End of Secrets Read Online Free PDF

pills.”
    “Who thinks pills? How would anyone know something like that already? There used to be a time when people preferred a medical examiner to make that call.”
    “And a medical examiner will have his say. But people have always wanted information as fast as possible, even if that information is imperfect at first. The only thing tha t’s changed is that now they can have it almost immediately. Look at the way Gnos.is works. Maybe a cop leaked something, or a resident working at the corone r’s office. Whatever the source, a new fact makes its way online and Gnos.is verifies it to the degree it can in that moment. I t’s doing the work of a dozen reporters in a fraction of the time.”
    “I t’s not journalism.”
    “Sure it is. Journalis m’s changing. Yo u’r e as aware of that as anyone.”
    What she wouldn’t let Parker know was just how much Gnos.is baffled her. The site had appeared three years earlier and, after a slow start as a hard-news site, it increased its offerings in entertainment news and started to gain real traction. While that trajectory was n’t unlike any number of other Internet start-ups, one thing set Gnos.is apart: the owners of the site were anonymous. No one knew who they were or where they operated—or why. At first, the sit e’s top-level domain—“.is”—was thought to be a clue, an indication that the site was hosted in Iceland. But the CI A’s cyberspies had determined that the site was in fact hosted by a complex network of servers around the world, bouncing from one to another randomly to prevent hackers or government agencies from sabotaging the site or identifying its owners.
    Gnos.is created no revenue. It simply used high-powered computing to assemble and publish news. The anonymity was irregular enough in a world where successful high-tech entrepreneurs typically flaunted their egos along with their sudden wealth. But what was first believed to be a gimmick on the part of the sit e’s unknown owners quickly became something more ominous. No one could crack Gnos.is. Even chat rooms frequented by the hacker community began to buzz about the mysterious site. And still, no one came forward with any credible insight about who was behind Gnos.is, nor how they kept the sit e’s operations secret.
    The obsession over Gnos.is in the intelligence community took the form of panic. Many analysts concluded that the site was a front for a foreign, state-sponsored intelligence-gathering program. Gnos.is did n’t exist to make a profit, so their intentions must be hostile. Or so the argument went. Some of that paranoia found its way to Hawk, and Kera had briefly been assigned to a Gnos.is task force. Like everyone else, though, the Hawk hackers failed to locate the sit e’s owners or to decode the algorithms that made Gnos.is work. But they also failed to come up with any evidence that Gnos.is was sponsored by a foreign state or that it was collecting the data of users and storing it for illegal or otherwise suspicious purposes. Eventually, funding for the task force was pulled and, embarrassed, everyone turned their attentions elsewhere. To Ker a’s knowledge, it remained the only case that Hawk had failed to deliver on.
    “See, more sources are contributing. Gnos.is is saying i t’s a suicide.”
    “You mean, some idiot on the street is tweeting that,” she said.
    The buzzer rang. For twenty minutes Kera and Parker sat across from each other sharing pad thai and curry out of plastic containers. Afterward, Parker opened another bottle of wine, and they sat on the couch with dueling laptops. Kera browsed a few news sites, looking for early reports of the hacker raids. When she came up empty, she closed her laptop and leaned her head on Parke r’s shoulder. He was reading Gnos.i s’s coverage of the Rowena Pete story. Other news sites had begun to report rumors of the singe r’s death, but few claimed to be able to confirm anything. Local television stations and even