InformationWeek

e have few great scientific quests left. We've learned that the human genome contains only about the same number of genes as the common roundworm, so it's time to put our scientific energies into other endeavors: the search for extraterrestrial life, for example.

If I may suggest a subject: one mystery of nature remains cloaked in myth and hearsay. Nobody has ever found a live giant squid.

Giant squid (Architeuthis) are the largest invertebrates in the sea. Conservative scientific estimates say the giant squid weighs over 1,000 pounds (454 kilograms) and reaches lengths of nearly 60 feet (18 meters), including the extended tentacles. Its eyes, roughly the size of dinner plates, are the largest of any animal.

You would think that something that big--with sucker-covered tentacles and a beak organ containing a flesh-shredding radula--would be difficult to miss. Perhaps scientists have been looking in the wrong places. Have you checked your network archive directories lately? The Internet is fast approaching the status of a live organism, or at least an artificial one--which explains why the most promising place to find a live giant squid may be online.

Pass The Calamari, Please
Every now and then, a 40 footer weighing up to 440 pounds will wash up, dead and reeking, on a beach or be trapped in a commercial fishermen's net off the coast of Australia, New Zealand, or South Africa. Sometimes giant squid are found in the stomachs of sperm whales.

In 1997, Dr. Clyde Roper led an international team of scientists on an expedition to Kaikoura Canyon, an undersea chasm located off the coast of New Zealand's South Island. This ecosystem supports both the sperm whale and, it is thought, Architeuthis. Despite the august backing of the Smithsonian and innumerable hours maneuvering undersea in an advanced diving bell, the squids were completely elusive. Roper details his frustration in his expedition journal and on the Kaikoura Web site.

Melbourne Museum scientist Mark Norman has collected and pickled giant squid carcasses for the past few years, and stores them in giant freezers in his lab. Norman once commented to reporters, "You'd get giant calamari rings the size of car tires, but they'd taste like floor cleaner." (How would he know this?)

But perhaps the research expeditions shouldn't be cavorting around in some deep-sea trench. Instead, they should be investigating what passes through their own modems. Could sentient tentacled creatures lurk on your network? And is there an organism more densely populated with suckers than the Internet?

How many network administrators should face the ugly truth and admit, "I've got squid trouble. I think I need to get my network drained."

Better Grab Your Life Preserver
To learn more about life on the Internet (squid, artificial, and alien), I called Jay Lee Jaroslav, a.k.a. Dr. Gn0ze, director and senior ISCE research fellow at the Center for Defense Science and Technology Policy in Cambridge, Mass.

Dr. Gn0ze doesn't think much of the SETI@home volunteer effort to form a vast distributed computing system by harnessing the spare background computing cycles of private citizens' personal computers. This sprawling network analyzes incoming cosmic data for repeatable patterns that might reveal signs of intelligent life.

"Well-intentioned nonprofits greedily using people's compute cycles!" comments Dr. Gn0ze in disgust. "Most people have about 200,000 times more compute cycles available in their off-the-shelf machine than they will ever use."

People donate their unused compute cycles to the SETI project by downloading a client program. The SETI@home client program plugs away, using spare computing power to process the telescope data.

"Your processor is now running at full clip and generating a lot more heat. You may not notice it because when you are using the machine, your programs will take precedence. This could have been simply alleviated by a program built into the client to govern the rate at which the processor works." Dr. Gn0ze says. "It can damage peoples cheapo machines. I wouldn't do it!"

The pitch of his voice dropped ominously. "Distributed supercomputing is, in fact, going on without anybody's knowing about it. Lots of folk do not know that other folk out there are accessing their machines--not to do nasty things, but just to run some software to compute significant codes."

"Ever hear of steganography?" he asks. "It is a very old concept. Somebody has a message tattooed on his head, lets his hair grow, and then sets off to deliver the message." The messenger's head is shaved again at the destination, so the code can be read. Computer files contain unused or insignificant areas of data. Steganography replaces these areas with an encrypted bit of code. The files can then be exchanged without anyone knowing their real contents.

Steganographic messages can be easily hidden using old spook methods. Programs will never be picked up as image files or sound files since they only contain data.

People commonly use active technologies like HTML, Java, and ActiveX. They download media players and send singing greeting cards. As a result, Dr. Gn0ze explains, "Perpetrators can insert an unobtrusive little client in seemingly innocent software downloads. They won't be greedy about compute cycles--the program will just run in the background on an occasional basis, and report back via E-mail. Somebody could be using 100,000 computers around the world to do his math programs."

Could Architeuthis be lurking on the Net?
Could there be surreptitious squid on your network? It's more than just a metaphor, asserts Dr. Gn0ze.

In terms of real compute cycles, the latest $500 PC game card will run circles around old NSA Cray Supercomputers from nine years ago. Your grandparents are gaming on AOL with hackers, crackers, and teens around the world.

"When people play simultaneous games, they let out a massive amount of intelligence," Dr. Gn0ze says. "It's not real. It's not artificial, because you cannot say anymore what is real and what is artificial. It is artificial life on a real scale. And the scalability of things is beyond most people's wildest dreams. If only one-thousandth of the things that people download from product or shareware programs is a tiny, plankton-like bot, you will never be able to tell."

"How would you know you have a squid, or a plankton-like bot in your computer?" I ask.

"We are not talking about viruses that McAfee can pick up. Military and intelligence communities are aware of this. You cannot find out. Period. Nobody is finding out--because either the experts don't know, or they are not talking," Dr. Gn0ze concludes.

The Squid Speaks
Giant squid, like their cephalopod brethren, are intelligent and secretive beings. Through cunning, deduction, and a diligent network search, however, I located what seemed to be the E-mail address of an actual Architeuthis and sent it a general inquiry for information.

In Cephalopod News, I'd read how an octopus named Roger Moore quickly learned to open a jam jar with its tentacles to get at the tasty crab placed inside by researchers. So, I wasn't surprised to get this reply from the squid. Its response was elliptical, neither confirming nor denying much of anything:

Dear Wendy,
It's always difficult to speak with any certainty about the giant squid, subtle, elastic, terrifying, and cloaked in myth as it is. ý. There are old and frankly hard-to-credit rumors that squid, giant, great, and small have been spotted online, feasting on data like so much plankton, in a variety of locations, in forms of all kinds, but the charts are faded and moist now, near illegible and spotted with saltwater decay.
Best wishes,
Squid.

By finding their remains, we know that giant squid exist; there's no doubt. Perhaps what we really need to do is hunt down lurking virtual cephalopods.

Symantec and McAfee, are you listening? Please protect us from the suckers.