Yes and no.

If you're wiling to forgo communications and such, you can turn off wireless and/or rely solely on skinlink, to manage your PAN. You can even use the throwaways to manage communications.

No street-samurai of mine is ever going to have his smartlink/smartgun hacked, because he's always going to either (a) run a wire, or (b) go with skinlink. Same for his cybereyes, cyberlimbs, etc. All wireless functionality switched off - and perhaps cut/burned out entirely.

...

And yes, I expect any competent NPCs to do exactly the same. IC and OOC, I will shake my head and "tsk, tsk" at anyone foolish enough to do otherwise. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

Hear hear.

I don't see the problem. If the team's hacker doesn't have at least the related skillgroups at a nontrivial level, what on earth did he spend his points on? Synchronised swimming? (Actually, he could within the standard build point rules be an epic synchronised swimmer and still a kickass hacker.) Also, between runs there's often a lot of downtime. If he's not using that time futzing around with commlinks, networking, and all the rest of it, I'd like to know why I shouldn't start docking his skills for being rusty. In my book, setting up the systems to be utterly ready for the next run is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, in character in both the roleplay and systems environments. So he makes a few extended checks - this is normal and expected. I'd expect that the adept would spend quite a bit of time in the gym, and the magician in a lodge.

Also, most of what has been discussed in this thread has pretty explicit mentions in the books, if not specific rules. When something is part of the common vocabulary of people in any peripherally related field (like logs, and virtual machines), I can't blame an enterprising, creative player for using these concepts in the planning of the game, abstractions or not. I would similarly expect a sammie who wanted to leave no meaningful ballistic information to consider shotshells, sintered rounds or possibly breaching rounds, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if a magician were to consider brewing up some kind of awakened yeast and keeping it in a spray bottle for some kind of magical interference.

So sure, call it a modifier, but if I were playing in a game where I arranged a honeypot and somehow mysteriously it never got touched, I'd want a darned good OOC explanation from the GM on what looks like a completely cheeseball move.



As I said above, everything can ultimately be hacked on some level, but there's always a context. For instance, if you go into every run with kit you'll fling into Puget Sound on the way out, then an ultra-genius hacker being able to steamroll through all your clever plots in the timeframe of six hours is largely irrelevant. You can't stop the professionals, but you can slow them down, and if that's all you need, you win. An entire part of the hacking skillset relates closely to extended effort preparing backdoors, decrypting passwords, tapping communications, laying your plans ahead of time. If someone who's playing a hacker can't, or doesn't want to play the long game, they're shortchanging themselves and the team.

By analogy, if you go to a shop and you buy a firesafe for your documents, you'll see on the side a label which says what its rating is. You can't put it in a pottery kiln for five years and expect your documents to survive, but you can probably protect them for 45 minutes, by which time the fire is either out, or the topic is probably moot.



TLDR rebuttal:
1) Hacking can be possible, always. It can, with some forethought, be made irrelevantly difficult for a targeted window of time. Finding ways of shaping that window of time and making it difficult is an explicit part of planning. The corps don't have that luxury, because they're all about continuity.
2) Sure. I do this stuff all the time when the opposition are heavy hitters. It's why they're heavy hitters, and not more dumb mooks. The offline log thing is a very sensible, real world approach which also has nasty consequences for runners who think they're too slick to ever leave traces.
3) Ingenuity is the game. It has to be the game. If it's not the game, why do four nutjobs from the wrong side of the tracks think they can break in to a megacorp's HQ and make it out?

To go one meta-level higher, if the opposition manages to clobber one of the team, grab their commlink and hook it up for the benefit of their security hackers, a lot of oh-so-cunning plots run into problems. Don't try to defeat guns with more guns - defeat them with fog. Can't hit what you can't see. Don't defeat infosec with hacking - defeat it with a baseball bat and brass knuckles. Don't fight the mage's magic with more magic - just geek him first.

Precisely. It's all about managing windows of vulnerability. Now, if someone sneaked into your street samurai's basement apartment and planted something wicked in his equipment, all that changes, but why would they do that? Maybe they have their reasons. This is why it becomes a truly deep game, which is what I like about it.

It's very hard to hack a crossbow and a katana.

Basically the rules suck. They have in all editions. They were designed to replicate the way this dude described computer hacking - who BTW wrote his computer hacking novels on a manual typewriter and had never actually used a computer. Everyone playing the game knows hugely more about how computers work than he did. Having computer rules that only make sense if you have never actually used a computer is kind of nuts.

It's like writing an auto racing game where the critical attributes of a winning race car are how many camels can your treadmill accommodate and what color the car is painted.

True, but I think that in fourth edition they've used the most recent crash historical elment to evolve the principle and the ruleset. AR? That's a real thing, on an experimental level, and rapidly becoming more real, courtesy of folks like Google. Visual metaphors for computer interactions? Real, if not so advanced, and with no current technological equivalent of simsense. Agents? Real. Scripts? Real. Wireless comms? Real. Add some handwaving abstractions for things like quantum computing implications for decryption and you're practically there. I don't expect my players to know, or use symbolic logic or chip tape-outs, but if someone tells me that they're kitting out with three antennae on the roof of their van which acts as a relay for all their comms, and uses timing measurements to ensure directional consistency so as to identify spurious signals, I won't gnash my teeth and disallow it because the book doesn't mention it. I'll make them use their knowledges and skills to actually build that in-game.

After all, remember that there is supposedly a world of context, things we assume to be real because of analogy and similarity to the world we know. We assume that the tyres of vehicles will be made of rubber owing to engineering compromises relating to ride quality, coefficient of friction and materials availability. These assumptions are not merely a good idea and a great time-saver, but also contribute massively to suspension of disbelief and a shared, relatable experience. In the case of computers this means that we assume computers are good at automating data transfer, decisions and calculations because that's why people bother with them in the first place, but we also assume that to hack a computer you need to be able to connect to it on some level.

Actually, come to think of it, you could get a very much more real experience (if this matters to you in your games) by simply dropping the VR hacking metaphor outright. Do it all by AR work.

I think that's mostly where they were headed with it but didn't want to alienate the grognards. Further once you have VR it makes a lot of sense to keep it and improve on it, telepresence, teleoperation etc means there's a lot of places for work, and therefore hacking in the VR realm. What they utterly fail at is how slow full on VR hacking is. Full VR should really be two to three times faster then meat world actions. Not just multiple IP passes but literally three actions (or more) for every one in the meat world. I started to mess with a house rule to reflect this but you run into "Decker's doing stuff, everyone else go on a food run" scenario.

Yeah, the fact that the rules suck doesn't mean that there are easy and simple alternatives. But my preference would be to purge the game of Tron and Mr. Mechanical Typewriter and start over from there.

It turns out, if you look into what we know about psychology these days, human ability to make decisions is highly restricted at the sub half second level, and decisions founded in actual reasoning, much more so. The equivalent in today's technology would be a script kiddie flinging prewritten attacks at a server - quick, requires little or no planning, as fast as he can type in a command, or click an icon. If you use a visual metaphor, it's like playing Quake.

That approach breaks down when you have an actual intellectual challenge on a higher plane than what a twitch game requires. Gary Kasparov wouldn't be a significantly better player if someone gave him cyberfingers for grasping the pieces. He'd just be shinier.

Assuming your hacker is basically a poo-flinging scriptkiddie, sure, have him work at the Speed Of Thought. If you're having the player actually think about what he's doing and you figure that the hacker is in game automating things (such as by throwing together scripts to search files for him because he won't do it fast enough manually, or better yet throwing together the scripts and having his agents execute them) then the idea of the meatshields buying him time suddenly becomes critical.

I usually combine the two approaches: Metaphor combat as a twitch game, actual decision-making as a slower process.

As pointed out by others, hacking does not require a preexisting account.
Furthermore, Optimization only works on "Common, Hacking, Autosoft, Simsense" programs. A device matrix attribute is none of those, hence no.


Not completely trivial, but considering that Firewall 6 is the hardest possible obstacle unless going milspec, it's still laughably easy:
Skill 6
Specialization 2
Exploit 6
VR Bonus 2
Encephalon 2

18 dice without bending over backwards, or even maxing out the potential pool. Chances are that 18 dice beat Firewall 6 faster than 10 (or even 12) dice beat Stealth 6.


Well, using probing means the intruder has time. And even a hacker with a crappy pool of 10 rolls 55 dice in total over a course of 10 hours, meaning that in 10 hours any system can be hacked. Including the R 10 Firewalls introduced in That Book.



Sure, in combat. But commlinks have to be reasonably safe to use at the local Starbuck's, too. If the average commlink can be hacked by the kid at the table next to you without any serious skills or programs, there is something wrong.

Make it completely Hack Proof?

Take a hammer to it. Repeatedly.

Takahara holstered his gun, and shook his head at the security team leader. "Negative, not a runner. Probably just a random lunatic, maybe a BTL junkie."

"How do you figure that? He was in a secured area. Nobody gets in there."

"Except, the pizza delivery guy, the uniform laundry truck, the sanitation team ..."

"I get it, sheesh! I still reckon he was pro, though."

"Doubt it, sir. The camera shows that the main gate man had gone to the restroom, so there was a window where anyone could have sneaked in. Last seen this guy was urinating on the remains of a smashed-up Stuffer Shack commlink before laughing like a hyaena and running off."

"Urinating ... darnit, he's a pro, and you let him go! I'll have your hide for this, Takahara!"

Working for the corps. A steady paycheck, and a steadier diet of shit.

The data going to a limited ontime duration Disposable Commlink with a bit of Homemade Thermite hooked up to a series of laser-link networked systems (With drones that can be ordered to take off with them when done), which downloads the paydata to a harmless and generic household item.

"And here's your Paydata, Mr. Johnson."

"It's a toaster."

"Yes. The data is in it. We also have the toaster pre-set to your favorite settings."

"... How do you know my... Never mind, I don't want to know. Let me just confirm the data and get your Credsticks ready."

Never said it does.

But if the system has a rule stating "There no Security accounts on this system", and one shows up? Trigger a Restricted Alert on that user, and begin terminating their connection.



"Optimization
This modification optimizes the device’s processor and components
to enhance one particular program, applying a +1 dice
pool modifier for all tests using that so ware. Each device may
only be optimized once."
(Unwired p198)

It's not the Program Option I meant; it's the Comlink modification I was talking about.


Since when is a rating 6 program, and a rating 6 then spcialised skill, someone "without any serious skills or programs" ...???

You realize hacking is basically bypassing system rules right? That didn't escape you at some point in your thought process, if you are being hacked the "system" is already failing to protect you.

You do realise, I never said "so you can't get in at all". No, I said "so you're going to be recognised as an intruder, and then the node will take steps against you" ...?

A good hacker might still be able to use their User or Security account to create an Admin account. But you've still BOUGHT SOME TIME before they have the liesure of doing whatever action(s) they wanted to hack in for.

If you have multiple systems watching each other, even if one is blind to the fact that it is being penetrated, the others monitoring traffic will at least see the unauthorised stream of traffic from wherever. That's the whole point. If you're doing anything nefarious, or expecting nefarious things done unto you, and you rely on one system only, you're more or less bending over, grabbing your ankles and screaming for it.

Even physical fortifications have the same principles of design, with crossfire zones overlooking flanks and entries. So the guys behind the castle gate couldn't easily see or hit the people with the battering ram? Their buddies on the bastion towers surely could, and rain burning death on them.

Don't try to apply logic to SR's hacking. That leads only to madness.

Essentially the better you understand RW computers the harder it is to get your head around the the craziness that is the SR computer rules.

Not to mention that the whole networking infrastructure has been rebuilt twice in shadowrun history.

I can follow the rules just fine, but I can't think of a faster way of killing off anyone's desire to play anything Matrix-oriented than to simply lock everything down to mindless recapitulation of the rules. Players want to find an edge, want to use their smarts. At some point I need to make a judgement call and say: "Yes, it is possible to monitor a signal to another commlink. Yes, given that commlink's auth keys/ID/Magic Widget, you can analyse the traffic to find things which don't belong, and yes, you can get the alerts sent to your high dollar goggles because that's your visual interface."

And just as much as they do that, I can turn around and use all that good stuff which the smart corp boys would figure out too.

In the big picture, I wouldn't want to limit a samurai who wanted to attack while bungie jumping. I wouldn't want to limit a rigger who wanted to find a way to rig a rat into a backhoe (although what that would achieve I can't imagine, right now). I wouldn't want to limit a shaman who was trying to find a way to summon a soykaf spirit, although I would have serious questions.

And if it's very useful, I might later have a wagemage summoning the spirit of the waterless urinal. Just to watch their expressions.

Which is why you just ignore modern computing paradigms. Once you do that, SR4a Hacking is not that difficult.

What happens when the response of a system goes to 0? Because if that shuts down the system, the original idea could still work, with the modification that the system has to be running at precisely maximum capacity, so any extra subscriptions will cause it to be shut down. Spoofing still works, but completely blocking one method of entry seems useful.

Fluff wise, the system bogs down. Mechanics wise, you just do not add your Response for Initiative, or for anything that requires a Response Roll. Result: You tend to go last in every pass, as your Initiative is almost non-existant compared to a hacker/agent with remaining stats.

Sure. It still doesn't work, but it's less confusing as to why.

But people still want to do things like "I'll record the encrypted data stream, then break it offline" because that makes complete sense in the real world. The "because I say you can't" explanation that is provided by the game in these kind of situations doesn't help.

Again, that is in the real world. Shadowrun does not work that way. See, even you have a hard time getting out of the real world mindset... (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)
Purge your mind of the real world constraints and paradigms in regards to computers and you will be set free... (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)