"Insect" Technomancers idea: Technomancers who worship AI, whether individual AI or the concept of AI, perhaps seeing them as a superior form of life, and who go around aiding AI (perhaps the more alien ones too) at the possible detriment of the rest of (meta)humanity.

"Blood" Technomancers idea: Misanthropic sociopathic online predators/stalkers, perhaps following some twisted ideals or twisted "paragons" like Darwinian survival of the fittest in the Unwired world. Naturally, they see themselves as the fittest.

To put the PDF/Hardcopy version issue into perspective: I had my author's copy of Augmentation in PDF before it became available. I got my author's copy of Augmentation in Hardcopy last week.

Seriously.

-Frank

Yes, there is. Average users and system loads. You must design system security in such a manner that it is usable for its intended legitimate function. You can't have it bristling to the point of slowing down performance and you need a soft response to users who push their security clearance without intending to. (Ie, I hard about "X" let me search the network for that see what it is... Oh, I don't have clearance ... okay, nevermind then.)

Beyond that, the FAQ entry for encryption applies. You have to cut "realism" back a bit in order to have something that is usable in an RPG.

As has been noted several times before, Unwired will present several advanced encryption options for those who would like more "realistic" encryption. Introduction of several realistic options significantly changes the effectiveness and hence playability of hacking which is why it was left out of the core book.

I'm looking forward to Unwired and wish it hadn't been slated so far back in the product timeline, but I've voiced my discontent with the schedule several times already (usually surrounding Arsenal's place in it). Well, it's on the horizon now and I'm looking forward to have it in my hands at last.

*Bounces like an excited 3-year old on a sugar high the night before Christmas in anticipation*

*Cries because he can barely run the Matrix as it is*

Still, I look forward to this book hitting the shelves. Now that my players are getting deeper into the game system several of them have voiced an interest in playing TM's and hackers. While I doubt we'll go beyond the core rules for hacking for queit some time I would just dissolve with joy at a heap of fluff to throw at them, plus a big helping of "dirty tricks" that can be thrown both ways at the game table.

My hopes- Hope Unwired can fill in some of the blanks.

My Dreams- Dreaming of bigger and badder matrix encounters.

My Expectations- Expect to bring back old tricks and learn some new ones in the matrix.

Getting back some old matrix toys and receiving some new ones is long overdue!

Psycotropic and Party IC anyone?

BTL rules, to match the normal drug rules.

So far BTL's are nothing but fluff, I'd like some effect on the characters.

Insect technomancers are inherant to the matrix. 'Cause, you know, there's always a few bugs in the system.

Do not crash this thread with the Matrix puns. It would be a virtual disaster that could byte you in the ass.

There there. I think I have a descent idea how to run the matrix, but at my table we give up on PC decking whole sale because the rules don't work. I have to say that I'm interested in the encryption rules. That has always been one of the things that stuck in my craw. RAW encryption is just too weak for global wireless commerce. You run RAW and think at it a little to hard and the world comes crashing down. Glad to see there onto that. I don't need realistic, just strong enough that it lets the world work.

Have you listened to the audio sample Matrix run?

I'm looking forward to seeing technomancers getting some more love. I'm also hoping to see some variant rules that make hackers benefit in the actual hacking part of the game from having good attributes, not just good programs and hardware. Most of the other oddities in the system vs. how stuff works is okay by me, seeing as how it's a game and all.

What audio sample matrix run?

I hope the rules for brainwashing make a comeback in Unwired.

Let me see if I can find it ... here it is: http://pavao.org/aud/HackingDemo.mp3.

I'm totally okay with cutting back realism. I'm not okay with the bad guys acting like morons (unless that is genre required, say I'm playing Feng shui). Agent spam should be a reasponable response to even the lowest level external threat. Remember, I'm not accountable in any way at all to anyone, so I can do whatever I like.

Ok, my wish list for Unwired is easy: Examples, examples, examples, examples...

I grasp the general concepts of the AR world, subscribing devices to commlinks and the whole 9 yards. I have not been able to internalize it to have an easy time in presenting it to my players. My understanding is that AROs are everywhere. So, what's subscribed and what's not?

A character walks down the street. They pass storefronts, restaurants and housing. There are traffic signals, environmental condition displays, etc. All of them are AR or AR enhanced. How does this play out? Do they subscribe to a street? Do they see a certain amount of information without subscribing to a particular node?

If they walk into a store, does it connect for them, prompt them to subscribe, just publish info to it...?

If a character or drone or whatever gets inside an office do they automatically pick up a general connection, do they auto-login as guest, do they need to spoof an employee's credentials to get the basics such as bulletin boards, notifications for the upcoming company volleyball tournament or just out of luck? How hard is it to conceal a connection to a node be that in a store, office, etc. and does it automatically or can it automatically flag a connection when it comes on board?

With retrans units from Arsenal, how does that work with regard to RF paint and protections? Is it a way of bouncing a signal into a secure facility? It's default signal rating is 6. How easy/hard is that to detect internally and perhaps a better question, how likely is it to happen?

How are hackers integrated during actual runs into buildings, what are some good examples especially for actions during combats? Likewise with security riggers, how do they gain access to closed circuit security? Do they have to be at a security station? Can they tap a line from say the cameras and then use the signal feed through the fiber to hack into the security node through the camera node?

For things like traffic controls, is there a single node that controls traffic for a city like Denver? Is it possible/common to hack the system to ensure that your vehicle's signal doesn't appear on the grid so isn't picked up by law enforcement for speeding? What about flipping certain traffic signals to allow for smooth passage or difficult passage for vehicles (a la the Italian Job) and how quickly are anomolies like that detected?

For data search, what are good rules of thumb for thresholds for different types of data that characters may look for? What are recommendations for the granularity of them doing the data search - i.e. the hacker says "I look for data on X" vs. "I check the border crossing logs, then hack the DMV as well as the local bodies on record for tracking permits for weapons and cyber in order to identify at least a single event then hit the traffic grid controls and logs to locate their existing vehicle as well as any frequent stops they make".

What's it really mean in terms of possibly having your cyberware/commlinks hacked during combat or in general? What are common approaches taken by runners to scramble singles, spoof commlink #s etc.? Are there shadow switchboards that provide routing for specific comm IDs?

How much info was lost pre-crash? Is a lot of data once available prior to 2065 or whever the new Matrix came up simply unavailable now?

What's the general reaction to folks going into/out of hidden mode?

Are commlinks tied to specific IDs? Do they need to be registered in some way?

How are monetary transactions handled by commlinks? What keeps the funds secure and prevents folks from picking someone's pocket?

Not only would I like to see clarifications for these questions, but examples on how to integrate them into games and runs without bogging things down.

Extra crunch and clarity is fine as it would be helpful to have some tables that summarize the common tasks, pools etc.

Currently technomancers aren't even a footnote in my current game, but I do have a rigger and a hacker so a better sense of what they can/should be doing, how each of them contributes to the overall run AND stays involved during the combat portions would be great.

With a sweep of his...

Hat

Pretty good comprehensive list. Subscribing has always made me curious as well, although they said that Unwired will expand on it, as well as Slaving.

Yeah it always bothered me that tech comlinks can't host a large chat room or a standard FPS game of 8 on 8 team deathmatch, because the max subscription limit is 12. I feel that SR4 has by an large benefited from the doctrine of simplisticty, but the matrix rules really suffered when the throw out all limits on data sizes and transfer speed.

Hey you think there is any chance optional MP rules will show up in unwired?

If by MP you mean megapulse, then EEEEEWWWWWWWW!

I was. I haven't actually played with the 3rd ed rules, but I think actually talking about data size and transfer would let you model some good distinctions. A text link subscription should not take up the same bandwidth as a sim-sense subscription. Without some kind of data measurement it does though.

I get, and fully accept, why data storage is ignored...too damned much bookkeeping...

Still, the old advantage to MPs of data was when the group's decker hacker would have a little extra time after finding the critical paydata and would just start downloading whatever other data they could find that looked valuable. Then there were silly, but useful, charts to determine what that data would be worth on the open market. Now, I just have to come up with an arbitrary figure in my head.

Sure, and just because you use an existing game term doesn't mean you have to use the old mechanics. As an off hand idea, you could just rank types of feeds as say Trivial(issuing preprogrammed go-codes, triggering denenators, lock/unlock, slow text and small data transmition ) Small Feed (what you can do with a real computer) and Large Feeds (what you need a cyberdeck for, ie sim-sense and "modern" hacking programs).

I had heard that the reason that storage space was removed was because in the years between 1st and 4th editions (or even between 3rd and 4th for that matter), storage space has become so cheap and compact that it's not likely to be a limiting factor for hacking. When 1st edition was released, the primary form of portable storage was the floppy disk, which could store about one megabyte, and was very fragile. Now, my iPod can hold 160 gigabytes (over 160,000 times as much as the floppy). I have a couple thousand songs and my entire library of gaming PDFs, and I've barely scratched the surface. I could throw on the entire human genome (750 megabytes) and not even notice.

Last year, Hitachi released a one-terabyte hard drive (about a thousand gigabytes). Imagine what might be possible in 2070. Add to that the increases in transfer speeds, and the notion of assigning stats to these factors seems irrelevant.

Shawn

Hmm, well.. that's rather sobering.

Yeah storage is cheep, transition and computation, I think will always be a real bottle neck. Knew a professor who worked at Amazon.com He said running a simple queries on there whole data base could cost over a million dollars in electricity and maintenance. So yes storing everything that everyone does ever would likely be trivial, touching each datum, and moving it somewhere, not so much.

From a balance angle though riggers need to have some kind of a limit how many drones they can field at once. The way things are now though there is no differance between the full feed of a drone, and and RSS feed. Both are a subscription capped at system x2. That's the main reason I want some kind of data metrics. Also even if there is zero or almost zero mechanics around data size/speed, I'd really like it if somewhere in 4th ed, they mentioned terms so I can throw them around as fluff.

The irony of the whole thing is that the amount of data being generated is increasing more quickly than storage space is. This is the source of the so-called "exaflood" problem, which is largely silly at this point because much of the data being generated is either useless or redundant, and simply will not be stored long-term. In the future, though, we're probably going to have the opposite problem: there will be too little storage space to keep everything we want to save. Computing power, on the other hand, is far outstripping the amount that we actually need; these days we're likely to waste much of the processing power we do use on feature bloat and useless graphical widgets that no one really cares about (see: Windows Vista), and most of us still aren't using the storage space we ought to (when was the last time you kept an offsite backup?).

Oh, and AFAIK the human genome is actually 3.2 Gb

Weird. Duelling Wikipedia entries! (Either way, my original point stands. That amount of data would fit easily on my pocket-sized iPod.)

The Gb in "3.2Gb" stands for gigabases not gigabits.

True, no more issues on how much space, but that data still needs to go SOMEWHERE.

Which is something that I'm going to insist that my group keep track of!

Remember that everything that's built by the Megas is Wireless, and probably has some minimum amount of Memory at the very least! Putting the paydata in the Troll's Boxers and then burning it's Wireless would make it bloody well secure, that's for sure!

And really embarrassing when it comes time to hand it over to Mr. Johnson. "OK, Tiny. Pants off." "Awwwwwwwww..."

Finally got around listening to this. Pretty much how we've been running things including some rolls like log stuff tossed in on the fly. Would like to have heard how you envisioned the node and programs visually.

I was just going for mechanics, so I didn't really think about sculpting at all. The cool thing about the Matrix, though, is that you can really do whatever you like, as long as the paradigm works.

If you really can't spoof it that would be quite interesting and useful. It also means that anyone who takes an implanted comlink as a runner is a total fool.

I doubt that. The solid state RAM explosion hasn't hit yet. It will, and you'll see storage costs continue to plummet for another decade or two. I'm thinking 1T USB sticks for $10 or less, using memory that doesn't wear out.

What is expensive these days are backups. Backing up 6T of disk space is a huge pain, much less the >300T of a large company. Hard drives capacities are still growing faster than tape capacities, and the prices of tape are not falling as fast as HDs. But having off-site backups is still incredibly useful, as human error/or deliberate acts are still a big factor in bad things happening to good data.

I recently had a dream where I was trapped in a bunker somewhere fending off endless waves of faceless bad people. To pass the time I was reading great works of literature but because I lacked anywhere to store them I deleted information off the brains of my grenades and loaded them in there.

I killed a man with Kafka.

It was outstanding.

The Human Genome is 3.2 billion base pairs long. To a first approximation, every Base Pair can be in one of four states. At maximum compression then, you can store a BP in just 2 bits. A byte has 8 bits, so maximum compression could fit four base pairs in every byte - so just under 800 million bytes would be needed. A Megabyte is actually 1048576 bytes, so 750 "Megabytes" is 7864 million bytes, which is about the length of the compressed genome.

Bottom line: yes, you can put the entire genome of a person on a CD. And no, you couldn't actually do much with it while it was in that format. You'd need like an mp3 player to get the kind of storage space and processing power needed to actual extract useful information from someone's genes.

-Frank

My genes are running on an iPod !

Having worked where MAC-Filtering was a wireless security suggestion, I can tell you that MAC-Spoofing is not that difficult.

Remember, people who build Security Systems have a deadline and a 9-to-5 punchclock.

Deckers and Hackers don't. They work when they want, how they want.

My hope and dreams is to actually see the book someday... hehe

Anyone heard anything new about a new projected release quarter?

They talk about BT books alot on Twitter, but havent mentioned Unwired in a while...

True, I hope Unwired comes out shortly, but I expect it may be a bit longer.

I have submersions paid for and waiting for the expanded echoes list.

Yea I usually check Twitter before log into DS and it's painful to see 2 CBT books off to printer and not a mention of were Unwired is. l;(

Maybe there's no news because it's at the printer? *hope* *hope* *hope*

Yes, but that's why I said "can't spoof it". This is Shadowrun, where mysterious forces make pistols as deadly as assault rifles. And I can think of ways to make spoofing very hard given a model where the companies that made comlinks also made the base stations and billed users for usage, which is what SR has.

Project managers may not worry that much about security, but their senior management is very concerned about collecting every damn cent, and the corporate auditors care deeply about possibilities of fraud and misappropriation.

Which is why there's a budget for overtime. But you still have to keep within a budget.

Hey, look, Deckers and Hackers budget is making sure the Nutrisoy tap is full, and the fridge is full of energy drinks, with the single case of beer to distract the Street Sami when he comes over to watch the illegal feed of Urban Brawl!

Unwired isn't at the printer, but it's awful close. Sorry for the relative silence lately; the BattleTech schedule got jammed up badly and feedback at the GAMA Trade Show was so good about our The Corps fiction anthology that we decided to reprint it quickly, so I've been working like crazy to get that untangled while Jason works on Unwired. Fun times!

Is there any estimate for a PDF?

And a Cost. I want to get PayPal ready for that one!

Be appropriate to buy it on PDF, I think.

No. As usual, we avoid doing "estimates" on release dates.

It will be priced in line with our other PDFs.