There's a problem with that.... your favorite music at 10000 decibels from 20km away is a reasonable volume. Say, one that could be reproduced by headphones with the power output of a commlink.

Your favorite music at 10000 dB, 2mm away, couldn't be produced by a commlink. Plus the headphones couldn't handle it and would just melt.

As for an actual contribution: Take their commlink out of hidden mode. Subscribe their commlink to every porn distributor you can. Watch with glee as they're inundated with thousands of ads and soundbytes.

Calypso

That's our job.

Only if it's got the rigger's black box and it was running out of hidden mode could you easily do that.

Otherwise control would be designed to be offline by any sane vehicle manufacturer for just this reason, as it would be receiving information with it's own sensors which are hardwired to each other. Additional (but not overriding) information would come from grid guide broadcasts, so you could divert a autopilot down a back street, but not into someone.

Now, if you were to engineer or find a back door (The poor fool connects his commlink directly to the autopilot for instant map downloads, or you add a cheap commlink in ahead of time,) Then you could. But that is a rare occurrence.

I understand the point but those systems are all based on hardwired systems. Aka, not hackable. They recieve a signal, and they react acording to that signal in a single preset fashion. A switch if you would.

This is how I see vehicles development in the future: You have a computer which handles the Autopilot, which then also takes minor inputs from a select set of signal frequencies.

The frequency says, "Open lock," according to it's own electronic brain, so it opens the lock. Lonestar sends the kill code for the chip in the engine, the engine dies as the computer is told is suppost to when that signal comes in. It's sensors say a car is too close, it slows down or tries to dodge. An alien frequency comes in (aka a hacker,) it will ignore it. It's not designed to hook up to the internet in that fashion, it's not a switch it recognizes, so it won't care. The protocols aren't there.

That is why not all vehicles are drones.
Pg 238 and 239 deal with what is nessesary to command vehicles.

Edit: This is my educated opinion based on what is stated within the book and my real life experiance with hardwired computers.

My last post on this topic, I swear. The problem is it's not designed to use frequencies in that way. It recieves, it unlocks, it does not communicate with the web the way a commlink does.

Real life example: I can not hack your (current) cell phone if I have your cell phones frequency. I can spoof it, I can intercept your text messages, make phone calls on your bill, but I can not access your physical phone and figure out who is in your call list. I need to manually hook up to do that.

Same with cars. Electronic keys use frequency identification, rather than the frequencies themselves. I could short out your car, open your doors, start your engine, but I could not turn the wheel or apply the gas, even though the gas is controlled by a simple computer which is used to monitor and improve your gas mileage. It isn't designed that way.

The way I read it both in SR4 and Rigger 3 was that this has not changed: To make a car a drone you have to modify it do so, pop in those components to put everything under your control and take some of the limits off the autopilot. In SR4 it is easier (A commlink hookup could probably do it,) but cars are not connected 100% to the wi-fi network.

At the very least, IF they are using gridlink, they would be using a trapdoor node design, accepting only a very limited input at certain times. That is the only inherant weakness I could see.

Well, that's kind of the problem: according to the above poster there *wouldn't* be a signal the car recognized that also did what you wanted. The list of remote commands that the car would respond to would probably be limited to "Open Lock", "Start Engine", "Stop Engine"... and that's about it. No steering, no disabling of the handbrake, no changing gears, no gas nor brake. All of that would correspond to physical controls, but there'd be no way to do any of it wirelessly. That, IMO, is what the rigger box does, actually; give the vehicle dog-brain an expanded set of commands that would let you remote-control a vehicle.

That said, I imagine there will be many more cars with unsecured rigger black boxes around in the '70s, because the not-security-conscious yuppies will think it's too cool to have a car controllable via commlink. And in a way they'd be right; how sweet would it be to have your car pick you up?

Who the hell comes up with drek like that? An MP3 player breast implant? That's insane.

It seems pretty reasonable to me. If people are going to get implants whose entire purpose is to "take up space", they might as well get some enhancements put into them. From a Shadowrun standpoint, a set of breast implants has a capacity of like 4, meaning that you can fit quite a bit of useful ware into them with no loss of functionality of the original device. Can you think of a Shadowrun character who wouldn't at least think of getting their Commlink installed in a space like that?

Now, with our backwards 2005 Tech, a commlink pretty much just plays/uploads music and has a signal of about 1 or 2. But by 2070, those things can operate a person's entire personal area network.

I've been wondering why people were content to have their breast implants jiggle around doing nothing for years.

-Frank

Depends on what you define as "useful", I guess. *shrugs*

Now that statement makes a lot more sense to me, unfortunately that isn't really how the RAW is written. But it certainly is the only way to keep me from using a 100 Maglock as cheap version of a 9,000+ commlink that i mentioned in a different thread....short of GM fiat dropping cows dropping from the sky and killing my PC.

However it doesn't really matter that the software/hardware is written for a particular direction of data flow. Anything accessable by AR is accessable to the hacker. Once the hacker can reach ANY AR point in the vehicle, he'll be able to jump to any other AR point even in an otherwise totally issolated system. Then any thing connected to that AR point is vulnerable to exploitation.

The only thing possible to slow the hacker is having everything 0 Signal, which means they have to be within 3m (depending on rules reading here) to hook up. Of course strategic use of a gumball on a microsensor thrown onto the vehicle pushes that range out substatially.

The next stage up of protection from there is radio dampening paint encasing the vehicle (on shutters ala the Tim Burton version of the Batmobile? or perhaps in a special mostly transparent coating on the windows?) and the only outside connection is your remote key entry with that system totally issolated. That just isn't going to happen on mom & pop's vehicle.

As long as my players aren't using the every Ford Jackrabbit they see as a vehicular weapon, I'm cool with that.

...useless until you spend an extra 2,500 . Well not entirely, the kids could play Miracle Shooter™ during long trips. You could also crack it and sell copies on the street corner for 2 + the cost of the chip you burn it onto.

Creative use of stopping engines/downshifting during pursuits would also lead to interesting results. However in the time it takes to crack into the vehicle the vehicle in question is likely long gone....except for the one you are pursuing, and if they have a commlink on and it's within range you're golden to try. Beauty part of it is that even if they see you coming in they can't just reboot the system to shake you. Cybercombat during car chases!

Gotta beg to differ a little bit. I have seen women, natural and "augmented" with capacities of less than 1 or certainly more than a 4.

Oh sure, the total size can be quite large, but the point is how much capacity there is before a loss of functionality occurs. I rather imagine that you could physically fit more devices into an ocular cavity than your eye's capacity would allow - it's just that eventually it no longer functions as an eye.

Similarly, an augmented breast issupposed to function as a breast, both in the milk delivery sense and as Apple would say: the "look and feel". Now a breast is normally a layer of skin over a structure that is mostly adipose tissue that is jammed in there tight enough that it holds its shape well, without being so squeezed that it tears the skin. Now underneath that, you have a series of secratory glands, but you pretty much can't feel them because of the intervening tissues. So in the augmented breast you have a substantial amount of leeway in the middle where you can put actually rigid bodies such as Commlinks, Biomonitors, and Autoinjectors.

But over that you are going to have to put an endoskeletal structure to hold those in place, and over that you are going to have to put several layers of supple material with increasingly large amounts of give. That's what's going to really kill your capacity - the soft coating on the augmented breast's endoskeleton. Remember, the harder you make the core materials, the thicker you're going to need to make the soft layers, and thus the less space you have for internal devices. It's quite a design problem.

Now, I feel that a capacity of 4 is somewhat conservative, but I also feel that in a situation where you intend the augmented area to be subjected to repeated tactile scrutiny that you should err on the side of caution. That kind of searching produces substantial bonuses to the perception check to find implants, after all.

-Frank

That's an Errata - Pilot is Software and has no prequisites other than Response, nor does Remote Control.

No, what i was talking about there is that making a vehicle not listed as a drone into a drone is not described in the Rigger Adaptation description (that is somewhat misleading in it's stated purpose), or judging it as such by it having Pilot software coming with the vehicle, but instead in the middle of the left column on page 238.

So what is the "errata", and has it actually been acknowledges officially as "errata"? That the Pilot software doesn't come with the vehicle (which is what i assumed that column ment)? By "Remote Control" do you mean as a drone? Because that does have a prereq of a Rigger Adaptation kit OR being a "drone" vehicle (but without Pilot software i don't see how you can Captian Chair it).