Steganography

Entangled's hero, Jason Angle, uses steganography to keep his company's project from being stolen. It's a way of secreting information that's thousands of years old. More description is in the link below.

It's a story about how the gang of Russian spies, recently outed by the U.S., have used steganography on public websites to communicate with each other and home base. Incredulously, back in 2005, this method was discovered when a password was left on a piece of paper. Anyone remember War Games and how the kid changed his grades? Right, he saw the password to the school's computers left on a piece of paper. Didn't these spies watch that movie? Hopefully, you don't write your passwords anywhere.

See this link - Gizmodo: FBI spies and secret messages

Published!

Entangled is now published as an ebook. See Entangled at Smashwords.com.

Chapter 1 of Entangled

Chapter 1

There was nothing ceremonious in the way Sheri Forrester slid from under the covers, tossing the sheet aside, and sitting at the edge of the bed. She took a few moments to catch her breath before rising to fetch the robe she left draped over the hotel room's desk chair. Reminding herself that Steven was at least a decent lover - not the best she'd had, but eager - she slipped quietly into the robe.

As she sauntered toward the bathroom, Steven watched her casually, savoring the view of her legs to help soothe his soul after the storm of a great woman's body. Eyes closed, he let a few minutes pass to daydream the episode before opening his eyes and spotting the marketing report on the nightstand.

He stirred under the sheets, reaching out for that report he grabbed earlier in the day during the Wireless Expo nearby in San Francisco’s Moscone Center. This generic wireless report he had picked up between his customer meetings and his speech. For him, there was probably nothing he hadn't already seen, but maybe the author's different perspective would provide some amusement. Sometimes a different view would complement his strategies, sometimes it would point out a weakness that he could exploit in his competitors, and sometimes it would crucify his company. In Steven's mind, all information was to be used opportunistically.

Sheri, meanwhile, emerged from the bathroom, strode to the desk, and drew out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter from her purse. “You want one?” she teased out of habit. He would say no, as usual, but maybe one day she would entice him into one long drag, just for her. Making men do anything they didn't want to do was a fun challenge. She turned and held out the pack to him.

“No, my little minx. You know better than that,” Steven replied in his practiced, patronizing voice.

Shrugging, Sheri pulled a single cigarette from the box with her lips. “Your loss,” she said, making the stick waggle. She tossed the pack on the desk and lit up, taking a long, slow inhale. She could always count on smoking afterward to give her some satisfaction no matter who she was with.

“Though,” Steven interjected into the silence, “you might get me that scotch you offered me earlier.” He had skipped the scotch when he entered the room, going straight for her; now, he figured she was up anyway.

“Sure, okay. Just-” she took another long drag, “gimme a minute.”

For a few more moments, Steven watched her pace and puff, staring out the big bay window into the East Bay like a panther. He watched how positively feline Sheri could be; disappearing like a house cat to preen one moment, prowling like a huntress the next. At 38, her body was lithe and toned as if she exercised constantly to keep herself fit and tight.

Once she stamped the half-smoked cigarette out, Sheri strode to the mini-bar and pulled two baby bottles of Scotch from the rack. Two ice cubes for Steven, she recalled. After pouring, she brought both glasses to the mattress beside him.

“These rooms here remind me of my grandparents who lived in Daly City back in the sixties and seventies. Something about the teak furniture, I think,” Steven commented, recalling his childhood visits to San Francisco.

“It’s a little out of style, don’t you think?” Sheri said without much care.

“But that’s its charm, and the view here is spectacular,” he said cheerily as his eyes moved from the furniture to the big bay window looking out into the Bay. In all his travels, he could not really appreciate decor or style even though most of the rooms he stayed in were top notch. No, he was much more taken with the windows, the most interesting feature of any hotel room. The views from the window said a lot about the hotel, whether it was a good view from a half-rate hotel, or if you watched trash bins from above. A window showed the living city, cars and people in a symphony of movement. A picture or painting on a wall was so static, like his life lately.

“So what’s new at T.W.P?” Steven asked. “You never said you'd be at the Expo and surprised me with your message this morning.”

Sheri smiled before delivering, “Ah, well, I have been busy, but if you have to know, I've got this new project idea. If I told you anything else I'd need to kill you.” Actually, as Vice President of Research and Development at Terra Wireless Products her schedule demanded constant travel between TWP's design facilities in San Diego, Colorado, and New Jersey, their headquarters. Her job had grown beyond the convenience of video conferencing, especially with Asian companies who had very different views on business relationships than U.S. companies. Besides, she figured out long ago, why bother with a conference call when she could traverse the world in TWP-sponsored style, a perk she had earned?

Her mind vectored to the new project. She still struggled with the implications of its fantastic possibilities.

The radio section of a satellite, and even of mobile phones, consisted of a complex and sensitive array of integrated circuits and discrete resistors and capacitors, the guts of modern radios. The integrated circuits were a specialized process technology different and more costly than their counterparts in computers. This entire radio section was commonly the most sensitive and problematic of all sections of a satellite's payload. With this new technology, the issues associated with the radio design complexity and sensitivity to manufacturing the boards would be radically reduced, maybe even eliminated entirely, slashing manufacturing costs while also enhancing reliability through the hazardous launch stage.

“Perhaps,” Sheri continued teasingly, “I can tell you it promises to revolutionize satellite radio design and resolve all those nasty satellite production problems, if you promise not to tell.”

“Sounds very interesting. Won't that end up disrupting...” Steven almost continued, but he realized he would jeopardize losing Sheri's focus to her corporate quest for promotion again. “I'll just leave that to you.”

“Well, sure. Someday the supply chain will break, but the project is still in research mode and won’t be ready for production for at least three years. Nothing to worry about for a long time.”

Silence pressed in for a minute as their thoughts diverged, so Steven took Sheri's glass and set both on the nightstand and motioned for her to sit.

He began, “I’ve got to catch an early flight tomorrow. How much longer before you get home?”

“I'm in Korea for another week. But I am here for one more night.”

“So,” Steven smiled as his hand slid under the sheets, searching for the smooth skin of her thigh, “let's merger again, shall we?”

The Prologue is here!

The following is an excerpt from Entangled, a novel by Thomas W. Baker. Look for Entangled in ebook format soon.

*****

Prologue

WANTED

Pony Express - St. Joseph, Missouri to California in 10 days or less. Young, skinny, wiry fellows not over eighteen. Must be expert riders willing to risk death daily. Orphans preferred. Wages $25 per week.

In the 1860’s, a half million people sprawled west of the Rocky Mountains, many driven there by a rush of golden dreams in California a decade earlier. They were desperate for news from the Eastern United States where the bulk of the Civil War was fought. One news service, The Pony Express, formed from a government mail contract already given to a stage coach service operating on both the Butterfield route through the southern U.S. and the even slower route by ship–stagecoach-ship over the Isthmus of Panama.

Two thousand miles separated St. Joseph, Missouri, and Sacramento, California. With twenty riders, a hundred and sixty-three stations, and two hundred horses along the route, a mochila, a specially designed mailbag, carried the news and important letters along the central route in ten days at one week intervals. The first express mail started on April 3, 1860 with young, skinny, and wiry Johnny Fry holding the reins.

In only one and a half years, the Pony Express was abandoned. What killed the Pony Express was not the golden spike joining the first Transcontinental Railroad in 1869, but an electric spike running along wires.

On October 24, 1861, the first transcontinental telegraph completed its first transmissions and what used to take ten days now took minutes. A paradigm shift in communication, a spooky action at a distance, had toppled the Pony Express. Then came radio, a wireless wonderment that first zipped across the English Channel before the 20th century, shifting communication to broadcast for the masses. Another shift quickly approaches, launching new human abilities yet again.

Kali Sticks

In defending his property, Jason Angle uses a martial art called Kali. This is stick fighting with one or two 26 inch rattan or wooden sticks.

Why use sticks for fighting? Look around you wherever you are. Aren't sticks the most available weapon at hand? A chair leg, a pencil even, a broom handle broken in two. Unless you carry a gun all the time, sticks are the only weapon you probably have available when you need it.

Almost any other weapon is illegal to carry around. Swords, nunchakus, and knives are all banned by most municipalities. How does that leave you, a sovereign citizen, in a time of need? Is an officer around when you really need one, at that moment, in the instant of crime? Not likely. So you need to be able to defend yourself in the moment.

A good alternative to carrying around a wooden stick is to carry a collapseable baton, one that telescopes out to 2 feet. These can collapse to around a foot and are easy to carry. Of course, you can't take one on a plane with you, but you can check it in your luggage when travelling. You just need it on the street if you have to be there.

Hey, it's up to you to be ready if you're attacked. You can go your entire life without a crime against you, but being ready to defend yourself, to make it back to your loved ones, is invaluable.

Digital Decoding inside a cell phone

Jason Angle uses a form of Viterbi decoding for his Quantum Communication invention in my novel Entangled. Most digital radios, including cell phones, have this type of decoding, but what is Viterbi decoding?

Viterbi decoding is used in a digital radio receiver. Most of you have cell or smartphones. The voice you hear or the text message you see or the web page you look at was transmitted from a base station to your phone as digital information, received by it, and processed by a small computer. Part of the processing is a best guess at an incoming sequence of bits. Viterbi Decoding been used for decades and the inventor is still alive breathing life into new stuff - Andrew Viterbi of QualComm

When a radio sends digital information, it sends it in radio waves, one digital bit at a time. Those waves fly from your phone, through walls, bouncing off trees, buildings, water, you name it. When the waves get to a base-station, those ugly towers dotting the highways, the real wave adds to all the bounced waves and some good old-fashioned radio noise. That confuses the receiver, maybe enough that half the bits coming in are guessed wrong. Texting messages would look like gibberish, more so than the sender intended - LOL ROTFL u c da point.

Cleaning up this mess, decoding the digital bits, takes a bit of computing. First, take all the waves and noise for each bit, line them up, and feed them to a decoder. The decoder runs through all possible combinations of a fixed length. For example, a length of 4 bits means the decoder will test 16 possible combinations, starting at 0000, then 0001, up to 1111. The best matching sequence to the incoming data is chosen as the sequence for those 4 bits. There could be a bit error or two, but it's pretty good if the signal is strong enough, more correctly if the signal is a lot stronger than the radio noise.

That's the basics of Viterbi decoding. In Entangled I fictionalized a super Viterbi algorithm just because I needed something with a flashy name that some people might recognize. If you're interested more in Viterbi decoding, or algorithms, just search it!

Part with your Operating System (Windows, Linux, Mac)

If the op system dies or you get a nasty virus, why not just re-install a fresh one without worrying about your data (assuming you put your data on a different partition)? Any OS is always faster and better with a fresh install. That's also the best way to get rid of a virus! I guarantee it's faster and safer than a recovery too. Once you re-install, you're ready to go immediately. You can go right to your applications on your data partition too without having to reinstall the app. You could have even created a folder with all the application shortcut links and kept that on the data partition, then just copy all of the shortcuts back to the desktop. Voila! Ready to go.

That gets you productive immediately. When you have time, you can install antivirus and other system necessities into the operating system (not the data drive for those types of apps). But the point is, you get back to work faster by yourself than taking the computer to the Geek Squad and paying them to do it, wasting driving time and money.

Here's what I have on a 1/2 Terabyte drive (500 Gigabytes). I have a 40 Gigabyte partition for Windows, my main man (I like FPS, RTS games too, even if outdate PCs). I have applications that take up more than the 40 Gigs, but I put those on my data partition and link the apps. Another 20 Gigabyte partition I leave for my virtualbox playground and run Linux through that. The rest, about 440 Gigabytes on a 500 GB drive, I make my data and Apps partition. I can use that data whether Windows or Linux is running - very nice. The big advantage is if my operating system barfs I do not lose my data; it's on a separate partition, or drive letter. The only disadvantage: a little more work on reboot (since I encrypt my data drive - don't you, especially laptop drives?).

My data partition has these directories: program files, music, video, and data. I share the music and video on my home network and can play them through my DVR too.

I don't have to do special back up if the operating system (which has always been the problem) dies. I don't have to restore the data, or most of my applications, either. And I backup faster since it's a partition or image backup - fastest you'll ever do. This doesn't help if the hard drive completely dies, but I eliminate the operating system taking my data, and even applications, with it.

And, if I upgrade operating systems? Clean install. That's what I did with Windows 7. In an hour I was writing again in the same application. I didn't restore data. I didn't re-install all the applications I use. I just waited (okay, took a walk) while Windows installed and then I took off into the internet again.

So if you are smart about computers and how to be productive, or want to be, put your data and Apps on a separate partition. I laugh at the Bluescreen of Death!

Are you still reading? Okay. You probably want to know how to do this. Here's a quick list. If you need more detail, Google instructions for repartitioning on your own operating system. You will destroy anything on your hard disk so be sure you have backups!

1. Make sure you have an installation disk for your operating system.

2. Have a backup of your entire data on a separate hard disk, flash drive, cloud space, whatever.

3. Grab a partitioning tool. Many free Linux downloads are available which boot from a CD, launch an application called gparted, and allow you to do this to ANY hard drive.

4. Partition your hard drive into an OS partition and DATA partition. Allow for an extra 10 gigabytes to the OS partition as you will need some anti-virus, firewall, and a few other boot time programs. Add another partition if you wish to mess around with dual booting. Two partitions are sufficient.

5. Reboot into your OS installation disk and install the OS in the OS partition.

6. Reboot into your fresh OS.

7. Restore your DATA into your data partition.

8. Install all your applications to the DATA partition in a folder you choose. I use Program Files just like Windows does. Except install anti-virus, disk encryption, and any boot time programs into the OS partition.

9. Enjoy fast upgrading, backup, and switching to a new OS if you like.

Every Operating System is Evil

How's that for an extreme headline. What I mean is every operating system (OS) locks you in and makes the switching cost hard, the cost being money to have a geek squad do it for you, or your valuable time if you got skills. Want to try a Mac but the data is hard to move from Windows? Or maybe you want to try Linux because it's free and sounds white and nerdy? You can, really easy, if you just separate your data from the OS. It's pretty easy to do once, and then it's brain-dead simple after that.

When a computer gets an OS installed, by default it wants the entire hard disk for itself. If you buy a prepackaged Dell, it comes that way. It'll make space for your data and applications along with the OS, all in the same partition, the drive letter like C: and D: in Windows. Data, Apps, and OS are put together in a mashup of folders. This is horrible! It's the proverbial putting all of your eggs in one basket. If the OS blows up, it's hard and sometimes impossible to get your data back because the situation becomes FUBAR. Your data is the critical information that needs to survive! An OS and the applications can be reinstalled, but if you don't have a backup, your data is sometimes gone completely.

And what if you wanted to try the new version of your OS? Like update from Vista to Windows 7? Do not try the automated upgrade! You must make a clean, fresh, install. And if you do that, won't the OS destroy your data folders? Yes or very special care has to be done, or new software bought. Forgeddaboudit!

There's an easy way to do this and I'll go through that in detail in another post. Simply, put your data and usual applications on a separate hard drive partition. The data doesn't die if the OS does. The data is untouched when a new OS is installed, whether it exploded or you got a virus. And the data can be backed up super fast by a partition or image transfer.

The catch is, if you buy a new computer, you have to repartition the hard drive to reduce the installed OS to a minimum and create a data partition. An extra step with a new machine but one which will be so much easier for you and save time in the future when the OS starts spewing chunks. See my sequel post, Part with your Operating System for more details.

Communications Revolution

I speculate how digital communication will radically change in my novel Entangled. Could this really happen soon?

You bet. It's the old adage about some scientists think they can, others think they can't, everything's already been invented, and so on. Quantum Entanglement has been known for a long time. Einstein called it spooky action at a distance (actually, it's an english translation of his german). That means that when two objects, like photons or atoms, are entangled, and one changes its "spin", the other object magically changes its own spin in exact response. Cool, I mean really cool. If it does work like I think it will someday, prepare for a revolution!

The first telegraph was based on flags. Different colors and shapes are a different message. Romans used this and navies adopted it at sea. American Indians used smoke signals. Not to magical, eh?

Even the first electric telegraph invented by Samuel Morse, of the Morse Code you may have heard, wasn't too magical. Electricity was well known by then and instead of a short wire between transmitter and receiver in the same room, a long telegraph (later telephone) wire was strung between two cities. People understood that, could physically touch it.

Next was radio. That was magic at first, the sending of information across the English Channel. No wires! Now that was cool, or like a college buddy told me, FM (fucking magic, but it really means Frequency Modulation in radio speak). Really, radios are cool. Your smartphone has one. WiFi, Bluetooth, Zigbee, they're all cool. You can search the web, send texts. Well, you know that today because cell phones are ubiquitous. But back before digital radio? We only had TV and radio (okay, I just gave away my age), and of course ROCKS to throw at one another, with or without a note attached.

So we have these ways of communicating. What happened to flags, and smoke signals, and radio. They're around still for special applications like sailing (flags), search and rescue (smoke), and driving (radio). Even High Definition television is still around using the old airwaves that analog TV used to own.

So what happens when Quantum "radio" appears? The old stuff will stay around for some applications, like personal area networks and GPS. But in my book I explore briefly the impact on the cellular market, WiFi, and Bluetooth.

Gone. Kaput. Did you know there are 4 BILLION cell phone subscriptions in the world? And what if each subscription averaged $50? That is a monsterous market worldwide. No wonder it's so cutthroat. Can you imagine if that disappeared overnight? I did imagine that in my novel.

So if Quantum Communication really comes about, I think it will decimate the cellular and WiFi industries. More so, I think it will free people from some tyrannical practices the service providers force us into, such as $0.20 text messages. Really? 140 characters for $0.20? That's skyway robbery;)

KILL YOUR SMARTPHONE

There has been increasing awareness that smartphones can record your conversation even when you have the phone OFF. In my novel, Entangled, Jason Angle uses this to do some investigation. Let's be clear about a smartphone being OFF.

By OFF, most people think that means when they hang up a call. Okay, let's use that definition. In this mode, you can still use your smartphone, right? Calendar, ToDos, music, they all work because your smartphone is not off, only the PHONE is "off." Anytime you see those bars, the signal strength indicator on your phone, you are connected to a cell tower (service provider, Verizon, T-Mobile, AT&T, etc). Your phone sends some data once in a while to tell the cellular tower that you can accept incoming calls. It also tells the tower where you are to within a 100 meters or so. And lastly, as has become news recently, an agency can have the tower tell your phone to send them whatever your microphone picks up. If you have speakerphone capability on your smartphone, this means you and others near you. Yes, that's right. Without you knowing, someone can listen to your conversations. And this also happens with your landline phones.

I used to design the chips, those integrated circuits, that went into smartphones. All this snooping capability is in software, which just controls the hardware at times. There are applications out there, like Window's system processes or Linux's daemons, that can live and run covertly in the smartphone operating system - it's just a computer program. They are like computer viruses. And smartphones are basically computers with a cell phone as a peripheral, like WiFi. These computers are capable of turning your cell phone function on at any time without you knowing, and send whatever the microphone hears, masking any visual clues. That's easy to program, really. The trick would be to get it on the smartphone without you knowing. That's another story.

By DEAD, I mean the battery is either really out of power, dead as roadkill, or the battery is removed. You can't use your smartphone to see your calendar, or read an ebook. It doesn't work at all. That's DEAD.

So, what to do? Even with wiretapping laws, some people and agencies don't follow them. Even if it's illegal, they can know what you're doing. They don't have to use that stuff in court.

I like my privacy sometimes. So if I'm ever anyplace, like a meeting with a publisher, and I really want my new book to remain secret, I kill my smartphone.

If you want to be lost somewhere or need real privacy, KILL YOUR SMARTPHONE.

Linux has its uses

Why Linux? It doesn't do gaming as well as Windows or Mac. Windows is the default gaming platform and will stay that way for awhile. Even Apple computers lag the gaming that Windows can do.

Linux is good for everything else, as good as the others, and almost always free. There's an application for everything that Windows has, yet they're named differently so finding them is sometimes harder. But your employer doesn't let you use an application you want?

So what? If you need to create text, multimedia, drawings, or art, Linux does that as good or in some cases better than the other operating systems. And you can work without being noticed, in private, do your own thing your own way. Put in an honest day's work and then do your work your way without the peeping CEO.

Take a USB flash drive, 1 Gigabyte is enough if you don't have a lot of data. Install any of hundreds of flavors of Linux on the drive. A good, small footprint Linux is called Puppy Linux. Even Ubuntu can fit on 1 Gigabyte with enough room for hundreds of megabytes of data.

Make your computer boot from the USB flash, and voila! Whenever you need privacy, reboot with USB.

An alternative - run Linux in virtualbox or some other virtual machine as an application in Windows or Mac. Easy to do. It looks like your machine is still connected with the employer too. But if your employer has a keylogger running, you'll still be watched. The safest way is to reboot into Linux, then back into Windows.

In Entangled, Jason uses Ubuntu Linux to work on a presentation to the Board of Directors while at work. He can't be tracked, traced, or seen if he doesn't go online. This keeps him safe from the prying eyes of his nemesis. Does he have a moral problem with this? Do you?

Entangled synopsis

In his first real challenge, following the mothballing of the company's highest priority research, Jason Angle finds that technical excellence can't trump political skill as he fights timeless greed to keep his revolutionary invention from being stolen from within.

After the death of his young wife, Jason Angle threw himself into his job with his research team accelerating the invention of the first quantum communication system. When his project, the company's highest priority, gets mothballed, he can't stop working for fear of spiraling back into depression. The continued work threatens plans of an ambitious corporate Vice President who tosses Jason into the middle of her game board. Dejected and uncertain, Jason realizes the gift from his short marriage is his best therapy. Unless he rolls his own dice soon, he may find he's lost the game, his job, and the future of all communication.

Copyright for Entangled

I filed for copyright on 5 Apr 2010, although the draft was completed in 2009. This could take up to 6 months apparently. Next is to get an ISBN.

New novel

Jason Angle, scientist at the former Bell Labs Holmdel campus, is working his heart out to achieve Quantum Communication for his company, Terra Wireless Products. Will he succeed before his invention is ripped away from him? Why is the FBI involved? Find out more soon.