The world of 2071 has a computer in everything. Dedicated servers run coffee machines, refrigerators, doors, lights, heating systems, trid sets, and everything else you will ever encounter or use. The man on the street hasn't got the time to manually set all these computers or press little buttons on them or anything - and he doesn't have to. There's a wonderful little gadget called a Commlink that allows each person to carry around a single user interface that accesses the computers around you and give them instructions within a single immutable metaphor that you carry from system to system.

It's awesome. If you want to lock a door, or order a pizza, or turn offthe oven, you can do so by reaching into your pocket and pulling out your commlink and requesting these functions. Heck, you don't even have to be at your home for a lot of this, because if there's an external rebroadcaster within range of your home (and there is if you don't live in a farraday cage) you can have your commlink send its requests to the nearest link to the optic network backbone and have your signals retransmitted in your neighborhood to have your will be done.

You don't even need to have functionality or processor power on your commlink particularly. All you need is to have access to devices around you that have processing power to spare and use. Your Commlink doesn't predict the weather or perform temperature checks on soykaf to make sure it doesn't scald - these are done by the physical devices that give a damn . Your commlink just serves as an interface for your user input into these processes. If you decide that you like your soykaf scalded, you can simply send the appropriate instructions to your coffee maker and the Braun 2800 will adjust brewing temperature automatically. Your commlink is essentially a remote control, it's not even an iPod - so long as you're wearing some display system for it to interact with, you can watch your favorite trid shows. They are possibly stored in Dubai. Or maybe in the Braun 2800, you probably don't even know. And that's fine, because you don't have to know, the wonders of modern technology handle that for you.

Unfortunately, there are Hackers in the world. These criminals undermine society by having illegally modified commlinks that pretend to be other commlinks. They perform constant identity thefts with their systems that mimic the perfectly legitimate service requests that fly through the air all the time. They can watch your trid shows, using your micropayment account to do so. They can make your soykaf cold or turn the heat up in your garage - all exactly as if you had decided to send these service requests yourself, because they seriously are using their illegal commlinks to send requests that are the same as your own.

Maybe these Hackers will take name in vain to make service requests to have the episodes of Who Wants to Conquer Libya? or Celebrity Knife Fight!! you saved sent to their glasses and watch them on your .01 Nuyen. Maybe they'll unlock your front door exactly as you might if you were coming home with groceries in your arms. The point is that the computers you work with every day, the ones you don't even notice as they seemlessly bend to your will, they will now do the bidding of some shady Shadowrunner. And that can be a danger to your bank account and your family.

Now you may be asking: Who stands against these miscreants? Who will bring the hammer of society down upon those who would use illegal commlink modification to destroy it? I'm glad you asked. That's where the Corporate Court has your interests firmly in hand and mind.

You see, when a financial request is made, there are verifications. I know, it's kind of a pain in he ass to put your finger on your commlink and send a real-time picture of your finger to ZO every time you set up an expense account, but that's an important security check. When Shadowrunners make financial requests of this sort, they have to duplicate your finger picts somehow - and Zurich Orbital can usually recognize a shop from the pixels and because they've seen a number of shops in their time. Once fraud is detected (and they are pretty good about detecting fraudulent requests on their watch), proactive security teams can be sent after the offending ommlink owner, and those pesky Shadowrunners can be stopped.

It is for this reason that Shadowrunners do not normally steal money directly out of your account or authorize the transfer of funds into their own certified credsticks. Instead what they normally do is request the sending of proprietary content which you have already licensed. This is far more pernicious, and if anything undermines our society even more. You see, once you've already contracted ith Horizon to send you media content on demand, your open-ended financial transfer has already been authorized (which is why you don't have to send a pic of your thumb or eye every time you want to list to fairy girl). By masking their illegal commlink as yours, they can have music and trid sent directly to their viewers and your account has already been authorized to make the appropriate micropayment as if you were using the media yourself.

The World Recording Industry Army does what it can to terminate users of illegally modified commlinks from stealing your content usage, but it's an uphill struggle.

-Frank

Sounds like "Don't Download This Song," by 'Wierd Al' Yankovich.

Thanks for the PSA

Nicely put, FrankTrollman \o/.

I should print it out and give it my players to read.

Ah, the commlink as universal remote idea!

at the low end--the average user--that's basically true. higher-end commlinks obviously do more than simply give you remote control over devices. but, yeah, this is basically how i imagine the wireless world working.

You want your Commlink to do more you buy programmes and a better commlink unit. Thank you Frank that is an excellent piece of fluff, please tell me it wasn't a reject submission.

Very nice.

However, I'll agree with mfb that it's probably more viable for low-end commlinks than high-end ones. Like Ophis says though, buy programmes and shit and you can do more stuff.

Perhaps you should toss in something explaining this too?

Honestly, I agree with Frank on even the high-end commlinks...the only things that are really changing with more expensive comms are the signal and response...in a wireless and overly connected world, as what I believe SR4 is, data and apps can and do reside virtually anywhere.

The comm doesn't physically need any sort of storage, just access to systems. I wouldn't want my SIN physically on my comm, nor any of my illegal programs or files...and in SR4 you don't have to have them there, just the capability to access them. Heck, even the functionality of a phone doesn't have to be "in" the comm...you have peripherals that handle seeing, hearing and voice...

I am all into the idea of a comm being the ultimate UI device that is capable of connecting with all types of electronics and giving you access to connected storage devices...it just makes sense that all your data would be someplace other than your comm...

Thats allready the case. The main difference between Franks idea and RAW is processing power. In RAW, major processing power is provided by a commlink. In Franks view, a commlinks processing power is negligible compared to the massive power of mainframes standing arround somewhere and providing it via matrix wherever it is needed.

Well actually a shadowrunner DOES have to have everything on their come because the good stuff usually IS in a faraday cage (since you can do that with paint nowdays).

However after reading that I think I may float a couple missions from a future version of the RIAA and see if they'll bite.

Sure, you can do it - it's just a transparence problem, and some of it is already implemented.

And there you are, exchanging storage consumption for network traffic... when it makes sense:
In a world where storage is cheap and near-infinite, it still will be a healthy balance.

Well, I see that this concept would work in reality. But unfortunetely it would not work as a game concept as it is too complicated and would require too much micro management.

Well, "adding everything" together is not that easy when every single thing in SR4 has some processing power, and is running some programs.

If you go that route, it becomes quite easy:

You declare your whole PAN a single node, adjust response to the amount of devices and if you loose significant amounts of them, in addition to loosing response, your persona gets permanent damage boxes that last until you reboot... let's say 1 box for every 10%.

Thats a very coarse grained method . . . and not capped at all.

That's great. Let's invent even more extra rules concerning electronics usage...

Personally I do not see a problem with lots of agents on the hackers side. For me, hacking is all about stealth. Once you involve lots of agents, they will find you and can just shut down the host.

The main problem with agents is on the corps side. How to prevent them from ahving a gazillion agents in their security nodes?

@Frank
My problem with your conception is: It is a must that some nodes can have connections to hundred or thousands of other nodes at the same time. Matrix cafes work that way, databases work that way and so on. So any restrictions that are below this limit are not really helpful.

Frank...
I can see and understand bits and peices of that entire thing but I cant wrap my head around it all, the last section especially.

Agents, when ran outside of the Hacker's personna, run off of pre-set instructions. IE. I could tell Agent 1 to wait 20 minutes then change File 1 (the Welcome sign) out with File 2 (Elf Pr0n) which was loaded with the agent. Then abbandon the node to come back to the commlink.

The hacker could hack in, drop off the agent, then go on his merry way and the agent will perform the desired tasks, based off if it's stats pass the required tests.

But agian, why can you handle (direct, benefit, whatever) only 6 connections to 6 trace actions but can handle (direct,benefit) 1000 Database connections at a time (which is a necessity for any working computer world)?
What hinders you from giving 1000 agents the same order? Certainly this can not be restricted in any way. The point of agents is that you give them very simple orders and they do very complex task, giving you back very simple results. Its not like your node has to do anything to keep the agent going if it is running on another node.

You seem to avoid that point.

Only that kind of abstraction layer hasn't anything to do with SR4 matrix rules.

It's not a houserule, is't pretty much a complete rewrite... in which case, everything goes.