The Prodigy

[tanya_sharma]

Nico's appartment, Claifornia
Nico grunted as he checked his mail. The ivy league universities were bothering him again. Nico was a genius with computers. He started writing C++ programs when he was 6. By 8, he was winning hackathons. He then turned his attention to networking. When he was 12, he had 12 websites, earning him $15000 a year. By 15, he had set up a company specialised in cryptography(the practice and study of techniques for secure communication between two people). As soon as he hit 18, he moved out of his parents house(He rarely ever talked to them. He was a typical genius. Disconnected from the rest of the world.). He dropped out of school. He was, at that time 'the' expert when it came to cryptography(Without a single degree). But the universities just wouldn't stop pestering him. He had replied negatively to each of the universities a countless number of times. Yet they would fire an email to him every f*ing month.

He found people very difficult to work with. Most of his fellow homo sapiens were just so intellectually inferior.Their behaviour patterns were seemingly very random and he found them quite weird. For instance, he found peoples apathy to security quite apalling.

As Neal Stephenson(author) put it
"We’re in a strange moment right now where everyone who uses the internet seems to be cognoscente at some level that it has its weaknesses from a security standpoint. So if you sit down and talk to most people who use e-mail they are aware at some level that their e-mail really isn’t private. Everyone hears about crackers breaking into systems all the time. Everyone who uses a cell phone must understand at some level that it’s a radio, a walkie-talkie, and every word they say is being broadcast in a way that anyone with a scanner could pick it up and listen to it.

People know these things but nobody acts on it, which I find kind of |interesting. Historically there is not a lot of actual spying on people’s email that goes on. It happens, but it doesn’t seem to be causing serious problems for very many people. The same is kind of true for cell phones.

An engineer would look at our communications system today--email, cell phones--and be horrified at all the security gaps and predict that the bad people would exploit those gaps on a massive scale and a huge market for crypto would spring out of it, but it hasn’t happened. Maybe it will.

For an expert like him, all the communications were wide open to him. He could crack access to almost any connection in his sleep.

Being a genius comes with its disadvantages. You always wanted to try new things. Curiosity was a bitch. It was just a matter of time before he started using his expertise unethically, out of sheer curiosity.

And so, out of boredom, he started cracking internet connections of all the people he knew, and started building their portfolios. He might as well learn a thing or two about human pshychology while he was at it.