Well, you can. Just not the way proposed in this thread. But under certain conditions, it is possible. Unless that is changed in Unwired.

They have to be using a wireless DNI, for starters. Which I personally think you'd have to be pretty insane to do in the world of Shadowrun, especially when you have many other options available to you (fiber optic cable, skinlink, hardwired in the brain).

Granted, there are probably a few clueless people in 2070. But if your runners are facing clueless people, they are still in the little leagues.

In fact the book uses the term access.

That is actually the first way discussed to gain access to a system.

First, I did not say that an account couldn't be created during a penetration, just that that was not the only way to do it as Doc stated.

As you can see though, the book actually reinforces my statement.

that's amazing. what i actually said is the complete opposite of what you apparently think i said.

thats because unless your running admin or similar, there will be actions your accont is not allowed to do, or areas your not allowed to access. stay within those limits and its ok, walk outside of them and shit hits the fan.

kinda like real life security in a way

Even admin actions may be logged or trigger a passive alert.

But that is not what I asked, or even meant to imply. I merely asked for a quote whereby hacking could be done without the creation of an actual account, which has since been provided.

i see what you meant, and i probably shouldn't have assumed you were being obtuse since i don't think i've ever actually seen you acting obtuse. but from almost anybody else, it'd have been an obtuse question. (and just because there actually is a statement saying X is false doesn't make it good logic ;P)

that's because it will vary from system to system.

in corp A, maybe the security guards are given 'security access' and security access actually just gives you the ability to activate (but not deactivate) defenses, view camera footage etc, whereas the actual security decker and shift supervisors for the security force are considered to have admin.

on the other hand, maybe corp B uses a totally different system, where user level access is all that's needed to do what corp A requires security access for.

it all depends on the system.

People are willing to believe that wireless black hammer can't hurt their raw brain because they know they have no wires in their brain unless somebody puts something there. People are willing to believe a manabolt can hurt their brain because of thousands of years of cultural lore. That's a lot of mental preconditioning to handle there, and people just aren't willing to hand it over.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but that's what a lot of people (including Lofwyr) did. Unplug. And it worked so long as they knew about the problem before it was too late. The trouble was that most of the world never saw it coming. They were infected before it was too late. Or because circumstances dictated that they couldn't shutdown in time. Or they were infected after reconnecting because infected nodes were still nearby.

I don't find these elements are not as incompatible with lore as you suggest.

They would shut down all undesirable signals if they knew what they were. But they don't. So you can either take the risk, and trust your firewall to go about your life. Or you can shut it all off when you need absolute isolation. For those that can't stay offline for convenience or monetary reasons, that's why you can the brain frying defense.

Again, when AIs are involved, people often know too little too late. I'm perfectly okay with pulling out the chord, and taunting Deus the digital godling. Until one of his banded or drones kill me using the f = ma protocol called Reality.

Agent Smith is one of the reasons that Momhammer is simply unacceptable in SR4. Given the information presented thus far, I fail to see how these two things are mutually exclusive.

There are pros and cons to either method. GMs and players must simply deal with them. If large firewalls actually meant anything, it might be reasonable. But as it is firewalls and defensive matrix specialists are completely impotent. Momhammer is hardly a fix for this.

--

All of that said, people will not sacrifice this sacred cow unless a more complete picture of a new matrix reality is presented in its entirety. A piecemeal presentation of flaws in the existing system is too disorganized.

That assumption is a huge mistake.

In real life, people drive automobiles on highways. If they could stop themselves from crashing into concrete barriers at 70 miles/hour just by not getting into a car people wouldn't do that.


But people actually do that. By your logic, there must be some magical device, in real life, which allows any random malicious person to magically accelerate any individual to 70MPH and ram them into a concrete barrier that can be defended against by the use of an automobile.

But there isn't (catapults notwithstanding).

Then why do people drive automobiles on highways when there is a risk of a deadly crash? If we answer this question, then we can answer the question of why people use the matrix.

The most obvious possibility is convenience. Cars move fast. Cars can be used to get places fast. Driving cars on highways is one method of crossing long distances fast. And the convince of crossing those long distances quickly outweighs the risk of crashing.

It is the same reason anyone does something that can result in death.

The current problem is that SR4s attempt to universalize the matrix has greatly reduced the advantages of DNI. There is no mechanical reason for anyone but a matrix specialist to use anything but AR with a glove and glasses.

This is exactly why in Shadowrun there are offline storage servers, and facilities that are not connected to the Matrix. For these facilities the hacker must go in with the team and access the computers on site.

Actually, for legitimate users, the computer skill is used. If you are in a system at user level, and you want to edit in a new administrator account, you use hacking + edit because you aren't allowed to edit it normally. If you had instead wanted to edit the contacts list, you could, with a computer + edit test because you are allowed to edit that file.

Also, its GM call, but I would argue that any uses of the hacking skill to go above and beyond the priviledges of your account level would result in an opposed test of stealth + hacking vs analyze + system for the system to notice your unallowed attempt.

I the 80s, when Shadowrun was made, every computer, even those that control nuclear missile launches, was connected to a phone line through a modem. Just watch War Games.

This is where you suspend disbelief. You must assume that the convenience of remote automatic missile launches outweighs the risk of Mathew Broderick singlehandedly starting World War III.

To quote someone "It's just a list of sci-fi tropes that are "awesome". And well, it doesn't work."

Is SR ever going to stop trying to emulate TRON? TRON is like Disco: It was stupid then and it hasn't improved with age.

Actually, WOPR was connected to the phone lines so that it could dial up nuclear missile silos and launch, which is far more cost efficient that installing dedicated lines. That was part of its intended design. The password used was a back door into the AI that was running onto the computer.

This can be compared to the use of Hot Sim by businessmen. Due to the automatic extra IPs granted by Hot Sim, you can get that important report done that much more quicker. In fact, AR is only preferable if you are multitasking in the meat world or if you have 4 physical IPs.

I might be wrong about that, but I do know that it had to be intentional on the part of NORAD because someone had to actually plug it in and Dr. Falcon left the project long before WOPR installed in Cheyenne Mountain, back when it was an AI project named Joshua.

No, they can't. This is an urban myth, which is easy enough to test too.

Sigh. This is the core of the problem with the Unwired plan. With the Matrix in general, for that matter. There isn't a "counter argument" prepared, because there is no overall plan. Hell, there isn't really an available argument, because there is no plan. Not that the plan is bad - it simply does not exist.

The thing is that you can just have poorly understood physical principals in a book or a movie. The characters do exactly what the author intends for them to do, so if there's an obvious seeming exploit and noone uses it one can presume that there is probably some in-world reason why it doesn't work the way you'd think it does. Heck, you can even have poorly realized physics in a video game, because any action that the "author" didn't set up scripts for is by default unobtainable.

But Shadowrun as we are discussing it here is neither of those things. It is a cooperative storytelling game. And in a cooperative storytelling game it is not acceptable to have poorly realized physical principals. In a cooperative storytelling game there are multiple authors and each one of them is simultaneously thinking outside of the box and extrapolating from the established rules to create plausible effects.

Basically a story only needs one thing: Be Awesome. But a cooperative storytelling game needs:

1. Awesomeness. If it doesn't make a cool sounding story, why do it?
2. Simplicity. Because there are between three and eight people at the table it is entirely unacceptable for any one character's schtick to take long enough to resolve that other people don't get screen time.
3. Extensibility. What happens when you throw a few extra kilograms on it? What happens if i's in space? Underwater? Covered in cheese? In copper foil?
   In a cooperative storytelling game you cannot accurately predict what is going to happen or which elements will interact. It's improv, and you need to be able to fairly and accurately model new and unique situations.
4. Consistency. Not necessarily that the results should be non-random, but that the results generated by the game system should match what the fluff says is supposed to happen.

So when the rules say that you can unplug the internets at any time and be completely safe while the fluff says that the '29 virus and the early cyberterminal users walked right through all the old completely segregated networks - that's a fucking huge consistency issue. And that sort of problem is endemic to the Matrix rules in every edition of SR, and SR4 is no exception. And it's a problem because the people who wrote the Martrix never really addressed any of the issues past #1. Really, the Matrix has never progressed beyond the "pile of awesome sounding sci-fi tropes" stage. Essentially it's still in focus grouping after near 20 years of development.

---

And I don't see that changing.

You can and you will. Shadowrun's Matrix hasn't always just been bad, it's always been contradictory. And bad. Anything you write is going to contradict something because the Matrix doesn't hold together.

At some point, someone is going to have to take a step back and come up with a playable Matrix. And to do that, not only are basic assumptions going to have to be challenged, they are going to have to be explicitly made in the first place. But I don't see that happening in 4th edition. Makes me sad, but there it is. In several years I'll have free time again.

-Frank

I actually have stuff to do and I can only post about once a day. This might surprise you, but there are limits to the length of post I'm willing to make. If there wasn't, I'd just write a complete version of Unwired myself and forget this entire discussion.

But since you seem to have nothing worthwhile to add, I think I'll have to get some advice from someone else:

Does anyone know how one goes about putting people on "Ignore" while profiles are down? I'd really like to permanently ignore the Bishop because I genuinely don't think that I can say anything more to him without it getting really inflamatory.

-Frank

I'm not just a single lonely voice in the wilderness

And Frank, if you think med school will be bad, I suspect residency will be worse. It's nice that they can now only work you 80/hours a week for your huge salary of $30someK/year, but it's still 80 hours a week.

Yeah, that's why I'm not going to argue with Frank, because it doesn't actually get anywhere.

I don't deny that elements of Shadowrun's past "lore" have issues with making sense. I never have denied that. I've found it only got worse when the novel writers were given very free reign to explain elements of the Shadowrun lore in ways that often made even less sense or even contradicted with the gaming material.

But as problematic as the past material has been at times, it isn't going anywhere. At least not yet. So we have to roll with it. I know the freelancers have all been more concerned with making the current system work than ensuring that past lore makes sense with it. For most players, the past lore consists of historical footnotes and they don't really spend much time examining it. And I also realize that the current system has had issues come up that were not considered during SR4 playtesting and we're working hard to address those.

I do actually find threads like this one helpful, up until the point where they become partisan, like Blade mentioned. It helps me figure out where there are actual flaws or considerations in the Matrix rules that need addressing. And no, that doesn't mean that we're going to scrap the entire Matrix and past Shadowrun lore to fix things, but we'll do what we can.

'Trodes are not just for VR. They can be used to interact with AR as well.

Fair point, but it doesn't address the other issues.

Ha, you still win. I almost shot coffee out of my nose.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to be in VR right now. *collapses*

Image link + haptic interface (I think they're called AR gloves, don't care to look it up just now).

Hence the manual part of the statement in my post.

...#1 yes it is for it radically changes the setting of the game if say my Matrix Violet could go around MomHammering everyone she doesn't like & spoof her trail afterwards.

...#2 unfortunately Biofeeedback filter and some of the other security countermeasures are Hacking programmes and not something that would be available at the local Best Buy or CommShack®. Encrypt (which is the only general use security programme) is so broken it is worthless.

...#3 I don't consider the random "out of the blue" instant flatlining of my character that I spent a good deal of time in designing to be"fun". At the very least I would expect to have my character go down fighting instead of just collapsing to the ground & having her brains ooze out her ears while she is shopping.

Missed that, yeah. Consider your point conceded.*

*Only Fortune's point, that is. Not the rest of it. You know who you are. =i)

How so? There are already matrix based assassins in canon. There are Matrix assassin cults and even hordes of Matrix-based doom legions. I fail to see how this would be a radical change to the setting over say: Deus fragments, Dreamchippers, or Crashbug1.

There are a number of problems with the way programs work. I don't think "The program list is stupid and broken!" is a good argument for how Matrix topology should work.

How do you feel about Sniper Rifles or Mana Bolts? Shadowrun has line of sight death effects. I genuinely don't see how another one more or less changes anything. Getting your PC whacked off camera is no fun, but that's far more of an issue with the sniper rifle than it is with the Manabolt or the Momhammer.

-Frank