reading keypad combos with thermal imaging

this is potentially game-breaking, dwarves and trolls can do this automatically.

got any others?
post 'em if you've got em...

if you haven't. study up.

Ah, but if every employee has a different code to enter, and more than one has entered in the last 10 minutes, this can foul your attempt.

If that's the case, one easy way to lessen the effect is to make the keypads from material that dissipates heat faster and also for added measure, have an air conditioner duct aimed at the keypad area, and also maybe having small cooling tubes that run up into the keypad areas also. If you can dissipate the heat faster, you can hopefully cut down the time the heat residue will remain on the pads.

if it looks like an easy way past, then it works on rating 1 keypads. anything better will start to prepare for that trick.

One thing that works on many facilities if to forge some reason to be there legitimately to case the place. While there, sneak off to do things like put tape over the bolt of a fire escape.

Oh, speaking of fire, nothing makes getting in undetected easier than a mass of panicked people Leaving.

For natural thermographic, I'd treat it as a perception test with a high threshold (maybe 3) or a high TN (SR3, to result in few net successes) to get the sequence right--the idea being that spotting dissipating thermal signatures with natural IR is like trying to distinguish between half a dozen socks which are all very similar shades of navy/blue/black.

This is no more game breaking than having someone with cyber-eyes zoom in as someone is punching in the code.
Higher security keypads might use touch screen and randomly rearrange the numbers.
Also the characters could have problems with good typists. Just how much would the heat sig. fade from one button press to the next if they were all put in at over 60 wpm, or 5 numbers per second.

Another way to defeat that is key pad keys internally heated to approximately 34ºC. The difference between touched and non-touched will become nill very quickly. To really screw with thermographic detection the temps presets could be randomnly raised/lowered slightly for each key over time.

this post is not here.

depends on how awesome your thermo-see-eye-things are. if they're sensitive enough to pick up the heat soaked up by a button that someone pressed for less than a second, it's probably sensitive enough to pick up the temperature difference between buttons that were pressed recently and buttons that were pressed less recently. the coolest recently-touched key will be the first number in the sequence, the next-coolest will be the second, etcetera.

Just hit the keys with a pen or something.

or just crack in and have the doors open for you, with all the cameras looped

speaking of a good trick my group often does:
Get the hacker to go into the system and hack the cameras.

-If the cameras go to a control room with normal guards watching screen (AA and lower corps on a budget would have this) have the camera feed to those screens loop, while the feed to you and your teams AR have the real feed, allowing you to see security personell etc.

-If there is a spider in the control of the security, either plant a loop into him ( a nice escher loop works fine), or if not using loop program rules (mostly since sr4 doesn't have real rules for them), have a very high stealth program, and hack into each camera individually as you go to not alert the spider.

This way you get the real feed of the cameras feeding your AR overlay, while those watching are none the wiser to you. But make sure the hacker is good, or else it can screw up pretty fast.

To initially get in, or if you want to use another approach, get a mage to cast physical mask on one char, while the rest of the team going in uses improved invisibility. Get the masked character to resemble a member of the security team, who was "delayed" for his shift, and on the way in, have him get sick and go to a washroom on the first floor,causing a distraction. Then the rest of the insertion party does its job, and gets out, while the mage (hopefully recovered from the drain from casting all those spells) goes in invisibily, and casts invisibility on both the "guard" and himself again, and have them leave, getting into the getaway vehicle with the rest of the team.

Also, a hint for any team, is to have a maglock key for sure, and a high level autopicker just incase.

Heehee. I just noticed that 60 wpm was listed as a "good typist." Heehee.

I would have to question the validity of this technique, really. From what I recall, plastic (which is what most buttons are made of) is a better insulator than conductor, which means a button press of less than a second is unlikely to leave much residual heat for any substantial amount of time. Plus the combinations of buttons are still problematic (the heat difference between a button pushed at 0 second and the two pressed together at .5 second will be minimal and more effected by drafts and ambient temperature, how hard they were pressed, etc. than anything) so on and so forth.

For this to work, I'd guess you'd have to be standing pretty much right behind the guy to pick it up almost as soon as he left, and even then you'd still have to take a few tries to figure out the order (which is more difficult when you can push two or more buttons simultaneously). Keypads that require more strength to push the buttons and that are inset more into the door will be slightly more vulnerable.

Truthfully, you might as well just dust the pad and check for prints at that point anyway. No suspicious equipment, just a bag of talc.

Found this little trick by accident, and don't know if it will work under all circumstances.
But while replacing some of the long flourecent light tubes at work one that I was holding brushed up against the antena of the walkie talkie radio on my hip and the bulb light up! Freaked me out for a second! But playing around I found that if you hold the antenna anywhere against the tube and hit the transmit button the radio signal caused it to light up! I figure if the power ever goes out and without a flashlight, in a pinch you can just take a flourecent tube out the celing and improvise some light with your comm radio.

Flourescent lights can be powered by static electricity. They can be powered by quite a large variety of current. The range has to be very short for the kinds of low power that would be found in a typical transmitting radio antenna. A radio that can't transmit would be unable to provide any power for this exercise, so all those radio recievers at WalMart would be useless.

Also, a handheld walkie talkie produces enough energy in the form of electromagnetic radiotion to detonate some less stable explosives.

This is something to remember when the runners are haphazardly carrying dynamite and also have radios.

Well, gosh, I read that website and it did not prove your point whatsoever, so I was wondering what you linked to it for.

As for your "any charge that is sufficient to ionize the gas... blah blah blah" wasn't even on said link, so it was just more made up sciency stuff which SOUNDS good, but ISN'T good.

Here IS something which came from your own link:

"There is a considerable voltage across the electrodes, so electrons will migrate through the gas from one end of the tube to the other."

Hear that? ACROSS THE ELECTRODES. Which, last time I checked, was from one end to the other. It's that current thing I mentioned earlier. A radio antenna is NOT going to send electrons down the length of a flourescent tube.

You're arguing with a guy who just so happens to sell lightbulbs. Until you cite some source (even a website) which even KINDA-SORTA prooves your point, consider yourself sufficiently out of your league.

Do ya one better. You post a video of you turning on an uninstalled flourescent bulb with a walkie talkie and I'll buy AND SHIP you a hardback copy of SR3 or 4. Your choice.

A little off topic, but could carrying a small flourescent light tube help you detect a high voltage electrified fence?

I think the best way to detect a high voltage electric fence is to look for the sign which reads: DANGER! RISK OF ELECTRICUTION! SERIOUS INJURY OR DEATH! ELECTRIFIED FENCE! HIGH VOLTAGE!

The only thing a fluorescent tube is good for is detecting very weak radio waves, like that from a walkie talkie. When it comes near one they just light up... for some reason.

Ok so I can't use it to detect the unmarked Azzie electric fence in the jungle but it will help me find the transistor radio I left in the park, cool

Man. Fitz is kinda excited tonight.

The buzzing and ozone might give it away, too.

You might also try one of those "tricorder" things they have that really can and do scan for electric fields.

The fact that it would be shocking the shit out of everything in the jungle would be a big tip off too. There'd be piles of birds and snakes and gators and monkies which would attract scavengers like bats and rats and they'd get shocked to hell and back too.

Then there's the paranormal jungle animals like the monkies with human faces and they'd get the shit shocked out of them too.

Then you could just climb over the dead animals like some twisted version of Lennigen Versus the Ants, because the electric fence is in the JUNGLE.

*EDIT* If you want to shock jungle animals witha portable device, may I recommend a walkie talkie antenna? They function as a low level taser. 9Mstun I believe. You can use it to shock the monkey.

University research labs can be extremely sensitive areas. o_O

you guys are forgetting something simple that's already used today.

Keycode entrance area's that use a display that switches the numbers displayed after each use.

Hell if you want tips and tricks on b&e, look up any of the old school punisher journals, and his armory comics.

Preferably from a distance of several feet, right? *toss*

Well, we know how to deal with electric fences. Now what do we do about the monowire fences? Assume they're cleaned regularly and/or some mojo has been worked so animals stay away, so there's not going to be any half-and-half carcasses to give it away.

6k a meter? forget infiltrating that base, let's just strip it of the monowire on the outside and take off. Dang, you do this along with jacking and stripping cars and you're set, who needs to actually infiltrate, eh?

re: flourescent bulbs

if you sell lightbulbs, why don't you just try it? I've lit them up without using the contacts at the end. Those flourescent lights will light up just fine if you hold one (anywhere is fine, not just at the ends) and touch a van de graff (spelling?) generator. I don't doubt that one touching a walkie-talkie antena (and transmitting) to it would produce some light. Might not work on insulated antanae, but the bare metal ones would probably work.

I have personally (in my foolish youth) put a flourescent desklamp bulb in a microwave. It lights up.

I have also seen video of a guy standing under a high-tension power tower with a lit commercial flourescent tube.

As I understand it, the core thing about a flourescent tube is the coating on the glass. When the coating gets enough RF energy, it glows. It doesn't care if the energy comes from inside or outside.

That walkie-talkie just put out enough RF to get the coating excited.

All of this is well and good, but you're citing examples of OTHER things activating the blub. While I believe that a generator, a power line and a microwave can turn on a bulb, i ABSOLUTELY refuse to be sucked into the absurd belief that a walkie talkie can make a fluorescent bulb light up.

I am on my lunch break now. I will go back to work and try the damn experiment. I'll try to get someone with a camera phone take a snapshot and email it to me.

It's nice to see you've changed your argument. I am not about to find out what the actual power input threshold is to light a flourescent bulb, and I am definately not going to seek out the energy output level of the specific communications item that started this sidetrack.

I will however say that if the normal ignition process in a flourescent fixture is faulty, brushing the bulb a few times with a dry mop can get enough static charge in the right places to get it started. I'm not sure what part it is that has to be faulty for this, but it was part of the fixture, and happened regardless of the bulb.

I hate absolutes, you talk about it can or cannot, but there is little talk about parameters. What size flourescent tube? What type of communications device? Little 6 watt walky? Or the huge honking type that weighs 10 lbs or something crazy like that.

With a sufficiently large antenna you can draw enough electrical power from ambient radio energy to power a home.

In an urban area, a 100 ft horizontal antenna can steadly produce a full half a volt of electricity. I'm not sure about the wattage.