Machine and Man in Cyberpunk

[Blade]

You can hate cypherpunks all you want, but blaming the expectation of realism on them is absurd.

Many people - and not only cypherpunks - want their Matrix to be realistic, or draw comparison with existing computer systems and networks. Or at least, they want an explanation to why things work. Encryption and everything that goes with it is jut one part of the problem, and I know at least of one cypherpunk who has no problem with playing a totally abstract Matrix or a realistic Matrix where encryption is broken.

[Username17]

You can hate cypherpunks all you want, but blaming the expectation of realism on them is absurd.

Many people - and not only cypherpunks - want their Matrix to be realistic, or draw comparison with existing computer systems and networks. Or at least, they want an explanation to why things work. Encryption and everything that goes with it is jut one part of the problem, and I know at least of one cypherpunk who has no problem with playing a totally abstract Matrix or a realistic Matrix where encryption is broken.

The expectation of "realism" in futurist computer systems that don't use modern systems is treacherous territory. What's the "realistic" way for a network with direct neural interfaces to work? There are of course, lots of answers, and almost all of them are going to look laughable in just a few years. It's really just the cypherpunks who are organized enough about their bullshit futurism that they claim that their technolibertarian vision is the one and only "realistic" setup that computers could have.

Most pieces of "realism" aren't even a huge problem unless they also come with demands of "minutiae". The people who obsess about realistic battery sizes aren't a big problem, because the shape and weight of fuel cells isn't a big constraint on the stories we can tell about the future. even the people fapping to firearm "realism" only get in the way when they start asking for additional minutiae. It really doesn't matter whether we get the "offensive" and "defensive" grenades backwards or not, so appeasing the realism demands on that issue hurts nothing. Again, it's just the people who fap to how there's no way the big bad corporations could possibly read their mail (or thoughts) whose narrow brand of "realism" is actually getting in the way of being able to make settings and rules that you can tell stories in.

-Username17

[Blade]

I don't see your point.

Someone who refuses your premises will always dislike what you'll do.
It's the same with hardcore physicist who refuse to accept that space has friction and will refuse to play a Space Opera game where spaceships work as if there was friction.

Some people are able to suspend their disbelief and have fun in settings contradicting with what they know to be true. Others don't, and they don't play in such settings.

Many religious fanatics keep saying that games with magic are bad and that people shouldn't play them and yet there are games out there with nice magic fluff and rules. Why would it be different with cypherpunks and the Matrix?

[Username17]

Why would it be different with cypherpunks and the Matrix?

Because while gun nuts want "realistic" ranges, "realistic" distinctions between guns, "realistic" weights, "realistic" terminology, and all that other crap, none of that fucking matters. People still have their locations and action times and such abstracted to some extent, and it's all fine.

The problem is that the cypherpunks want to create a specific and extremely unplayable world topology for "realism". The gun nuts want to fiddle with the damage numbers of various attacks, and this is actually very small potatoes. The cypherpunks want to fiddle with the ability to have adventures at all, and not in a good way.

-Username17

[Pulsewidth]

You're not just claiming AES might be broken in the future (highly unlikely but at least plausible), you're claiming AES and every other conceivable symmetric cipher at any practicable key length can be broken, with all that implies (P=NP). I'd bet everything I own that P!=NP.

Even if you ignore the consequences of P=NP, this still does nothing to promote the stories you want unless you also start tracking bandwidth and storage space, which you've already rejected as impractical. If you don't track them then OTPs are a perfect replacement for symmetric ciphers.

Your new physics already make every device hackable and keys potentially retrievable, so a world with realistic mathematics is perfectly playable. That realistic mathematics could even include a ban on asymmetric ciphers if you wanted to, although I haven't yet seen any argument why you might want to do that.

[Username17]

See? This is why cypherpunks are a pox on cyberpunk in a way that gun fetishists, medical amateurs, and armchair physicists never could be.

You're not just claiming AES might be broken in the future (highly unlikely but at least plausible), you're claiming AES and every other conceivable symmetric cipher at any practicable key length can be broken, with all that implies (P=NP). I'd bet everything I own that P!=NP.

OK, first of all, no it doesn't. The fact that a cypher can be broken does not mean that P = NP. It would be consistent with P = NP, but it would also be consistent with the algebraic transformations themselves being in no way as inviolate as some people think they are.

Let's talk for a moment about evolutionary algorithms. Those are real things. As a mathematical discipline, they are super young, and we don't really understand them very well. But what they do, is emulate evolution's problem solving technique. And that's important, because actual evolution cracked the Dystophin gene.

The Dystophin gene is about four and a half million bits of information, and if you were for some reason compelled to try to get there by brute force it would take you about 10^1,300,000 times as long as it would take you to do a 512 bit key. That's a really long time. Like, many googols times the entire history of the universe long time. But evolution doesn't play that game. Evolution uses mutation and selection, which means it uncovers and assembles long codes in linear time. This is where I show the Hamlet Typing Monkeys, where the standard brute force version takes 5.8*10^25 attempts to write "to be or not to be", the preserve and add version takes only 486 attempts, and the mutation and selection version gets it in about a hundred. That classic Hamlet Typing Monkeys example is about equivalent to finding an 85 bit key, and while the brute force version is extremely implausible, the actual way biological evolution actually works in the actual world would solve that problem before the commercial break was over.

However, I also wouldn't bet a dollar that P isn't NP. I mean, today NASA and Google paid $15million each to get their hands on shiny new quantum computers that solve traveling salesmen problems in less time than traditional computing is capable of. That really sounds an awful lot like solving NP problems in P time. It might not be, and the generation of these things after that might not be either - but betting everything you own on no one ever doing it seems like an incredible sucker's bet at this point.

Even if you ignore the consequences of P=NP, this still does nothing to promote the stories you want unless you also start tracking bandwidth and storage space, which you've already rejected as impractical. If you don't track them then OTPs are a perfect replacement for symmetric ciphers.

No they aren't. OTPs are always bigger than the messages and cannot be contained in the messages they are wrapping. No amount of bandwidth will ever help in any way. The code book always needs to be physically transferred because it is literally impossible for OTP encryption to encrypt itself. The synchronization problem is also real, and makes OTP use for mass messaging completely impractical no matter how much storage space you have. State Grid or Agrencore cannot communicate with Customer #13967325 via one time pad. No matter what kind of bandwidth or storage space they have, they just simply cannot do that.

But the bottom line is: people like Pulsewidth are the problem. And ignoring them and everything they stand for while designing your netrunning game is the solution.

-Username17

[Foxwarrior]

Just a reminder: a genetic algorithm only helps you write Hamlet if you can select for Hamlet-ness.

[Pulsewidth]

OK, first of all, no it doesn't. The fact that a cypher can be broken does not mean that P = NP. It would be consistent with P = NP, but it would also be consistent with the algebraic transformations themselves being in no way as inviolate as some people think they are.

If you're talking about a specific cipher then this is believable. If you're talking about every possible cipher based on a huge variety of different mathematical techniques, no, it's not believable.

The Dystophin gene is about four and a half million bits of information, and if you were for some reason compelled to try to get there by brute force it would take you about 10^1,300,000 times as long as it would take you to do a 512 bit key.

In the case of the encryption key, every single bit has to be perfectly correct, and you cannot tell whether changing any bit got you closer to the correct answer. Your evolutionary algorithm is of no use, because the selection stage is "everybody dies". It would be like trying to evolve Hamlet where your only measures of Hamlet-ness are "not Hamlet" and "exactly Hamlet".

BTW, the only way to measure Hamlet-ness that will get you the exact correct result is comparison with a reference copy, in which case why are you trying to evolve it?

I mean, today NASA and Google paid $15million each to get their hands on shiny new quantum computers that solve traveling salesmen problems in less time than traditional computing is capable of. That really sounds an awful lot like solving NP problems in P time.

Vebyast already posted links explaining that it's not. The best quantum computing can do again symmetric ciphers is to halving the effective key size (that's a ridiculously huge speedup so don't think I'm criticizing quantum computing in general), but it's trivial to double the key size to compensate. Asymmetric ciphers may be more vulnerable, but they might also be generally vulnerable to classical attacks without needing P = NP.

It might not be, and the generation of these things after that might not be either - but betting everything you own on no one ever doing it seems like an incredible sucker's bet at this point.

Betting on P=NP would be like betting on the speed of light spontaneously doubling. And you're not just postulating P=NP, but P=NP with small exponents.

OTPs are always bigger than the messages and cannot be contained in the messages they are wrapping. No amount of bandwidth will ever help in any way. The code book always needs to be physically transferred because it is literally impossible for OTP encryption to encrypt itself. The synchronization problem is also real, and makes OTP use for mass messaging completely impractical no matter how much storage space you have. State Grid or Agrencore cannot communicate with Customer #13967325 via one time pad. No matter what kind of bandwidth or storage space they have, they just simply cannot do that.

OK, now you're talking about asymmetric ciphers. That doesn't change the fact that OTPs are a perfect substitute for symmetric ciphers if you're abstracting away the hardware details.

And OTPs are not impractical for mass communications in the Shadowrun setting. My bank already sent me a unique piece of hardware for generating one time passcodes. Even today the only barrier to them sending OTPs sufficient for all anticipated future communications is cost.

But the bottom line is: people like Pulsewidth are the problem. And ignoring them and everything they stand for while designing your netrunning game is the solution.

Protecting one specific type of story that's easily replaced by the ubiquitous hackability physics is not a good reason to make mathematics go completely crazy while pretending there are no consequences.

[sabs]

You're going to have an OTP for your bank, your work, your email addresses, and every single website you log into for any reason? For your health insurance plans, for your vehicles, etc..etc.
Now multiply that times a couple of million.

Lets say you're the IT department for an Arcology in Seattle.
You need a OTP for every major subsystem, for every person who needs to access it. And what happens when John Q Employee's commlink is stolen? You now need to deauthorize all of his otp's and reissue new ones, for him, his home appliances, his office appliances.

You also need OTP for your cybernetics.

It's the future, with full on virtual reality and super cybernetics.. You can allow things to be decrypted in a "handwavium" way without breaking math.

[Pulsewidth]

If I'm a Shadowrunner I'm definitely going to do those kind of things, even though it won't protect my cyberwear from anybody capable of hacking my commlink.

However, all the objections you made to OTP based encryption apply equally to purely symmetric cipher based encryption. This implies you can achieve your anti-cypherpunk goals without breaking the setting with crazy mathematics by arguing for the "minicrypt" world, where all asymmetric ciphers are easily breakable. You can totally handwave the method, because it has nowhere near the serious consequences of breaking all symmetric ciphers.

[Heisenberg]

How does a really skilled gunman with a really cool gun deal with a spirit who just uses materialization to walk through him? Is this a huge issue? If sometimes guns don't work is it ok if sometimes computers don't work work either?

(It does point out the whole MagicRun aspect of the game, but that's pretty much how it has always been.)

To my mind, both examples are fine as long as it's the exception and not the rule. Some things can't be hacked, some things can't be shot, some things can't be hacked or shot, some things can't be magicked, or at least there are some places magic doesn't work (background count).

But the bottom line is: people like Pulsewidth are the problem. And ignoring them and everything they stand for while designing your netrunning game is the solution.

I'll focus on developing my ignoring people skill then. : )

Which gets us to levels of abstraction. Basically, books and video games and card games work in this medium because they are extremely abstracted. You get some sort of setpiece about how there's a metaphorical wall or a metaphorical guard dog or something and then the Hacker uses some weird metaphor to metaphor themselves past it (or fail). To work in a tabletop role playing game, the stuff needs to be at least as abstracted.

Computer topography can't matter. Computer topology can't matter either. That's going to break peoples' brains, but the sad fact is that a table top role playing game cannot handle worrying about whether a connection is routed through a portable phone in Formosa or not. This may seem like kind of a surprising statement, considering that "I routed the traffic through a portable phone in Formosa" is like the 3rd most likely thing for a Cyberpunk genre hacker to say. But the fact remains that the game can't handle having that statement actually make any difference, because the hacker could jolly well have additional portable phones to route traffic through in Pakistan, Nigeria, and Kentucky and even if that was somehow fair we've already used up too much fucking table time.

The actual game actions need to start and stay very high concept and very abstract, with the details of things being filled in on the fly. The model should probably be Star Trek technobabble. One run you avoid detection by "rerouting traffic through an Icelandic server", and on another run you avoid detection by "spoofing the access ID of an off-duty employee", but it does not matter which you choose because the "Avoid Detection" test is the same regardless. And frankly, the cybernetic upgrades need to be the same. Whether we're playing ICE Cyberspace, Cyberpunk 2020, or Shadowrun, I am simply never going to spend my precious Empathy/Humanity/Essence on having cyberhorns, because horns are kind of stupid and there are much better options to spend that limited resource on (like blades on your arms). The only way "cool concepts" like cyber minotaurs and grafted sharkskin and shit are going to actually happen is to make the upgrades effects based and then let the player go off on their own pseudo-scientific rant about what the hell they did to their body to get those numbers.

I definitely agree...are there really six-seven pages of people NOT agreeing?

Someone is hacking my ability to work forums.

Yes, we are going to abstract things, however if you allow my character given time to break any decryption I'm never going to leave my basement. I'm instead going to have a field day making the entire internet my bitch.

It seems like everyone is either discussing decryption being impossible or decryption being automatic given enough time. What about a middle ground where decryption is possible, but not automatic, i.e. a rather difficult non-extended test?

[Foxwarrior]

It seems like everyone is either discussing decryption being impossible or decryption being automatic given enough time. What about a middle ground where decryption is possible, but not automatic, i.e. a rather difficult non-extended test?

If it's possible, and each hacker can try their hand at decrypting the message, then it is possible given enough time spent finding hackers (so it's not actually a compromise between the two positions).

If rolling for the test serves to determine whether the message actually was encrypted properly (and uncrackably) or not in the first place, then it might be a compromise.

I definitely agree...are there really six-seven pages of people NOT agreeing?

The dispute is primarily over which details can be "abstracted away" and which details should be core limitations, I think.

[Ice9]

I don't think it does, which is why I put it into a single thread. The bottom line is:

"People focusing in on small details and getting chubbies for "realism" in their Man/Machine connections causes a host of problems for cyberpunk games, most especially in genre emulation and storytelling capabilities. But also ironically enough in the game's ability to provide realistic results and the ability of the game to focus in on small details."

The issue is that ultimately the fact that we can't have nice things in our cyborg killers and the fact that we can't have nice things in our net runner rules is coming from the same problem. And that problem is cypherpunks.

-Username17

I don't think it's just a "realism nitpicking" factor - or at least you can't discount realism entirely. Personally, I have no problem with abstracting details, but the abstraction can't actually contradict those details or it sucks. For example, if all guns are covered by a few categories, no difference within a category, that's fine. If shotguns are a better sniping weapon and sniper rifles are a better close-quarters weapon, that's bullshit, and you don't have to be a gun nut to think so.

So if your hacking rules just say that you have "a bunch" of memory to store things and "a bunch" of processing power, that's fine. If it says things like "you need to go on a difficult cyberspace journey to find some info you could look up on Google in a few seconds IRL", that's not so fine. I think that "computers have advanced to cracking any possible encryption in a short timeframe, but this massive processing power isn't used for other purposes (like actually using that ubiquitous monitoring data effectively, for example)" is over the line for some people.

And I don't think that's unreasonable. After all, when people say something like "D&D should be like the middle ages, and all the magic should somehow not affect that, because genre" - they get laughed at, at least here. It's not about "realism" so much as genre vs plausibility - and while some genres like superheroes are pretty far on the "genre" side (although even then, people complain about stuff like MHRP), cyberpunk is (for many people) not.

Besides, it's not like you still can't decrypt things. The key has to be stored somewhere for anyone to be able to read it. That somewhere can be hacked. You can still have the "it'll take X hours" scenario by having the hack obtain a large number of potential keys that must be tested. Although in a world where processing power is abstract, things taking an amount of time between "seconds" and "centuries" is going to be "narratively convenient" anyway.

[RadiantPhoenix]

Question: If it's not a public-key system, how do you even figure out the encryption algorithm?

[Ice9]

And while we're on the subject of things that are a bridge too far - hackers paying for software, at least in general.

The whole point of the hacker is that they hack things. Things such as software. Software which is illegal and used for illegal purposes, so how exactly are the people making it going to enforce anything? Ultra-DRM? What hacker worth their salt would trust a program they couldn't dig into? Sounds like something that would get you mocked on the net, honestly.

And it doesn't even matter whether a given hacker has the skill to hack a given program, because a non-trivial number of other hackers will believe that "information wants to be free" (or they just dislike the person selling the software), and will distribute cracked versions to all and sundry.

The only thing I could see a SR hacker paying for is super-recent information. The absolute latest vulnerabilities found, before anyone else gets a look at them. Even then, there's going to be some people who distribute those for free as soon as they get them and strip away any identifiers, but that does add a few minutes delay - so maybe in some cases it's worth paying.

And even for that, trusted people are still going to share a copy. There is just no way that makes sense to have everybody pay for an individual TacNet license when there's a hacker on the team.

That said, you can still gate program access by skill, in that more powerful programs are harder to use. Just not money.

[Heisenberg]

What about during character creation? Is spending nuyen for hacking gear acceptable then, if only as an abstraction?

[Foxwarrior]

I don't understand why you'd want to pay for something during character creation if it's free as soon as the game starts.

[Ice9]

What about during character creation? Is spending nuyen for hacking gear acceptable then, if only as an abstraction?

It's not really necessary. A hacker is already spending points on the following in chargen:

* Hacking Skills and related Attributes
* Neural Interface / Augmentation implants
* Connections, to have a good source for the latest exploits
* A good commlink - sure, there's talk about unlimited processing on "the cloud", but I can definitely see a possibility for better processing on the thing that directly connects to your brain being important.

And that's just on direct hacking stuff, not other things that a hacker might want/need like a gun, other cyberwear, vehicles, drones, etc.

[Lokathor]

The whole point of the hacker is that they hack things. Things such as software. Software which is illegal and used for illegal purposes, so how exactly are the people making it going to enforce anything? Ultra-DRM? What hacker worth their salt would trust a program they couldn't dig into? Sounds like something that would get you mocked on the net, honestly.

Happens all the time in the real world for some things.

Some of the more diehard linux junkies still use binary device drivers for their GPU and Wireless. Because it's easier that way than trying to write your own drivers.

Basically, the reason you'd pay for a program as a Shadowrun Hacker is if time is a factor to the point where your need that program now more than you need those credits now.

Anyone can build a gun, but people buy guns because they want to know that they'll work properly, they want to know that they'll work with the right size bullets, and they want to save their time because they got shit to do.

[Vebyast]

Besides, it's not like you still can't decrypt things. The key has to be stored somewhere for anyone to be able to read it. That somewhere can be hacked. You can still have the "it'll take X hours" scenario by having the hack obtain a large number of potential keys that must be tested. Although in a world where processing power is abstract, things taking an amount of time between "seconds" and "centuries" is going to be "narratively convenient" anyway.

I like this proposal. You need a reason for airgaps and power switches to not exist, but that's much easier to deal with. Probably something to do with brainputers and wireless cards.

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@Frank: I'm no longer posting about what I think should be in the game. I believe I've already posted my argument there: game devs some up with something that works, and then we'll come up with something that fits. Rather, I'm posting corrections and links to real life because you appear to have a series of real-life misunderstandings of basic computer science and I believe that these misunderstandings may be contributing to your game design issues. I'm hoping that resolving these issues might help you move forward with the game design.

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and more vulnerable to attacks the rest of the world put together in 1999.

This is perhaps the only thing where you've messed up on something other than math.

Up until DES was published, the academic community basically ignored crypto. The controversy over DES was in fact the reason academia started studying crypto in the first place. Think of it this way: it took the NSA 30 years to go from WWII crypto to where it was in 1974. From there, it took academia only 20 years to go from zero (we didn't know that Enigma had been broken until the 70s) to the same point. On top of that, encryption is sufficiently far ahead of decryption that, even if you do give the NSA a twenty-five-year head start, you can probably still keep them from reading your email.

Second, if you read the last paragraph of this section of the DES wiki page, you'll note that IBM had discovered the vulnerability that the NSA strengthened DES against; they told the NSA what they'd found in 1974, a year before DES was finalized, and the NSA told them to lock it up and throw away the key. If you don't want to give the NSA any credit at all, someone there thought really fast to make the NSA look good and corporations, not the government, were the frontrunners.

Third, the vulnerability that the NSA weakened DES against was... a trivial brute-force attack. It took until 1999 because that's how long it took the EFF to raise $250k to build a machine that was powerful enough to convince the haters. And they had to do that because, just to prove their point, they tested literally every single key. Which anybody could have done before then, which people had in fact been complaining about loudly since DES was published.

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As a mathematical discipline, they are super young, and we don't really understand them very well.

Wrong. We've been poking at them since the sixties. We're pretty sure that we know how they work, and we have a wealth of knowledge about how well they work. To be more specific: on most common problems, they don't. For example, as far back as 2000 people were showing that basic tabu search outperforms GAs while requiring much less user expertise and effort. I personally have done some work in that field and can tell you from my own experience that EAs are not worth the time and that you will be better off with simple simulated annealing. If your problem is such that evaluating each sample takes a long time, which is the case on many interesting tasks, then EAs are even steamier shit and you should be using an estimation of distribution algorithm like MIMIC.

And, of course, I'll add my voice to Foxwarrior's when I say that evolution doesn't work the way you think it does. It doesn't work to on organisms the way you think it does, it doesn't work on problems the way you think it does, it doesn't work on hamlet the way you think it does. Technically speaking, they're a form of gradient ascent - they work by walking uphill until they've found the top, which is the highest-scoring input. They work great when your metric is "how many characters are shared with Hamlet", because now you have only a single hill with Hamlet at the top. GAs don't work very well when your metric is more like New York because, once you finish going up the stairs and reporting your result, you have no idea that you'd have found a better result if you'd chosen the skyscraper on the other side of the street. GAs don't work at all when your "hill" is a perfectly flat mirror the size of Texas and your "peak" is a grain of sand somewhere.

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However, I also wouldn't bet a dollar that P isn't NP. I mean, today NASA and Google paid $15million each to get their hands on shiny new quantum computers that solve traveling salesmen problems in less time than traditional computing is capable of.

First, that article is full of shit. D-Wave's machine is being used to "evaluate the technology", not to build anything. There's a reason for that: you can actually beat D-Wave's computer by 15x by... simulating the physics that D-Wave is using. The paper that the BBC cites compares D-Wave's approximate stochastic solver to an exact solver; it's the difference between getting a friend to Australia by saying "go that way" and getting them there by handing them full itinerary, maps, tickets, reservations, and a rental car. This tech won't be useful unless it really is running more than linearly faster than a classical computer, which we won't find out until they release a Rev 3 of their hardware with more than 512 qubits.

Second, as I posted earlier, quantum computers probably only achieve polynomial speedup over classical computers. And by "probably" I mean "almost certainly". For that matter, whether NP is in BQP is completely different from whether NP is in P. Complexity theory just doesn't work like that; the best analogue I can think of is that socks are a type of clothing no matter what material they're made of. So, while it's true that these machines are going "faster" than the thing on your desktop, it's only for a very technical definition of "faster" that really, really isn't the one you're thinking of.

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Question: If it's not a public-key system, how do you even figure out the encryption algorithm?

Look at the plaintext in front of it that tells the recipient what algorithm to use, because the best cryptosystems are the ones where the entire world has had a few years to point out and fix stupid mistakes. Or you run every algorithm you can think of and it takes you some extra time because there are a few dozen things to try. Or you feed it to your "kids in treehouses" tool because it's not a public system and probably has a stupid mistake in it.

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But the bottom line is: people like Pulsewidth are the problem. And ignoring them and everything they stand for while designing your netrunning game is the solution.

No. The problem is that these people are your target audience. I agree that the solution to the problem is to ignore them while you build your mechanics. But, for the love of six-sided dice, once you have your mechanics, bring them back in to make sure the fluff is as good as the mechanics. Otherwise your game will be a joke. A joke with good mechanics, but a joke. As Ice9 says, you can have different "shotgun" and "cannon" categories if you want, but heaven help you if your shotguns are a better option when you're fifteen miles uprange.

[Ice9]

Happens all the time in the real world for some things.

Some of the more diehard linux junkies still use binary device drivers for their GPU and Wireless. Because it's easier that way than trying to write your own drivers.

Basically, the reason you'd pay for a program as a Shadowrun Hacker is if time is a factor to the point where your need that program now more than you need those credits now.

Anyone can build a gun, but people buy guns because they want to know that they'll work properly, they want to know that they'll work with the right size bullets, and they want to save their time because they got shit to do.

Yeah, but it's not "write your own drivers / build your own gun", it's "take the existing drivers and pirate them", or even just "download the pirated drivers someone already posted".

I could see someone paying for a super up-to-date exploit program, although what they're really paying for is that it's so recent there won't be defenses against it yet. In a few hours, there will be pirated versions, but by that time there will also be patches against it.

But that doesn't apply to your basic tools, anything non-opposed (TacNet, for instance), or anything you plan on using for more than a short amount of time.

And subscription-based doesn't really work when you're using the software for illegal purposes. You hack into Ares using GlitchSploit, they go bribe/threaten the vendor to get your info, and at the least you just got a line of credit burned, but probably more because GlitchSpoit Inc. would need some actual identifying info if they want to prevent widespread distribution. And maybe this doesn't even happen because you hacked Ares, but because someone else using GlitchSploit did. Black market weapon sales work because you pay cash and then you have no further connection to the seller. Which is possible because guns are physical objects and can't be effortlessly duplicated.

[Username17]

I'm no longer posting about what I think should be in the game.

Then I'm no longer reading your posts.

Deal?

-Username17

[Vebyast]

Then I'm no longer reading your posts.

Is there a way to let you know when I have a correction for a computational error in your posts? Because, well, it's not going to go into the game, but it might still be important to the game's audience that the computation is correct.

[Red_Rob]

I could see someone paying for a super up-to-date exploit program, although what they're really paying for is that it's so recent there won't be defenses against it yet. In a few hours, there will be pirated versions, but by that time there will also be patches against it.

I like the idea of one-time use super hacking programs tailored to a specific system. That seems very true to the fiction; writing, stealing or being given a back door exploit program to an otherwise impenetrable target by a Mr. Johnson is like the starting point to half a dozen Cyberpunk stories.

The key would be making it so you didn't just knock up a specialised program every time, or else it would become mundane. I guess you'd just have to make it costly in either time or money (by spending one you save the other) so that it only became worth it for the big runs.

[Stahlseele]

OK, let's step away from the encryption/decryption nonsense for a bit . .
How do we get the Vehicle Rigger to be more usefull/integrated?
The Drone Rigger is easy, but if you want to play Michael Knight or Jesse Mach, you are boned something fierce . .