"BOFH" by Thomas Hardman

"Howdy! Nice boat! - Um, I'm from Data Systems Support Services."

"Yeah, come aboard. Welcome to the field office of the Delphic Research Institute."

"Field Office?"

"Yeah, we have a main branch at the University. Kind of hard to research cetaceans from fifty miles inland though."

"Uh, yeah, I see what you mean. Um, hang on. Coffee? Sure. Hey, nice office! didn't expect this on a craft of this size. Lot of weird iron - what the heck is that, real-time acoustic spectrograph or something?"

"Yeah, it's not like we're really underfunded, it's just that it's a small operation. We're trying to minimize human interaction with the dolphins, so basically it's just me and all of the equipment."

"I like the underwater window. Hey, was that a dolphin?"

"Sure was, that's Binky. He flies by to look at people when we get visitors. He hangs out a lot when most of the other dolphins head out to sea for the night."

"Hmm, what a trip. I haven't seen one this close before."

"Want to go out and talk to him? Not really supposed to, but - "

"Nah, don't like the water all that much. It and electronics don't mix all too well - heh heh."

"O-kay. Whatever - you don't have to worry about that out here, we run everything off of twelve volt, stepped up in some cases, but we're definitely not wired to the mains here - as you say, electricity and water don't mix too well and I'd feel pretty bad if I dropped a hundred-twenty volts onto my research subject."

"Um, yeah. I can see that."

"All I have run out here to the boat from "civilization" is the phone line, which brings us to the problem."

"Which is?"

"Damned modem."

"Um, I'm more of a systems guy. I mean, I do do hardware, but I got the impression you thought this was a software problem, not hardware."

"Well, about every time I dial in to my ISP to upload the daily data, it dials out, I get a decent connect, it passes login and password, and then drops to 'ppp'. So I run 'rdist' with 'ssh', remote file-tree updating via an 'idea' encryption link, and the files get uploaded, and if there's anything there that I don't have here, it gets sent, encrypted. Well, considering that half of the files are digitized dolphin vocalizations, it takes awhile, and of course I'm going to do whatever I can to make this process go a little faster. So I start checking the packets, with 'tcpdump' and there's all of these really weird packets going out in the background."

"Check your connections?"

"Yeah, they're all fine. At least all of the electronics are. It's this crappy acoustic coupler."

"You're using an acoustic-coupler for a modem connect and you wonder why it's crappy?"

"Well, it's not your usual acoustic coupler, we replaced the telephone module with a high-quality hydrophone, it's got a lot better bandwidth than the phone-line does. Basically, the acoustic coupler is for speed of disconnect, we're on a budget here and this laptop is half of our non-dedicated dataprocessing capacity, and it's basically just for the internet connect. Sometimes we have to cast off pretty quickly and haul ass outta here, the hydrophone is hardwired to the phoneline and waterproofed, when you jam the coupler into the laptop it "off-hooks" the phone which is dedicated anyway. If I forget to disconnect the laptop, and take off (I've done it a few times, heh) the acoustic coupler just pops loose and the phoneline hangs up."

"Okay. I can see that. Actually makes pretty good sense. You get a lot of line noise though I guess?"

"Well, we have all of the regular error-correction stuff, we get pretty good throughput. Lot of padding around the coupler anyway. Here, take a look up here topside."

"Hey, pretty neat. Sorta like hookups on a Winnebago!"

"Yeah, that's how we came up with the acoustic-coupler scheme. We tried a bayonet-type electrical connection, but between water, movement of the boat and all of that sort of thing, it turned out that the acoustic coupler with a hydrophone was the only workable solution. The laptop's so filled with custom wares that we just keep it bolted-down below and when we had a hardline connection, first time I took off too quick, I yanked the phoneline in half, next time I almost yanked the laptop loose, I said to hell with it and got a grad-student back at the campus to whip this up."

"Fairly elegant solution, I guess!"

"Cheaper than a ship-to-shore databand license, I can tell you that much. Ship-to-shore is what we use for voice, that's inexpensive enough, 'bout like cellular."

"Okay, well, hook the thing up and let's get to work."

"Sure. One sec - We're hooked. Dedicated is connecting, chat is going, there ya go."

"Okay, tcpdump, um yeah. That is weird. Looks like IRC traffic."

"No fooling, can you tap in?"

"Um, well, lessee - um - um - damn, you don't have a client here. Lessee, um, um, okay. Hang on."

"Whatcha doing?"

"Gotta download some code, compile the damned thing."

"That's okay, we got good GNU on this box."

"Yeah, I saw that. Ain't Linux great?"

"And cheap too - heheheheh."

"Okay, wait a minute, here we go - gotta hack the makefile - check the libs, okay okay - build, you bastard."

"Is goin?"

"Seems to be. Yup. Fast little box!"

"Well, lessee what we got."

"Here goes. - Damn. Someone's tapped you somewhere downstream, looks like they wait until you connect, let your password log them onto net and then inject packets. Of course when return packets come back, they can't suck 'em out or anything, so you get 'em."

"You figger?"

"Well, it's gotta be - look at the keying speed - can't be anything but undernet upload or something."

"On IRC?"

"Sure, happens all of the time. Definitely the sort of people who'd find a dedicated line and then piggyback on it."

"But look. They just sent ten paragraphs and they're waiting for a reponse!"

"And here it comes. 'But you can't just abandon tuna fishing, it's a lot of people's traditional livelihoods and' um, typo backspace backspaces 'besides they don't kill all that many dolphins anyway'."

"And - damn! What the hell, is this tapper just hitting a macro key? Look at that, gotta be a macro or a 'bot or something."

"I'd say a 'bot but it's addressing the issues pretty well I guess, not my politically-correct but 'when you say traditional livelihoods do you say that people should be used to die because some family is thieves' hey, that's fairly good logic if weirdly worded."

"So who's our suspect?"

"Got any politically-correct foreigners around here that are computer geeks?"

"Not that I know of."

Beyond the windows the dolphin continued to grin as, listening carefully at the jerry-rigged acoustic modem-coupler, it awaited the painfully slow rebuttal.