pp107
No. They don’t. We believe the components are triggered not by each other, but by reading news stories. For example, one component just issued this press release…” he passed a printed page, “…only after the siege story hit the wire services. The release is digitally signed, Sobol wants us to know it was his. We already tracked down the origin of the press release; it was emailed from a poorly secured computer in a St.Louis accounting firm. The program destroyed itself after it ran, but we were able to recover it from a tape backup. It was a simple HTML reader searching hundreds of web sites for headlines about the estate siege.
pp183
Ross raised his eybows at that. “That’s to prevent him from inadvertently triggering a new Daemon event?”
“Precisely. There’s no doubt it’s reading the news. So you’d be advised to stay out of the headlines.”
Daniel Suarez, aka Leinad Zeraus, in Wall Street Journal March 2009
Over-centralization and excessive interconnectivity in the pursuit of hyper-efficiency increases the fragility of the system.