into studying, then breaking, security protocols and very high-level encryption. But at this point, he wasn’t doing it for any particular company or vendor, he was doing it to try and reset his own comfort level. Being behind the scenes, watching and fighting off digital attacks, it was old hat by now, especially since his crowning achievement was a defensive AI he programmed himself over a few years. He proudly named it T-Rex, which was also the laziest name anyone could have imagined, based on his own name. 

The funny thing about defense is that it’s just offense in reverse. You have to know certain things about the attackers, attack patterns, weaknesses, etc. in order to shore them up. You must know all your soft spots to harden them. By that same token, it’s not difficult to turn a defense into an offense. Attack others where you are weak, assuming a certain amount of commonality across organizations is in place.

For example, regardless of how big or wealthy a corporation becomes, they are often stuck with very outdated servers and hardware somewhere in the network that are easily exploited. Legacy systems, custom programming, vestigial limbs that nobody ever spent money to rebuild and replace. Every company has these “legacy assets” that they can’t do without, and someone in the organization is aware of it. As time goes by and these legacy assets accumulate and remain unpatched, they represent a challenge for the attacker, because no matter how old an attack vector becomes, it has to stay in the toolkit just in case it’s found. This swells the toolkit over time, to the point where nothing can be discarded and you have an enormous, unwieldy bag of tricks. It just comes with the territory.

Years after T-Rex was released, security researchers had turned it inside out and made it an attacker. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a major blow to Rex’s organization in particular. Despite how paranoid and careful he had been, he had left the door to the toolkit open for expansion for licensed owners, which malicious actors used to add their own bag of tricks to what they called Xer-T, the inverted version of T-Rex. Security organizations would sometimes stage virtual battles between T-Rex and Xer-T to essentially watch the AI battle itself, to look for flaws or improvements. That was actually beneficial in testing, and some would sell improvements back to Rex himself. But honestly, none of this interested Rex at this point. He had gone off on another tangent entirely. Let the product managers and coders worry about all this.

In the information technology field, and security, there’s a term known as RCA, or root cause analysis. The concept is simple. When there’s a problem, keep digging even after it has been solved to determine the root cause and apply your permanent fix at that level. Rex had been doing RCA’s his entire life in one way or another, and was particularly skilled at it. Which, inevitably, led to him creating a root cause of his own, solving a lot of problems he had with the state of the world.

He got an idea after watching a documentary about zebras in the wild. Their stripes were a natural camouflage, although appearing fairly uniform and almost copied and pasted to the casual observer. It was discovered that the stripes short circuited the visual processing part of predator’s brains, namely, big cats. Something about the way cheetahs, lions, etc. see the world and process that world was truly confused by the stripes, essentially making the zebras invisible to them. Rex wondered if there wasn’t something similar in technology; after all, technology is based on human perception, so cameras and microphones are generally designed to only capture what people can see or hear.

Rex built up a very secretive research team, hand-picked and fully vetted, to dive into camera technology of all kinds. Cell phone cameras, CCTV cameras, traffic cameras, the hardware and software that drove them. What he initially discovered was not that interesting: they were almost all built upon the same core libraries, which meant at the lowest hardware level, they all behaved nearly identically. At some point during the early development of these devices, there must have been a competition between different technologies, and a single standard emerged. Or, as Rex saw it, a single point of failure…a single point of weakness. He poured millions into the team, moving the project goalposts regularly over the span of three years. He kept getting results, and eventually his company became the dominant player in the imaging device technology sector. How? By giving away upgrades for free.

Nations, states, and cities all took the bait, making TIDE, or Tarkington Imaging Design Engineering, the single largest supplier of hardware and software imaging solutions worldwide. His solutions were truly ingenious and easy to operate, simple to keep updated, and had the best price of them all. His tech was so good, it was being applied to satellites and space-based hardware platforms as well, because, again, the cost was too good to be true.

On more than one occasion, the press asked the main question. “Why is something this good, free?” And every time, Rex insisted that something that good must remain free, and he would be doing humanity a disservice by charging money for those products. That wasn’t a good enough answer for some people and rightfully so. It reeked of corporate diversion, but nobody could really find a problem with what he was giving away, and over time, people asked less and less to the point where TIDE solutions were the global standard. It’s just what you used, anywhere you needed surveillance solutions or cheap imaging for portable devices. He included premium features others charged millions for, like chip sensors that could detect light across the visible and invisible spectrum. The full spectrum sensor was a huge hit in the scientific community, and some labs were using it to explore black holes via space-based telescopes which had been upgraded with TIDE sensors. Spy satellites weren’t late to the party either, incorporating his upgrades as fast as they could launch space missions to retrofit the hardware.

One man, in one company, had essentially taken over the world of digital imaging in a few short years. Rex intended it. Because once Rex had ensured that his TIDE sensors were everywhere, in everything, he could finally relax.