Week Seven
The Mill, Part II
Click here for The Mill, Part I
Consolidated Data Systems knows you. They know who you are. They know where you live. And, they know what you'll do next. Every time you use a credit card, swipe a loyalty card, or sign up for a company's newsletter, CDS adds to your profile. They then take this data and sell it back to companies who pay good money to have detailed insights into the types of people who are buying their products.
Through a series of management disasters, failed initiatives, and a souring of the public to this blatant ripoff of their privacy, CDS's stock has plummeted. More and more consumers are opting out of sharing their data, the federal government is cracking down on illegal use of private information, and CDS employees are jumping ship.
Just like a scared animal backed into a corner, CDS is willing to do anything to survive no matter the cost. The one thing they realize they do have is a tremendous amount of computing power. After all, studying/stealing everyone's purchasing habits throughout the globe requires the handling of a lot of data. And these days, just simply mentioning "cryptomining" in a press release will raise your share price by 10 points.
The one smart thing CDS did was realize they had all this computational power, and began researching how they could use it to cryptomine without much overhead. Convert their data centers to rows and rows of mining rigs and they'll churn out cryptocurrency at an unprecedented rate. Figure out a way to maximize the hashrates, and they'd own the world.
This is why I'm sitting in a dirty cocktail dress, shoeless, in the back of a black SUV headed to some remote location. Ted Jeffers, the head of security for CDS, was nice enough to hold a gun to my back when he asked me to follow him. Having been in an abandoned mill, at night, the scene was set for a "Missing Girl Movie of the Week." I was strangely relieved when he walked me to an SUV and told me to get inside. If someone isn't going to rape and kill you in ruined building, they're probably not going to rape or kill you at all. But the fact that he needed to use a gun to persuade me was still horribly unsettling.
After formally introducing himself to me, locking the car door, and putting the gun away, I felt I was entitled to a few questions.
"So... How did you find me?" I asked.
"We're CDS. We know more than you think. It started with that anonymous comment you made about your hashrates on the message board," Jeffers sneered.
I knew that would come back to bite me.
"That was tantalizing for us," Jeffers wiped his lower lip with his index finger, "From there, we looked at your logs, studied the GPUs you were using - their serial numbers - and who specifically bought them, in a corresponding time frame. We matched them up with other purchases you made, and figured out pretty quickly who you were. We looked at your energy bills, and realized the rig wasn't at your home. So we looked at wifi spikes in the area, and wouldn't you know it, a coffee shop downtown had a really high internet usage. Too high for a normal shop. From there, we studied places that fell under the wifi umbrella of the coffee shop. We knew you bought steel, locks, and most importantly, rubber seals. Those really gave away the fact that your rig was in a location prone to flooding. Hence, the Peabody Mill."
"Jesus. Privacy really is dead."
"You have no idea."
"So, why the gun? Couldn't you have just called? Asked me to participate."
"Nope. Again, we know exactly who you are. You listen to Rage Against the Machine, N.W.A., and Cypress Hill. You own a can of mace. You've taken shooting lessons in the past five years. You actively post in protest groups on Reddit. You subscribe to several anarchist newsletters."
"Martha Stewart Living is anarchist?"
"Funny. But yeah, based on those purchases, we determined you weren't someone who'd come along quietly."
"Why didn't you just reverse engineer my motherboards? Steal my programing software? You don't need me."
"We tried that. Turns out the one thing we couldn't crack were the security measures you'd programmed in."
A smile ran across my face. He was talking about a little security protocol I'd thrown into my code. If the software determined that someone was tampering with it, it would "brick" the motherboard. Basically, it erased everything.
"So what do you expect me to do? Program your rigs? Watch you collect millions of dollars?"
"Well, we intend to fully compensate you for your programming efforts."
"And what's to stop me from going to the police? Telling them you kidnapped me?"
"Go for it. Tell them everything. I'm sure they'd love to hear how an upstanding public company kidnapped you to program their computers. They'll have you committed in less than a day."
"And how long is this going to take? You know," I pointed to my dress, "This isn't really my everyday attire."
"We've already contacted your friends, and left messages saying you weren't feeling well."
"And they believed you?"
"No. They believed you."
"They believed me?"
"Audio spoofing."
I shifted uncomfortably in my seat. CDS had thought of almost everything.
"We expect, with your background, you'll be able to insert your code into our system in less than a day. Send your program out to all of our mining rigs. And with any luck, you'll be back home tomorrow."
---
I looked at my bank account. A deposit of $250,000 from CDS sat intimidatingly at the top of the page. Further proof that I was "working" for them. No one would believe I'd been kidnapped if they'd paid me a quarter of a million dollars to program their computers. It'd been six weeks since Jeffers had pulled me out of the mill. I hadn't been back to clean up the remnants of Wintermute, nor to pick up my shoes that had fallen off as I was "escorted" out of the building.
According to the reports I'd set up, my swarm programming was working well for CDS. They were pulling in half a million dollars a month. Their mining rigs, situated in five different "farms" around the country, were churning day and night. Each was running my code, and the entire setup was quickly outpacing any other setup like it in the world. They'd even told investors that their new cryptomining endeavor utilizing a distinct program developed "in-house" was quickly turning it into an industry leader. Their stock price jumped, and I imagined all of the executives patting each other on their backs for all of their "hard work."
But I waited, because I knew.
Giving someone free-access to an internal computer system is stupid. Giving someone with an extensive knowledge of computer programing was downright disastrous, especially after you've held them at gunpoint and forced them to work. You'd think a company that specialized in breaking security would have put more measures in place. But they were frothing, and they were too excited to see those dollar signs start appearing on their bank sheets. So I waited. I needed them to see the fruits of my labor. I needed them to start reaping the benefits. I needed them to trust my code and not shut down any of their rigs. And once they did start reaping the benefits, I waited for the inevitable.
There were over 5,000 CDS mining rigs spinning away. Each had 8 GPUs per rig, and each GPU had a dedicated fan cooling it off.
If someone was looking at the rig monitors at around 4:30 in the morning on October 25, they would have seen it. The screens going blank, and a text readout saying, "Wintermute Lives" scrolling up them. Behind the scenes, they would have missed the large transaction that transferred the entirety of their latest cryptomining earnings to an external digital wallet that was attached to a small computer, in a small house, in a small New England town. And that pesky code I wrote that Jeffers had been so upset by - the code that bricked all my data? That code was about to run through all of CDS's computers, effectively wiping out all of the consumer profiles they'd stolen from every single person in the country.
But there was one other thing. One more command that was key to my plan.
"fan=0"
That was my favorite part. Assign the fan speed a value of 0. A short command line that told every fan on every GPU to turn off. But the thing was, there was nothing telling the GPUs to shut down. No, they'd continue to run. And run. And run. But without anything to cool them off, they'd overheat, meltdown, and destroy all of CDS's server farms. Scorched earth.
---
CDS claimed faulty wiring caused the "issues" at their server farms. That they'd be back up and running in a matter of days. But after two weeks, and with a stock price dipping into the single digits, CDS was forced to reveal that they'd lost all of their data - including the data stored on their redundant storage devices. Everything had been wiped out, and they were declaring bankruptcy.
When Jeffers and his cronies at CDS were figuring out who I was by studying my past purchases, they missed one key item. I'd purchased a Nest Cam to monitor Wintermute. Placed in an unassuming corner of the basement of the mill, it recorded everything in daylight and night visioin and saved the past 30 days of footage to the cloud. As powerful as CDS was, they didn't put that together. And, accordingly, a clip of Jeffers holding a young woman in a dress at gunpoint made its way to our local police department through an anonymous source, and he was soon awaiting trial behind bars.
With cryptocurrency still trying to find its equilibrium, I decided it was time to exit the game. I never bothered rebuilding Wintermute. I'm sure someone could have made a nice chunk of change if they had found the rig and realized how expensive those GPUs were. But my time with cryptocurrency had come to an end. And truthfully, I had other things I wanted to concentrate on. With my new-found wealth, I was determined to continue to fight the CDSs of the world - those companies who pray on people (both figuratively and literally). So, I got to work building again. Creating something larger. Something even more powerful than a hyperclocked mining rig. I was putting together the initial plans of a computer science school to be built in a soon-to-be refurbished mill I'd just purchased.
