Note by Daniel M. Bensen on Substack: "The Big, Red Button For this week's sci-friday, I'll share the results of the question I asked on Wednesday, in aid of writing a technothriller short story. The scenario: the embittered ex-CTO of a ubiquitous communication app sets himself to destroying that app. He threatens h…"

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The Big, Red Button

For this week's sci-friday, I'll share the results of the question I asked on Wednesday, in aid of writing a technothriller short story. The scenario: the embittered ex-CTO of a ubiquitous communication app sets himself to destroying that app. He threatens his ex-boss the CEO with terrible consequences if he doesn't disable that evil app! My question: what can the owners of a ubiquitous mobile app (like Gmail) do that will disable that app on all its users’ machines?

The answers:

shut down the servers, or the app's ability to communicate with the servers

delete the repository of user data (and all its backups)

shut down a library for some basic function of the program

destroying or hiding the organization’s private key, so they can't access customer data

update the app with a patch that disables it, as well as disabling its update function, so the change cannot be reversed. Users can't just uninstall the app and download a clean version, because this app is preinstalled bloatware on most devices, with no option to uninstall.

(perhaps my most Zen suggestion): make the owners of the app want to disable it, themselves.

if the app doesn't use servers (for example, it's a peer-to-peer network between phones) then it polls a server every 5 minutes to see if the kill switch was activated

But why would that activity be programmed into the app in the first place? There would need to be people on the inside of the company doing this: at least one person adding the code, another checking it, and another making sure it stays in new versions of the product.

And what exactly does this terrible app do? I've kept some details about the story secret because I hope you will read it when I finish it and post it here on substack. Please subscribe and stay tuned. In the mean time, please use these ideas in your own short stories. It would be fun to compare the stories when they're done :)

AJ Armstrong

Alejandro Piad Morffis

and

Brett Richards

I also want to thank my extra-substack informants Kris, Veli, Vasil, and Pavlina.

Alejandro Piad Morffis

Hannah

Kathryn Vercillo