Film and Television: My Cheat Code is AI

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Sure enough, just as Zhang Yang was about to go out to see Gao Jun, his Mercedes-Benz S600 was waiting downstairs, driven by his bodyguard Xia Tian.

Xia Tian stood there respectfully, "Mr. Zhang, you've arrived."

Zhang Yang smiled and said, "President Gao is so well-informed, you even know where I live."

Xia Tian opened the back door and said, "Mr. Zhang, please come in."

Zhang Yang smiled and said, "Thank you." He then got into the car and set off.

This time, Zhang Yang didn't expect that as soon as the car drove out of the community gate, Xia Tian said, "Mr. Zhang, there is a hood next to you. Just in case, please put on the hood."

Zhang Yang said, "Okay, I didn't expect your boss to have thought of so many things." In an instant, everything went black.

Outside the car, at the entrance of the residential area.

"The package has been dispatched. License plate number: 京Axxxxx."

"Received, Number One."

"Received, number two."

"Note that today is not the day to close the net, but to protect it."

"receive."

Sitting in the car, Zhang Yang could sense where he was heading.

After an unknown amount of time, Xia Tian's voice came, "Mr. Zhang, you can take off your hood now."

After Zhang Yang took off his hood, the sunlight was so bright that he couldn't open his eyes immediately.

"You went through seventeen traffic lights in total. This is... this is the northern suburbs, right?"

Xia Tian was stunned; he hadn't expected Zhang Yang to be so formidable.

Zhang Yang looked at Xia Tian, ​​who was stunned, handed him the gloves, and said, "Let's go."

Zhang Yang followed Gao Jun through the dimly lit corridor of the factory area. Several old-fashioned chandeliers hung from the steel beams overhead, their bulbs covered with a thick layer of dust, making the light appear yellowish and dim.

There was a smell of rust and machine oil mixed together in the air, which I don't know was coming from some abandoned machine.

At the end of the corridor was an iron door, most of the paint peeling off to reveal rusty steel plates underneath. Gao Jun pushed the door open, turned to the side, and gestured for him to enter.

Zhang Yang walked in and stopped.

From the outside, this factory looks like a small district-owned factory that went bankrupt in the 1990s. The slogan "Safety in Production" still remains on the brick wall, but most of the characters have been lost, leaving only the top part of the character "安" (safety) and the bottom half of the character "产" (production).

But it has been transformed into a complete workshop. The floor is covered with anti-static flooring, the walls are reinforced with sound insulation cotton, and the fluorescent lights overhead are new, making the whole room appear white.

In the very center was a custom-made L-shaped workbench, three meters long and 1.8 meters deep, with a black fireproof desktop and aluminum alloy edging at the corners. Three CRT monitors were arranged in an arc on the table. The host computer was a tower case with a silver casing, the "DELL" logo on the front panel, and three Microsoft genuine license labels affixed side by side below.

The CPU was a dual-socket Pentium III Xeon processor with a clock speed of 1GHz, and it was equipped with 2GB of memory—which was almost the ceiling for consumer-grade hardware at the time, enough to run large databases and parallel decryption tasks. The graphics card was a Matrox Millennium G450, which supported dual-monitor output, so it could drive three monitors simultaneously.

For hard drives, there is a high-speed SCSI hard drive as the primary drive, with a rotation speed of 10,000 RPM, and another IDE hard drive as a backup drive, both with a capacity of 40GB. A tape drive is also connected to the back of the chassis via a PCI expansion card for offline archiving.

On the left, there was a separate Sun Ultra 10 workstation running the Solaris operating system, equipped with a 20-inch Sun-specific monitor. This machine was transferred from Gao Jun's own company and was mainly used for network boundary security isolation and logging. In the right corner stood a standard server rack containing a switch and a NetScreen firewall, both enterprise-grade devices.

"Hey bro, how's it going?" Gao Jun stood beside him, arms crossed, a smug smile on his lips. "Just like you said, I've got everything I could. This setup took a lot of effort, and just getting this Dell barebone system from Shenzhen took a long time."

Zhang Yang sat down in front of the chair. The chair was a high-backed ergonomic chair with a mesh surface, and when he sat down, he could feel the lumbar support firmly supporting his spine.

He reached out and grasped the mouse. The mousepad was made of glass and had precise positioning; it was probably a drawing-specific model. He flicked the scroll wheel with his middle finger, and a command-line window popped up on the screen, the flashing cursor hovering after a string of system information.

He typed the "systeminfo" command, and the middle monitor of the three immediately listed a long list of parameters. He glanced at it, confirmed the hardware configuration and operating system version, and then pushed the keyboard in half an inch.

The keyboard is a mechanical keyboard with Cherry MX brown switches, made in Germany. In 2003, this kind of keyboard was almost impossible to find in the domestic market and could only be ordered through overseas channels.

Zhang Yang's fingers paused on the keycaps, then he turned to look at Gao Jun. "Thank you for your trouble, Mr. Gao," he said. "This setup can sit here for three months; it'll get everything done."

Gao Jun chuckled and patted him on the shoulder. "No rush, brother. Use it for as long as you want."

Zhang Yang pulled his chair forward and his fingers landed on the keyboard. In addition to the operating system and necessary drivers, the machine also came pre-installed with the Tru64 UNIX development kit, a hexadecimal editor, a port scanning tool, and two network packet capture software programs. The rainbow table had been imported and placed in a hidden shared directory named "REF".

In 2003, encryption technology was at a transitional juncture. MD5 and SHA-1 were still widely used, but collision attacks had already been verified in academia. Most commercial websites still used 56-bit DES or 128-bit RSA encryption, while banking and e-government systems were migrating to 3DES and AES. The vulnerabilities during this transition period were so numerous that high-tech methods were almost unnecessary; all that was needed was to know which version of the program the other party was using.

Zhang Yang said to Gao Jun, "Mr. Gao, where is the thing I need to solve?"

Gao Jun said, "That's not urgent. I need your help with something else."

Zhang Yang looked displeased: "President Gao, you only asked me to do one thing. When did you start adding conditions?"

Gao Jun smiled ingratiatingly and said, "Brother, you have no idea how hard I've been. If you help me with this one thing, I guarantee you'll get a 20% raise on your commission."

Zhang Yang thought for a moment and said, "Mr. Gao, please tell me, what do you need me to do?"

Gao Jun waved for the people behind him to leave, then took out a floppy disk and said to Zhang Yang, "I need you to encrypt this for me, preferably in a way that no one but me can decrypt it."

Zhang Yang took the floppy disk, flipped it over, and saw it was a Sony disk, 1.44MB, with a blank label and no markings. "Mr. Gao, this is..."

Gao Jun said, "You don't need to know what's inside, but this is very important to me."

Zhang Yang nodded and didn't ask any more questions. He inserted the floppy disk into the drive, and the floppy drive whirred as it read the disk. A window popped up on the screen, containing only one file with no file extension, its size almost filling the entire disk.

[Floppy disk inserted. File system: FAT12. Number of files: 1. Unrecognized file type, no file extension, approximately 1.38MB in size.]

[Recommendation: Perform a full disk image copy immediately. The maximum floppy disk read speed is approximately 30KB per second, and a full disk image copy will take approximately 45 seconds. The copy can be completed without opening any files or writing to the floppy disk.]

Zhang Yang held down the keyboard with his left hand and the mouse with his right, two windows open simultaneously on the screen. The top one was the WinRAR compression interface, directly facing Gao Jun's line of sight. The bottom one, partially obscured, was a command prompt window with a black background and gray text, almost invisible unless one looked closely.

While talking to Gao Jun, he typed a command in the command line. This command called the system's built-in disk copying tool. The parameters were set to read sector by sector, skip bad sector detection, and the output file was directly saved to a hidden folder named "sysback" on the local hard drive. This folder was hidden deep in the system directory and mixed with dozens of system files with the same name. It was impossible to find without a search tool.

"Encrypting this isn't difficult." Zhang Yang maximized the WinRAR window, covering the entire screen, and pushed the command prompt below the taskbar, leaving only a minimized icon flashing. "But you have to tell me what level you want. Do you want a random password, or do you need to use some special techniques that make it impossible for people to open or guess?"

Gao Jun said, "The safer the better. Ideally, no one but me should be able to solve it."

Zhang Yang nodded, moved his fingers on the mouse twice, and the WinRAR compression settings window popped up. At the same time, he glanced at the taskbar out of the corner of his eye. The minimized command line icon was still flashing, indicating that the image was still being created. The floppy disk drive's indicator light flashed rapidly and emitted a uniform whirring sound, which was exactly the same as any floppy disk being read normally, without any abnormality.

"Then I won't look at what's inside." Zhang Yang turned around and looked at Gao Jun, his body blocking the floppy disk drive. He leaned back in his chair, took his hands off the keyboard, and showed Gao Jun a clean desktop. "If you trust me, I'll do it now. Once it's done, you can enter the password yourself. I don't know the password, so only you can open it."

Gao Jun smiled and said, "Okay, brother, I believe you."

Zhang Yang brought the WinRAR interface to the front. At this point, the command line icon on the taskbar stopped flashing and became static, and the floppy disk drive light went out. The image was complete, the whole process taking less than a minute.

He said in his mind: Deep Blue, confirm the integrity of the image.

[Mirroring complete. Verification and comparison: total number of sectors, file allocation table, directory area, data area—consistent bit-by-bit with the source disk. The copy has been stored in a hidden directory, filenames are obfuscated with system files, and timestamps have been removed.]

Zhang Yang opened WinRAR, dragged the files from the floppy disk into it, checked "encrypt filename" in the password field, and then pushed the keyboard towards Gao Jun. "Enter the password yourself, at least sixteen characters, letters, numbers, and symbols, and enter it twice."

Gao Jun bent down and typed twice on the keyboard. The password field on the screen was full of asterisks. After he finished typing, Zhang Yang clicked "OK". The compression progress bar flashed by, and he opened Notepad, wrote a few lines of code, and saved it as a batch file. This batch file would pop up a fake password input box when double-clicked, and would exit with an error message no matter what was entered. The real way to open it was to enter a specific string of parameters in the command line.

He reformatted the floppy disk, putting only two files inside—an encrypted compressed file and the batch script used for disguise. He removed the floppy disk and handed it to Gao Jun.

"Alright. Write the instructions on that piece of paper and slip it into the floppy disk case. When you insert the floppy disk into the computer, nothing will be displayed. Double-clicking the batch file will bring up a fake password box, but no matter what you enter, it won't open. The real way to open it is to enter parameters in the command line. Remember the parameters. Burn the paper after you've read it."

Gao Jun took the floppy disk, glanced at the note, and stuffed it into his pocket. "Brother, you're even more efficient than I expected."

[The floppy disk has been returned. The full disk image has been safely stored. Gao Jun did not notice anything unusual. The original disk's contents were not opened or read during this operation; only a sector-by-sector physical copy was performed. The image file can be analyzed offline at any time without the original disk.]