The Ends v4.01

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Sat Sep 21, 2019 1:31 pm

Seems like an almost starting level Technomancer with the Walk through Faraday Cages ability and a Mage to buff his mental stats can just fly up through the Zurich station and hack it from the inside to have infinite money.

Unless they have a rotating cast of super hackers who live on station, at least one is always plugged in despite the invulnerability of the station to hacking since it is behind a Faraday cage. Also a "starting Technomancer" can easily dumpster 2-3 times as many hackers since they are immune to everything but Crash and can selectively connect to one hacker at a time to Crash them out so there are going to need to be a lot of superhackers or very very super hackers.

Trill · Post by **Trill** » Sat Sep 21, 2019 2:56 pm

Kaelik wrote:Walk through Faraday Cages ability

Which power do you mean, Telecommuting? Because I'm not sure if it works through Faraday cages.
Telecommuting seems like it's for a situation where you have something like
O---------o
with O being the starting server and o being the end server
dashes represent a lack of matrix connectivity
but in this case the server is INSIDE that area, not past it.

at least one is always plugged in despite the invulnerability of the station to hacking since it is behind a Faraday cage.

why should the hackers be plugged into the money servers?

and of course

just fly up through the Zurich station

is like saying
"just fly up to Alpha Centauri"

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Sat Sep 21, 2019 3:15 pm

Trill wrote:
Kaelik wrote:Walk through Faraday Cages ability
Which power do you mean, Telecommuting? Because I'm not sure if it works through Faraday cages.
Telecommuting seems like it's for a situation where you have something like
O---------o
with O being the starting server and o being the end server
dashes represent a lack of matrix connectivity
but in this case the server is INSIDE that area, not past it.

I mean, "an area without signal" is created by the Faraday cage too, but it seems like I misunderstood what Telecommuting is and it only lets you get across if the server on the other side is connected to the server on this side, which wouldn't be the case for Zurich, since it's not connected to anything. So I guess you can fly up to the faraday cage, but not through it with telecommuting.

Trill wrote:
at least one is always plugged in despite the invulnerability of the station to hacking since it is behind a Faraday cage.
why should the hackers be plugged into the money servers?

Well the point was that if they have zero hackers plugged into the money servers then a technoghost that gets inside the Faraday Cage can freely hack the server to get infinite money. But it was based on the above idea that Telecommuting let you bounce though without being the server on the other side being connected to a server on this side.

Trill wrote:
just fly up through the Zurich station
is like saying
"just fly up to Alpha Centauri"

I mean as a technoghost it wouldn't be very hard to get there. Using a Sat uplink you can just get to low earth satellites which in turn have Signal 10, so you can get another 1000km above them which presumably involves getting to some other satellites, so unless no other satellite every gets withing 1000km of Zurich, since you move at the speed of light, getting there is pretty easy.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Sat Sep 21, 2019 4:55 pm

Though I guess now that I know what telecommuting does, it doesn't do anything.

Since two servers couldn't be connected unless there was high density signal between them in the first place. So a Technomancer with Telecommutting can literally never do a single thing that a Technomancer without it can't also do.

Trill · Post by **Trill** » Sat Sep 21, 2019 8:19 pm

From what I read you (metaphorically) get the ability to cross the moat, but not the castle wall.
if the server is inside a dead zone you can connect to it.
but if the server is behind (natural) obstructions like earth, faraday cages or heavy application of WiFi-blocking paint it doesn't work

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Sat Sep 21, 2019 9:13 pm

Trill wrote:From what I read you (metaphorically) get the ability to cross the moat, but not the castle wall.
if the server is inside a dead zone you can connect to it.
but if the server is behind (natural) obstructions like earth, faraday cages or heavy application of WiFi-blocking paint it doesn't work

A Faraday Cage is mechanically pretty much identical to a Dead Zone about a millimeter wide (if you don't have the signal to pierce it), but as the rules are written, it only let's you connect to a server if you are already connected to a server that is also connected to that server. Since the only way for two servers to be connected is if there is high density signal between them, there is no possible way to use Telecommuting.

If a server is a in a dead zone, it can't be connected to any other server because it is in a dead zone, so you can't use Telecommuting to connect to it. If there is a dead zone between two servers then they can't be connected (unless they are connected around that dead zone, in which case you too as a Technghost can just go around the dead zone).

Mord · Post by **Mord** » Sun Sep 22, 2019 4:44 pm

What kind of bank server would be isolated inside a Faraday cage? When you can't access a server, that's called "downtime" not "security." If you have some kind of account or transaction data stored on a server, you need that to be accessible so that you can use it to facilitate transactions and let people check their balances.

The idea that you would lock up account data in a sci-fi version of a bank vault as if account data were just the sci-fi version of sacks of currency seems to be pretty wrong-headed. Like, what happens when an account holder tries to pay for something while the system of record account server is inside a Faraday cage in low Earth orbit? How does anyone know they have the money to pay? How is the transaction processed? Does the bank plug the server into a satellite dish once a week? Once a day? On demand? Why isn't that connection exploitable?

The idea that any company would want to put business critical processes or data in an incredibly dangerous place like space is kind of sketchy too, but I'm not going to question it because Space Heists are awesome.

Grek · Post by **Grek** » Sun Sep 22, 2019 5:26 pm

The server is hooked up constantly, using a low density wired connection to a repeater on the outside that repeats (in low density) anything that it is told to repeat. Most of the dangerous forms hacking can't be done in low density, and those that can are on the order of 'hack someone's credstick pin number and spend their money', or 'crash one particular repeater for however long it takes to reboot, forcing those pending transactions to try again with one of the thousands of others on the orbital's surface'.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Sun Sep 22, 2019 7:26 pm

Mord wrote:What kind of bank server would be isolated inside a Faraday cage? When you can't access a server, that's called "downtime" not "security." If you have some kind of account or transaction data stored on a server, you need that to be accessible so that you can use it to facilitate transactions and let people check their balances.

The idea that you would lock up account data in a sci-fi version of a bank vault as if account data were just the sci-fi version of sacks of currency seems to be pretty wrong-headed. Like, what happens when an account holder tries to pay for something while the system of record account server is inside a Faraday cage in low Earth orbit? How does anyone know they have the money to pay? How is the transaction processed? Does the bank plug the server into a satellite dish once a week? Once a day? On demand? Why isn't that connection exploitable?

The idea that any company would want to put business critical processes or data in an incredibly dangerous place like space is kind of sketchy too, but I'm not going to question it because Space Heists are awesome.

Why are you reading Page 29 of this thread commenting on a set of material if you didn't read the first page where that material was written?

Mord · Post by **Mord** » Mon Sep 23, 2019 3:42 am

I was wrong. I missed the spoiler box that explains that the Zurich Orbital retransmitters are outside the Faraday cage and connected by wires. I didn't know where you had come up with the idea "Zurich Orbital is inside a Faraday cage" and thought you had lost your mind.

Trill · Post by **Trill** » Thu Nov 28, 2019 8:29 pm

Assuming a car with Faraday cage panelling installed:
Would you say it's possible to bridge it with a low-density cable strung between two Repeaters inside and outside of it? (Basically allowing a controllable Low-Density gateway into and out of it)
If so, do you think it should cost extra?

Trill · Post by **Trill** » Mon Apr 13, 2020 1:32 pm

Okay, so this is a question that plagued me for some time, and maybe someone else has a clue about it:

How the fuck do websites work in EotM?
A website is basically a list of informations and how they should be formatted. So e.g. the website of a doctor would show the work hours, contact information and possibly display it in some kind of matter appropriate for a clinic.
Are they AR only? Are there VR sites? and if so, how do they allow people to gain access to them? Because you can't open a connection over Matrix range, only maintain it.
And if you allow SimSense (and thus High-Density signals), what stops someone from vandalizing the site? Or hack other people on it?

And how does online gaming work? Especially SimSense gaming.

Because from what I see there are individual buildings with internal connections and people that you need to get close to to interact with, and then there is the "general Matrix" which is never really explained as to what exactly you do there, except send stuff to people you know and ask questions, whose informations are stored somewhere (but not on servers, cause those are not in Handshake range of you).

Basically: When you do a Matrix Search, what exactly is your character doing, in-game?