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"It's hard to tell stories about critters that are not human. John W. Campbell tried it, in "Twilight," and everybody says it's a wonderful story, and nobody ever reads it twice."
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Forming a criminal network is time-consuming and dangerous. What if you could just post your requirements online, and have proper villains reply?
Stross makes a generic word "blacknet" out of a specific experiment performed in 1994 by Tim May. He set up what he described as a "working information market" using PGP for secure communication. May describes it as follows:
Read more about Untraceable Digital Cash, Information Markets, and BlackNet and the Introduction to Blacknet.
This is a better way to do it; in the old days, when a criminal hacker wanted to get his dirty work done, he used the old-fashioned method. Here's how John Varley described it in his excellent 1984 novella Press Enter.
"I don't get it. Kluge never left the house."
"Oldest way in the world, friend. Kluge looked through the LAPD [computer] files until he found a guy known as Sammy. He sent him a cashier's check for a thousand dollars, along with a letter saying that he could earn twice as much if he'd go to the hall of records and do something. Sammy didn't bite, and neither did McGee, or Molly Unger. But little Billy Phipps did, and he got a check just like the letter said, and he and Kluge had a wonderful business relationship for many years. Little Billy drives a Cadillac now, and hasn't the faintest notion who Kluge was or where he lived. It doesn't matter to Kluge how much he spent. He pulled it out of thin air."
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Science Fiction
Timeline
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