When I first opened the page, I almost it in disgust...
Who the
hell wants to read a
web page where they misspell
HTTPS ??
Then somehow my eyes caught the word '
temporal'.
Hyper-spatial temporal tunnelling protocol proxy server
read the rather inconspicuous expansion of the
acronym.
There was little else on the page except a huge blue link saying :
Then the
weirdness started!!
I could have sworn that the download window of my
browser opened a
fraction of a second before i actually clicked the link.
"Hmmmm weird... maybe the mouse button is acting up!" I thought, but then again the left button hadn't ever done that in my ken.
In a couple of seconds the browser was redirected to a rather plain looking
text file , which read as follows:
JTEG
While you may not have been aware , you have already had a demonstration of our
unique and 'futuristic' technology.
We are the 'Joint Temporal Experts Group' , working on several top secret
technologies. By a purely random means , you were selected to be a beta tester
for one of our more hush-hush projects - The HSTTP proxy.
To describe it succinctly , it's a 'time machine' for your HTTP packets.
That was the reason your browser started downloading the file before you clicked
on it.
Our webserver services download requests for this application one second
before they arrive.
The software you are now downloading isn't so much complex in itself , it's
simply a small local proxy that sits between your browser and our servers,
translating your requests into a special form.
Running it brings up a small digital clock display showing time and date.
After you set up your browser setting to use 127.0.0.1:81 as a proxy, you are
ready to go.
Just adjust the the clock to the time and date you want to browse , and you can
view the webpage belonging to that time, past or future.
-----
double take -----
By this time , I was pretty sure this was all a crazy
gimmick to host some nasty
backdoor on my system and
trojanize it.
But then I noticed that the download speed had suddenly shot up to 100 mbps on my download meter.
Whoa!!
Thats like a 100 times faster than my connection speed!
WTF!!!
-----
continuing -----
You have surely noticed by now that the download speed has increased 100 fold.
That is because we are sending packets across time to save you some of it and demonstrate
our amazing technology.
Enjoy our software!!
PS : Be careful of temporal causality violations...
The entire JTEG team.
The last note seemed a little
ominous to me.
Kind of like saying
"You are now the proud owner of an assault rifle, please don't shoot anyone important with it"
But being an avid reader of
science fiction and having watched "
Back to the future" and "
TimeCop" and "
Timeline" ad nauseam, I considered myself quite an expert on causality and temporal paradoxes.
I shrugged off the
feeling of dread and boldly doubleclicked the downloaded program and set up my browser proxy as they instructed.
My first instinct was to use the
scientific method to test it. Obviously I could not depend on the outside
world wide web to check its action as it might just be some trick proxy server sending old cached pages.
So as the
Buddhists say, "I looked inward..."
I fired up
Apache and patched up a small
HTML page which showed the current time on my system.
Then disconnecting from my network, I first set the clock to 2 minutes in the future.
I assured myself that by just reading the time, I wouldnt be transmitting any significant information into the past or future (actually both ways since it was HTTP over HSTTP).
I navigated to
http://127.0.0.1 and my eyes nearly popped out!!
Now I was shaking with fear, excitement and glee.
Think of the
possibilities...
The
fun I could have...
The
havoc I could wreak!!!!!
Today localhost ... Tommorow the world!!!!!
I started questioning the sanity of the JTEG for offering the download to random individuals such as myself, but as it turned out they had
all bases covered ...
The first thing to do was to find out this peculiar 'HSTTP' proxy's IP address and the protocol it used. With luck it should be some plaintext protocol and if I could figure it out, I should be able to use this thing anywhere, anytime (anytime... heh! heh!)
I brought up ethereal and started logging the
outbound packets
I wound back the clock display as far as it would go and it read 12:00 AM 1/1/1970.
Good old google.com ...
Obviously there was no google as such then (or the WWW for that matter) so I should receive a simple
"Host not found" error.
No sooner said than done…
The packets flew by in ethereal and sure enough it was a plain old http.
http://www.google.com had turned into
http://222.173.190.239:49374/hsttpbeta.cgi?url=www.google.com&time_t=0
The significance of the web adress or port did not strike me then... ( And I should have known they were
UNIX junkies -
time_t indeed! )
On a whim I threw caution to the winds (I'm the type who tests
48 volts DC with the tongue) and navigated to news.google.com setting the date to 2020,
curious to see if the
oil crash had hit hard then and whether they had
cold fusion finally.
Instead I got :
HSTTP Error : 714
Temporal causality violation.
The information in the webpage you are trying to view exceeds
the recommended TIQ ( Temporal Interference Quotient ).
Please try another time.
"Aha!" I thought, "These guys are good... They have all the
paradoxes blocked!"
And a
corny sense of humor too "Please try another time" indeed!
For sometime I wondered how my evil plans to use this for fun and profit would work out, and then suddenly I had it ....
Everyone in their right mind knows that the stock market is chaotic.
I reasoned that that any information about stock prices has no chance of violating causality as it's taken for granted that its
random.
I cautiously ( I didn't want some bug in their software or my foolhardiness
tearing a hole in the universe ) experimented for a few days and actually found that my
theory actually worked.
It was the same for all
chaotic models , the weather, the traffic and so on...
I continued to use this proxy until the software went public in the year 2040, by which time I had amassed a small fortune through my '
investments' and a vast library of future technological documents ( I had come to realize in time that just knowing some information from the future would never cause
causality violations as long as it wasn't
remotely connected to me).
It turned out that there were only 7
beta testers who had continued to use it over this period, among whom I was the only one who had made most of the "time".
Soon after, JTEG had perfected the science of what is now called
Temporal branch theory which allowed them to implement
copy on write semantics for universal effectations.This was rapidly put into operation after the great "Lets-swamp-an-ancient-webserver-with-too-many-parallel-requests"
mania that all the
script kiddies went into when the software became freely available for download.
They also developed an O(log N)
algorithm for universal
garbage collection which allowed them to delete otherwise
lifeless universes to make space for useful branches (also speeding up trans-temporal
host resolution by a huge factor). Soon they started
auto-updation of their server software from the future.
The
storage device market was hit really bad as people no longer needed
backup they could read the data from the past when it was generated.
But then there was an alternate
market to host data to be read from the future, so the
data storage folks jumped
bandwagons and got into that side of the
business
Rumor now has it that the hardware they use would soon be small and cheap enough for end users, and that JTEG would begin field testing soon.
I just can't wait for my own temporal IP router!! Full
IPv6 support ,
SMTP ,
POP ,
HTTP ,
FTP ,
RTSP - the works...
I boldly decided today, to make this write-up documenting this wonderful stuff, the information dispersed
backwards in time can in no way affect me or my
universe anymore as
I just upgraded to the paid Version 1.77 today which allows a +/-40 year temporal range!!!
At worst the
version of me in the destination time when I post this writeup could lose some XP.
I'm a
level 10 noder now anyway, so who cares.
rep_movsd
July 3rd 2046 9:58 AM