Foxwarrior wrote:The "Protagonists must accomplish [goal] before [bad event] happens in [fairly precise amount of time]" story is not unique to worlds with breakable encryption, and (unless you're using Frank Trollman-style chemical computing) breakable encryption is as terrible a way to make a precise time limit as the reactor instability in The Dark Knight Rises.
What's so great about this particular variation of the story?
First of all: it's absolutely ubiquitous. We're talking about a genre where James Bond is a major iconic character, and
that was literally the premise of the last James Bond movie!
But perhaps more importantly, it is a variation of the story which flows naturally from the most used mission in the genre: steal (or stop someone from stealing) the data. Data-steal is bar none the
most iconic cyberpunk mission, and players can reasonably expect to be on both sides of it. The "you have to do something (or stop someone from doing something) before the time limit runs out" is another classic and well-loved story structure; and it follows naturally from a data-steal mission,
but only if cryptography is breakable.
Breakable cryptography is pretty much the best and most used method for getting from Act I to Act II of a cyberpunk plot. Without breakable encryption, you have to steal both the data and the cypher key at the same time - which simply sends you directly to Act III because you no longer have the time trial in between.
Lich Loved wrote:Beyond the cyperpunk genre mandating it via author fiat, why would any futuristic company even connect anything truly valuable to any external network?
This is actually not much of a problem.
Companies are always going to have
something worth stealing that is accessible to external networks because they engage in international commerce. So there are always going to be piles of money and shipping orders for shipping containers full of fancy cars and luxury cheese for hackers to steal.
There is however a
related problem that is a real problem, which is that it is not enough for the purposes of our stories for the hacker to be able to steal things that are "valuable" in the sense that they are or are worth
money. They have to be able to steal things that are valuable to the story structure. Also, they have to have things that they need to spend effort protecting from enemy hackers despite the fact that they aren't engaging in international e-commerce.
Now, you'll note that there is nothing about the last part that specifies specifically that anything has to be accessible from the intertubes itself. Indeed, while there are lots of stories of "basement hackers" who don't leave their basements, those don't make terribly good cooperative storytelling adventures. Having hackers need to get on site in order to hack important story stuff is actually
fine, because then they are infiltrating with the rest of the team and playing the damn game. Like how in episode 22 of Arrow, the team has to get their hacker into the computer room in Merlyn's building in order to get the information they needed.
That is fine.
Here are things that are problematic:
- A message can't be sent securely without having a secure channel. If that can happen, e-commerce is inviolate and hackers can't reroute traffic or confuse orders or do any of the other stuff they are supposed to do to cause havoc and not pay their phone bills. This means that asymmetric encryption cannot be unbreakable.
- Stored information on a harddrive has to be extractable given time. If that doesn't happen, we can't tell stories like Skyfall and we've failed the cyberpunk genre emulation test. This means that symmetric encryption can't be unbreakable either. Though unlike asymmetric encryption, it's actually totally OK if it takes hours or days to break.
- Simply turning off wireless input can't be enough to protect you from combat hacking, because enemy hackers are supposed to be a threat to you in combat. And "you" in this case could also mean "them", because that has to go both ways, as either the hacker or the target could be the player character or the opposition. This requires there to be meaningful combat actions a hacker can take against luddite opponents. This can take the form of Minority Report style personal vision obscurement, Lawnmower Man style VR telepathy, Fringe style incapacitating light flashes, Snow Crash style mind controlling audio-signals, or Langford style basilisks. But it has to be something such that the hacker can do something meaningful against luddite opposition.
Bottom line is that having
the player characters stamp their feet and refuse to have anything valuable in harm's way of enemy hacking is a much bigger problem than having companies doing that. The companies are always going to have millions or billions of dollars worth of stuff hanging in the network winds no matter how the hacking rules work. The issue there is to arrange for the hacking the companies are vulnerable to be hacking that the player characters can do while interacting with the adventure. So your goal there is to discourage basement hacking and encourage on-site hacking, while simultaneously supporting "cold" hacking and not requiring social hacks or password guessing. Line of Sight spooky action at a distance is probably your ideal there.
-Username17