| The Hacker Files | |
|---|---|
 Cover toHacker Files No. 2, artist Tom Sutton. | |
| Publication information | |
| Publisher | DC Comics |
| Schedule | monthly |
| Format | mini-series |
| Publication date | August 1992 – July 1993 |
| No. of issues | 12 |
| Main character(s) | Jack Marshall Barbara Gordon Sarge Steel |
| Creative team as of August 1992 | |
| Created by | Lewis Shiner,Tom Sutton |
| Written by | Lewis Shiner |
| Penciller | Tom Sutton |
| Inker | Mark Buckingham |
The Hacker Files is a twelve issueDC Comics mini-series published from August 1992 to July 1993. It was written byLewis Shiner and illustrated byTom Sutton.[1]
The series, written bycyberpunk novelist Lewis Shiner, is notable for the first appearance of a post-Suicide Squad memberBarbara Gordon (Oracle), as well as the introduction of theDigitronix computer company, a fictitious computer brand which would continue to show up in theDCU for years thereafter.
At the end of issue 1 in the 'letters pages' section,[2] author Lewis Shiner reveals that he'd basedThe Hacker Files story and comic book protagonist Jack Marshall on his unpublished novelRed Weather, which he'd began developing in Summer 1978. That story dealt with a software programmer in his late-twenties named "Jack Marshall", who worked for a sinister Texas-based computer company. This in itself was inspired by Shiner's employment withWarrex Computer Corp. in the ’70s who produced the Centurion family of minicomputers.[3][4]
Jack Marshall (Hacker) is a freelance systems analyst fromRaleigh, North Carolina. Fascinated with computers ever since he was a child, he grew up alongside the industry and eventually ended up working atDigitronix World Industries (DTX), a small company inDallas, Texas. Maverick company president Donny Travis worked alongside Marshall to invent the Digitronix Desktop PC.[1]
The Digitronix PC's success and profits caused rapid growth in the company, and a new senior Vice President named Walter Sutcliffe denied Marshall any profit sharing from his invention, because said profit sharing was based on a handshake agreement between Marshall and Donny Travis. Sutcliffe was one of five middle managers Donny Travis brought in from CompuTech. According to Jack, CompuTech went under due to incompetent middle management. Marshall attempted to steal his owncodebase for a new updated version of Digitronix' proprietaryoperating system DROS (Digitronix Resident Operating System) but was caught and summarily terminated. But since he is the only one who truly understands DROS, he is brought in by the United States government (specificallySarge Steel) as a freelance troubleshooter whenever there is a problem.[1]
The first Story arc SoftWar dealt with a virus infecting the Digitronix computers used by thePentagon, it had somehow spread over the internet and infectedArpanet (Advanced Research Projects Agency), Securenet (connects to bombers and missiles) andMilnet. Jack compiles ananti-virus and recounts his history with Digitronix after a confrontation with Sutcliffe. He's able to cure the virus everywhere exceptCheyenne Mountain Complex which isolated itself the moment a virus was detected. The virus takes over the Cheyenne Mountain system and uses it to begin deployingICBMs. Jack uncovers a traitor in Cheyenne Mountain who dies while trying to escape, he later stopsGeneral Wade Eiling from accidentally launching a nuclear strike on Russia and prevents World War III.[5]
The Operation Moonwitch storyline was based on real worldOperation Sundevil, aUnited States Secret Service crackdown on illegal computer hacking activities that took place in 1990. The operation is named after a decoy message board used by the Federal Government calledMoon Witch. Someone got hold of theE911 document which details how the national emergency response system works, and then they put the document online in a real worldzine namedPhrack. The government uses the theft and publication of the document as an excuse to dismantle the Hacker subculture. They arrest Sue Denim of the Speed Metal Kids after copies of the document are planted on their personal computers, and Oracle (Barbara Gordon) who downloaded a copy from Phrack as part of an investigation. Barbara accidentally shoots a Federal agent who had burst into her bedroom, but his vest saves him, in federal prison she uses the aliasAmy Beddoes from her days with theSuicide Squad. Jack Marshall finds a copy on his own machine and deletes it, he's able to trace that copy back to Digitronix World Industries.Catherine Cobert ofJustice League International calls in the assistance ofGreen LanternHal Jordan on behalf of Sue Denim and Oracle, but Jack Marshall gets there first.Oracle is able to prove that the file originated at Digitronix and all the detainees are set free.
Jack confronts his former co-worker Yoshio Natsume. Yoshio is the nephew of Tohiro Natsume whose Japanese company originally supplied Digitronix with cheap computer chips he bought on the Black Market from the Yakuza, but he later built chip foundries on the Chinese mainland. Jack confronts Yoshio with evidence of his complicity in the Pentagon Virus and the E911 document leak. Jack discovers that Yoshio was framed by Sutcliffe who has been using hissuperuser account and password. Yoshio introduces Jack to Yan Qing a Chinese exile and a survivor of theTiananmen Square protests of 1989, her fiance Yi who worked at a Digitronix assembly plant in China, had discovered anundocumented feature in the machine he was working on, it automatically recorded all spoken conversation in its local environment and stored it in a hiddenpartition on the machine's opticalhard drive. He disappeared soon after sharing this fact with a close friend from the plant. Jack schedules a meeting with his ex-wife Kathy Spencer who works in Digitronix' hardware division, and who designed the security hardware that protects all Digitronix plants. Kathy gives Jack a device which should get him past a plant's electronic security. Jack goes to China intending to break into one of the assembly plants, but his arrival is anticipated by Sutcliffe. Due to a botched infiltration Jack and Yoshio and captured by Sutcliffe and thrown into a holding cell with Yi. While in that cell they begin to see the outlines of theAleph conspiracy, the true reason for the virus, and how the information retrieved from the computers would be routed by the virus and co-ordinated by Tohiro Natsume's newest project asupercomputer with 64parallel processors. They escape from the cell using Kathy's anti-security device, and sneak Yi out of China by shipping him to the US in an equipment box.[6]
Yoshio discovers a massive mobilization of Digitronix personnel and hardware being sent to a secret facility atTyuratam in Kazakhstan,parallel processors,Prolog language modules, and experimentalfiber optic buses. They figure out that Digitronix is building a working globally networked artificial intelligence which they intend to use to process a few milliongigabytes of stolen government and industrial secrets.[1] Jack uses a Digitronixvideophone to contactJustice League Europe headquarters in London, and offers them a cure for the Pentagon virus. When he gets there he tells Hal Jordan and the rest of the JLE what Digitronix is really up to.Wally West scouts the installation at superspeed and runs into a door knocking himself out, he is captured by Digitronix security but escapes them when he wakes up. Jack uses thevirtual reality interface to hack the AI which looks like Sutcliffe, he confronts it inside a game ofCode of the West. Jack had designed a compact videogame for the DTX PC calledCode of the West, it is also abackdoor which ishardcoded into the operating system of every Digitronix PC. Jack uses this game to define the rules of the fight between himself and the AI. The AI makes sure there is no possible way for it to lose the game. Jack deliberately loses to the AI, allowing it to kill him in the game, because "There's a million ways to END the game by losing...but NONE to end it by WINNING. And since you CAN'T lose...you're going to be here a LONG time". He leaves the AI playing the game, stuck in arecursive loop. Yoshio is put in charge of Digitronix, and no charges are filed against the company.[7]
The Speed Metal Kids are teenage hackers who worship internet personalities like Hacker and Oracle, and who serve as his assistants:
The Digitronix PC (DTX PC) of 1992 is an inexpensiveOEM personal computer that can also serve as a business capableworkstation or aclustered file server. It boasted 100megabytes ofram, anHDTV monitor and optical disk storage, possibly based on theNeXTcube'smagneto-optical drive. It also had built in compatibility withNTSC\PAL formats and had built incomposite video out, as well as advanced digital audio and video editing capacity on-chip, possibly ascoprocessors similar to theAmiga.
DROS is theDigitronix Resident Operating System, a free copy of DROS was bundled with every machine. Lewis Shiner gives detailed information on the inner workings of DROS in theusr/hacker/mail section at the back of the first two issues. Because series consultant Alan Wexelblat had warned him thatUNIX wasn't considered secure enough for government installation (in 1992), he decided that DROS would look like UNIX but would not exactly be UNIX. Kim Fairchild, another series consultant, suggested that he useemacs as DROS' residenttext editor. In DROS file blocks are graphically represented as rows of stacked rectangular blocks. All commands shown when Jack interacts with DROS are Unix commands. As in UNIX,BSD andLinux, there are user and superuser accounts.[8]
| /dev/sd0a |
| pent1.dod.com:/usr/share |
| rm vcom.doc |