The Robot Gene: a Hacker D. Lite Dream Sequence

[Author's note: any chance similarity in the names of computer programs
or operating systems, living or dead, is sheer coincidence.]

A story of a hacker who invents a replicating heuristic.
Oh, it's sad, it's a dreadful horror story.

Hacker wanted a smaller Windows. She didn't want to
give up its newest functionality, she just didn't
want it to take up so much room, so she could collect
more pictures without buying a new drive.

She wrote a program she called Similar, to learn the
places she could squeeze the system code together.
She had to kill the run because the output got too
big. She hooked her code into a compression program,
so the program could squeeze together the similar
parts without bothering her with it. Out came one
huge file in her System directory, but it was a lot
smaller than the sum of all the other files, that
she had used for input into it. Also, it was even
smaller than the zip of all the files, she checked.
She knew she had found something important.

She knew Windows wouldn't work out of her super-
compressed file, any more than it would out of the
zip file, because it went by filenames. But Hacker
was stubborn. She didn't know what it was good for,
but she had found something of her own, and she
meant to thrash on it until she had beat it into
the shape of something useful, or at least meaningful.
So she rewrote the code to eat up everything on the
drive, just to see how much smaller she could make
everything and still be able to unfold it all later.
Maybe she could use it for backup or something.

Because the runs took so long, she found out how
to make her squeezer run in the background, by
launching threads. So she turned it loose to eat
up her whole system, except for the pictures she
had collected, and then she guess what forgot
about it. No, really, something came up, and she
was preoccupied, and her computer was working fine.
The upshot was, that her program ran for three
days straight before she thought to check on it.

It had produced a monster file, that it was
constantly rewriting. Evidently her program had
been merrily launching threads the whole time.
She watched the file size inch downward, as
her program gradually found more similarities
to generalize. The file was much smaller than
the files it had used for input.

OK, she had an automatic system squeezer. What
was it good for? She had to download a hex editor
that wouldn't blow up when it saw the file size,
but she was able to see that the first part of
the file started out like her partition table
and boot track at the start of her disk!

She had gone ahead and bought a new disk. What
would happen if she wrote that monster file over
to the new disk as a disk image? Would it boot?
It couldn't possibly, with only one file on the
disk, and no directories. But it did.

Hacker was now really sure she had found out
something important. Booting just from the new
disk, the computer behaved exactly like her
old one! It couldn't, with just one file on
the whole disk, a fraction of the size of her
old system. But Windows came up looking just
the same, and it thought that all the old files
and directories and programs were there. Weird.

Then Hacker found out that her program was
in this new machine somewhere, running and
launching threads, and still shaving a few
bytes off the file size every few minutes.
The interesting part was, that it just didn't
have any filename, that this fake Windows
could see. Her process name, squeezer.exe
showed up in the Task Manager's list of
running programs, but no file name like that
could be found by Windows, the fake Windows.
And she couldn't kill that process, permission
denied.

It came to her then, that her program was the
only thing that was really running, and it
was faking Windows. That was it, she had
something useful. She made her source code
into a Web page and posted it on the Internet.
In a couple days, somebody sent her a stripped
down version in an email, which was even
smaller. When she looked at it, she found
this code a lot cleaner, so she changed her
Web page to this version. Another week or so,
and she was amazed to find herself in the
middle of a hurricane of hacker activity.

Everybody was spreading her code and calling
her a genius. Well, was it so special to want
to make Windows smaller? The really crazy
thing was when she heard that her program
could be ported right over to Linux, and do
the same insane things! It would make a
bootable file that generated a working fake
Linux system. Both programs would chop out
about 25% of the system size in the first
few minutes, but then had to run for a couple
days before rounding the corner and making
some really dramatic shrinkages. There were
some really monsterous intermediate files,
which Hacker hadn't noticed the first time.

There was a real problem, though, when you
wanted to install new software. Programs
that would work fine on normal Windows
sometimes wouldn't run on fake Windows.
Some geek on a newsgroup found out why.
The squeezer program hadn't really saved
all of Windows. It just kept the parts
which were needed by the programs which
were already installed on the machine
when the squeezer started running. The
rest of Windows was tossed, along with
the unused parts of application programs.

So when you tried to give the fake
Windows a new program to install, and
the new program wanted to use some part
of Windows that had been tossed, it just
wouldn't work. Put the new program in
before running the squeezer, and it all
worked just fine. Strange.

It took her a while to figure out what
the hackers were so excited about. It
turned out to be a legal matter. If you
had a program, or Windows itself, you
were in theory liable to worry about
somebody else's copyright. But after
her squeezer had worked the software
over, all the copyrights were squished
together in a huge mound of mangled
code spaghetti. It was totally impossible
to trace what part of the code had come
from which file without her emulator
running, seeing files and directories
that weren't even there. The hackers
all figured she had killed off copyright
on computer software.

Somebody explained it to her like this.
Her program didn't run Windows and it
didn't run Netscape. It ran an emulation
of the Netscape program, running on top
of an emulation of the Windows operating
system. None of the original code was
left which could be traced. Only the
look and feel of the original program
remained, and the look and feel was
beyond copyright. Her program
essentially wrote a complete port of
every piece of software to each individual
machine. It resolved the issue of
software copyright at one blow. Hacker
had managed to build a machine to make
copyright extinct.

Her program could keep learning, and
still keep its size pretty small. That
compensated for the lossy compression
method it used to build its initial
emulation. It was hard to compile
programs in her emulation, without
getting errors from some mysterious
problem in memory management, or some
tricky twists in device drivers that
weren't there in the real software.
But her machine kept learning, and
after a couple tries at writing a
program in a couple different ways
the machine seemed to sort of get the
idea, and the third try generally
worked.

The best part was, that it was hard
to crash. The number of frustrating
crashes got fewer as her program ran
longer. It didn't keep getting smaller
forever, of course. It would grow a lot
when she browsed the Internet, but she
knew that was just the cache size, and
she checked this out by getting Netscape
to erase its cache. But if she didn't
erase the cache it would gradually shrink
anyway, as her program digested the cache
by compressing it.

It felt good being the center of attention.
Hacker especially liked on her IRC channel,
how people kind of hung back for a second
after she sent, like they were in awe, and
hanging on her every word. Well, she had
done something important, and it wasn't by
accident, she had meant to do it. Partly,
at least.

Then one night a gloomy dude got her thinking
really paranoid when she was chatting with him.
She got some Internet utilities and started
pinging servers, and logging return times.
She wanted to learn if her packets were
forwarded by too many routers, to find out
if some kind of spooks were delaying her
packets to clone them. She quit that when
she figured that a tap on her phone line from
the downtown office couldn't be spotted that
way, and would be a lot more efficient.

Then she spent a couple minutes worrying
about her ISP, who for all she knew might
be a front for the NSA, and then she was
out of her paranoid stage. There was nothing
she could do about any of that. Also, there
was no reason any of that should matter. She
didn't do anything wrong, she just wrote a
small utility program to compress the disk.
She just forgot to tell it to stop.

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Kallisti(k)Copyleft, November 12, -2, all rites reversed.
Everyone is welcome and encouraged to steal everything.