Drone Commlinks?, You have HOW many hackers with you? Options

[BlackHat]

I think he means that, due to availability, one cannot start wit ha pilot rating higher than 4.

And, for what you want to do, it sounds like you want a pilot running on some device (drone, commlink, toaster, whatever) that is linked to a commlink. That way, if the commlink gets hacked, your pilot isn't (since its a seperate OS) and can still take actions to take back the compromised commlink.

However, this has a problem in that you will want them linked via wire or skinlink or some non-hackable medium (otherwise the hacker could just compromise the drone-device and gain instant control of the commlink that way), which makes it difficult for you to give orders to it (unless, of course, it's the skin-link option).

So, yeah, skinlink two commlinks, install a drone-OS on one instead of whatever it normally has on it. Keepp them on you, and you can command the pilot to operate teh second commlink - and should it ever get hacked he could attempt to do something about it.

However, since SR4 doesnt' differentiate between the directions that links go, your drone is recieving information from the commlink as much as it is giving directions to it... so should the commlink be hacked, the hacker may send quite a bit of false data to your pilot before either of you realize anything is wrong. (If the hacker doesn't trigger any alerts on his way into your spare commlink, the drone probably wouldn't think it strange if the data it was recieving was slightly altered).

[The Jopp]

[The Jopp]

*double post*

[BlackHat]

Yeah, I'm pretty sure - by the rules - you can't do that. One device, one OS.
Of course, having two commlinks hardwired to one another isn't hard... and would barely take up more space than one (approximatly double). It would look a little large for a commlink, but you would have a commlink with a backup OS running - which is what it sounds like you want.

What you cannot do, is have two OS's going at once (the commlink's OS, and the pilot OS) nor can you run the pilot OS inside of the commlink OS and have it be seperate on a single device.

If you put a pilot program on another device, you're basically reinstalling with this new OS. I would even argue sofar as to say that you could set up the device to "Dual boot" into either its standard OS or its semi-autonomous Pilot OS... but you could not boot them both at once, and have one control the other and use it as a "body shield" against hackers, unless, of course, you split them into two distinct devices - in which case the rules would be complely happy to agree with you.

[Valatar]

Turning a drone into a mobile electronics warfare platform makes a huge amount of sense. Having a hovering pet following you everywhere and jamming the hell out of everyone else's stuff seems only prudent for a mobile hacker on the go. The only problems're that the AI still isn't as good as a live decker, so the range of functions it could perform would be rather limited, and that if you can think to do that trick, so can the bad guys...