basketball court. When a student showed up wearing new shoes.
So now it just tries to keep track of who's where and when. If someone leaves by the school-gates during classes, their gait is checked to see if it kinda-sorta matches any student gait and if it does, whoop-whoop-whoop, ring the alarm!
Chavez High is ringed with gravel walkways. I like to keep a couple handsful of rocks in my shoulder-bag, just in case. I silently passed Darryl ten or fifteen pointy little bastards and we both loaded our shoes.
Class was about to finish up — and I realized that I still hadn't checked the Harajuku Fun Madness site to see where the next clue was! I'd been a little hyper-focused on the escape, and hadn't bothered to figure out where we were escaping to .
I turned to my SchoolBook and hit the keyboard. The web-browser we used was supplied with the machine. It was a locked-down spyware version of Internet Explorer, Microsoft's crashware turd that no one under the age of 40 used voluntarily.
I had a copy of Firefox on the USB drive built into my watch, but that wasn't enough — the SchoolBook ran Windows Vista4Schools, an antique operating system designed to give school administrators the illusion that they controlled the programs their students could run.
But Vista4Schools is its own worst enemy. There are a lot of programs that Vista4Schools doesn't want you to be able to shut down — keyloggers, censorware — and these programs run in a special mode that makes them invisible to the system. You can't quit them because you can't even see they're there.
Any program whose name starts with SYS is invisible to the operating system. it doesn't show up on listings of the hard drive, nor in the process monitor. So my copy of Firefox was called SYSFirefox — and as I launched it, it became invisible to Windows, and so invisible to the network's snoopware.
Now I had an indie browser running, I needed an indie network connection. The school's network logged every click in and out of the system, which was bad news if you were planning on surfing over to the Harajuku Fun Madness site for some extra-curricular fun.
The answer is something ingenious called TOR — The Onion Router. An onion router is an Internet site that takes requests for web-pages 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. There are millions of nodes — the program was set up by the US Office of Naval Research to help their people get around the censorware in countries like Syria and China, which means that it's perfectly designed for operating in the confines of an average American high school.
TOR works because the school has a finite blacklist of naughty addresses we aren't allowed to visit, and the addresses of the nodes change all the time — no way could the school keep track of them all. Firefox and TOR together made me into the invisible man, impervious to Board of Ed snooping, free to check out the Harajuku FM site and see what was up.
There it was, a new clue. Like all Harajuku Fun Madness clues, it had a physical, online and mental component. The online component was a puzzle you had to solve, one that required you to research the answers to a bunch of obscure questions. This batch included a bunch of questions on the plots in d™jinshi — those are comic books drawn by fans of manga, Japanese comics. They can be as big as the official comics that inspire them, but they're a lot weirder, with crossover story-lines and sometimes really silly songs and action. Lots of love stories, of course. Everyone loves to see their favorite toons hook up.
I'd have to solve those riddles later, when I got home. They were easiest to solve with
So now it just tries to keep track of who's where and when. If someone leaves by the school-gates during classes, their gait is checked to see if it kinda-sorta matches any student gait and if it does, whoop-whoop-whoop, ring the alarm!
Chavez High is ringed with gravel walkways. I like to keep a couple handsful of rocks in my shoulder-bag, just in case. I silently passed Darryl ten or fifteen pointy little bastards and we both loaded our shoes.
Class was about to finish up — and I realized that I still hadn't checked the Harajuku Fun Madness site to see where the next clue was! I'd been a little hyper-focused on the escape, and hadn't bothered to figure out where we were escaping to .
I turned to my SchoolBook and hit the keyboard. The web-browser we used was supplied with the machine. It was a locked-down spyware version of Internet Explorer, Microsoft's crashware turd that no one under the age of 40 used voluntarily.
I had a copy of Firefox on the USB drive built into my watch, but that wasn't enough — the SchoolBook ran Windows Vista4Schools, an antique operating system designed to give school administrators the illusion that they controlled the programs their students could run.
But Vista4Schools is its own worst enemy. There are a lot of programs that Vista4Schools doesn't want you to be able to shut down — keyloggers, censorware — and these programs run in a special mode that makes them invisible to the system. You can't quit them because you can't even see they're there.
Any program whose name starts with SYS is invisible to the operating system. it doesn't show up on listings of the hard drive, nor in the process monitor. So my copy of Firefox was called SYSFirefox — and as I launched it, it became invisible to Windows, and so invisible to the network's snoopware.
Now I had an indie browser running, I needed an indie network connection. The school's network logged every click in and out of the system, which was bad news if you were planning on surfing over to the Harajuku Fun Madness site for some extra-curricular fun.
The answer is something ingenious called TOR — The Onion Router. An onion router is an Internet site that takes requests for web-pages 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. There are millions of nodes — the program was set up by the US Office of Naval Research to help their people get around the censorware in countries like Syria and China, which means that it's perfectly designed for operating in the confines of an average American high school.
TOR works because the school has a finite blacklist of naughty addresses we aren't allowed to visit, and the addresses of the nodes change all the time — no way could the school keep track of them all. Firefox and TOR together made me into the invisible man, impervious to Board of Ed snooping, free to check out the Harajuku FM site and see what was up.
There it was, a new clue. Like all Harajuku Fun Madness clues, it had a physical, online and mental component. The online component was a puzzle you had to solve, one that required you to research the answers to a bunch of obscure questions. This batch included a bunch of questions on the plots in d™jinshi — those are comic books drawn by fans of manga, Japanese comics. They can be as big as the official comics that inspire them, but they're a lot weirder, with crossover story-lines and sometimes really silly songs and action. Lots of love stories, of course. Everyone loves to see their favorite toons hook up.
I'd have to solve those riddles later, when I got home. They were easiest to solve with
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