Up and Coming: Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

The Keresztury TVirs

Translated from the Bulgarian by Vladimir Poleganov, Ivan Popov, and Kalin M. Nenov

Originally published in Sci Phi Journal #5, May 2015.

The title of this book is slightly misleading. Or rather, the word "history" is misleading, bringing expectations of abstract moralizing and technical ignorance. However, the author—the TVirologist Andrew Keresztury—is an outright "techie"—one of the greatest experts in the field. That’s why his book is in fact a thorough technical overview, disguised as a history out of decorum.

The disguise succeeded in confusing even the publishers, as the first edition was included in the Critique of Postmodernism series, and the blurb compared the book to Douglas Rushkoff’s Media Virus! As a matter of fact, World TVir History saw the light of day only due to its publishers' confusion. TVirs are a rather delicate subject, and various secret services have made various aspects of their technical details top secret over time. Had it been classified as technical literature, the competent authorities would have stopped Keresztury’s work long before it reached the bookstores. In this particular situation, however, the first edition of TVir History remained on the bookshelves for twenty-three days’ before it was brought to the attention of the intelligence services and its entire print run was seized. The authorities went as far as tracing customers who bought copies from online bookstores and forcing them to return their purchases. In fact, this part of the book’s history is no less intriguing and edifying than the story of the TViruses it tells. Nevertheless, let us focus on the contents of the work itself.

Keresztury begins his presentation directly with the question "Who is to blame?" and gives a fitting answer: everyone, or—tantamount to this—no one. There are, as the virologist calls them, certain objective causes: the obsession with digitization and protocol standardization, the developers' penchant for creating systems with a great number of extraordinarily powerful undocumented functions. To top it all, we have had incredibly "lousy" operating systems since Microsoft, overblown beyond all measure, which when released in firmware, require chips with an immense capacity. Moreover, any smart programmer can insert almost anything into the "small" amount of unused memory on the chips.

And this "anything", according to Keresztury, has evolved greatly over time.

Historical sources cite the Ukrainian city of Odessa as the motherland of TVirs; the names of the first TVirmakers are well known: the hardware developers Leonid Kunitz and Miron Craciunescu (the latter is Moldavian). Kunitz and Craciunescu discovered by accident undocumented functions in digital TV sets, which allowed commands to be sent to the set via the cable along with the TV signal. More specifically, they were commands for upgrading—as well as tampering with—the firmware OS behind the back of the TV set’s owner. Besides, it turned out that these functions had been an implicit standard, adopted by all manufacturers. So Kunitz and Craciunescu invented the mixer: a device placed on the cable before the TV set, convolving the appropriate commands into the signal (initially, this used to be a computer program, not a separate hardware device). The first virus they wrote was quite simple and mischievous: its functions included shaking and inverting the screen image, creating "snow"; it assigned these functions to certain button combinations from the remote control.

After spending considerable time experimenting with their own TV sets, the budding TVirmakers plugged a remote control mixer into the TV cable running along a block of flats and started terrorizing all the viewers in the neighborhood by inverting the picture during key scenes of the popular soap operas of the time. The viewers, naturally, showered the local cable operator with complaints. It did not take the technicians long to find the mixer, but instead of unplugging it, they played a Byzantine trick: they removed the battery and hid nearby, waiting for the TVirmakers to show up and fix the device, and then caught them with the help of some private security men. The unwitting Ukrainian court passed a surprisingly light sentence on Kunitz and Craciunescu: 10 days in custody for hooliganism using technical devices. However, the news about those "technical devices" spread like wildfire. The cable operators in Odessa started a full-blown war: they all installed mixers on their competitors' cables and inverted the picture using the Kunitz virus. They soon concluded a truce, but someone—perhaps even Kunitz or Craciunescu—released the virus code on the Internet, making it accessible to every hacker in both Eastern and Western Europe.

The second generation of TVirs brought along more complicated "user" functions, mainly to do with sound manipulation. At first, they were restricted to changes in the voice timbre and other similar effects; from a technical point of view, this was no easy feat, because the sound was digitally encoded and the manipulation algorithms were rather compact. The center of this new generation of TV infection was thought to be Romania. There is a story of one Traian Radulescu who caused his aunt to have a heart attack by making the delicate and beautiful actress in a movie declare her love in a hoarse drunkard’s bass. Later, though, these effects became extremely popular, and cable operators themselves started installing them on TV sets at their clients' request. It turned out that people liked it: pressing buttons on their remotes and changing the actors' voices, the timbre of musical instruments and so on—replacing them with the weirdest substitutes.

Shortly afterwards came the first TViruses capable of inserting new lines into film dialogue. On the eve of the regional elections, a group calling itself the Maznev/Razmaznev TVir Crew unleashed a virus which, during the pauses, inserted various insults with a random timbre, aimed at one of the candidates: "Nevertheless, Artuchki is a swine!", "But we must keep in mind that Artuchki is a swine!", "The fact that Artuchki is a swine is indisputable," and so on. The name of that group featured the abbreviation "TVir" for the first time. (Keresztury makes no mention of the denigrated candidate’s reaction.)

Over the next few years this type of virus evolved considerably and became a favorite weapon of radical political organizations across America and Europe. They were widely used by antiglobalists and neofascists, to mention but two examples. Besides the now conventional medium of remote control mixers plugged into cable networks, propaganda TVirs also spread via infected pirated DVDs. (The undocumented commands can infect a TV not only through the cable input but also through a random digital video recording.) These PropaTVirs caused the police serious trouble, and draconian measures were introduced, decreeing sanctions not only for the propagators but also for those who willingly installed broadcast-changing code in their TV sets. During one of its campaigns, Interpol arrested the members of the Maznev/Razmaznev group, but several weeks later the convicts managed to escape custody under mysterious circumstances and vanished into thin air. It was a good fifteen years later that a member of the group was discovered, accidentally shot during a police operation against the "white plastic" mafia in Germany.

Among the so-called active-sound TVirs, Keresztury includes certain minimalist, obscure ersatz versions, which do not have the line insert and voice change functions. For example, if the virus identifies the president’s name in the signal, it emits noise in the channel and briefly deteriorates the picture quality. This behavior of the signal makes viewers angry, and their anger gradually projects onto the person mentioned—analogous to Pavlov’s dog conditioning. It is interesting to note that these simpler active-sound versions appear later than their more complex predecessors. They have been used not so much by the radical fractions, but by election offices that would release the virus against their own candidate and subsequently charge their opponents with unlawful subliminal attacks.

Image-manipulating viruses appeared a good ten years after the sound-manipulating ones. According to Keresztury, this was due to the more complex and extensive program code required for image analysis. Once the TVOSs evolved sufficiently and the TV processors became fast enough, such viruses cropped up in the wild. As always, sheer hooliganism led the way—with "the mustache painter" (which, along with the entire algorithm for facial recognition, fits in a tight 36 kilobytes!). Later, the "sentence eraser" appeared, designed as a weapon against advertising. Next came Bayraktar:[1] a tiny figure, waving a red flag with a crossed hammer and crescent, which would jump out in a corner of the screen at those very instants when the video stream was at its dynamic peak. (Thereby mercilessly distracting the viewer’s attention.) Bayraktar spawned a whole new brood of animated pests that switched on to torment the viewer on all kinds of occasions. Usually they formed part of an advertising campaign or counter-campaign.

The antiviral efforts of TV operators included the automatic distribution of anti-TVirs in their networks, which scanned the memory of the sets and wiped out the parasites. Programs for TV memory disinfection were also made available on the Internet. The TVirmakers responded with stealth TVirs, capable of completely disguising themselves. Furthermore, at a certain point TViruses became a fad: for example, teenagers who wanted to get back at their parents would infect the family TV sets, using special outer devices bought from the black market. The same market saw the advent of pre-TV boxes, which provided signal preprocessing along with the functionality of all viruses: sound manipulation, picture inversion, bouncing Bayraktar-type pest images, and even elements of AI, inserting moronic lines into movie dialogues and anchors' announcements.

According to Keresztury, the most outrageous aspect of the whole story is that the TV set manufacturers never eliminated the commands and functions which made TVirs possible. They neither agreed to restrict the standard, nor provided virologists with any explanation for the necessity of having such powerful and dangerous options in an ordinary household appliance. Consequently, the author makes the assumption that the manufacturers had been planning to use the millions of TV processors for their own purposes—to employ parallel computations and then harvest the results, for example. (At the time, there was an extremely popular rumor that any extra computational power of household devices was being used in such a manner.) It was only when the TVir epidemics broke out and spread that two or three TV models were introduced whose hardware disabled any TVOS upgrades. However, firstly, these models were not very popular, and secondly, the hardware deactivation could be reversed by soldering a single pin onto the circuit board.

The above does not contain any new or classified information: this has all been publicly available for a long time, and the author only deserves credit for gathering and systematizing it. Later in his book, however, Keresztury focuses on an entirely different type of TVir which had only been rumored to exist, without any substantiating facts or official statements. We refer to TViruses that contain subliminal messages as a "user" function.

Subliminal suggestion techniques had been known since the previous century: a sound or a voice whose volume (or frequency) is just below the threshold of perception can still be perceived, although subconsciously. The same applies to images hidden in the video stream: by either using a 25th frame or dispersing the individual pixels over multiple frames. These techniques have long been developed by special services as a promising tool for "conviction pushing"—propaganda or advertising. But there is nothing, absolutely nothing, preventing their release as TVirs.

In fact, Keresztury provides no evidence that such TVirs have actually been created and propagated. He only outlines the basic scheme and denies the rumors that subliminal viruses had been employed by the once notorious dictator Julio Cesar Milletbashian. As some of you doubtlessly still remember, Milletbashian was overthrown after an international intervention, provoked by reports that he was secretly designing a new generation of psychomanipulating technologies in order to zombify his subjects. Afterwards, however, no one could say what these technologies were, or whether they had existed at all. Keresztury, who at the time used to work for one of the departments responsible for Milletbashian’s ousting, notes that in the country in question, due to the extremely low standard of living, digital TV sets were relatively rare, which means that the subliminal viruses would have only zombified the wealthy minority. Keresztury’s department only discovered a few modified versions of standard TVirs of the Bayraktar and "Artuchki is a swine!" variety; furthermore, they had been used for campaigning against rather than for Milletbashian.

It has been commonly believed that the discussion of Milletbashian’s viruses—or, to be more precise, of their nonexistence—led to the book’s incrimination and its author’s arrest, on a charge of disclosing top secret information. Indeed, almost all the information concerning Milletbashian used to be classified until recently. However, according to most experts, the real reason, the real bomb, is hidden in the penultimate chapter of the book where Keresztury describes hemisphere-switching videomodifiers (HSVM).

What is the general principle? It is a well-known fact that the brain has two hemispheres, each one inhibiting the other, so that at any moment one is dominant and the other is repressed. The left hemisphere is responsible for logic and speech, and the right for image perception. When a person is watching TV, especially if the picture is bright and dynamic, the right, irrational hemisphere is more excited and dominating, even in viewers whose left hemisphere is stronger. But Keresztury insists that if tiny, barely visible special changes (videomodifiers) are inserted into the TV picture, they would repress the right hemisphere and excite the left, which is the rational one. What is more, he sets out the exact technology for generating videomodifiers, along with all required formulae and algorithms.

The modifiers are visually perceived as weak disturbances in the picture just above the threshold of perception. Their subliminal component manages to subtly attract the viewer’s attention. Thus some visual areas in the right hemisphere are repressed, and otherwise easy image processing is hindered—as if a filter or a silencer were installed in the brain. The disturbances are generated according to a complex geometrodynamic scheme. Keresztury says that he discovered the scheme in the files from the celebrated Asanovic trial, documented as a report on mental disorders caused by an unknown illegal video technology. The report had been prepared by an intelligence agent called Michael Singh. Later on, Keresztury discovered that a similar method had been developed by a pair of Ukrainian humanitarian technologists, surnamed Datsyuk and Yakimets, who were investigated in connection with the regime of dictator Milletbashian.

Keresztury concludes the section with the announcement that "quite recently"—that is, shortly before the book’s first release in 2021—several TVir strains were discovered, employing videomodifiers using the Datsyuk and Yakimets method.

It was never explained, however, which strains these were. No one else has ever detected them. The print-run of the book was seized, the author arrested…but this was not the end of the story. A few months later, Keresztury was kidnapped by an armed group from the prison truck that was taking him to court. About two years later, a journalist came across Keresztury in the town of Berettyóújfalu at the Hungary-Romania border and even managed to interview him, but the mysterious TVirologist disappeared again.

Unlike his book, which literally days after the incrimination appeared as a file on various hardware sites on the Internet. The intelligence services acted swiftly against the online copies and even convicted three sysadmins who had been hosting the file on their networks. However, they found out much later that all their actions had been in vain. The book had become permanently available on websites in Bulgaria; but in order to remain undetected by search engines (and, in turn, the intelligence services), some of the letters in the file had been replaced by identical letters from the Cyrillic alphabet.

All of this was revealed after the end of the First World Humanitarian War, when the previously competent authorities were disbanded and the TV networks, or at least what remained of them, were transferred to the control of the World Great Jihad Organization. Given current television standards, the possibilities of virus infection have effectively been ruled out, and the balance of information intended for the left and right hemispheres is closely regulated according to the decrees of our leader and teacher, Ayatollah Mukadassi as-Sadr. Therefore nowadays Keresztury’s work is of purely historical value—which has made its triple reprinting possible, thanks to the enormous amount of reader interest. Let us all hope that its value will always remain purely historical. Allah karim!

Jallal Masudi

Thracian Kurdistan Book Review (Eski Zagara Hisar)[2], vol. 152/2059

Translated from the Kurdish by Ovanes Papazian[3]