|
| |
Something Phishy This Way Comes... On
a night of gambling, Bobby Deltoid is interrupted by an emergency
distress signal from his beloved car. Big surprise: It's being jacked.
He soon learns, however, that more than mere grand theft auto is afoot.
Millions of his dollars have been lost in illicit purchases made in his
name. Worse, the guilty parties are perhaps not as guilty as they first
appear.
He's been phished.
Rather than simply
taking the hit like some hapless civ, Deltoya embarks on a night of
violence and retribution, making examples of those who contributed to
the intimate crime of which he is the victim.
The stakes, now, are higher than in any back room poker game. He's playing for his very identity.
* * *
Typing
this story was slightly weird - not big weird, but the little weird of
a missed detail to which one has grown accustomed and therefore notices
the absence of whilst simultaneously being unable to identify it.
In
this case the detail turned out to be, during the time I spent typing
it out, the squiggly red line under words that the dictionary shouldn’t
recognise. The word “phish” and every derivation thereof didn’t come up
in my word processor’s hit list, and therefore got to swim in the
public vocabulary pool with all the other words. “Virtua” “ZoneSec” and
many, many other terms integral to the mythos are an ongoing battle
against which my only weapons are “Add to Dictionary” and “Ignore all”.
The term “phisher”, which appears many times in this story, wasn’t
among them, even though some part of my subconscious seemed to think it
should’ve been.
It makes sense, I suppose, since phishing
is a real goddamn thing, and the makers of the dictionaries used by the
linguistic departments of word processor manufacturers need to contain
it. It’s just a subtle sign of an expanding influence of cyberspace
(and cyber-crime) on our world I suppose. Funny how even a nasty
concept like phishing can illustrate that.
|
"To the mind that is still, the whole universe surrenders.” – Lao Tzu
~Sir Pencilot
|
|
|
|
|
