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Ravor
You know, with all the attention that the Matrix has gottten recently I've been wondering how much DMs have been charging for Wi-Fi Blocking Paint/Wallpaper as well as how hard it is to get ahold of in your campaign? (Unless I've simply missed something, it doesn't have a listed Cost/Avaiblity.)
ShadowDragon8685
I'm personally assuming that RF-inhibiting paint/wallpaper is essentially wallpaper that has a backing of a fine copper mesh, and the paint is basically laced with fine copper that will solidy into a mesh when it dries.

Thus, basically turning a room into a giant faraday cage.


As such, I'd expect it to be cheap, pretty darn cheap. I'd say you could do a 20x20 room for about 500 nuyen.gif worth of stuff - labour is of course not included.
kzt
QUOTE (ShadowDragon8685)
Thus, basically turning a room into a giant faraday cage.

Except that it won't. Do you wallpaper over your electrical outlets? Water pipes? How about doors, given that the space at the bottom, top and sides of a door is essentially a slot antenna? Do you wallpaper over them? Do you wallpaper the ceiling and floors? How do you protect the floor from damage?

Actually making an effective RF containment requires a lot more work and money than throwing some metal on the walls. And the longer the wavelenght, the smaller the holes. And SR RF seems to be extremely wide spectrum, so you end up needing the maximum hole size to be less than a millimeter. Which is quite hard.
odinson
As for the electrical outlets I'm sure the plate that covers them can be filled with copper and the doors all have paint.

I'd wager the rf blocking paint is some new miracle in technology and we should just assume that it magically works because the game designers wrote it. It could be tons of tiny jammers that block the signals, it could be the copper in the wall, it could be many things. Saying it works is enough.

As to availability I would assume that all the wallpaper and paint sold comes with it. Every room would also have a hard wire to the outside or a matrix repeater so that you can access stuff inside if you have the codes.
Rotbart van Dainig
WiFi inhibiting wallpaper/pint uses aluminium whiskers IIRC, and works quite well IRL in reducing the SNR.

Keep in mind though, that it is capped at 10 in SR - so any signal broadcastet with Signal 5+ and received on a ECCM 6 platform will go through.
kzt
QUOTE (odinson)
As for the electrical outlets I'm sure the plate that covers them can be filled with copper and the doors all have paint.

That won't work. See the seam where the plate screws into the wall? That's a slot antenna. Look at the gap under your door?. That's a slot antenna. You'd need to install metal RF gaskets on all of these. And since people walk and roll carts full of hundreds of pounds of junk over door thresholds this is hard to do and keep undamaged.

That's ignoring the issues with having electrically conductive RF blocking material and power lines in extremely close proximity.

Covering the walls with a conductive material will attenuate the signal, but not block it unless you really do a lot of difficult and expensive tricks that have to be tested and maintained on a regular basis. You're a lot more likely to live with extensively attenuating the signal rather than trying to really block it.

Which means a really powerful signal outside and a high gain antenna inside can probably do something, but you can't connect to the low powered building network from the outside without a lot of expensive toys, skill and a certain lack of subtlety. Like the Semi parked outside the building for a week with the running generator.
Buster
Shadowrun is 2070, not 2007. It's not hard to assume that there are far more impressive materials and technologies that can be used to affordably block wireless communications as the rules allow.
kzt
I certainly don't want to get in the way of your worshiping the rules, if that's how you are inclined.
ShadowDragon8685
Look, I provided a 2007-understandable explination, it dosen't have to be exact! It dosen't need a radio engineer to pick it apart. The point is that even in 2007, turning a room into a faraday cage in such a manner would quite effectively block all signals. Sure, you could jink, juke, and jitter, and get some small measure of signal through, but hell, my cell phone can't get a reliable signal near the middle of my house. If they actually TRY to block the signal, it's getting blocked.

So, maybe it's not a faraday cage as we know of it now. Maybe it's a faraday cage made in new and interesting nanorelated ways. Maybe it's only conceptually related to a faraday cage.

The point is that rating 10 wifi inhibiting paint/paper is cheap, flows like, well, wallpaper and paint, and effectively blocks outside signals.
mfb
there is no disparity between the rules and real-world tech, in this case. or, at least, not much disparity. as Rotbart has pointed out, even the badassest wifi-inhibiting wallpaper, in SR4, can be overcome with enough Signal and ECCM.
ShadowDragon8685
This has never been in doubt. But it takes significant power to do so, which is the point - it filters out the garbage.
Ravor
I must be missing something Rotbart van Dainig because the way I read ECCM wouldn't it only work if the broadcasting unit is running the program?
Rotbart van Dainig
That rule makes my head hurt. So I'm assuming the devs didn't loose their sanity and were speaking about two-way connections the matrix normally needs - so both nodes need to run enough ECCM.
Ravor
Ok, so if I understand you correctly then in a worse-case scenerio Wi-Fi Blocking ( Rating 10 ) is needed to block a Stealth Tag ( Signal 6 ) running ECCM (Rating 3 ).

I guess its lucky that Stealth Tags only have a ( Device Rating 3 ) otherwise they would be impossible to counter.

*EDIT*

Although it does beg a question, what would be the 'typical' level of Wi-Fi Blocking found in various buildings? Surely the corps wouldn't really want Wi-Fi Blocking capable of hindering their Security/Stealth Tags to be so widespread as to be useless but on the other hand they would want it to on hand to protect their buildings from Deckers/Riggers...
ShadowDragon8685
So, he'll need a Rating 5 transmitter and a rating 6 ECCM on all of his drones, and his relay-station car...

Heh. That would be funny if one has the ECCM, but not the other.

"You're reasonably sure your commands are getting to your drone, but you can't recieve any of it's feedback. Have fun."
Rotbart van Dainig
Steahl Tags still only got Signal 1. Take a closer look at the rules and the table.
Ravor
embarrassed.gif When I glanced at the RFID Tags I missed where the table switched from Signal to System and then to Avaliablity, I stand corrected. (And here I thought I was mistaken in an earlier Thread when I was talking about how Tags weren't all that big of a deal even for newer characters.) embarrassed.gif

Still, since a Stealth Tag has ( Device Rating 3 ) wouldn't it also have ( Signal 3 )? I thought that the bit about RFID Tags only having ( Signal 1 ) was referring to normal Tags and not Security/Stealth Tags.
Rotbart van Dainig
That depends on you, but normaly, specific values override Device Rating.
WhiskeyMac
That statement doesn't make sense when applied to security and stealth tags. They have a device rating 3 which allows them Matrix stats of 3, which means they have a Signal of 3.
Rotbart van Dainig
..unless the GM chooses to specify individual values as the device is important - and the Signal for RFIDs is 1. Take a closer look on the device rating rules.
Ravor
Hmm, I stand corrected again. Tags are starting to look less and less scary and the best tag running ECCM is bested by ( Rating 5 ) Wi-Fi Block or by getting 41 meters away from a Matrix Router.
Jaid
QUOTE (Ravor)
Hmm, I stand corrected again. Tags are starting to look less and less scary and the best tag running ECCM is bested by ( Rating 5 ) Wi-Fi Block or by getting 41 meters away from a Matrix Router.

not quite. you can upgrade the tag.
Rotbart van Dainig
There are more interesting ways to burn money, though.
Ravor
Well I would assume that ( Signal 1 ) is the best that you could squeeze into a tiny RFID Tag, and upgrading the Responce in order to run better ECCM very quickly becomes cost prohibative.
WearzManySkins
Well In RAW one can get response upgrades for half cost, ie build their own.

Again one can write the softwares or copy one, then put it everything, initial costs time and or one copy of the software.

WMS
Working on the Spam Drone/Hacker, with upgraded RFID tags as the emitting source of spam.
Ravor
Why would you need upgraded tags as a Spammer? Wouldn't just use your drones to scatter normal cheap tags by the hundreds, maybe using 2070s version of Super Glue in the process?
WearzManySkins
Very True, but that is the easy way of doing, I never get the easy way. smile.gif

Edit

One issue I see is the standard issue RFID tags lack the signal power to reach out beyond a very limited distance. Rather than carpet the area, with such off the shelf RFID's, I have looked at another approach. Also such tags are much more effective if they are upgraded via hardware and especially software.
Ravor
Very true, what exactly is your current outline?

Because an issue that really jumps out at me is the fact that unless I'm misunderstanding your idea you are spending alot of money on something which when you get right down to it is most likely going to be a 'fire-and-forget' deployment.
WearzManySkins
Most spammers are paid to spam persons, one makes the spam RFIDs as cheaply as one can get, then again upgrades with as cheaply also.

They can be set to go active for a period of time then go inactive, like say 10 seconds, then another RFID takes up the broadcasting for 10 seconds and so on.

Part of the cost of doing the spam covers basic costs, ie RFID costs, and some overhead.

WMS
Aaron
I know I'm a bit late to the party, but since the Wi-Fi inhibiting wallpaper/paint reduces Signal rather than blocking it entirely, it seems to me that they're talking about something that absorbs radio waves, rather than blocking them entirely, as with a Faraday cage.
Ravor
WearzManySkins ok, I guess I'm still slightly confused about how you could do that while remaining cost effective, but it sounds like a really cool plan.

<><><><><>

Aaron ok how much do you think it should cost and how hard should it be to get ahold of?
Samantha
QUOTE (Ravor)
Why would you need upgraded tags as a Spammer? Wouldn't just use your drones to scatter normal cheap tags by the hundreds, maybe using 2070s version of Super Glue in the process?

All RFID tags come standard with self adhering backing.

No fancy superglue needed! Yay! grinbig.gif
Ravor
Sure, but imagine what you could do with thousands of RFID Tags coated with whatever the strongest glue 2070 has to offer (Which I'm sure isn't standard.) launched into a crowd? cyber.gif
ShadowDragon8685
Are you a criminal, or a bisuness entity that has no fear of class-action law suits?
WearzManySkins
@Ravor the spam rigger/hacker has to purchase a an electronics shop or facility, that way hardware can be made for half costs.

Pack of 20 RFID's is very cheap, even upgrading them to 3's is still very cheap, the hardware upgrades are half price due the shop or facility being used to make them.

If you use security types of RFID's erasing them is extremely hard. Now getting into the stealth tags can make things very interesting.

Lets say a run of spam RFID tags is a set of 20. Have not yet worked out the details on what sensors if any are carried, what software etc.

Question can a team of hackers work on lets say finding a hidden node, by pooling all of their dice to find that one hidden node?

WMS
Ravor
QUOTE (ShadowDragon8685)
Are you a criminal, or a bisuness entity that has no fear of class-action law suits?


In 2070 why can't I be both? cyber.gif

Besides, what are these 'class-action-suits' you speak of? Some new Tres-Chic powersuit designed for lawyers? cool.gif

Seriously though I very much doubt that the Megas wouldn't have gutted the very concept of class-action-suits along time ago given their power in the Sixth World.


<><><><><>


WearzManySkins sure, but I guess where I'm getting hung up is the idea that even at 1/2 Price, you are spending more then 500 nuyen.gif per Tag, to me anyways I don't see it as being cost effective although I do agree that your Tags will be in every way superiour to your rivals.

As for Security Tags, well my favorite method of erasing them involves a hammer. cyber.gif
Aaron
QUOTE (Ravor)
Aaron ok how much do you think [Wi-Fi damping wallpaper/paint] should cost and how hard should it be to get ahold of?

Well, it's kind of like an area jammer, but it's not portable, isn't selective, and is fairly ubiquitous and available. After some calculations involving the area covered by a gallon can of paint, the area of coverage, availability, and cost of an area jammer, some guesstimation and two pieces of cocoa mochi, I'd set it at about (Rating x 20¥) for 30 square meters of coverage (about a one gallon paint can) for both paint and wallpaper, with an availability of (Rating).

Also, if it was me writing the description, I'd say that such wallpaper and paint always had a rather dead look to it no matter what color it was, just to add to the cyberpunkiness of the world. But that's just me.
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