gopherhole/20190301.txt

Corrosion
---------

Tendrils of smoke from a cigarette stub curl their way through the stale air
of her apartment building, caught in rays of burning city light through
half-closed blinds. Displays above her desk show an IRC session and a network
map - a spider's web of rings and sprawling lines - her next paycheck. The
cigarette is dropped into a nearly empty mug of coffee, and both her hands
return to the keyboard.

<zdm> Update on the nginx exploit?

Sections of the network map attempt to give some order to the digital chaos.
IP addresses from entirely separate AS numbers sit together in their neat
boxes for Payroll, Customer Relations, Sales, IT Support, Development - the
interesting one.

<aphyr> nearly there, it crashes 1/3 of the time
<aphyr> not sure why

Nobody owns servers these days, not really. Since the late 20s, a few
companies have owned most of the hardware on the net. Easier management, they
said. Now you rent what you need, leave the legwork to them. Who needs bare
metal?

<zdm> The exploit or the service?
<aphyr> service
<aphyr> my codes written into its memory by this point

Containers for your services makes them more secure; that was always the
marketing behind them. People jumped ship quicker than the manufacturers could
keep up, and it put a few out of business. If you weren't in the Cloud game
already, you were too late to even think about catching up. For the crackers,
it was business as usual.

<aphyr> okay the new version is up on the sftp
<zdm> Fixed?
<aphyr> yeah, some canary check i needed to get round
<zdm> Good. I hope you tested it, we start tomorrow.
* zdm (~zdm@null.host) has quit #kotec

She gets up and walks across a smoky room, to the bathroom and a blindingly
bright artificial light that blinks into existence as she enters. A couple of
sleeping pills from the cabinet washed down with tap water from a glass,
slowly replacing the caffeine in her system with a new drowsiness as she lays
on top of her sofa, staring at the lights on the ceiling shifting and changing
colours with the city outside. When she wakes up tomorrow it will look the same.