The Hood
A woman I know invited me to accompany her to a dinner at a temple in Brookline, Massachusetts. I’m not religious, but like any other programmer, I'm not one to turn down free food either. The rabbi at the Temple is a very well-known man and was just a few months from retiring. For whatever reason, the guy liked me. And while others fought for the honor, he sat beside me at the table. The dinner was about a month after the horrible Temple shooting in Pittsburgh occurred. He was talking about it and then said, " I wish there were something I could do, but I am too old and not smart enough. If only there were a young man who was smart enough to come up with some kind of solution”. He looked at me. Then that pesky voice in my head, the one that always gets me into trouble, said,” There is nothing he can do. But you can,” before I could tune it out, I had an idea.
Antisemitism is a rapidly growing problem. But it’s hard to know exactly how big a problem is because random events are happening nationwide. If someone notices something, who do they tell? Maybe they call the police. But what if someone 500 miles away sees something similar? These two actions would never be correlated together. If there was a way, patterns could be spotted before significant events occurred. If some local Communication System merged with the same system in other locations, maybe a pattern would be noticed and funneled into some central office.
The idea was a mobile application that connected regional groups of people. It worked like a text messaging or an email system. But the problem is that it would be too dangerous to have a server that had personal information about 1 million Jewish people. That would become a target for terrible people.
This was Dejavu! I had thought about such a system before. I was in Russia for much of three years. I became very close with a few Russian men and their families then. As it happened, they were all KGB-affiliated. If you work in information security in Russia, KGB school is the only school that teaches it. These guys have nothing to do with the things you see in the news. However, they had access to anything you would imagine a KGB guy would have access to.
On a trip, I became friends with a young Russian woman. And, not that it matters, but she was relatively attractive. She was also a legit genius (they get a certificate for that). “For my own good”, these guys felt they need to know everything about her. They were positive she was out to either kill me or infiltrate them, so they were dead set on tracking me. So, I essentially had Government agents with a lot of resources in my business. What to do? I invented A method of Communication that is (thus far) impossible to trace.
When I built the original Version of Reflex the base of this communication system was built in. The reason being, that one of the problems that it solves is that companies will not share information about incidents with anyone. Since no one is sharing, this information could never be used to help with similar issues. I coined the phrase Situationally Aware Artificial Intelligence ™. It does not rely on a model of existing data to become smart. Instead, it builds its own model as people use the product. Stealth is required because people would never agree to authorize this function if it were not because it is impossible to determine where the data is coming from. Anyway, it works. No trace of it anywhere in any database or cache.
It says in my will that I want one thing written on my tombstone.” It seemed like a good idea at the time”. It was pointed out to me that this system could be used by organizations that no one would want to have secret communications (terrorists, extremists etc.). It couldn't be controlled without an infrastructure to validate every group that wants to use it.
As I am already the father of Violent Video Games, Spam, Streaming Media and RI (AI that is real) I don’t need to add the destruction of America to my portfolio. The Hood was too dangerous. It’s gone now.