On this page I will collect new fictional abstracts as I write them. Most of these short pieces will contain lots of dazzling jargon from the field of computer science and security, as to give some impression of plausibility.
I will link to downloadable documents for each of these, that are also formatted to resemble scientific papers.
For some time, I had already been playing with the idea of writing creative but fictional abstracts as a nice mental exercise. What finally kicked me off was this paper from 2007 published in the Island Studies Journal, about Archipelagos and Political Engineering.
Planetary-digital engineering: The impact of cloud-based side-channel attacks on planetary-wide ecosystems
Cyber-Planetary Security Journal, Vol. 12, No. 5, 2041, pp. 256-275
Gwern Acck, University of Åbinta, gwern.acck@abinta.edu
Abstract
In recent years, the world has seen a large increase of cloud-based side-channel attacks targeting critical infrastructure of the planet. Researchers found a large share of these to originate from—as of yet—unknown species of life. Most forms of attack are exceptionally novel, but prior work has already proposed several effective mitigation techniques for attacks targeting global information networks, multimedia feeds, and industrial supply chains. Highlighting a forgotten but potentially catastrophic area, this paper quantifies the impact of these attacks on planetary-wide ecosystems—including oceanic life, vulcanic microbial singularity, equatorial rainforests, and aerial-synthetic lifeforms. The findings suggest that cloud-based side-channel attacks affect these systems in unprecedented ways, disturbing planetary balance and catalyzing natural disasters that have the potential of wiping out humanity. This paper proposes a partial solution that mitigates the effectiveness of some side-channels attacks. However, further work is desperately needed.
Keywords: planet, cloud, side-channel, attack, planetary-digital security, ecosystems, disaster