9/23/2024
Due to family medical issues, Requiem is on indefinite hiatus.
An elderly family member of ours took a bad fall on Labor Day night, and we’ve been dealing with the aftermath ever since. Hopefully, things will get sorted out, but as of right now, doing a daily comic is not something my schedule can allow.
Sorry to have this happen, but as everyone knows, real life comes first….and at least we don’t have too many running storylines on the backburner.
House Tindal. Physicist, Head of the Crystal One development team and all around curious man. A late term cancer patient, Dr. Gage heads out to Bellisarius Territory to settle his own curiosity about some flaws in the eyewitness reports. He now finds himself spending the last days of his life with his reformed team of Crystal One scientists in an attempt to prevent the literal end of the world.
Yes, the internet of things is bigger than most people realize. My CPAP machine connects to my wireless modem and uploads the data on my usage to my doctor. He can even adjust it from his office if he thinks I need it adjusted. And ROM chips are in just about anything electronic. I wonder if any of Edgar’s chips are off the shelf? BTW, where is Edgar? Usually if you see Clarence in a couple of panels Edgar is not that far away.
I just went back and checked. The last time we saw Edgar was June 2013 and the last time he was with Clarence was in October 2012. I knew it had been a while just not how long it had been in our world. I realize that in the novel it has only been a few weeks.
EDGAR is okay, and he’s been around. I just haven’t really had anything particularly special for him to do or say, so I hadn’t really been putting him in. As for what he’s been doing…he’s been doing his own training and helping out with getting the containment setup for the Throne they hope to grab.
As for the net being everywhere…back in 2004 I was talking to a co-worker and advanced the theory that at some point it would be possible to hack a pacemaker or something similar. I love connectivity, but sometimes somethings shouldn’t be hooked up to the web.
Of course, I also advanced a theory that the most asshole thing to do would be to develop a computer virus that flashed the ROM of an infected computer. There wouldn’t be much of a payload to it, just enough of one to brick the machine…I’ve always kind of wondered why no one has ever done it.
Back in the DOS days there was a small virus done in assembler code that stored itself on the ROM in the password storage section. It was particular nasty as it launched a TSR (Terminate and Stay Resident) that when you had a modem would launch the modem quietly and dial a server via a phreaked number. That server would then download the main virus which basically locked out the keyboard and began propagating the original program via war dialing.
Concerning hacking a pacemaker they did it on the series Homeland and the way they did it seemed very plausible.
I noticed a recent report (BBC News) of a networked fridge that had been infected and was busy spamming DDOS attacks. Made me chuckle.
As to the rom-buster virus… it sounds kind of self-defeating, unless it waited until it had infected something else before doing it… sort of a Darwin-award winning virus.
Infection these days seems to be big business… money changes hands for bot-nets, and data mined from machines. Perhaps mid-90’s someone might have produced a virus to brick your PC. Now, they’d much rather brick your bank account, steal your identity, and use your email address to infect other poor sods.
The whole commerce aspect of virus infection was why we decided, at the time, that it hadn’t happened yet. I still wouldn’t be surprised if some military of some country had something like that sitting on a sandboxed system for cyberwarfare use.
If a country is prepared to go that far, it just stands to reason they made more than one, perhaps even a whole suite, of nasties to use as required.
And I’m not pointing to the U.S as the ‘bad guy’ here… I would bet money my
own country (Britain) has similar tucked away, along with just about everyone else.
‘Mutually Assured Destruction’. It was never going to work, in my opinion.
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EDGAR is okay, and he’s been around. I just haven’t really had anything particularly special for him to do or say, so I hadn’t really been putting him in. As for what he’s been doing…he’s been doing his own training and helping out with getting the containment setup for the Throne they hope to grab.
As for the net being everywhere…back in 2004 I was talking to a co-worker and advanced the theory that at some point it would be possible to hack a pacemaker or something similar. I love connectivity, but sometimes somethings shouldn’t be hooked up to the web.
Of course, I also advanced a theory that the most asshole thing to do would be to develop a computer virus that flashed the ROM of an infected computer. There wouldn’t be much of a payload to it, just enough of one to brick the machine…I’ve always kind of wondered why no one has ever done it.
Concerning hacking a pacemaker they did it on the series Homeland and the way they did it seemed very plausible.
As to the rom-buster virus… it sounds kind of self-defeating, unless it waited until it had infected something else before doing it… sort of a Darwin-award winning virus.
Infection these days seems to be big business… money changes hands for bot-nets, and data mined from machines. Perhaps mid-90’s someone might have produced a virus to brick your PC. Now, they’d much rather brick your bank account, steal your identity, and use your email address to infect other poor sods.
Eli…
The whole commerce aspect of virus infection was why we decided, at the time, that it hadn’t happened yet. I still wouldn’t be surprised if some military of some country had something like that sitting on a sandboxed system for cyberwarfare use.
If a country is prepared to go that far, it just stands to reason they made more than one, perhaps even a whole suite, of nasties to use as required.
And I’m not pointing to the U.S as the ‘bad guy’ here… I would bet money my
own country (Britain) has similar tucked away, along with just about everyone else.
‘Mutually Assured Destruction’. It was never going to work, in my opinion.
Eli.