[production-notes] 13.5 (Patreon)

Hi folks! Hope you're very well!

Today's episode where Seth uses external support to get his body back is based on a real principle in computer security. If you can touch it, you own it.

It's simple enough - if you have physical access to a machine, there's nothing stopping you cutting power, removing hard disks, pressing reset buttons, all the way up to getting an electron microscope and looking at the individual bits in memory. A computer cannot hide secrets from someone who can touch it.

This means that good computer security comes with good traditional, physical security.

This is why you can't just walk in to an Amazon data center. If you've ever seen one in real life, they're like going through an airport, with check-in desks, hermetically sealed zones, and even diesel backup generators in the basement.

(By the way: A strong influence on Lost Terminal is the short story "When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth" by Cory Doctorow. It's part of his collection of stories called "Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present." The story revolves around a global apocalypse where only those inside data centers, specifically system administrators, survive. They work together to keep the internet, and thereby civilization, running amidst the chaos. Sounds familiar, right?!)

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It's turning into quite a serious, stressful season, isn't it? That's the way of stories, to see what our characters and protagonists are made of, we must challenge them. Chase them up a tree, throw stones at them, and, eventually, set fire to the tree!

It's going to get worse before it gets better, as is the way of all stories <3