Question: Is the rating system voluntary? If so WTF are you rating him immediately after a job? That's like always going down to the regular bar to have a celebratory group piss-up right after every job. Just bad craftmanship. :/

If you treat it like e-bay and don't think in a paranoid frame of mind then yes, you are setting yourself up to be profiled.


Question: Does it say the individual ratings, with timestamps, are recorded? If so where are they recorded? Likewise say a history of rating someone else. If you store it locally on your own system then yes, you are humped if someone gets into your system. But you are pretty much humped anyway because that's very likely the least of your, and your buddy's problems at that point.


EDIT: I think what I'm really getting at here is that I basically agree with you that this could be a bad security risk. But then breathing can be a security risk. You just adopt practices to mitigate the risk to a acceptable level, just like with everything else you do. At this momment I suspect there are ways to successfully mitigate the risks to get it roughly inline with just connecting to the Matrix at all or doing your normal shadowrun jobs. For example getting any info on someone's cash flow is likely to give up similar if not even more information. Because anything can be broken into, right?

There's no saying that JackPoint is even close to real-time. It could be that users simply sync up with JackPoint for a very brief period of time occasionally, their files updating with any changes since their last synchronization and other files being appended with any comments they made while they were working offline. Timestamps in this case (which aren't displayed, but possibly could be discovered) would probably reflect when the user synced, but not when the comment was really created. Considering you can easily have an agent sync the device at a pre-programmed or even random time, the sync-times don't say much about the user. Once the files are synced up, you could beam them (and the JackPoint client) over to another commlink and toss the one that synced into the trashbin, if you want.

That makes rating people after jobs a bit senseless. Not to mention I'm not sure how these people would know about the job and what they'd be rating you on anyway. The reputation ratings are based on their interactions with your posts on JackPoint only, pretty much. They don't tell you much about the runner's job history or working relationships.

As for the danger of reputation systems and profiling, runners live and die by their reputations. A runner can not work being anonymous to the corporations, since Johnsons hire based on a runner's work history and past relationships. There's a limit to how much you want the corporations to know, but they aren't going to get anything from your JackPoint reputation score that is relevant to them and they don't already know.

The structure makes the important data (user tracking) inherently insecure, Rotbart. Anyway, I can go on at length as to why the setup is non-ideal from an IC standpoint, and I will below for those who are interested. However, I find the OC move to be more disappointing than the IC reasoning.

I suppose the Neo-Anarchists still have a system of data havens and such set up outside of Jackpoint. I suppose there is still a method to disseminate files "the people" should see. I suppose there's a place where you can start a thread about how all the orks need to be killed on the same board there's a thread about how all the orks need to be hugged. Now, with Jackpoint, we've removed all that clutter to concentrate on the core shadowrunning information that the top 100 freelance criminals need to know.

Diversity? Street level? I'm sure this format will provide the perfect platform to deliver narrative from the gameworld that represents the street. I mean who knows the street better than the 100 most elite runners?

Unless the 100 most elite runners are actually not very elite at all the authors might find themselves having to constantly invite a "guest" poster to make any sort of post on information that wanders from the elite world of professional crime. This doesn't seem like a wise move.

I'm not entirely sure consistent shadow posters is a great idea at all, much less consistent posters who come from a narrowed background of work. Are the player characters supposed to be on par with these people (I know, answer "up to the GM" hurray more fiat)? If they are, then I suppose I could be underestimating the desire of readers to delve into the lives of their peers. Perhaps I'm underestimating the desire of characters to interact with the big-name NPCs (but never kill them!).

If the characters are supposed to be more street than the shadow posters. Then I guess I underestimate the desire of readers to harken to the exploits of characters doing things and referring to things they'll only think about touching when the game advances beyond the stated goal power level. Although I have to wonder why the game would not be centered around information tailored specifically to the goal power level with some outliers for flavor.

It is not that Shadowland lacked consistent personalities either. Many of the consistent names on Jackpoint are posters who commented extensively on Shadowland. The rest are either someone's old characters or templates created specifically to be cool. I suppose we'll see how interesting these characters (including the Shadowland ones, there were some pretty uninspired primary posters there as well) will be.

In summary, the wide-open terrorist-runner-activist-racist-paganist-scientist format of Shadowland provided, in my opinion, a much better vehicle for interesting sourcebook narrative than the newer elite-runner format of Jackpoint.

--------------------------------------------------------------

Boring (or perhaps not, mileage may vary) technical stuff follows:

Darknets are not secure in the way that, I think, some may be assuming.

The core information in the form of posts, public profiles, etc must be stored somewhere. There are a couple options for this.

1) Private Haven(s). The information can be kept in servers designed specifically to hold it. Located in lawless zones or hidden on someone else's bandwidth (but not hardware) this places the information firmly in control of the administrators. However, this also means that the administrators must care for the servers and networks they are attached to. Additionally, if the data is tracked back to these servers, the corporations gain a very powerful listening point and an automatic knowledge about specific aspects of the administrators. As the network is small, I would doubt that Fastjack would want to entrust too much information to people outside of the network or that he has much of an administrative staff around the world. The number of such servers would then be limited, further increasing the risk of the negative effects listed above.

2) Public Hosts. As this is the all-software solution, it would be foolish to put it all in one basket. However, it is important to remember that if a host has enough traffic and power to hide the program running the Jackpoint back-end, the security will be more than token. Even low-level security deckers stand the chance of eventually noticing foriegn programs running on their iron. Once the program is noticed, it can be studied, watched, or simply taken offline (in the best case). The more nodes you have, the greater the chance of some being discovered on a regular basis. The more volatile the nodes, the more need for redundancy. You can see the spiral here.

In either event, there are then a few ways to connect to the data.

1) Active Client with Reactive-Blind Lookup. The client connects to a list of nodes it is given. If these nodes need to be changed by the system, then this information can be updated on a successful login, or the client user can be contacted directly if the administrators have his or her information for at least a blind drop. If node volatility is high, this access list will need to change often. However, this allows the network to operate in a cell-structure. Various nodes and clients are limited (initially) in the scope of the network they have access to. Unfortunately, if the network is compromised further up the line, it is very easy to trace back to the clients. This setup is good for the administrators, but less so for the clients. The line up can be obscured by tricks such as blind-passes, subnet broadcasts that are then passed blind (this would be a double-blind pass) up the line until the actual information serving node returns the information in a static chunk from a node that only sends information and makes it as difficult as possible for that information to be traced back (in today's technology it would be a send with forged IP information from a network connected to the highest volume backbone router near the requesting client). Usability also suffers from the most impressive methods of obscurement. Latency is high and interactivity is limited. The users wouldn't be sitting in a virtual room having a chat, or if they were it'd look like a slide-show. Even the best of these can be narrowed down until the passes are identified without too much problem. To prevent complete cracking of the network, the nodes would need to change a lot. The passing nodes are likely on someone else's box and all but the near-end nodes do so blind so discovery of one would not compromise the network. Additionally, the static discovery addresses need not be nodes, they could be subnetworks that the client then transmits a blind broadcast on. You don't want to keep doing this, however, or you're broadcasting the conversation. Eventually the client would need the address of a static passing node.

In this configuration, you're limited to a BBS format (like the books, so that makes sense), there is a moderate amount of upkeep that needs to be done (some of it can be scripted on agents that act like worms but one would need to be careful lest the propagating worm becomes identified and hijacked), and security is high for the administrators. Clients are less secure, and user profiling information is still readily available with a watch placed on only a few end-users.

2) Passive Client with Reactive-Blind Lookup. Same as a above really, but the client would wait until it received some sort of wakeup token on a network, broadcast a response, and then receive (from a blind send) the node it should connect to in order to continue the conversation. No real advantage but added complexity.

3) Active Client with Static-Direct Lookup. This would be a system similar to the original Shadowland. The client would connect to a specific server which would act as its routing blackbox. The client could keep a full stream running as the stream could be routed through a few move logless systems. Completely insecure unless the volume on the network is sufficient to obscure a single stream. Also, this requires ownership of a decent number of systems.

So option 1 is the most likely for Jackpoint. With all of the security I have described layered on. It would do a fair job protecting the administrators (so it looks like SL James was correct, oddly enough). To further protect the system and administrators, could the entire network be made of dynamically linked clients? Possibly but there would need to be a lot of them. Far more than it is suggested exist. Also, to gain the maximum security advantage, this network needs to be spread out over the largest number of nets that can be managed. The new directive in SR4 for there to be multiple focus cities helps this more than if everyone was in Seattle, but still, the Jackpoint nodes will cluster, and this can be used against them.

Unfortunately, this is all simply active trace-back security. The actual data is only protected by obscurity. Once one of the data passing nodes (not the token passing ones) that is upstream of a high-access client or the client themselves, the data becomes readily available. Not only the data, but all the trend profiling information that I referred to earlier and that Rotbart echoed.

Summary: in the best-case scenario, the network is no more secure than Shadowland was for most things. For some things, Shadowland was more secure. Jackpoint's only advantage is a social one, ie the limited membership. However, this limits varying views, limits the number of eyes on any one problem, and increases threat of security breech for all clients.

Rask pretty much covered what I was thinking for JackPoint. It's not perfect, no, but I'm not sure it's terribly dangerous either. Profile data can still be gleaned, but it's fairly limited data (unless some runner is dumb enough to put his 2070 MySpace page up there). Connection times and such can be gleaned, but like I said, there's no saying those are even user controlled. You can have your client commlink sync up while you're nowhere near it, at a randomly determined time, via a simple agent. And then you could dispose of the commlink. Since it's a low-bandwidth BBS-style system, cheap and disposable commlinks could easily handle it.

There certainly are arguments to be made on the behind-the-scenes reasons for replacing Shadowland with JackPoint, sure. It's a very different atmosphere. I'm not sure I'd call them "elite" runners so much as informed runners, but it isn't the egalitarian mix of Shadowland. Which has its good points and bad points. As a writer, I'm not sure which system I like better, I have had faults with both. As a reader, I think it's too early to judge JackPoint on one book, since one of the strengths of the limited poster pool is that you should see more characterization of the posters over the span of multiple books than you would see in a similar span of the old Shadowland style. If it's done right. Which might be nice in the absence of Shadowrun novels.

You do raise a good point about the absence of shadowrun novels. I never really read them anyway, but I can see how some people would like more character narrative. Still if character development in prior works is used as the example I wonder how long it will be before one of the characters has a pet AI, one of them runs a A or AA corp, and one of them rides a dragon who is their best friend and also slave?

Not to say that many of the authors can't handle the characters better than that, but I can easily see a tug of war between authors on these characters unless this development is outlined and agreed upon by the developers (at least in broad strokes). One book can have a character going one direction while another pulls them back another. One might make a character look like somewhat of a buffoon, while another might make them look like the most competent runner alive. In the collaborative works like this, I just think it's tricky.

I suppose old characters who don't seem to be working out can be discarded, and new ones introduced. However, I liked the ready explanation Shadowland provided for how a non-traditional poster could arrive. I also liked the ability to use a post extensively in just one section of a book. This is often how things are on the actual internet. One person may know an extensive amount about a single topic and rarely or never speak on others. For instance, I do not think it is cluttering or out of line for a character (let's call him NAN-Runner, actual name would hopefully be better) to post extensively about his insider knoweldge of the NAN in a section dedicated to that topic. This provides a second insider view (to oppose or reinforce the primary IC author of the section) and is reasonable in my opinion.

Additionally, Jackpoint (even if only slightly above street-level) limits the primarily proposed scope that runners operate in. After Loose Alliances, a book almost entirely about non-traditional shadow actors and runners, I would have thought one would want to do the opposite of presenting a more unified "typical runner" front in source book fiction.

I would maintain those powerful characters should never post at all.

The poster creep was annoying, I will grant, especially the ones with obvious joke names. Names that applied directly to the thing they just posted. /wrists

I would have rather seen a list of primary posters with a secondary list of filler characters. Then if a name couldn't be found on either list, and you needed a section-specific poster, load in another and append them to the secondary list.

Management of these lists could be as simple or complex as anyone was willing to put the effort into. Point being; I don't think the change in posting structure was really required.

EDIT: James, I think you're being a little hard on the guy. He's saying that the same problems you point out were indeed problems. The fix is non-optimal in my opinion, but DE wasn't the guy who made that call.

No, he isn't. I should make that clear. But he's working with most of the people who MADE it a problem.

Work is work. I tend not to like a lot of the writing that has come out for SR, especially the 4th Edition plots, however I don't recall DE specifically making anything that irked me. Even if he did, I'd think he'd only have responsibility to answer for that aspect rather than speak for all SR work.

I don't think he has any sort of responsibility to push for a higher quality of writing. I mean, I'd like to see a higher level, but failure to see this does not mean everyone associated with the project automatically earns vitriol from me and I don't think it would be entirely fair to work that way yourself.

DE is playing advocate for the changes made, its true, and it would be reasonable to address his points. However, downdressing him for tangental association with past mistakes is a little out of line, even if you have a personal annoyance with his current work. Generally it is more effective to attack the product than the author(s). Although, I will admit there are occasions where specific people build up a trackrecord or trainwrecks. I don't really think DE is one of these authors.

So I'm looking at The List of core shadowtalk posters, figuring that maybe half (28-29) could conservatively even be called shadowrunners. Of that, I am stupified that one of them is Kane.

I mean, really? Fastjack would associate with Kane? Have the shadows dulled that much? On one hand, yes, he's a hell of a survivor. On the other, I can't think of a canon NPC with a more notorious and unsavory reputation within the shadows themselves.

[Edit]
Oh, hell. I'll do you one better: Puck.

The idea of The Puck being one of Fastjack's chosen few is, without some incredible backstory during the interim period between SF and SR4, ludicrous. He was one of Deus' most favored. He was key in the Crash 2.0, which killed Jack's good friend, Cap. Yeah. I can see that being cleared up. Sure.
[/Edit]

I would say it's a given that there will always be a 'limited fluctuation' regarding the list of shadowtalkers. Runners retire or die (which may be the same in some cases), JackPointers invite locals to share their experience and POV with the JackPoint audience (as shown in Runner Havens already, see the invited guests listed on the Log in page) or other up-and/coming runners might be invited to join, others might be expelled.

As for 'unintentional' character development, I would say that managing the limited cast with all it's rivalries and disputes is a task on it's own for all the freelancers and their editors (and already I can see Synner heavily nodding in agreement - don't break your neck, bud ). Don't think everybody's all that happy with Puck enjoying JP membership priviledges, for example.

But I think it's to soon to speak of either forced (=unconvincing) character development or the lack thereof with only one SR4 book (Runner Havens) published that contains a significant amount of shadowtalk in its new format (not counting the SR4 BBB or OtR).

Anyway, yeah, I'm not sure much more can be said on the JackPoint topic. Though if others still have stuff to say about it, make a thread for it.

I'd like to hear more about views on RH, if anyone has any.

Yeah, thanks for the link. Before, I was reading "Kay St. Irregular" as "Kay Saint Irregular" and not "Kay Street Irregular." (What can I say - I'm not oldschool like most of you guys. ) Now the name actually makes sense to me.

Don't feel bad. At least one of us Old School types saw it in your post and thghout Kay Saint Irregular was a stupid name, and wondered who would name a character that.

Anyways..... I'd be interested what the impressions are regarding the other minor hot spots covered in Runner Havens (Capetown, Istanbul, Hamburg..). So, let's hear 'em, please.

I like Hamburg a lot- the whole polluted venice thing gives it quite a character.
The other three are subtler affairs without such overt scene-setting gimmicks, but Istanbul and Caracas have grown on me like a delicate wine. Cape Town, however, just didn't seem to have much to it. Either that or for some reason I just didn't 'get it'.
I think the main problem with these sections is that they are just too short, and that there isn't quite enough in the way of moodsetting. If you've already visited these cities IRL, or places like them, then I guess you'll be ok, but if not I don't think you really get a strong sense of 'being there', and you'll have to work that much harder to set the atmosphere for players if you want to set a game in those places.
There should have been maps for all four. There also (IMO) should have been a good cityscape and street-level picture/montage for each one. A well-chosen picture can be worth a thousand words.

I'm sure you'll be able to get a scan of Hamburg map at least, as there will be one in the extended Hamburg chapter of the German version.

Mike

That'd be good. Will it / can it be placed on the official website as a free download?

So, who else is reading the book?

Heya,

Still waiting for hardcopy to reach my local shop...

Chris

My local UPS man is holding mine hostage. Mine shipped from Amazon on the 17th, but the UPS guy didn't ring the buzzer when he came by yesterday and left with my package! AAARRGH!
So anyway, yeah, hard copies are out there.