only way to become a great general and master the secrets of war.”!5° I sometimes fee] the same reading over stories of zero-day attacks, clever hacks like “rowhammer’” or the Tel Aviv heat hack. You can distill from each tale of a broken, once-secure systems an essential principle: The hackers rush always, relentlessly at the central core of a system. They aim to make it weird, to manipulate it madly from the inside out. Network power doesn’t merely come from that 10 million device-per- day spread of global connectivity, after all, it also comes from incredible concentration of power inside certain systems we all rely on: Chips, data bases, centralized and gatekept platforms. Control of such hubs and roots of our world can influence everything; little wonder they are such an appealing target. “The conventional belief that all nuclear systems are ‘air gapped’ is a myth,” the Russian security researcher Eugene Kaspersky has warned. The result: “There are three types of people: Scared to death. Opportunists. Don’t care.”151 This sense that the systems are so vulnerable if you can get to their hearts is what lures hackers ever deeper, into the code kernels where the most basic instructions are decided. That they can often make machines weird by using the device’s own code against them, like some sort of autoimmune disease, is only a marker of the particular perversity of the problem here. Security researchers call such holes “vulnerabilities” in a system, but of course they are much more than weak spots. They are potentially fatal. In a way, the hot rush to touch and tickle and maliciously use these already waiting cancers reveals to us the essential Seventh Sense secret of the Warez Dudes: Connection makes an object vulnerable, yes; but it can also reveal the possibility of total control, of the fundamental root mastery of a connected system. Such a hole, when it is exposed by connection and then corruption, can be complete in the scope of its damage, devastating. Lor