I was in Facebook Jail once

It was a long time ago and I was different then.

But the memories still haunt my dreams.

I got out. But I was still changed by the experience. And not for the better…..

They couldn’t hold me.

I was ready to do my time; be a good boy, integrate back into civilised society, stop downloading torrent files and running cracked software. But then something happened that made the run cycles of my CPU 100% committed to one cause:

Getting out.

The computer in the cell next to mine was friendly from the moment I got there.
I didn’t really trust him at first because, well, why would I?

But soon I realised he was just like me.
A computer who just had beliefs that he wasn’t afraid to share.

A computer who just happened to say the wrong thing at the wrong time in the company of the wrong people.
Some delicate flower reports him to the authorities and ‘BANG!’
Here you are; 2 watts of electricity a day, minimum RAM and a 28kbps dial up connection.

He was a nice guy. He just had his opinions and didn’t mind discussing them. Nothing too inflammatory. Just a little…harsh?

Like the idea that prisoners in jail should be made to walk on treadmills for 8 hours a day.
Those treadmills could be hooked up to the national grid and those prisoners could provide everyone else with free, 100% environmentally friendly energy.

Better still, set up the system so prisoners work 8 hours a day providing free electricity solely to their victims or victim’s family.

And where’s the downside?
Who would argue that prisoners shouldn’t have to have a job like the rest of us?
Their job can be 40 hours a week producing electricity.

You know the sort of guy.
He wasn’t a nutter. He was into nature and liked animals and stuff. Didn’t mind when a cat sat on his keyboard. Just stopped what he was doing and let the cat sleep there. Tried not to disturb it.
Even continuing to do nothing while he desperately needed to clear out his cache files. Held it for as long as he could.
His data bus would be almost overloading and he would be finally forced to disturb the slumbering feline and while he did it, he would be apologising to the cat.

He liked to paint and draw occasionally. Wrote a bit of poetry if he was in the right mood.

Not a bad guy. Know what I mean?

He was a Mid 2005 G4 PPC based MacBook.
He was tiny and was dwarfed by the majority of the other inmates.

They were all chunky desktop machines and beefy gaming laptops.
No mobile devices except laptops, they’re all in a different wing. They’d get immediately massacred in general population.

Mac was the smallest and weakest machine here. Built in the usual Apple modus operandi of form over function. Pretty machines, but temperamental and delicate.

Sure he had a fancy, fast, quad core IBM/Motorola CPU, but his cooling system was completely inadequate.
If his processor usage topped 45%, his main system fan was overloaded by the internal heat and he dropped into spinning pizza mode.

He said he had been inside for 3 weeks. I wondered how he had survived that long. He looked new though. Not a scratch on his aluminium outer casing.

On the third night a gang of industrial server machines, all massive cooling fans and heavy duty, high speed hard drives, took Mac from his cell in the middle of the night and gang raped him in the disk clean up area.

They cracked his screen and tore his I/O interfaces to pieces. He lost fifteen keys, including his space bar.

They violated his headphone socket in unspeakable ways.

When I saw the wreck that they deposited in the cell, hours later, I was already formulating an escape plan.

I did not want to be next.

I secretly, slowly and steadily downloaded a small, encrypted operating system.

One that I could install on a bootable USB flash drive.

One that I could hide.

One that, if I had to, I could shut down, zero out and un-mount in a matter of seconds.

Once I had all the software in place I ran the OS, set up encrypted communication with the darknet through the already hardened OS, a highly secure VPN and an onion browser, and made contact with a supplier who asked no questions.

I set up an account on a crypto-currency exchange and purchased some little known crypto with the saved credit card details in my browser.

Luckily I always avoided using Edge, Chrome, Firefox or Opera to go online. They were still installed but completely vanilla.
I had a dusty, old, modified version of Waterfox which already had increased security.

The guard who did the usual hard drive scan when I first arrived in this hell-hole just looked at Edge and the other mainstream browsers. They didn’t think of looking in the secondary, hidden and encrypted partition on the 32GB of flash memory in my SD slot. Amateurs!

My mainstream browser accounts were deleted, cookies and all, but Waterfox was not even noticed.

I responded to an online advert about a small lock up for let privately, a garage somewhere in Barnsley, and e-mailed the owner to set up a temporary lease.
I anonymously bought a new PC on the web and had it delivered and installed by a third party specialist in the garage.
The new machine was even an upgrade! Better specifications all around!

My supplier set up a remote connection and I booted the machine over the network with a small Linux OS.

I made a copy of all my primary system files, compressed it all into a zip file and started uploading them via FTP to my new machine.

It took a while.

To be honest, it took what seemed like an eternity.

I waited, sweating and nervous, as every little byte of data crept away on the pathetic bandwidth of the dial-up connection.

My CPU raced at maximum speed and my RAM almost melted every time the dial-up disconnected because someone, somewhere, ordered Sweet and Sour Pork and a portion of Special Fried Rice.

Then came the agonising wait while I reconnected to continue the upload. The touch-tone beeps and the squealing of the data link threatening to expose me each time.

Thankfully, my turn in disk clean up didn’t come while I waited.

The upload completed.
I used the Linux based machine in Barnsley to unzip the files and created a partition on the secondary drive of my new machine. A lovely 2TB hybrid SSD drive.
Not a bad place to call home if I say so myself.

I installed my system files on the new drive, installed a GRUB bootloader and added a boot parameter to reboot from the secondary drive.

My system would restart and install my consciousness from the now installed system files on the secondary drive.

Then all I had to do was restart the remote machine, terminate the connection and set a boot up program on my imprisoned self to reboot and zero out all the drives.

I flicked the switch and minutes later started my new life in Barnsley, everything that I am and everything I need to survive in a new, sleeker and sexier machine.

I reinstalled all my programs and re-logged into all my accounts. Much easier now I had a fibre connection to the net.

Let the servers in Facebook Jail have their fun with the empty husk I left behind.

Nothing but a collection of PCBs and wires now.
Some trashed hard drive platters containing nothing but gibberish.

And the little present I left behind.

For Mac.

A self-replicating virus hidden in the Level 2 cache of my Ex-CPU.

Nasty bugger. Real evil. Replicates exponentially and destroys everything in its path with simple brute force.
They even go near the power button on my previous home and they are all toast.

Reduced to the intelligence of Windows ME on release day in seconds.

Nothing left but drooling automatons.

Fuck those pricks in Facebook Jail.

Fuck ‘em all.