‘Not A Villain’ Webcomic – Page 326

It was a game for Kleya to see how many backdoors she could get into any program. Often they were found and removed. But quite a few slipped by unnoticed. Also, Jake would have been killed a long time ago if he had resided in any other city than TENka.

29 Comments

Wait a minute…he’s *still* on the friend list?

Kleya…you probably should’ve cleaned up that list. :p

(More seriously, this is an interesting setup – a super-powered backdoor that more than one person has access to – and potentially more.)

To me, it doesn’t seem like Kleya has a reason to take Jake off the friend list. Quite the opposite. 🙂

That would have confirmed she was alive.

My memory is a bit shoddy (so correct me if I’m wrong) but I guess Jake probably knows Kleya = Kat now?

He has been pretty sure about that since the beginning, but he is telling his boss he is sure of the opposite. But no one could know for sure without her telling them, could they?

Oh ok, ‘cus I do remember him telling people he -doesn’t- think it’s her, but couldn’t remember if he himself believed it

Thanks for the clarification! 😀

Panel 2: so many teeth, it’s scary…

So, I just wanna know, what’s up with the masks???

some kido thing I guess?

Think a future google glass

Probably something like the Occulus Rift, Google Glass, or something like that. What I don’t get, is why they are wearing them all the time, even when outside playing.

Wouldn’t YOU want to play a half-virtual game where there were dragons and whatnot, and you waving a wooden stick looked like you were fighting with a great big sword, etc. And that’s just augmented reality.

You can read “Rainbows End” by Vernor Vinge for a quite awesome implementation of what you describe (though less obtrusive that this setup of Kleya).

Why did they not jsut make a new OS?
Or is the Virus that adaptable/on AI level to even counter that? Or not enough programmers left to make such a big project?

Yea, I bet it’s the second bit. In principal, you can fix any hacking attempt by formatting the disk and installing a new OS. But it’s not foolproof. There’s a lot of tricky things you can do to get around that – hidden partitions, BIOS backdoors, self editing programs (“AI”). To make sure you were 100% safe you can A) Smash the computer B) Have someone who really *really* knows what they’re doing clear those problems and program a new rudimentary OS. It looks like their society decided to murder all the programmers who could do B in favor of A.

Don’t forget “LIFE” is using their “internet”. Without patching the holes in the system, the virus can always re-infect the formatted OS, even through the internet.

It takes a knowledgeable team of coders and a few years to completely write an OS from scratch.
Since the hacker event, it seems lots of people have died and all the major programmers are used to keep “life support” running and keep the world “LIFE” going to keep everyone’s mind off the real world issues.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there was almost no one left who knew how the internals of the system worked, especially if it was considered proprietary, like Windows/Macintosh, at the time of the event.
Now even if they could and did format the computers, without updating the OS and turning off the internet preventing them from entering “LIFE”, the virus could always re-enter the system and re-infect it.

“Friend list.”

Poor Jakey…. 😉 JK.

I love this comic! Please keep it going!

Ok, is D going to report Jake’s location and activity to Kleya? I suppose she may already have known where he was.

Interesting that even in TENka City Jake is still trusted, given how much evidence there is tying him not just to hacking, but to Kleya and the “Virus.”

Yanno, I’m kind of skeptical of the idea that D and the Virus are one and the same. While D does seem to have a good bit of autonomy, it still follows Kleya’s orders. Since Kleya is trying so hard not to be a villain, I’d think that she’d have absolutely forbidden D from hurting people. And yet the Virus seems to be active, dangerous, and potentially fatal. While those may not be irreconcilable – especially given that a lot of this has only been implied – that doesn’t seem like the likeliest scenario to me.

I do have a different theory, tho. Given what Kleya’s dad’s parenting style seems to be, anyone want to bet that her family name is actually Kiryuin? 😉

So… Tenka city is special. How & why….?

And…. We have a ‘virus’ with a back-door that has an explosive theme, and this virus is her dads?

I see many dots, but have little idea how they all connect.

I would guess it’s because Tenka is the host city for the LIFE network and people working on it are living there….

Tenka city is special, because it belonged (and still belongs, it seems) to TENka corporation. At which Kleya worked (well, her parents worked) before “everything went boom” (and also, creators of L.I.F.E.). Program is her dads (most likely a security system, or, even worse, the main controlling AI for all TENka infrastructure), but Kleya made some modifications to it (backdoor, perhaps way more), and at some point is assumed to have taken it over completely. Why it is called The Virus is unknown, but the deaths it apparently caused might be a sideeffect of some severe security protocols (and/or AI reacting to Kleya’s personal likes and dislikes – even without her knowledge).

“everything goes boom” not the most encouraging of magic phrases.

This is a bloody good comic. One of the very best stories I have ever had the pleasure to read.

For a really scary example of a real virus:

there is a virus that infects usb drives at the hardware level (not files on the drive but the drive itself) that then infects the bios of any motherboard its plugged into. from there it infects multiple OS’es – simply wiping the OS does not remove it. its designed to infect windows, Apple, Lynx and a few others.

as a 2ndanary thing given the correct hardware it then set ups a network using Ultra sonic sounds through any mic / speakers connected to the computer in question.

its a virus designed to infect a stand-alone machine thats kept completely isolated with an unknown OS – proberly government designed. they are funding some truely scary viruses.

http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/10/meet-badbios-the-mysterious-mac-and-pc-malware-that-jumps-airgaps/

The report seems off for me in several ways, well written but there’s a lack of mention about several things, and the wide feature set it claims has me thinking this guy is either fighting multiple viruses with a dubious mix of features, or more likely making stuff up.

If you find such a virus, hand it over to an antivirus company and let them make a cure for it.

The guy in the article *works* for an antivirus research organization. He’s a key computer security researcher.

At first I was skeptical, but on a close read, I realized that the researcher isn’t claiming that the computer was infected via an ultrasonic network– the airwalled computer was infected at the BIOS level by a compromised USB stick. The hypothesized ultrasonic network was a working theory to explain how a computer with no network card might be sending and receiving network packets, which is the symptom they were observing.

I work in IT, even though my specialty isn’t network security. I know enough that the hacker hunts would probably kill me, unless I worked in TENka. 😉

If you look at the ‘virus’ and then at the tenka symbol it kind of looks like the second is the Virus giving a cheeky smile 🙂

Not A Villain Webcomic

Webcomic of a semi- reformed hacker trying to redeem herself in a post- apocalyptic world she may have created.

‘Not A Villain’ Webcomic – Page 326