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chazuli
I've been thinking about commlinks and of course they're quite ubiquitous. I wonder, though, if the megacorps would use mere commlinks as their mainstays? Bottom line, is I've noticed that our technomancer has very little difficulty cutting into the top of the line decks w/ rating six firewalls, and would like to come up with something to challenge her.

I've been thinking that *if* a main frame did still exist, it might be able to transcend some of the limitations of a commlink and allow perhaps some more potent levels of IC and programs, but I'm not sure how this might be handled. Obviously this would only be for exclusive super secure stuff, not your everyday hackjob. Any ideas on this?

Best,
Chazuli
Jack Kain
Top of the line systems tend to use alot of IC's if your scanned by an IC every 15 seconds even a high rating stealth can fail.


People often forget that starting characters in shadowrun aren't green like in other RPG games. In most games the PC's start at the bottom rung. There above average to be sure but they aren't elite or speical forces level. At 400BP most runners are special forces level.
Konsaki
/derail
Except for technomancers... they start at street level even at 400...
/rerail
FrankTrollman
The backbone of the wireless world is just that: a backbone. There's a system of frighteningly powerful computers which actually run most of the equations and very high throughput optical cable which carries the bulk of the data around the world.

When you open up your commlink and request tasks to be done you are literally requesting tasks - from a mainframe somewhere. Now that mainframe could be anywhere, your house, low earth orbit, whatever. But there's no reason for anyone to carry that stuff around with them. The commlinks that corporate drones walk around with are basically just using dedicated devices that provide a GUI and a portal to the main system - that's a really efficient way of doing things in the Shadowrun world.

But imagine if there was something that the commlinks didn't have access to. The administrator section of a server set up for security instead of usability. You'd have to hack into it directly. You'd have to physically get to the actual computer and plug a wire directly into a port before you could even hack in.

That's a pain in the ass from a corporate standpoint. Their man in Taiwan can't even see the information on it which severely annoys everyone. But it is secure. If you're trying to do covert research, perhaps even something where you have plausible deniability at the top - you might do exactly that.

-Frank
ShadowDragon8685
QUOTE (FrankTrollman)
The backbone of the wireless world is just that: a backbone. There's a system of frighteningly powerful computers which actually run most of the equations and very high throughput optical cable which carries the bulk of the data around the world.

When you open up your commlink and request tasks to be done you are literally requesting tasks - from a mainframe somewhere. Now that mainframe could be anywhere, your house, low earth orbit, whatever. But there's no reason for anyone to carry that stuff around with them. The commlinks that corporate drones walk around with are basically just using dedicated devices that provide a GUI and a portal to the main system - that's a really efficient way of doing things in the Shadowrun world.

But imagine if there was something that the commlinks didn't have access to. The administrator section of a server set up for security instead of usability. You'd have to hack into it directly. You'd have to physically get to the actual computer and plug a wire directly into a port before you could even hack in.

That's a pain in the ass from a corporate standpoint. Their man in Taiwan can't even see the information on it which severely annoys everyone. But it is secure. If you're trying to do covert research, perhaps even something where you have plausible deniability at the top - you might do exactly that.

-Frank

That sounds hideously unsafe, and it disagrees with what I understand Commlinks to be - personal computers, in a very personal sense.
Serbitar
It is also not the canon interpretation.
Lovesmasher
Yeah, that seems like a jammer would disable your commlink completely instead of just stopping communications. Also, hackers would be completely useless in a shielded area, since their commlink couldn't communicate with whatever central computer it was associated with.
FrankTrollman
QUOTE (Lovesmasher)
Yeah, that seems like a jammer would disable your commlink completely instead of just stopping communications. Also, hackers would be completely useless in a shielded area, since their commlink couldn't communicate with whatever central computer it was associated with.

What difference does it make? Sure, you have a Browse program on your commlink, but if you can't reach the backbone that doesn't actually matter. What are you going to browse, your porn collection?

There's no reason to put a lot of programs onto individual commlinks, so they don't. Just like your drivers for your smartlink are in your smartlink (and not, for example, on your commlink), a lot of the actual business drivers that run the world are on the actual devices.

So people aren't running around with nanite production engines on their commlinks. Those programs are on the stationary machines that actually produce nanites. The program that runs on your commlink is "Command" - a Multipurpose User Interface that tells other systems what they are supposed to be doing.

But the actual doing of it is handled by the pilot programs of those devices. Command is just an interfacing tool, and it's the thing that every commlink is wandering around with in active memory.

-Frank
Lovesmasher
QUOTE (FrankTrollman)
QUOTE (Lovesmasher @ Dec 16 2006, 08:49 PM)
Yeah, that seems like a jammer would disable your commlink completely instead of just stopping communications. Also, hackers would be completely useless in a shielded area, since their commlink couldn't communicate with whatever central computer it was associated with.

What difference does it make? Sure, you have a Browse program on your commlink, but if you can't reach the backbone that doesn't actually matter. What are you going to browse, your porn collection?

There's no reason to put a lot of programs onto individual commlinks, so they don't. Just like your drivers for your smartlink are in your smartlink (and not, for example, on your commlink), a lot of the actual business drivers that run the world are on the actual devices.

So people aren't running around with nanite production engines on their commlinks. Those programs are on the stationary machines that actually produce nanites. The program that runs on your commlink is "Command" - a Multipurpose User Interface that tells other systems what they are supposed to be doing.

But the actual doing of it is handled by the pilot programs of those devices. Command is just an interfacing tool, and it's the thing that every commlink is wandering around with in active memory.

-Frank

I don't get what you're saying. I was under the impression that you were saying that commlinks are just the user interface to the actual computer hardware elsewhere.
FrankTrollman
QUOTE (Lovesmasher @ Dec 16 2006, 10:41 PM)
I don't get what you're saying. I was under the impression that you were saying that commlinks are just the user interface to the actual computer hardware elsewhere.

Pretty much, yeah. Here's what a Commlink does:

Analyze
Command
Edit
Encrypt
Scan

Woo-frickin-hoo. Does it drive a car? No. It does not.

You can use it to drive a car, but only because the car has a dedicated "Mitsubishi Swordfish Driving System" built into it, and the Commlink has a Command program that will allow you to interface with that dedicated system. But without that system on the car, the commlink just sits there with a cool customized faceplate on it. Fortunately, this is the twenty seventies, and cars do have dedicated systems on them for you to interface with. But if they don't have these systems your commlink is useless. You can hold up a commlink to an old 2007 Jaguar and it will do absolutely nothing.

Essentially your commlink is a very fancy Wiimote and just about everything in the world is a Wii that's running some utilitarian package on it. You can play these games whenever you're in range, and you can even have the Matrix backbone pass your signals along to do that even if you aren't in range. That's awesome. But it's still just a remote control.

You can flip up your commlink and send real-time commands to your kitchen to have a pot of coffee started so that you'll have a cup when you get home. But the commlink itself does not make coffee. It doesn't even know how to make coffee. It knows how to pass security IDs to the coffee maker to pull up the coffee production menu so that you can make the appropriate coffee related selections on the coffee machine itself.

The office of 2071 is set up the same way. Only instead of "make coffee" it has devices that do things like "make 3D predictions of protein shapes produced by hypothesized genetic structures based on first principles and extensive protein libraries" or "make economic predictions for the African continent over the next six quarters". Just like your commlink doesn't make coffee, it doesn't make protein folding predictions. That's why they still have offices.

But your commlink can interface with the machines that do fold proteins. Unless those machines are for some reason set to not accept wireless data, in which case it can't. You can still have a toaster that physically won't go until you press the "button" to make it heat toast. And you can still have an office mainframe that will only send data to devices that are physically interfacing with its cables. These things do exist, and they are a bitch to hack.

-Frank
ixombie
I agree with the general principal of what you're saying, but your conceptualization of commlinks is too limited.

Commlinks aren't a remote control, they're a communications device. They are, for one thing, the primary way for everyone to communicate with everyone else. They also communicate with other devices like your refrigerator and your car and your guns.

But there's nothing in the fluff to suggest that they aren't also powerful computers in their own right. They're not unlimited - a commlink alone would probably be insufficient to program an AI, but other than extreme examples like that there are no hard and fast rules on what a commlink can or can't do.

The way SR4 rules deal with stuff like protein folding would be for you to pick up your commlink and bust out a skill+logic extended test to see how long it took you to build the thing you wanted. You wouldn't even need a special program, and you could even run a knowsoft to give you that biochemistry skill. You'd tell the commlink what you want to do, and then up pops your edit program with an AR interface where you fernagle all the protein pieces you want into place. Or if you want to do it fast, you go into full VR where the interval of the test is probably 10 mintues instead of 1 hour.

It might not be realistic, but who gives a damn? Think Ghost in the Shell! 2070's computers work more like how they do in GiTS than how they do today. All the calculations are done rapidly behind the scenes, and what the user sees is an efficient, totally intuitive graphical representation. The computer does the math without breaking a sweat, all it needs is the intuitive human input that it can't provide for itself.
kzt
Adding things like huge processors has two costs: Money and power. Major computing horsepower is expensive in terms of consumer items. Major computing also takes a lot of power. This is why people don't run real time stock market trading programs on their smart phone. It has all the connectivity, but it has a piddly little processor so that it doesn't need to have the batteries changed every 15 minutes. Hence the average high-end smartphone processor (an Xscale) in 2006 appears to be about 3-15 times faster than the original computer installed in the space shuttle in the early 70s (The AP101, which was a really spiffy avionics computer when it was released in about 1967).

So it's something over 100 times slower than a modern desktop (at least in mflops, which was the only common benchmark I could find). But it's VERY power efficient. So no, you probably won't have a supercomputer in your comlink. Particuarly the cheap ones.
ShadowDragon8685
No, but your comlink won't be a slouch, either.

I'd expect the comlinks of 2070s to be about as powerful as a Cray is today. Really. Freaking. Powerful. So powerful in fact that for most pure numbers work, the comlink dosen't need anything external


Remember, the Comlink is capable of running full hot VR. That alone should tell you something.
hobgoblin
frank reminded me of that old IBM quote "there is a market for maybe 3 computers in the whole world"...

if one look at the time before the net it will seem that a home computer was of limited use.

but then, lets never forget the good old "sneaker net". as in, the diskette and its grandchild the CD/DVD.

so a comlink thats jammed may not be able to access the matrix. but you can still use it for any locally stored (externally or not) entertainment, work or similar files...

QUOTE
Remember, the Comlink is capable of running full hot VR. That alone should tell you something.


and a laptop today can render images in real time that would take days to render 20 years ago. and that by using the cpu alone...
dog_xinu
QUOTE
I've been thinking about commlinks and of course they're quite ubiquitous.  I wonder, though, if the megacorps would use mere commlinks as their mainstays?  Bottom line, is I've noticed that our technomancer has very little difficulty cutting into the top of the line decks w/ rating six firewalls, and would like to come up with something to challenge her.

I've been thinking that *if* a main frame did still exist, it might be able to transcend some of the limitations of a commlink and allow perhaps some more potent levels of IC and programs, but I'm not sure how this might be handled.  Obviously this would only be for exclusive super secure stuff, not your everyday hackjob.  Any ideas on this?


yes there are still mainframes. as the famous quote in the IT circles "Mainframe is dead, long live the Mainframe...." think of the a major corporation (Coke, Wallstreet, AT&T, Home Depot, etc) have all try to get away from it but it is very very good at certain things. That is why banks and financial firms still use them. in 2070 they will be faster, better, etc. Just like everything else.

dog
kigmatzomat
Mainframes have evolved over time. The original term "mainframe" simply referred to the physical size of the device as compared to, say, a minicomputer. The technological differentiation became clearer in the early 1960s with the release of the IBM System/360 series. If you boiled down the "essence of mainframes" what you tend to get is lots of I/O + access to data devices via channels + logical partitions (aka virtualization)+redundancy (it's bad for mainframes to be unavailable, mmkay)

Mainframes of today could be bladeservers or a cluster tied together by fiber. Heck, the PBX I used to run was essentially a mainframe since it had copious I/O (36 full T1s inbound plus a couple hundred phone sets), storage addressing via channels (2 different IVR systems plus voicemail), and ran two copies of the OS at all times to ensure failures would be handled silently (a BSD variant; remember that Unix was an AT&T invention).

The mainframe of the future will have the same basic concept. Virtualization to provide sandboxed environments, lots of storage and craploads of bandwidth. Corporations will use mainframes the same way as they are used today; each step of each application is run through multiple execution engines and compared against each other to ensure there are no hardware failures. Failure will result in that subsystem being taken offline and the load being redirected to another execution engine.

IMO, this is the reason why the SR device rating schema has any validity in terms of corporate servers. The systems will be set up to consume lots of the CPU power for redundancy and data correction, with more than a smattering of virtualization to provide security-via-sandbox. And, the applications that Comms run just doesn't get that much of a kick when run on a mainframe, decryption excluded. Decryption runs like the devil when run on an appropriately configured mainframe.

Encryption/decryption really should be the killer security app of the corporate security world, the thing that makes hackers salivate. They should have levels of encryption that no Comm can process in real-time, even with the keys. I know it's a game mechanic but IMO the corporate communications should be sufficiently encrypted that even if someone were able to record the encrypted data it would take another mainframe months to defeat.
kzt
QUOTE (kigmatzomat)
I know it's a game mechanic but IMO the corporate communications should be sufficiently encrypted that even if someone were able to record the encrypted data it would take another mainframe months to defeat.

It really doesn't help. The problem is that you just can't crack heavy crypto by brute force due to the the laws of physics.

What’s thermodynamics? Can the NSA get around that?

Thermodynamics is a branch of physics that concerns itself with heat. Or maybe it concerns itself with the ultimate fate of the universe. Or maybe it concerns itself with how much energy it takes to get stuff done. All answers are accurate.

Entropy is a measure of the statistical disorder of a system. In physics, disorder manifests itself as heat. Something that’s hot is in a much, much more disordered state than something that’s cold. In computer science, disorder manifests itself as…

…heat.

This is something that stunned Claude Shannon when he discovered it. He was trying to figure out a way to measure the information content of telephone lines, and the equations he kept on discovering looked very familiar. Shannon eventually called it “entropy”, just because the equations were the same as the physics equations for entropy. Shannon’s discovery was that information and “entropy” were opposite sides of the same coin: an increase in one necessarily involved a decrease in the other.

Thank you, Rolf Landauer.

Whether these two entropies represent the same thing is a subject of immense debate within computer science. What nobody disagrees on, though, are the real–world implications: that every single time you discard information, you have to pay a cost in heat. Period. End of sentence.

This number is very, very small, but it’s not zero. Every single time you lose a bit of information, you pay kT ln 2 joules of energy. That’s how much energy has to leak from the system with every single bit of information that’s lost.

This is an incredibly small amount—about 10^-23 joules per bitflip. By comparison, a car battery puts out about 10^26 times that each and every second. That’s a huge difference, just mind–blowingly huge. Most people think we can just ignore the Landauer Bound… but when it comes to crypto, that’s just folly.

Assume a 128–bit cipher. Each time you want to try a new key, you’re going to have to discard (on average) 64 bits. 64 is close enough to 100 for our purposes—we want some quick back–of–the–napkin estimates, nothing more—so let’s write down: “each key = 10^2 bits lost.”

Now, to break a 128–bit cipher by brute force requires, on average, 2^127 attempts. That’s close to 10^38, so let’s write that down. “Total attempts = 10^38.”

Multiply the two numbers together to get the total number of bits of information you’ve discarded. To multiply together two numbers written in scientific notation, you add together their exponents. 10^2 × 10^38 = 10^40.

Finally, we have to multiply our total number of discarded bits by the price we have to pay for each of them. Just like before, multiplying scientific–notation numbers is addition… except this time, one of the numbers is negative, so we can think of it like subtraction. 10^40 × 10^-23 = 10^17.

That gives us an absolute lower bound on the amount of energy we would have to lose while brute–forcing a 128–bit key. 10^17 joules… but that’s just a number. It doesn’t mean much to us, does it? So let’s put it in terms we can understand.

Some of the younger crowd might think I’m overstating things here. Please, listen to me very carefully:

Nothing pleases me more than the fact you live in a world where you don’t need to worry about nuclear war.

Seriously. Keep on thinking I’m an old fogey who probably rants about the “godless Communists” in his sleep. It’s all right.

But please know that I am so, so pleased that you have the freedom to grow up without worrying about nuclear annihilation.

A one–megaton nuclear weapon—the citykillers which terrified a generation during the Cold War, the devices so terrible they were correctly called “portable concentration camps”—they work by releasing a lot of heat. A Bomb, a citykiller, something that can turn an entire city into radioactive ash, releases 10^15 joules of heat.

If multiplying two scientific–notation numbers is addition, then dividing them is subtraction. 10^17 joules of energy ÷ 10^15 joules per citykiller equals 102 citykillers.

In other words, it would take one hundred strategic nuclear warheads just to power the computer to break a 128–bit cipher by brute force.

Let me say it clear and cold: anyone who says the NSA has the computing power to brute–force a 128–bit cipher is living in a fantasy.

The math just doesn’t work.
kigmatzomat
First off, you're only proving my point. Mainframes should have a level of encryption that is impossible to break in realtime.

Second, that all goes out the window if it turns out the SR computers are quantum. Superpositional computers will merely roll their eyes at current encryption schema much like an NSA cryptographer dealing with igpay atinlay or ROT13. mainframes with lots of redundant CPUs (aka lots of qu-bits) would probably decimate Comm-level encryption (with only a couple of qu-bits) in short order and could produce encryption sealed with so many qubits that no Comm can keep up with the datastream.

IMC the big comm/bandwidth explosion came with the ability to produce molar quantities of quantum-entangled materials for communication and a fairly high number of stable qu-bit systems. IMC a standard radio signal is used as a control channel, outside of that range the qu-e data is meaningless gibberish.
Lovesmasher
QUOTE (kigmatzomat)
First off, you're only proving my point. Mainframes should have a level of encryption that is impossible to break in realtime.

This is intentionally not so. Making computer encryptions realistic removes PC hackers from the game completely.
kzt
QUOTE (kigmatzomat)
Second, that all goes out the window if it turns out the SR computers are quantum.  Superpositional computers will merely roll their eyes at current encryption schema much like an NSA cryptographer dealing with igpay atinlay or ROT13.


Not really.


What are the quantum limits of computation? Will it really shred RSA like people claim?

What are the quantum limits of computation? Will it really shred RSA like people claim?

RSA is in trouble from quantum computers only if very, very large quantum computers become possible. Theoretically there’s nothing holding them back, but as far as the engineering goes we might be decades away still.

Where conventional computers work on bits, quantum computers work on quantum bits. We usually shorten it to “qubits”, and pronounce it much like the 1980s video game Q–bert. We have an algorithm for quantum computers which can factor large composites without breaking a sweat. The only problem is, it requires twice as many qubits as there are bits in the composite.

Right now our largest quantum computer has fifteen qubits. This is enough to factor a seven–bit RSA modulus. If you’re using a key that small, you might be in trouble. Given most people use keys with moduli thousands of bits long, I don’t think we need to start running for the exits just yet.

The jury is still out on whether quantum computers can be used against the Discrete Logarithm Problem. It’s believed that they can be, but to the best of my knowledge no–one has made a real–world demonstration.

However, in a demonstration of the perversity of the quantum world, quantum computers fare poorly against symmetric–key systems. We have to use a different algorithm, and while it’s still an enormous improvement over conventional computing, enormous in this case simply isn’t enormous enough. We can slash the effective keyspace by a ridiculous factor: we can turn a 256–bit key into a 128–bit key, a 128–bit key into a 64–bit key, and so on and so on.
dog_xinu
QUOTE (kigmatzomat)
First off, you're only proving my point. Mainframes should have a level of encryption that is impossible to break in realtime.

Second, that all goes out the window if it turns out the SR computers are quantum. Superpositional computers will merely roll their eyes at current encryption schema much like an NSA cryptographer dealing with igpay atinlay or ROT13. mainframes with lots of redundant CPUs (aka lots of qu-bits) would probably decimate Comm-level encryption (with only a couple of qu-bits) in short order and could produce encryption sealed with so many qubits that no Comm can keep up with the datastream.

IMC the big comm/bandwidth explosion came with the ability to produce molar quantities of quantum-entangled materials for communication and a fairly high number of stable qu-bit systems. IMC a standard radio signal is used as a control channel, outside of that range the qu-e data is meaningless gibberish.

there is some areas that the hacker should not be decrypting on the fly. some ares sure. He (or she) can always download the encrypted file and decrypt is later. Just since a MainFrame (or any other computer) uses encryption doesnt mean that everything is encrypted, the commands/actions are still unencrypted. Just the "data" is encrypted. Now being someone that deals with encryption on a daily basis at work (in RL) I can go into much more detail that we all would like. But the key to heavy encryption is not that it is not breakable, but not breakable in a timely fashion. For instance the old school DES (not TripleDES) can be hacked/brute forced in a fairly short period of time with todays computers. Lots and Lots of power/speed vs the simpler algorithm. Now if we switch to something like AES256 that is much more complicated algorithm which will take much long to brute force it. Can it be done? yes. but you are going to need way lots of processing power and lots of time.


so for your game, you just decide how you want to handle it.

dog
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