Lester waited. "All right," Eva said, "I'll bite. What happened last night?" "Brazil came online!" Lester said. "Like twenty rides opened there. But they got their protocol implementation a little wrong so when I showed up, the whole ride had been zeroed out. I'm sure I can help them get it right; in the meantime I've got the ride resetting itself and I've blackholed their changes temporarily." He grinned sunnily. "How fucking cool is that? Brazil!" They smiled weakly back. "I don't think I understand, Lester," Kettlewell said. "Brazil? We don't have any agreements with anyone in Brazil." "We have agreements with everyone in Brazil!" Lester said. "We've got an open protocol and a server that anyone can connect to. That's an agreement, that's all a protocol is." Kettlewell shook his head. "You're saying that all anyone needed to do to reprogram our ride --" "-- was to connect to it and send some changes. Trust is assumed in the system." "Trust is *assumed*? You haven't changed this?" Lester took a step back. "No, I haven't changed it. The whole system is open -- that's the point. We can't just start requiring logins to get on the network. The whole thing would collapse -- it'd be like putting locks on the bathroom and then taking the only key for yourself. We just can't do it." Kettlewell looked like he was going to explode. Tjan put a hand on his arm. Slowly, Kettlewell sat back down. Tjan took a sip of his coffee. "Lester, can you walk me through this one more time?" Lester rocked back and forth a little. They were all watching him now, except for Suzanne, who was fuming somewhere or getting ready to go home to Russia, or something. "We have a published protocol for describing changes to the ride -- it's built on Git3D's system for marking up and syncing three-d models of objects; it's what we used all through the Kodacell days for collaboration. The way you get a ride online is to sync up with our version-server and then instantiate a copy. Then any changes you make get synced back and we instantiate them. Everyone stays in sync, give or take a couple hours." "But you had passwords on the Subversion server for objects, right?" "Yeah, but we didn't design this one to take passwords. It's a lot more ad-hoc -- we wanted to be sure that people we didn't know could get in and play." Kettlewell put his face in his hands and groaned. Tjan rolled his eyes. "I think what Kettlewell's trying to say is that things have changed since those carefree days -- we're in a spot now where if Disney or someone else who hated us wanted to attack us, this would be a prime way of doing it."