The Forgetting Curve (Memento Nora) Read Online Free

keep me busy on the flight. Her bank thought it was the next wave in encryption: security in a tiny package.
    Security isn’t about code, though. It’s about trust.
    With a few clicks, I logged into the bank’s database of employees and located a likely mark. Two calls, one message, and a little digital dumpster diving later, I’d convinced one of the software team members to divulge his password to the project source code. Most people trust a call from their own tech support.
    And with the password, I found the key to unlock the code.
    The actual key.
    Information—whether it’s money, messages, code, etc.—can be encrypted with a long string of characters called a key. And most encryption needs two keys. One locks, or encrypts, the information so it can be sent securely; another unlocks, or decrypts, the stream at the other end. The longer and more random each key is, the more secure it is. Sure, you can write a program to crunch through every possible combination of characters, but that kind of brute force attack can take weeks—even months.
    Humans are always the weak link in the system. There’s no security patch for us. We’re hardwired to trust. Social Engineering 101.
    I’d found only the decryption key in the bank’s files, but that’s all I needed.
    Still, it was way too easy. And it didn’t take my mind off what was in that book Winter had sent me, the book that was now stuffed into my backpack in the overhead bin. I didn’t dare take it out on the plane. You never knew who was flying the unfriendly skies.
    The flight attendant tapped me on the shoulder and made an unhappy face at my mobile. I flicked it off and shoved it into my backpack. We’d obviously come to the tray-tables-and-seats-in-their-upright-and-locked-positions part of the flight. We were on approach to Dulles.

     
    Take-offs and landings make me a little jittery. Not for the obvious, we’re-all-going-to-die reasons. No, if we crash, we crash. Everything is everything. But with my portable electronic devices stowed properly in my luggage, I only had the stupid ads to look at as they played across the seat-screen in front of me.
    Of course, it was another ad for the mobile I’d just stuffed in my pack. A young guy rocked out to his Chipster in the shower sans earbuds. The Nomura Chipster. It speaks to you. Tacked onto the end of the ad was an announcement for a new app. It’ll be like having TFC right in your pocket. Take it back to school. Only on Nomura.
    The family biz. I wasn’t looking forward to it.
    The only way Dad would let me come home was if I interned at the company this summer. I’d played the prodigal son bit. I’d convinced him that my hacker ways were behind me, and all I wanted to do was learn the family biz and become the buttoned-down corporate prince he’d always wanted. I was amazed Dad bought it; he’s usually way sharper than that.
    I hadn’t left him many options, I guess. Not after I got myself kicked out of Bern American last week. (And Switzerland wasn’t proving to be the neutral safe haven it had always been.)
    The pilot announced our final descent. Landings were worse than take-offs. At least during take-offs I could study the flight attendant dynamics—who was senior, who got along with whom, who flirted with the passengers, who had a mother complex, who was schmoozable, who I could charm into a free headset or a drink. It’s all code. People. Systems. Software. During landings, though, the attendants are all business. They’re ready to get the hell off the plane. They’ve got husbands or hot dates or even just hot baths on their minds.
    So that left me with too many idle processing cycles to crunch over the one piece of code I couldn’t crack: me. Can source code do more than it’s programmed to do? Can it peer down through its own layers to the assembly language and machine code underneath it? Can it change its very being? Whoa. Way too deep for business class.
    I didn’t want to think