Little Brother

The answer is something ingenious called TOR The Onion Router. An onion router is an Internet site that takes requests for webpages and passes them onto other onion routers, and on to other onion routers, until one of them finally decides to fetch the page and pass it back through the layers of the onion until it reaches you. The traffic to the onionrouters is encrypted, which means that the school can't see what you're asking for, and the layers of the onion don't know who they're working for. There are millions of nodes the program was set up by the US Office of Naval Research to help their people get around the censorware in countries like Syria and China, which means that it's perfectly designed for operating in the confines of an average American high school.

TOR works because the school has a finite blacklist of naughty addresses we aren't allowed to visit, and the addresses of the nodes change all the time no way could the school keep track of them all. Firefox and TOR together made me into the invisible man, impervious to Board of Ed snooping, free to check out the Harajuku FM site and see what was up.

There it was, a new clue. Like all Harajuku Fun Madness clues, it had a physical, online and mental component. The online component was a puzzle you had to solve, one that required you to research the answers to a bunch of obscure questions. This batch included a bunch of questions on the plots in dd jinshi those are comic books drawn by fans of manga, Japanese comics. They can be as big as the official comics that inspire them, but they're a lot weirder, with crossover storylines and sometimes really silly songs and action. Lots of love stories, of course. Everyone loves to see their favorite toons hook up.

I'd have to solve those riddles later, when I got home. They were

Cory Doctorow/Little Brother/12

easiest to solve with the whole team, downloading tons of dd jinshi files and scouring them for answers to the puzzles.

I'd just finished scrapbooking all the clues when the bell rang and we began our escape. I surreptitiously slid the gravel down the side of my short boots anklehigh Blundstones from Australia, great for running and climbing, and the easy slipon/ slipoff laceless design makes them convenient at the neverending metaldetectors that are everywhere now.

We also had to evade physical surveillance, of course, but that gets easier every time they add a new layer of physical snoopery all the bells and whistles lull our beloved faculty into a totally false sense of security. We surfed the crowd down the hallways, heading for my favorite sideexit.

We were halfway along when Darryl hissed, "Crap! I forgot, I've got a library book in my bag."

"You're kidding me," I said, and hauled him into the next bathroom we passed. Library books are bad news. Every one of them has an arphid Radio Frequency ID tag glued into its binding, which makes it possible for the librarians to check out the books by waving them over a reader, and lets a library shelf tell you if any of the books on it are out of place.

But it also lets the school track where you are at all times. It was another of those legal loopholes: the courts wouldn't let the schools track us with arphids, but they could track library books, and use the school records to tell them who was likely to be carrying which library book.

I had a little Faraday pouch in my bag these are little wallets lined with a mesh of copper wires that effectively block radio energy, silencing arphids. But the pouches were made for neutralizing ID cards and tollbook transponders, not books like

"Introduction to Physics?" I groaned. The book was the size of a dictionary.

Chapter 2

This chapter is dedicated to Amazon.com, the largest Internet bookseller in the world. Amazon is amazing a "store" where you can get practically any book ever published (along with practically everything else, from laptops to cheesegraters), where they've elevated recommendations to a high art, where they allow customers to directly communicate with each other, where they are constantly invented new and better ways of connecting books with readers. Amazon has always treated me like gold the founder, Jeff Bezos, even posted a readerreview for my first novel! and I shop there like crazy (looking at my spreadsheets, it appears that I buy something from Amazon approximately every six days). Amazon's in the process of reinventing what it means to be a bookstore in the twentyfirst century and I can't think of a better group of people to be facing down that thorny set of problems.

Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0765319853/downand outint20

"I'm thinking of majoring in physics when I go to Berkeley,"

Darryl said. His dad taught at the University of California at Berkeley, which meant he'd get free tuition when he went. And there'd never been any question in Darryl's household about whether he'd go.

"Fine, but couldn't you research it online?"