So has anyone read unwired?

[Sma]

I´d rather not play with completely unhackable drones than with them. Fucking up machinery is kind of what hackers do for a living and going ahead and WiFi painting them so they only react to the lofi signal of "targeting lock on that dude" takes nothing away from the rigger commanding a drone swarm and wastes a ton of actions on the deckers part. And by ton I of course mean two to three which tends to be one third of a SR battle.

Now what I could accept would be nearly unhackable drones. Since a drones sensors need to be able to detect what is going on around them and jamming affects sensors anyway, I´d be ok with only making those vulnerable to Misplace and Ostraka. So when you face the army of unhackable drones your only option is to blind them, instead of playing diplomancer and making them join your side.

[CatharzGodfoot]

I...WiFi painting them so they only react to the lofi signal of "targeting lock on that dude" takes nothing away from the rigger commanding a drone swarm and wastes a ton of actions on the deckers part.

"target that dude" is not a lofi signal, and that's the key. At best, it might be that the rigger can paint a target with a laser. Guess what: the hacker can paint the rigger with the same laser.

[Sma]

Using the highlight a target free action would require the drone to be part your network which it can´t be since it would require hi-fi signals.

Having a scheme where you send the drone an actual picture of the guy you want to be shot, does not require you to have hifi access to the drone you´re micromanaging.
Combined with the fact that low density signals (which goes up to video) can be encrypted so well that cracking it would take more than your lifetime would allow you to retain control of your drone while it´s basically in autonomous mode.

Giving a drone dicepools of 10 all around costs 4500 in software and 5k in hardware, (Rating 8 goes for 5600 total), so it´s not like they are going to be significantly worse at shooting or following people home than actual grunts you´d assign to similar duties.

What it would do is benefit someone who decides to sit down and write out elaborate scripts for their drones containing lists of commands and reactions to those commands, so he can have his unhackable drone and still have enough fine control over it to make it functionally the same as having a drone subscribed to your network.

And while that is a paradigm you could play Shadowrun under, since it´s basically third edition again, it´s not the one I prefer.

[Username17]

If people want to send low-density photos to their drones and have the drones rely on their own on-board pilots for target recognition and firing, I genuinely don't see any way conceptually to stop them from doing that.

You can jam them out, you can even hack the antenna to refuse incoming signals from the official drone operator. So there are certainly ways to hamper that strategy using hacking techniques. But if people seriously want to cover their drones with Faraday Cages you're going to have to accept that the things inside those cages are hacker proof. I mean, similarly people could cover themselves in Faraday Cages and run around like Big Daddies, confident in their hacking invulnerability. One just has to make sure that people doing that sort of thing isn't good enough to always be the answer to everything.

-Username17

[Sma]

The problem I have isn´t that you can put stuff in a metal box and then it is immune to hacking. My problem is with stuff in metal box working just well as if it weren´t.

The ability to run around in wifi painted heavy armor has the drawback of the opposition calling the red guard to take you down. The ability to paint the 20 drones, you never intended to jump into in the first place, with wifi absorbing paint needs to come with a drawback you actually care about.

Retaining the ability to force a shut down of all communications would be one of them. As said before being able to shut down sensors (which given the need to actually receive (mostly EM) information from the outside seems to preclude highly efficient EM shielding), would be preferred solution.

(Yes I´m conflating wavelengths. But I´m ignoring the holes left for driveshafts cabling and access,so it things even out in the end.)

[Draco_Argentum]

What about a Faraday body stocking then? Which NPC group polices those?

[Sma]

Pushing off he starts taking long strokes towards the bridge. He switches his current equipment to his trusty shotgun and pulls out a couple of bandages just in case.
Derek has is sustaining 3 programs at the moment, Armor and Biofeedback Filter and the Find Mind he started earlier.
Now that he has reached the bridge Derek spies the form of an octopus sitting in the center of the a control pit, fiddling with a rather large number of controls. “No time like the present” he thinks and aims his shotgun at the Security Spider letting loose a barrage of viral code.
Since they are both in the same node it is a simple action close the range to the Security Spider to connection. Initiative gets rolled using Intuition +Reaction +Response. Coming out ahead Derek takes his second action after closing range to use his Crash Program. He rolls Logic +Cybercombat vs. the spiders Firewall +Cybercombat getting 2 net hits. Because he´s using a rating 5 program his damage is 7 (5 +2 net hits). Since Crash is a Type D program this damage is Icon damage so it gets soaked with System +Armor.
While he got a solid shot in the Spider doesn’t seem to be too impressed and, ignoring the derezzing playing over her body, lashes out with a tentacle managing to nip him lightly in the arm. He Thinks himself lucky for a splitsecond registering no obvious damage to his code, but then the searing pain sets in. Even through his RAS cutoff he can taste the blood in his mouth.
The Spider isn´t playing around and uses a Black Hammer program on Derek, just like for any other combat program she rolls her Logic +Cybercombat -1 for the 3 boxes of damage he just took vs. Dereks Firewall +Cybercombat getting a net hit. The programs rating being 4, Derek has to resist 5 Damage with Willpower + Redundant Biofeedback Filter.
Ignoring the pain Derek aims for the eye, scoring a hit and watches his viral code dismantle the octopus
Derek uses Edge to get more dice and overcome the limit on hits for his next attack. His Magic Plot Armor seems to be working so he gets 9 net hits raising the DV of his attack beyond what the spider is able to resist. Her commlink is frozen and needs to reboot before she can take any other actions.



SALESFLOOR NODE
In Control of helping customers decide what to buy, taking care of payment and logistics.
Response 3
Signal 2
System 3
Firewall 3

Programs
Armor
Terminate Connection
Smart Shopping Assistant (Con Skill, or Jingle based)

Manager:
Int: 3, Log: 3; Computer (Operations) 1+2, Cybercombat (Defense) 1+2, Datasearch 2

Security Node
Controls the cameras, doors and doorway weapon/RFID scanners.

Response 3
Signal 2
System 3
Firewall 3

Programs
Armor
Terminate Connection
Redundant Biofeedback Filter

Guard
Int 3 Log 3; Computer (Operations) 1+2; EW (Signal Defense) 1+2, Datasearch (Perception) 1+2

So those nodes have six dice to throw at their respective tasks and 3 dice if the live operator is taken out of the equation. Most smallish shops don´t need to bother with IC since having a live guard gives them a pair of feet on the ground if someone simply decides to break a window and a better chance at noticing matrix shenanigans.

[Sma]

Also moving or repeating the info about number of programs being able to be sustained in the system paragraph would help with finding it.

What about a Faraday body stocking then? Which NPC group polices those?

The same one policing bike helmets.

[RiotGearEpsilon]

In a world where people can literally hack in to your brain and alter your life history, I can see people wearing faraday body stockings as a matter of course. They'd be looked at funny, like people who wear body armor all the time except less so, but it would happen.

[NoDot]

No, I think the Tin-Foil hats in Armageddon would be a better example.

For those of you who can't handle too much liquid awesome in one sitting, the people who'd look funny would be the people who didn't.

[Username17]

In a world where people can literally hack in to your brain and alter your life history, I can see people wearing faraday body stockings as a matter of course. They'd be looked at funny, like people who wear body armor all the time except less so, but it would happen.

I expect that sort of behavior to raise people's suspicions. If you walk around in 2008 in full riot gear, people will suspect that you're going to start a gun fight. If you walk around in full Tesla gear in 2071, people are going to suspect that you're in to start some EMP hoolganism.

People will do it, but other people wll become justifiably afraid.

-Username17

[Draco_Argentum]

Perhaps, or maybe 2071 society thinks that wearing a jumper in winter is a better analogy. I doubt anyone feels like getting their brain hacked.

[Username17]

Question: What do people want the maximum high density signal range to be? It's based on the Speed of Light. See, Light goes 300,000 kilometers in a second. A Matrix action takes .75 seconds. So just for data to go and come back in that time (leaving no time for processing or reaction), the Light would itself travel 112,000 kilometers. Except you can do two simple actions, assuming they are sequential, the light would only go 56,000 kilometers. And obviously some amount of time should be set aside for processing and activity. So 56,000 km is too far, probably by a multiple.

Which brings us to important break points:

• A Low Earth Satellite is 2000 kilometers straight up.
• A retransmitted broadcast from a Satlink to a LEO Satellite and back down to another point on the ground is about 6000 kilometers.
• Tokyo is 9000 kilometers from San Francisco.
• A satellite feed to Tokyo from San Fransico is 14000 kilometers.
• The shortest distance from the North Pole to the South Pole is 20,000 kilometers around.
• A Geosynchronous Satellite is 36000 kilometers straight up.

-Username17

[Sma]

Unless it happens to be part of the focus of a particular run I do not want to have worry about which way a particular batch of packets happen to travel.

Thus I´d choose the abritrary number 30,000 km. This would allow geostationary objects to be safe from groundbased matrix and magic attacks, keeping them as a decent choice to put your top secret thingamajigs in.

Also, is it any help if spam more examples or not?

[Username17]

Four Questions

“Why is it that on all other nights we drink a full bodied Merlot and on this night we drink this sweet nasty stuff?”

Within the game of Shadowrun the player characters drill holes into their heads in order to create a good mind/machine interface so that they can better hack into secure computer systems while running around cyber ninja style so that they can complete espionage missions and go back to the seedy dives that they that live in and take the electronic currency that they are paid in and spend what they don't squander on food and rent and buy black market gadgets that let them be even better at espionage and/or shooting people in the face for money so that they can be a bigger noise in freelance crime and eventually retire to a tropical island with a Mercedes full of cheerleaders. A lofty profession and a noble life goal to be sure, and it makes for some very nice storytelling and some entertaining characters.

But while one can make a very good story out of just that information, it's insufficient for the needs of a role playing game. Because while when you or I are sitting down to write a novel we can have the characters do any part of that simply by typing a sentence that says that do, in a cooperative storytelling game it is nowhere near that easy. A cooperative story has a world and rules and characters have to justify their actions in reference to them. A story that I write myself could have the main character co anything at all at whim, I can seriously write “Jack-O sprouted wings and flew” as easily as I could write that he bought a new commlink or hid from a security drone, in a role playing game that shit does not fly.

Which brings us to the central four questions we have to answer about the world before we can create a rule set that could generate that world: we have to ask ourselves why people get those data jacks. We have to ask ourselves why people can break into supposedly secure computer systems with them. We have to ask ourselves why people who commit crimes over and over again against the most powerful entities on the planet for a living exist at all. And finally we have to ask ourselves why someone who breaks into and alters computers belonging to secure and powerful installations as his actual job gives an entire rat's ass about being paid in electronic currency and still lives in a leaky apartment next to some dwarven prostitutes. Once we can answer these questions, we can make a rule set that allows and reinforces our answers and we'll have a game that logically plays out the kinds of stories that we intend to tell.

Why Datajacks?

"It's going to be like getting a hole drilled into your head. Probably because they are going to drill a hole into your head."

What exactly a datajack is capable of has changed dramatically over the years. In 1st edition a datajack would by itself allow a character to send and receive their entire sense data worth of information through a cable on a continuous feed. But then of course it also cost half an Essence point to get a cellular phone in your head. Nowadays a datajack is much more limited in scope and any device you happen to have can probably double as a cell phone if you really care. We can pretend that this all works together in some sort of continuous march of technology from 2050 to 2070 but the truth is that the Matrix's rule system has changed unrecognizably about 7 times between 1989 and the present day and the understanding of technology in general has likewise changed. In 1989, the prospect of having a really small phone was supposed to be a big deal. And yeah, in today's world they already make phones that are so small that they are hard to use and the novelty has really worn off. Making a phone feel "high tech" means combining it with other things, and thus the "phone" became an afterthought ability of a variety of devices in the 4th edition rules.

Nevertheless, people in Shadowrun live in a world where getting cybernetic enhancements is something with a real and measurable cost. You lose Essence. This is a real problem, which could potentially even cause you to die. Also, computers can and do interact directly with the brains of people who don't have any cybernetic enhancement at all in the world of 2071 – so what exactly the purpose of the datajack is somewhat... open for interpretation. We've made some interpretations for the purposes of this document, but remember that this marks a core point of divergence with other Matrix writeups. For the purposes of this document, the biggest advantage of a datajack is relative signal privacy and reliability. You can put nanopaste on your head or even your fingertips and get the same Direct Neural Interface (DNI), you can even get the same benefits from just pointing some trodes at your brain. But any external devices can have the signals they send and receive to and from your brain interrupted or even intercepted by shady types. For this reason, people who handle data that is in any way important are highly encouraged to get a data jack.

Or at least they were. In Shadowrun's current 2070s run, a lot of people have upgraded to internal commlinks. That's fine, the mind/machine interfaces are still internal and relatively safe from shadiness. But a lot of the older stuff and the equipment designed to interface with older people (like research scientists for example) will have inputs designed for people with datajacks. So if you want to do espionage for a living, you probably want a datajack as well.

Essence: Just Do It
"It isn't wiz at all. It's kind of shitty actually. But it is essence friendly."

Essence doesn't make any sense at all. There, I've said it. And I stand by this assessment. The datajack is and has been so unbelievably powerful in every edition that it's really hard to justify an Essence cost for much of anything. Why would anyone get cyberarms when they could chop their arms off (losing no Essence) and then just wear some robot arms and run them through their datajacks? If Essence actually existed, and yet the Datajack seriously allowed you to send out any output you wanted, you're damn skippy that people would do that sort of thing. And yet, in Shadowrun they don't. They don't for no reason. That's important. Essence is a game balance concern, not a rational one.

• Equipment Spotlight: Bone Lacing
  Bone Lacing is the classic example of a piece of cyberware that costs essence for no reason. And that's fine. In the case of Bone Lacing, it would be entirely "realistic" for it to cost nothing at all. Not only does it not interact with your nervous system in any way, it doesn't even replace a single cell. Your Calcium Phosphate matrix isn't "alive" in any meaningful fashion, it's just a dead mineral scaffold that your body happens to hang on like a fleshy coat. Even more damning, Bone Lacing actually costs more essence when it's made out of something that is more awesome. That's absurd – but it's also good game balance. You should pay more Essence when you get a better bonus, the fact that you're replacing the same amount of stuff that isn't even your living tissue in either case is beside the point.
  And that's the point.

Minds on Sleeves: Nanoware replacing Cyberware
"What if I just painted a picture of setting my spiritual wellbeing on fire? Isn't that enough?"

Not only do people in the Shadowrun future apparently have the ability to replace almost all DNI in their body with their datajacks, they can potentially replace their datajacks with external devices which take advantage of their brain power with phreaking and induction. This allows people to put on trode nets and stand inside of data stalls and connect their brains directly to the computer without ever once getting a hole drilled into their head, without spilling even a single monad of precious bodily fluids. And yet… people still get those datajacks in 2070 for some reason.

From a world-design standpoint, people are willing to spend Essence on Datajacks essentially because whatever it is that they get from a Datajack is better than slapping an Essence-free trode net on. If it wasn't better, it wouldn't cost Essence. That's the behind-the-scenes metagame reasoning, which unfortunately is the real reasoning. But that doesn't make a good a story, so it is imperative that there be an in-game justification for this. Granted, the in-game reasoning is in reality backformed from the game balance concerns, but that doesn't mean that the characters have to know that.

We could come up with a number of reasons why this is the case, but the ones that are going to be assumed here are security and mobility. A cybernetic interface is in fixed spatial relationship with your brain; you can turn upside down and get shaken and your datajack will stay in. A similar treatment to a trode net is quite likely to scramble the signal for a moment even if it's taped down pretty well. Heck, with its very low signal rating it'll be likely permanently on the fritz the first time someone throws up a jamming field – a problem which a fiberoptic cable running from your datajack to a high-signal commlink won't have. But perhaps more importantly, anything going into your brain is going to have to be in “Brain Text” and in the world of 2071 that's essentially unencrypted because anyone who matters can decode signals sent to or from a metahuman brain.

• Equipment Spotlight: Nanotrode Paste
  Nanopaste trodes are a set of nanomachines that can be painted on to your body which uses the powers of induction to transfer information into and out of your head. In many ways, it's like having a datajack that you never had to spend any essence for, using very short distances and very weak signals to approximate the privacy of an internal link. However, it does also have limitations which make true hackers openly dubious about the stuff. First of all, it's a paste on the outside of your body, which means that the connection becomes sketchy if you're doing vigorous or stressful things. That's not a huge problem in a club scene – if extreme moshing causes your AR feed to fritz for a second or even six then you won't actually have time to get to edge the of the pit to complain before the visuals come back. But of course when you're running through an Aztechnology compound trying to spoof cameras in real time a few seconds of static is unacceptable. And of course, the signals involved are very weak, that's the point, and that makes it inherently susceptible to being jammed out by magnetic fields and strong language.
  But more importantly still, nanopaste is still an external system even if it is very close to the brain it is not directly connected. Any data flying in and out is still going to be in plain brain text. Anyone with a sufficient receiver can see what your trode link is sending you. Anyone with a sufficient transmitter can send mental commands the same as had they come from your own mind.

Getting the Most of your Datajack
"I'm tired of just radiopathically sending text messages."

The 4th edition Datajack sends and receives computer gibberish to and from your brain. And that's it. It does not allow you to "interact" with that information in any way other than that allowed by the information itself (in stark contrast to the Datajack descriptions in 2053, but whatever). So you can send out any text or computer commands you want, but by itself the datajack does not allow you to receive any meaningful feedback on how your actions went over.

Having computer gibberish inserted into your brain is not always completely useless. Indeed, if that computer gibberish has already been specifically formatted to interact properly with your brain's informational retrieval system (as is the case with a Know Soft), then you can in fact proceed as if you had gained useful information from the impulses coming up your datajack. But that sort of formatting is apparently so difficult that chips with Linguasofts and Knowsofts cost thousands of nuyen and people are OK with that.

Systems exist that allow whatever computer data you are interacting with to be transformed into sensory stimuli that you can interact with in a more traditional fashion. After all, the primary visual cortex can be stimulated directly as easily as any other part of the brain. However, this is very specifically not the preferred method of getting things done in any version of Shadowrun. The assumption for this document is that the systems that do this are memory and cycle hogs, and that computer professionals consider themselves better off by getting hardware that displays matrix information for them inherently.

• Equipment Spotlight: The Display Link
  People who want to really use anything other than a Know-Soft with their Datajacks are advised to get a Display Link. The display link converts computer impulses into visual stimuli, which is plenty for most people to get their jobs done. Sure, a "real" hacker is going to want to cut the crap and get an implanted simrig, but for the average user the ability to send brain impulses out and literally "see" the computer returns is more than plenty.
  
  But the thing that people are really excited about is the external display link. A person without a cybernetic DNI can still get information sent to them with relative secrecy by skipping the entire part where the information is broadcast in brain text at their head and is instead encrypted right up until the point that it is displayed on the insides of the person's glasses. The person can just plain read it, and there's no signal to intercept.

Why Crime?
"Why yes, Big Brother is watching. However Big Brother has ADHD, so I'm going to sit here drinking my soykaf like any of a billion wage slaves are doing right now. And then Big Brother will get bored. And distracted. And then I'm going to do… anything I want."

One of the core conceits of the Shadowrun game is that crime is possible, and that crime pays. Given the wealth of potential satellite oversight (just look at Google Earth in 2007 – imagine the law enforcement version in 2070), and the incredibly daunting task that is cracking through somewhat decent encryption, it is entirely reasonable to project a future where getting away with any crime at all requires some sort of elaborate social engineering to pull inside jobs that play off of secret limits of the anti-crime system. But this isn't Minority Report or any other Phildickian setup, this is Shadowrun. And in Shadowrun bad people shoot other people right in the face for money and get away with it to do it again.

So here are some quasi-plausible justifications for that:

A Revolution in Data Collection, a Crisis of Storage
"I'm sorry, I seem to have misplaced my 'give-a-damn'."

Throughout human history the creation of data has exceeded the capacity to store it. It starts in infancy where a babe simply doesn't remember every single thing she sees, and it continues on through the Age of Bronze where not every conversation or every play gets written down, and it continues today. It could very plausibly continue in the Shadowrun future and for the sake of playability we're assuming that it does. The cameras in the world exceed the number of people who could watch them, and they collectively generate more video footage every day than can be stored on all the world's storage media.

And that is amongst the things that makes crime possible. When you go to the bathroom, a computer is measuring the mass of your deposit. When you flee a crime scene you're being watched by every store front you pass. But likely as not, none of that information will actually be saved anywhere. Some of it may be, but it quite likely isn't organized enough to actually identify you as the perpetrator (of the crime or the leavings). More importantly, information getting deleted isn't really news. If 18½ minutes are missing or overwritten by elven pornography, that's not weird.

Furthermore remember that in the world of 2071, it is entirely possible that a "legitimate" information request from investigating authorities will simply be refused. There's nothing in it for a Wuxing or Aztechnology subsidiary to share their security footage with Evo security to assist in the investigation of a crime against Evo or one of its subsidiaries. Corporations, especially major corporations are in competition, but beyond that they actually are regularly committing crimes against one another. Even showing what footage Aztechnology has of an event would be tipping its hand to Evo and it isn't going to compromise itself that way under normal circumstances. Further, it is in the interests of Aztechnology to make investigation and enforcement as expensive a proposition as possible for Evo as this reduces the company's ability to compete with them in other areas. So even when data is successfully stored, there's no reason to believe that investigating authorities will ever be allowed to actually see that data – which when you think about it is a lot like that data being lost or simply not recorded in the first place.

A Cacophony of Echoes
"OK. Everyone who agrees that I'm Jennifer Woodyard, raise their hand."

Your SIN, your driver's license, your home owner's insurance, your medical records, and really every other thing about you are stored electronically in the Matrix. It's like your credit report today. And like your credit report (or wikipedia), pretty much anyone can put stuff into the data stream at any time. You can challenge the data in court and maybe get it changed, but by and large stuff just accumulates in the data stream. Because of the fact that things aren't always correct and some people are total tools, the system is equipped with failsafes to try to weed out incorrect data. Data which is repeated many times in many places (or in important or "trustworthy" places) is considered to have a high veracity. Data which shows up only a few times or in very sketchy places is treated as having a lower veracity. If data conflicts, the system automatically chooses to believe higher veracity information at the expense of lower veracity information.

An example of this in action might be someone getting your name wrong on a delivery of NERPS. Your name is something like Chris McGee, but on the invoice it says Chris Maggie. Now off in the Matrix somewhere there's a little piece of data that your name is in fact Chris Maggie. But fortunately for you, your UCAS driving license and your AzTech Tech diploma are both in your real name. So in the future when machines check your name, the right name will have a higher veracity and displace the wrong name. The Chris Maggie typographical error will only show up again after low intensity searches which stop after the first couple of hits. So the "Chris Maggie" spelling may continue to haunt you for the rest of your life, getting picked up by cheap companies that purchase sales information from NERPS distribution; gradually gaining veracity as it is passed from company to company and appearing in more and more places in the Matrix – but it probably won't.

This can be used by criminals (that's you). Because of the complete lack of a central authority of Truth©, you can actually create truths that happen to suit you. If you treat something as true long and loudly enough, everyone else will treat it the same way. While archaic considerations like "statute of limitations" are out the window, the fact is that if you can fool the world into believing that you've always lived in Nag Kampuchea for a while, the world will continue to believe it pretty much indefinitely. The world of 2071 has an extremely short attention span and you actually can reinvent yourself with sufficient effort.

Why Hackers?
"There are people who can sling a spell or swing a sword and I'm sure that on some level what they do is fine. But in my world, I'm the best you'll ever see."

A core conceit of Shadowrun has always been that a savvy matrix expert is an essential member of a Shadowrunner team. That means that the Hacker character's skills and attributes have to be important; it means that the Hacker's contribution to the team has to matter; it means that the Hacker is not easily replaced with a contact or a device that says TraceBuster on the side. And it also means that Hackers have have to be able to be able to do their job (breaking into a secure computer system) in a reasonably short period of time so that they don't end up making the story grind to a halt. In short, hacking has to work absolutely nothing like it works right now in 2008. There are of course a tremendously large number of ways that hacking could work in 2071, but almost all of them are inconsistent with the story demands we have put on the system: hackers must be resource starved hooligans living in seedy dives who hack things on the fly during ninja assaults. Any of the many realistically plausible models that involve the be all and end all of the hacking race being very large sums of money, or of hacking taking very long times, or of hacking being done from a basement in Formosa are all incompatible with the stories we want to tell, and are thus not going to be incorporated into the speculative fiction.

The Meat in the Machine: Power for Precision
"Can I run some of these programs on your sister? She's like a little porcelain doll."

How powerful are the computers in Shadowrun? Very powerful. But exactly how powerful has never really been explained. And honestly, it shouldn't be. Computing is very fast, very accurate, and very awesome. But for whatever reason, human brains are still employed as an important adjunct. This is itself not particularly surprising. The human brain is in total capable of over 100 trillion computer instructions every second. That's an amount which is, quite frankly, ridiculous. It's a very, very large amount of processor power, and although a tremendous amount of it is being "wasted" in subconscious thought about whether you'd enjoy a Blue Donut™ or whatever, it still has more total processing power than any device in Shadowrun. Computers aren't really ever more powerful than a human brain, they are more dedicated and more precise. A computer can get the same answer to a question over and over again without ever being wrong (or creative) and that right there is its strength and its weakness.

In Shadowrun history the Cyberterminal was created in 2029 and it is established that no existing computer system could possibly stand against someone using one. This isn't because the cyberterminal was a revolutionarily faster and more powerful computer capable of crushing other computers with its virtual biceps (though it was), it's because the cyberterminal was cybernetic – it literally plugged into the brain of the user. And it crushed other computers not because thinking instructions is so much faster than typing them (though it is), but because a cyberterminal actually uses part of the human's brain in its computer operations. That alone gives it a processing reserve that is well over one hundred thousand times what a super computer was capable of when Shadowrun was first written.

Shadowrun progressed through the existence of the cyberterminal to the cyberdeck: a portable computer which was nonetheless able to utilize the powers of the human brain. It was the standard in 2050 and for the next 15 years it remained on the cutting edge for Hackers. And that's where the history gets confusing. Because it's entirely possible that at some point the people in Shadowrun managed to create something portable that was in fact more powerful than a human brain. And at that point, the human really is just a vestigial appendage whose purpose is to press the Go button. But while that's admirably dystopic and fits into the overall cyberpunk genre fairly well, the game still centers on the player characters – who are still "just" individual humans. The moment they become obsolete, the game is over. Not just your particular campaign, but indeed the entire game of Shadowrun. So we're constrained to believe that in fact the human element is still vital to the operation of high end computing. That's fine, there can be many revolutions in computing power without actually pushing the one hundred trillion computer instructions per second threshold.

So when we get to the Commlink, the one thing we know didn't happen is that the Commlink did not replace the need for it to be connected to a serious metahuman brain in order to orchestrate enough processing power together to do real cybercombat. We know this did not happen because we are still playing the game.

• Equipment Spotlight: The Math Subprocessor
  Many people have asked why one would bother with a math subprocessor as a cybernetic enhancement. After all, a handheld calculator has a stupidly fast and accurate look-up table for approximating trigonometric functions and you can jolly well just hook such a function up to your datajack and get the answers to any reasonable "math" question in less time than it takes to ask it.
  The answer is that a Math Subprocessor is not a calculator that feeds you answers. It's more like a nerve staple that forces part of your brain to perform mathematical analysis on demand. That's why it applies to things like signal jamming, it literally turns part of your brain into an incredibly powerful bio-computer slaved to the tasks you designate for it. In some ways it actually makes you less intelligent: you are seriously using less of your brain on a moment to moment basis. But when the chips are down and you need to extrapolate a wave function or predict the results of a three-body problem, the Math Subprocessor is your friend.

Modern Data Management: The I and the Storm
"The falling cherry blossoms symbolize both the beauty and the transience of life. The blossoms fall as men fall and remind us of our mortality. Also every one of them is a music player I've harnessed together into a giant parallel processing computing gestalt for the singular purpose of calculating how to make your life a little bit more transient."

The Wireless Matrix heralds a new paradigm of computer use. Not necessarily in computer power, but in utility. In the real world of 2007 parallel processing is a difficult problem; but by 2070 it is the norm.

With so much computing power all over everything it is a wonder that anything gets done. Indeed, quite often things don't get done simply because the instructions to do so are buried so deeply in lists of things to do that they just never get looked at.

• Equipment Spotlight: the Toaster
  Computing in Shadowrun has reached a level of abstraction that is truly epic. The toaster on the shelf not only has a computer in it, but it has processor cycles to spare after calculating the proper toasting methods based on the thickness and consistency of your bread compared with your stated preferences regarding toast. Not just that it could be utilized as a calculator or day planner while not heating bagels – but that even while in use it could potentially be added to a network and contribute helpfully to the entire operation of a network. The implications of this are far reaching: most importantly it means that the actual amount of total processing power available to your network is both large and unknowable.
  Seriously, it's unknowable. This is a boon to both the Player of the Hacker (as it means that he doesn't have to keep track of exactly how much memory he has to play with), and to the Hacker himself (as it means that there's an unknowably large number of ways to sneak data and access into the networks that he is infiltrating).

Why Money?
“Why rob a bank? That's where the money is.”

Perhaps the most extraordinary claim of all in the annals of hackerdom is the idea that these people get paid in electronic currency to break the laws of society and change electronic records. The extremity of this claim is quite apparent: people are breaking the rules of society to change data records in exchange for being gifted with data records that according to the rules of society entitle them to goods and services. Why not eliminate the middle man an just hack the money records directly? The fact that people in the Shadowrun universe don't is highly indicative that they can't. And the reason for this is primarily because the monetary records themselves are very far away.

Electronic Nuyen: The Ledger in the Sky
“It is the finding of the Corporate Court that the creation of a unified currency that is itself immune to the damaging effects of speculation and devaluation is an essential pillar upon which the global economy must be placed.”

Electronic money can exist in a world where people can force the changing of electronic data from a distance by impressing it with high density signal because it's actually really simple: it's just a number. That means all transactions of electronic money can be done entirely with low density signal. There's nothing complicated enough going on to actually need any of the fancy processing that Shadowrun era signaling can do, and so it lies within the capacity of those maintaining the money to block out all high density signals and still conduct business. To hack the money supply with traditional methods would thus require one to get inside the barriers and thus be on site. Considering that the money is “kept” in servers that are extremely inaccessible, this rarely happens.

The biggest reservoir of money is a series of servers maintained in Zürich Orbital, a space station which passes over the Earth at nearly 2,000 kilometers above the seas. The “money” is a series of account numbers with money amounts on servers that sit inside this well fortified bunker floating continuously in space. These servers are connected through low density signal cable to retransmitters attached to powerful receivers on the outside of signal shell. The externally available computers don't hold any account information, encryption keys, or passwords, they literally just retransmit heavily encrypted (and short) data bursts into and out of the internal server farm through a signal bottleneck. Thus ideally there is nothing whatever that an external hacker could hack that would mean anything.

Now this doesn't mean that the enterprising hacker can't steal money, just that they have to steal it from a specific account by getting a hold of an actual credstick or commlink and hack them to authorize the transfer of funds. However this is understandably dangerous, because doing so still leaves a trail of money transfers on the hidden servers that the hacker is probably in no position to do anything about. It is for this reason, that fraud of this sort is mostly confined to spending sprees on relatively untraceable goods and services rather than actually getting the money into one's own credit line. And thus we get back to the question of eliminating the middle man: it is often plain easier and safer to just hack a carpet supply warehouse to think that it should deliver you some sweet rug than it is to hack a stolen credstick to transfer money to the carpet supply warehouse and “purchase” the same rug with money that may well be flagged as illegit in days, hours, or even seconds. For this reason, personal credsticks are often left to lie by hardened criminals.

• Equipment Spotlight: Cash
  In addition to the purely electronic Nuyen, there are available notes and coins for use with small or informal purchases. Coins are usually issued from national mints and have a variety of imprints. They come in units of .05, .10, .20, .50, 1, and 2 nuyen. The nuyen bills are of a variety of different colors and sizes (and in recent years, the colors have been overhauled to avoid confusion by those metatypes who see in broader frequency ranges). They come in 1¥, 2¥, 5¥, 10¥, 20¥, 50¥, 100¥, 200¥, and 500¥ denominations. The bills are printed under the direction of the corporate court and generally have the portraits of free market advocates from history. All are human men.

  • 1¥ William Edwards Deming
    2¥ Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk
    5¥ Milton Friedman
    10¥ Robert Mundell
    20¥ Carl Menger
    50¥ Keith Joseph
    100¥ Adam Smith
    200¥ Alan Greenspan
    500¥ Arthur Laffer

  Cash is generally avoided as a medium of exchange by corporations and wage slaves alike because it is essentially untraceable. Very large piles of cash are viewed with suspicion even by shady people. The general feeling even amongst criminals is that anyone who could steal themselves a very large amount of money should be able to get themselves together to get an off-shore bank account like a respectable gangster, and that anyone who isn't a criminal should also have a bank account rather than piles of bills that could be so easily stolen or misplaced.

Other Currencies: ¥, $, €

ZO is not the only game in town, but the others aren't super different. The Malaysian Independent Bank operates an island fortress where they keep all the records, and while it's not actually “in space” it might as well be as far as most people are concerned. The European Economic Commission operates the Euro rather than the ¥, but its account server vault at the bottom of a mineshaft is not especially easy to crack into either. Aztlan's secret bank is so secret that they don't even tell people what is protecting the Peso accounts, but it's presumably pretty intense because all legends of people hacking that particular server are vague and unlikely.

[Username17]

Question: does that formatting make the equipment spotlights fit better into the narrative? As asides, they seemed t kind of break the flow of the text, and putting them in spoiler boxes is the closet I can do to having them be box text. If that works for people, there should probably be a lot more equipment spotlights, and if people want to write some of them I would be happy and thankful.

-Username17

[CatharzGodfoot]

Yeah, the spoiler boxes make for decent sidebar substitutes, and they didn't seem to break up the text too much.

Good luck getting any work at all out of others.

[RiotGearEpsilon]

The spoiler boxes are a cool idea. What equipment do you need highlights for?

[Sma]

Works for me.

[Judging__Eagle]

The equipment asides in spoiler blocks works great.

[Surgo]

Equipment Spotlight: Old(er) School Encryption

As of 2007 it would take X years (a conservative estimate) on the world's largest supercomputer to crack a message encrypted with 256-bit Blowfish by a brute force search. To put that in perspective, that is more years than (unlikely event Y). In 2070, however, decrypting the same message with the absolute largest parameters for the cipher (key size, block size, whatever) would take about five minutes. Why, then, would anyone bother with old-school encryption? The answer is combat. Five minutes is longer than most combat takes. That means if you want to talk to your drone securely to tell it to go around and shoot people in the face, you can do it with old-school encryption. When combat is over people will be able to decrypt your messages but, at that point, who cares? The only thing the message contained was you telling your drone to go around shooting persons X, Y, and Z in the face. You no longer care about that message, and neither does anyone else.

[Manxome]

At the risk of displaying my ignorance of yet another popular RPG system and/or injecting far more realism than you care about:

1) Why exactly do you care if someone can read your instructions during combat?

2) If we're assuming that brute force search is still the best decryption option, is there some reason you wouldn't jump to 512-bit encryption and increase the break time from 5 minutes to around 10^72 years?

3) What's the protocol for generating/distributing new keys? A brute force break would result in retrieving the key and therefore being able to read not only the message you broke, but every future message sent with that key, so using the same key in two consecutive battles would negate the 5-minute window in the second battle.

[Surgo]

1. I'm assuming that they also break authentication. Even without it, advertising your strategy to your enemies is hardly a good idea.

2. What I said was badly phrased and in a moment will be rewritten. I wasn't assuming a 256 bit key, I was assuming the limit of old-school encryption. (Whether it's key size, block size, whatever.)

3. I'd imagine you'd make a codebook beforehand, and switch to the next key in the book after like 3 minutes.

[Manxome]

1. I'm assuming that they also break authentication. Even without it, advertising your strategy to your enemies is hardly a good idea.

Using it for authentication is not even close to being acceptable. If a random brute force search breaks it in an average of 5 minutes, that means that there's a 1 in 64 chance of breaking it in less than 10 seconds by lucky guessing--would you really be willing to give your opponent that large a chance of stealing your bot? And that 5 minute mark has to assume some particular amount of computational power, and I assume that some people/groups in the world of Shadowrun actually have more computational power at their disposal than the average.

2. What I said was badly phrased and in a moment will be rewritten. I wasn't assuming a 256 bit key, I was assuming the limit of old-school encryption. (Whether it's key size, block size, whatever.)

While particular specific algorithms may have such a limit, I'm not aware of any general limit on the "style" of encryption, and I know at least some modern ciphers are generalizable (at least in principle) to any size you want--there's literally no limit apart from the hardware. 256 bits is the sane limit for modern symmetric ciphers because it's effectively unbreakable by any plausible technology we can imagine, not because it's hard to do bigger. And you can double the time of a brute force break every time you increase the key size by one bit.

I don't know if you care about realism at all, but if you do, I suspect it's more plausible to claim that there's been fundamental advancements in our understanding of mathematics and algorithms, so that now all "old"-style ciphers to be broken in polynomial (maybe linear?) time, rather than by brute force (exponential time). That would prevent the defender from having batshit crazy leverage compared to the attacker. It also means that you can't necessarily trade off between computation time and probability of success--the probability of a crack could be almost zero at 4:59 and 100% at 5:00.

Some sort of insanely parallizable computation technology would also potentially work, but only if the number of keys you can crunch in parallel is...really fvcking enormous. Like...somewhere on the order of the total number of serial computations that a computer can do in the amount of time the defender is willing to devote to the process of encryping/decrypting his message. Which is trillions/second for mass-market personal computers in 2008 and probably an awful lot bigger in Shadowrun. I know that your toaster has processing power to spare in Shadowrun, but I seriously doubt your personal computing network consists of literally trillions of separate processors.

3. I'd imagine you'd make a codebook beforehand, and switch to the next key in the book after like 3 minutes.

Ignoring the fact that every 3 minutes isn't nearly fast enough (as noted above), this is starting to sound awfully close to a OTP. Is data storage in Shadowrun expensive enough (compared to signal density) to make this preferable?


You can tell me to shut up at any time if this is becoming more technical than you care about...

[Surgo]

They're all good points, really. And they all point to "don't bother with modern day encryption in this game" I just wanted to try to salvage it.

I noted (though did not post about) the problem that five minutes is a probabilistic time to begin with. And that's pretty damning. So, yeah, scrap that equipment focus.

One-time pad write-up coming soon: the "noise generator" (aka antenna).


edit: On another note, instead of saying that exponential time algorithms are now polynomial time, you could say that an attack has been developed on Feistal networks that makes any key above length X useless. Similar to, but much stronger than, the actually-exists meet in the middle attack on multiple encryptions.