In SR3 you needed fairly specific equipment to eavesdrop on radio communications, nowadays in SR4 anyone can do it, and it opens up to a lot of possibilities.

A few problems with this:

1) Intercepting a wireless signal does not mean that you have access to the devices that are transmitting or receiving that signal.

2) It also does not mean 'blocking' that signal.

3) Short of successfully spoofing your own signal, you will not be on the subscriber list for the officer's radio, the Johnson's PAN, or those drones you're trying to redirect.

Intercepting a signal is just, literally, eavesdropping.

Even in RL today Wireless signals can be easily intercepted. The encryption algorithm currently is a 40-bit based system. This means wireless signals can be easily hacked.

Another trouble spot for wireless system today is that anyone can set up a WAP and hack into the network.

That's why you don't see many wireless network running all over the place.

maybe you alter the timestamp of the transmission and put in a "forget the last transmission, this is your orders" kinda thing in there

I agree with mfb. The amount of alterations you should be able to perform on a signal should be very limited. You have to alter the signal before it reaches its destination, and EM waves move pretty darn fast. I would say you have time for one edit operation, so you would be limited to the description of the Edit operation in the sort of changes you can make. Also, you should have to make a Spoof test every time you make a change. Fail (or glitch) even once and the faulty command will be detected.

Basically, if you really want to mess with someone's network, you have to Hack in. As a final note, whenever one of my PC's starts to get out of hand with an idea like this (and how "awesome" and "unbeatable" it is) I usually (gently) remind him that enemy Hackers can do the same. Usually PC don't like the idea of their own techniques turned on them.

i think its mostly used for dealing with stuff like devices on a persons PAN.

ie, editing the smartlink traffic so that the crosshair turn into a big black square or something similar. basicly its mostly prankster stuff.

want to take on drones and other stuff, break out the spoof program.

So in reality, when you sniff traffic (wired or wireless) it's not to make "on-the-fly" changes, but to capture and study to data for things like passwords or other juicy bits of data.

To perform "real-time" editing (even in 2070), i'd wager you'd need to have something on-hand to insert into the data stream since you aren't stopping the original signal but tagging onto it.

Without the ability intercept the original signal and "spoof" a new signal to the intended receiver and preventing them from indeed receiving the original message, I don't see how you could do more than insert new content or just tweak it after some amount of analysis.

more or less. if you want to block a signal, you sniff its package number, and then forge a package that tells the system to disregard that other package.

in a mesh network you can have the experience that a older package arrive after a more recent one (you can allso do so on the internet, but its rare).

The Drone:
Couldn't you just hack the drone outright? Assuming that the random security drone is operating on a network full of other drones, and there is a very bored spider in the control room, it's got some sort of scripted routine running.

Patrol between A and B.
Monitor IR and Lowlight Spectrums
If you see anything without the company tags, wake me up.


...at which point the sleepy spider takes the helm, and goes and checks it out.
Instead of pirating the signal between control and the drone, wouldn't it be more feasible to hack the drone, and rewrite it's script, or something like that?


Same thing with the Star calling HQ. Instead of editing his transmission, wouldn't it just be easier to subscribe his porky ass to a phantom network, or take him offline entirely.

Not to say your theory is unsound Jopp, because I think it makes sense. I just think you maybe able to get better results by sniffing the airwaves, and hitting the device direct, than trying to intercept and redirect the signal once it's "in the air".

hmm, your right. it can be read that way to. ouch...

@PH3

I see what your saying.
If you wanna grab ahold of that drones signal, the signal that is meant for whoever is controlling it, WITHOUT making an attempt at filtering the data, your gonna get a stream of stuff you don't need.

You wanna see what his IR camera see's, not all that OTHER relativley useless stream of data thats packed around it.

Hence the edit check?

Am I reading you right?

that would make a lot more sense. i would suggest a clarification in the official rules that make it clear that you can't use it to spoof stuff.

The only way I could see editing the transmission on the fly working would be something like causing an error, and then beating the real sender on a resend.

But I prefer the edit check to filter out unrelated info.

given how fast the whole transmission process takes place, i'm not even sure i'd allow that. maybe a very specific setup where you set up a jammer and then send out falsified data--basically, breaking contact between sender and recipient completely, then making up what you want the recipient to hear. you'd have to make the faked data realistically patchy, to simulate data that has somehow managed to push through the jamming field intact. that's not really what the text describes, though.