Little Brother

The problem with hotels is that they have a lot of nongamers in them, too and not just scifi people. Normal people. From states that begin and end with vowels. On holidays.

And sometimes those people misunderstand the nature of a

game.

Let's just leave it at that, OK?

#

Class ended in ten minutes, and that didn't leave me with much time to prepare. The first order of business were those pesky gaitrecognition cameras. Like I said, they'd started out as facerecognition cameras, but those had been ruled unconstitutional.

As far as I know, no court has yet determined whether these gaitcams are any more legal, but until they do, we're stuck with them.

"Gait" is a fancy word for the way you walk. People are pretty good at spotting gaits next time you're on a camping trip, check out the bobbing of the flashlight as a distant friend approaches you. Chances are you can identify him just from the movement of the light, the characteristic way it bobs up and down that tells our monkey brains that this is a person approaching us.

Gait recognition software takes pictures of your motion, tries to isolate you in the pics as a silhouette, and then tries to match the silhouette to a database to see if it knows who you are. It's a biometric identifier, like fingerprints or retinascans, but it's got a lot more "collisions" than either of those. A biometric "collision" is when a measurement matches more than one person. Only you have your fingerprint, but you share your gait with plenty other people.

Not exactly, of course. Your personal, inchbyinch walk is yours and yours alone. The problem is your inchbyinch walk changes based on how tired you are, what the floor is made of, whether you pulled your ankle playing basketball, and whether you've changed your shoes lately. So the system kind of fuzzesout your profile, looking for people who walk kind of like you.

There are a lot of people who walk kind of like you. What's more, it's easy not to walk kind of like you just take one shoe off. Of course, you'll always walk like youwithoneshoeoff in that case, so the cameras will eventually figure out that it's still you. Which is why I prefer to inject a little randomness into my attacks on gaitrecognition:

I put a handful of gravel into each shoe. Cheap and effective, and no two steps are the same. Plus you get a great reflexology foot massage in the process (I kid.

Reflexology is about as scientifically useful as gaitrecognition).

The cameras used to set off an alert every time someone they didn't recognize stepped onto campus.

This did not work.

The alarm went off every ten minutes. When the mailman came by. When a parent dropped in. When the groundspeople went to work fixing up the basketball court. When a student showed up wearing new shoes.

So now it just tries to keep track of who's where and when. If someone leaves by the schoolgates during classes, their gait is checked to see if it kindasorta matches any student gait and if it does, whoopwhoopwhoop, ring the alarm!

Chavez High is ringed with gravel walkways. I like to keep a couple handsful of rocks in my shoulderbag, just in case. I silently passed Darryl ten or fifteen pointy little bastards and we both loaded our shoes.

Class was about to finish up and

I realized that I still hadn't checked the Harajuku Fun Madness site to see where the next clue was! I'd been a little hyperfocused on the escape, and hadn't bothered to figure out where we were escaping to.

I turned to my SchoolBook and hit the keyboard. The webbrowser we used was supplied with the machine. It was a lockeddown spyware version of Internet Explorer, Microsoft's crashware turd that no one under the age of 40 used voluntarily.

I had a copy of Firefox on the USB drive built into my watch, but that wasn't enough the SchoolBook ran Windows Vista4Schools, an antique operating system designed to give school administrators the illusion that they controlled the programs their students could run.

But Vista4Schools is its own worst enemy. There are a lot of

Cory Doctorow/Little Brother/11 programs that Vista4Schools doesn't want you to be able to shut down keyloggers, censorware and these programs run in a special mode that makes them invisible to the system. You can't quit them because you can't even see they're there.

Any program whose name starts with $SYS$ is invisible to the operating system. it doesn't show up on listings of the hard drive, nor in the process monitor. So my copy of Firefox was called $SYS$Firefox and as I launched it, it became invisible to Windows, and so invisible to the network's snoopware.

Now I had an indie browser running, I needed an indie network connection. The school's network logged every click in and out of the system, which was bad news if you were planning on surfing over to the Harajuku Fun Madness site for some extracurricular fun.