I see the biggest advantage of Trodes to be relative privacy. That is, anything you send to your brain has to be sent in metahuman brain format, so it's essentially unencrypted as far as anyone listening is concerned. So if you send data to your brain with a wireless device, then even if you've been really good about cryptography up to that point your secrets are totally out in the open. On the other hand, if you send to your brain with a trode set, then the very low signal power of the trodes makes listening in very difficult. Having your commlink send the data directly into your brain is the equivalent of projecting your emails onto the side of a building so that you can read them.

Data can be encrypted all the way up to the point where you actually have to access it yourself. So it is imperative that the transmission mode into your actual brain be relatively private. Either by having a very low signal strength (trodes), or by being a direct wired connection (datajack). Otherwise everyone can read your mail.

-Frank

Which is why I think internal commlinks will be very popular, contrary to the fluff in Unwired.

I'd also think that the fluff intro to L.A. in Corporate Enclaves showed how stupid manual controls are for commlinks compared to mental controls via DNI.

I can't see internal commlinks ever being hugely popular with the masses, what with it requiring reasonably extensive brain surgery to install. Now, the actual wiring may be only slightly more complex than a jack, but the psychological effects and scarring are significantly larger, not to mention needing to go back on the table if you ever need an upgrade. On the other hand, a wireless DNI plug-in sounds wholy feasible, if not necessarily sensible for runners or other people with a mind on security.

On similar grounds, I can never see cybereyes becoming hugely popular, outside of very specific circles. I mean, think about it. You're having your eyes ripped out, all for the promise of zoom and slightly better resolution? Call me insecure in my identity, but I'm rather attached to my eyes. I've had them all my life. Even in terms of applications, eyes suffer (except, ironically, for mages) as glasses and lenses possess nearly all the same functions whilst being significantly more disposable, a major advantage in most criminal and some military work

Per main book, it is 'popular with hackers and salarymen on the go'.

Sure, Unwired tries to claim that since Emergence, they aren't anymore... but all it does is make Emergence look more silly: The whole upper and middle class of corporate citizens had radio brains to begin with.

And now internal comlinks are a social stigma. Trends change.

I think that the flavor text I'm going for there is that hidden Commlinks are considered to be somewhat threatening, rather than being uncool. Build it into the whole hidden mode scare. The idea is that if you're running around in modern society you do have a network. So if people can't see your network, the assumption is that you have something to hide rather than that you just are a cheap bastard who doesn't have a netwok assignment.

Frankly, since commlinks themselves, like ipods and the like are frequently carried in pockets and just generally invisible anyway, people can't really tell on a daily basis if you have an internal commlink. You have an active network, and whether it's coming from a commlink internal to your jacket, a commlink that is internal to your brain, or a commlink that is spontaneously generated by your resonance powers is just impossible to tell. So I sincerely doubt that normal people will get freaked out about that aspect because they can't tell the difference.

But the hidden network thing, that'll freak people out. They know you have a network because you're filtering out enough McHugh's Ads that you can walk around with confidence. So if they can't see your network, they'll get kind of edgy, and rightfully so.

---

So what do people think of the idea of Technomantic networks being inherently hidden? By making the technomantic network difficult to see, you make it inherently threatening to the common man, thereby retroactively making a lot of the statements in Emergence make a lot more sense. And I would like to maintain compatibility with the fluff books as much as possible.

-Frank

In other words, the humble datajack. And though SR4 datajacks are wireless-enabled like most other headware cyberimplants, they do actually retain a jackport for backwards compatabilty with stuff that's expecting to connect via fiber-optic cable and as a general convenience for sensible, security-minded people.



====================

It certainly makes sense, as long as they're not completely invisible. They get enough of a free break in that regard by being at connection range with systems in their signal range, but untouchable by those systems' firewalls until taking an action on those systems.

Not really - even if one is to to accept Emergence's premise as outlined, it just made them cooler. Additionally to make people envious, it now makes them afraid.
Those who had and have them are the one that make decisions and those that don't... don't.

Sure, there were some people that tried to touch their boss and they were made an example off. Now, someone that doesn't need to lug around a clunky external commlink and stuff is not someone a lowlife can touch - either he's way up the social ladder or he is a monster in human skin... most likely, both at the same time. The only hope is not to get involved.

Actually, a datajack is a security nightmare. It gives everyone plug-in access to your brain and implants... than can even superseede DNI.

It can't supersede a DNI because it is a DNI. But the big problem with 4th edition Shadowrun tech is that anyone can turn on a set of trodes or even some nanite dust and get direct access to their brain and implants. Instantaneously, with no implants or anything on your end at all. As Unwired said, it's not Plug and Play anymore, it's just Play. So basically you're in a security nightmare all the time where anyone can get access to the brain and implants of anyone at any time.

Getting security of any sort in a world with that kind of technology is a headache and requires a fair reserve of handwavium. The Unwired solution is to say that Trodes and such only work when "you" turn them on "yourself" - which is very gamist logic. The idea is basically that you have to sign the Devil's contract before you can be afflicted by the black magic of the Matrix. Personally, I find that completely unsatisfactory. I'm going for something more like this draft section:

---

Hacking in a World of Perfect Encryption
“We estimate that we can crack this faster by waiting a few years for comuters to become faster and then starting the project on the new generation of machines.�

Cryptography is a complex thing. But an immutable fact of it is that if you are handed a set of data that has been scrambled by a non-repeating transformation of comparable size, that you cannot decipher it. Not “it's really hard to decipher� or “It'll take you a long time to decipher that� but that in fact you simply can't do it at all. So anyone with sufficient time on their hands and dedication to cryptographic secrecy can make a system that cannot be decrypted under any circumstances. It's called a one-time pad, and while resource intensive it is actually unbreakable. But people generally don't really need codes that can't be broken ever, most people will settle for codes that cannot be broken any time in the next hundred million years. That's the kind of time frame that even the extremely long lived are generally willing to concede that their secrets of today won't matter much once it has passed.

So while it is entirely within everyone's capacity to go out into the street, turn the microphone on super high and record random discordant noise for an hour, then download that hour into their drone as an exceedingly long cypher to get an hour of unbreakably encrypted communications between themselves and their drone – the vast majority of people are willing to accept a less intensive system where their communications are merely unlikely to be decrypted before the sun peters out.

Most secure communications use Essentially Unbreakable Encryption (EUE), a system where the sender and the intended recipient both have a cypher that is overlain on the messages and subsequently removed. The keys used in the 2070s are of variable length, but generally are thousands of bits long, and cannot be expected to be broken by any sort of mathematical attack. In order to attain such levels of security the cypher itself must have been shared at some earlier point between the intended sender and receiver, and it can of course be stolen either during the hand off or at any time that anyone has direct access to any of the computers which store the cypher itself. After all, EUE doesn't make the message completely illegible to anyone but the intended recipient; it makes the message completely unintelligible to anyone who doesn't have the key – not the same thing once espionage comes into the equation.

Vaguely Decent Protection: Asymmetric Encryption
“The algorithms required to decrypt these things are illegal, so no one has them.�

Sending a message of any kind through EUE requires that both the sender and the receiver have a copy of the key. But what if you don't have a prearranged key, how can you communicate with any privacy? The answer is Asymmetric Encryption. Here's how it works: There are a set of mathematical transformations based on one number that are really hard to undo unless you happen to know a specific second number. So your Commcode gives out the first number to anyone who wants it, and then people can send transformed (and thus encrypted) data to you and since you have the magic second number you can reverse those changes very easily.

You can also do this in the reverse order, transforming your message with the secret number and letting the receivers of the message decrypt it with the publicly available number. While this is a fairly useless way to keep information secret, it makes a fairly decent digital signature – in that whoever sent the encrypted message must have known your personal secret number. This is the core of how every Access ID in the Matrix is verified.

Protecting Unencrypted Data: Using Your Inside Voice
“You actually are the weakest link.�

No matter how sweet your encryption is, everyone's brain runs on pretty much the same codes. When each data packet is sent to a metahuman brain, that data is essentially unencrypted. Anyone who can “hear� that transmission can read it. Worse, if someone hears the transmission in brain text and they also had a recording of the encrypted version, they can make a Rosetta stone to decrypt all the rest of your data, which makes all your base belong to them. So it is of no surprise that people in the 2070s attempt to make the actual communications between their brain and the rest of their network be as “quiet� as possible, which is why people use Datajacks, Internal Commlinks, and Trodes. The first two have a directly wired (and shielded) connection between themselves and the brain, while as the last option is merely at very low signal strength and very close to the intended recipient. In any case, these methods of data transfer are very difficult to listen in to, and people generally feel relatively safe sending brain formatted information into their own heads by these means.

Now no data transfer mechanism is truly 100% safe: unscrupulous men can get microtranceivers very close to your trode set and rebroadcast the precious unencrypted information to their own networks. They can compromise the physical hardware of the datajack or the trode net. And so it is that over and above having relatively secure direct neural interfaces, the truly security conscious will endeavor to conduct import communications from the sanctity of rooms that have been cleared of bugs and at special times and places that hopefully opposing spies won't know about – cloak and dagger stuff that has been going on for literally thousands of years and shows no signs of stopping at any time in the future.

-Frank

Technically, the wired interface or the wireless can be used to make a hacker gain control over the DNI. Oddly, only the wireless interface can be turned off, making a wired interface a greater risk.


Nope, as they need to be configured for the specific user... usually by willing feedback from the user.
The datajack however is ready for use & abuse... of course, it's the same problem with trodes you already configured.

I´d like to hear the situations where having disposable eyes is a major advantage.

While it´s completely understandable that you´re personally reluctant to scoop your eyes out, one of the premises of the cyberpunk genre is that people lop their arms of to replace them with robotic ones. For no other reason than because the new one has a mirror finish. Over the years the shadowrun books have been sufficiently schizophrenic on that point to support any point you´d care to make in that direction.



Sounds good. Comes with the added benefit of making not everyone freak out all the time when they see someone is in their network. Because while IC might not be able to take action before the technomancer does, everyone else is not restricted from doing so, thus making a stroll through downtown corpville a unreasonably risky proposition for them.

While were on that note. What happens when terminate connection is used on a technomancer.

@Frank
Not sure where you are trying to go with the Cypto excerpt you just put in.
So I thought I would provide one technical clarification (which you are probably already aware of, but which doesn't match the text.)

You say that good crypto requires preshared keys, and then you talk about asymettric cryptography, and how that is good for identity / signing. If you assume that current mathematics still works, then if you have decent signing, you can establish a dynamic shared key bewtween the two parties. The basic technique does involve a piece of public information, but that can be shared by everyone. Using that, each party generates a number, such that the two people end up with the same key, but nobody else can end up with the key at all. The current art is basically Diffie-Hellman.
The point being that you do not need a presarred key to get a key of arbitrary length with sescurity as good as the signature mechanism.

(I presume that stops working well if you assume, as unwired is reported to,that some set of crypto mathematics has been broken.)

Joel

One minor clarification request that probably takes about one line in the updated matrix rules.
How does sleeping affect technomancers?
Obviously, to some degree folks sleeping are usually farther away from other folks. (But that isn't always true, for example on airplanes or trains.)
Equally, a normal person would seem to be able to sleep with their comlink on and connected, getting the protection from it.

But, does a technomancer get his automatic protection from his biological systems when he is sleeping?
(I hope he does, but given how careful you are about thinking through the implications of things, I thought I would raise the question.)

Joel

One of the assumptions here is that some of the crypto math has been broken. Pretty much a requirement I think, because otherwise a rational wireless world would have a public key as each commcode, with the owner of the commcode owning the private key. Then digital signing is rock solid, all commcalls are essentially unbreakable, and the cheese stands alone. So what we have to posit to bring back all our cool cloak and dagger stuff is that people have managed to break asymmetric encryption in combat time. Those supposedly one-way transformations can actually be reversed, and then you have to sneak datachips with the codes across enemy lines and shit like it was a film noir spy thriller.

So what this is left with is if you use asymmetric encryption, then you can digitally sign stuff, and you can send and receive messages. And an ordinary user won't be able to forge your digital signature or listen in on your communications. But a law enforcement agency, or for that matter any adept hacker with access to the banned algorithms can. And that's how Hackers spoof Access IDs - by reverse engineering asymmetric encryption keys and digitally signing their data packets with other user's transforms.


OK.

As for Technomancers, I'm deeply divided. One of my goals is to stay essentially compatible with the ongoing Shadowrun story, which means among other things to work in details from Emergence as best as can be (since I have the power of retcon, can explain away several of the seeming inconsistencies in Emergence by any of a number of means). One of the things that sticks in my craw is that whoever wrote the Technomancer section of Unwired (presumably Lars) went to great lengths to draw the Technomancy == Magic[/u] parallel that Emergence went to great pains to leave open. I would prefer to work in the Virtua-Kinetic mode of Emergence and keep magic separate.

Unfortunately, while I don't intend to use Unwired as a base, there's still the stone cold fact that Unwired was the latest book, and that future books may be written based on the Technomancer tirades from Unwired. And that means that not including all that crap about DISSONANCE == TOXIC MAGIC!!1! might marginalize things even more. Although hopefully I can get away with it as future supplements will be largely written in-character and having one person or another log on and rant about how Dissonance Technomancers are a threat to the natural order can be written off as in-game zealotry.

It's a tough call. The writer of Unwired's Technomancer chapter really wrote me into a bind there because that's some seriously messed up stuff. I mean, Discordians are a real religion for goodness sakes, and while they very specifically wouldn't care about having a fictional pointless genocidal magic using techno cult named after them, it's still a total dick move on the author's part.

-Frank

Thanks for the explanation Frank. I think I follow it, and it seems to make sense. (I had misunderstood part of your post, I think.)

That seems to lead to the result that really strong encryption is used only in very limited cases.
Something like that does seem necessary to make the setting work.
It leaves the question of how financial transactions can be sufficiently trustworthy on the Matrix for folks to use them for everything day-to-day. (Even corps seem to buy and sell most B2B stuff over the Matrix from the fluff.) But I suppose that becomes a question of handwaving just how easily the broken crypto can be broken, to match the desired effect.

This leads to another minor question that should probably be addressed in your rules. (From the discussions it appears to be something they tried to address in Unwired.) You have a Great Form power to make money. (I asked about the implications of that, and understand the choices. It makes sense.)
THe question is whether a hacker / technomancer without such a great form spirit can reasoanbly safely steal themselves money on a regular basis.
If yes, how much, with what tests?
If no, why not?
I suspect that you can construct an approach that is consistent with what you have to give either answer. It seems sensible to state which one you conclude makes more sense.

Thanks,
Joel

This reminds me of 3rd (or was it 2nd ed) with the security tally... you could screw up a few times and still manage to hack the system without tripping every alarm. They give it a mention as an option rule in unwired too.

Usually, but not always, even in the defalt setting per the RAW?

It's not a 'hard rule' - p. 42 explains the proccess a bit.


BTW - Unwired seriously mixes up cyberware's internal connection and DNI.

DNI is a man machine interface, not a network interface - and not to be confused with the internal networking of cyberware:

So while hacking one implant will gain you access to the internal network, it doesn't have a thing to do with DNI.
And hacking trodes will get you a DNI, but no connection to implants.

Of course, people that invest in non-standard ware should get the basic functions (implant on/off, wifi on/off, etc.) of their DNI implemented in hardware, as per p. 103, Hacking Electronics.

Actually, with cybereyes you can change the color of your iris and the shape like you would change the wallpaper of your desktop. Also, cybereyes have the advantage of being attached. You can't lose them (unless someone rips them out), or get them knocked from your face (in case of glasses).

As for getting cybereyes... I would do so in heartbeat! Think about it, you get perfect vision, get a high resolution digial camera/video recorder, and a display link for free. You also can have cool options like thermographic vision, lowlight vision, and vision magnification. Also with cybereyes... you can have LASER BEAM EYES!!!!

And if they can build an AR display on the inside of a pair of contact lenses, that changes how you see the world, who says they can't use that display tech on the outside of the lenses to change how the world sees you? Hmm?

Because that might make it so that you can't see out them?

I like the crypto part, seems reasonable. The other thing that you could do, given that storage is free, is assume that every comlink has a symmetric key to a provider burned in, with the provider having a seperate key for each phone on file. Remember, this is a dystopia, the corps have absolutely no reason to allow unlocked phones to be sold. Your phone come with a subscription to the provider, when you stop paying it stops calling.

Until someone in management realizes that 'programmed in' is so much cheaper than 'burned in'.
Dystopia, to the tech person, means that security models are based on cost, not on security.

If frank runs with the previous stuff though, you wouldn't be able to do that as the storage space required to hold enough bits to fully record couple of dozen hours of VR would exceed the storage capacity of the commlink.

Which means that a one time pad of sufficient size to encrypt it would be equally too large.

This is why everyone doesn't store everything.

As allowing programming results in people stealing service, which impacts the bottom line, burning in the code is based on a cost model.

You don't need an OTP to get secure symmetric encryption. A OTP provides an ability to get theoretically unbreakable encryption, while a symmetric system can be decoded in only a few hundred million years. However the Verona project was decryption of OTPs, broken through attacks on the entire system used for communication and flaws in the way the agents and Moscow center used the OTPs.

Oh.

Hrm.

I actually agree with you - maybe we do need OTP to be the only viable encryption method?

Not really, forcing people to exchange key codes to establish a secure session is a pretty big limitation. But it is possible to overcome this by having things like comlinks and credit chips having the keys burned in and linked to an essentially unlimited data base at the telecom company or the bank.

This means that nobody (other then the communications company - and you trust them, right?) could snare your messages off the air, but it also means that the only way you could securely communicate with someone over a comlink (secure from the communications company) is if you had met face to face and exchanged keys.

There are supposed to be certain approaches to public key encryption that are not effectively compromised by quantum computing, but I have no idea how true that is.

Frank, here're some more random requests to consider: descriptions of exactly what AR and VR mean and do, in terms of bonuses to real-world or matrix actions or initiative passes, including how many initiative passes can be used in AR, and if the answer is "As many as you get," then the answer to the question, "Why would anyone use VR?"; the distinctions between cold-sim and hot-sim, how they are activated, whether you can switch between them, what kinds of damage you can sustain in each, the bonuses and IPs they give, and what becomes of your meat body when in VR, including perception tests; an explanation for why a lucky hacker can't use Jedi Trick once and have control over all of Zurich Orbital's systems; an explanation for how technomancers' constant Connection range keeps them from totally hacking the hell out of everything and everyone; exploration of the possibility (or explanation of the impossibility) of downloading information directly into your brain, skillwires-style, with your datajack; whether brain hacking includes Control Actions/Control Thoughts-like shenanigans.

Sorry for doing that sort of datadump-style, I just wanted to throw out a sort of checklist of various things. Two more suggestions/requests for explanation are why hacking an orphan device/brain from a distance is a better idea (from a game-design perspective, not from an in-game perspective, since you can invent fluff to support it any way you wish) than requiring handshake range (in the brain's case, contact range) because I always thought handshake seemed more reasonable; and second, why you don't want to go in Unwired's direction regarding Technomancers, and Dissonance followers being like toxic mages. I haven't yet read Unwired, but I'm just curious why you think that's a bad thing. Thanks for taking the time to write this stuff.

Hello Frank, what I would really like to see are some tables (for various opposed tests, prices, capacities etc) also some parenthetical section (or page) referances with the text would make using and learning your rules much easier. While I'm wishing I'd love a table of content, illustrations, and an index (in that order if you are thinking about it at all)

What, no pop-up book stuff or a DVD-ROM filled with useful GM tools?

I have been using a two sided cheat sheet in my games, which I´m reluctant to put up right now since the rules I´ve been using differ in some points form the ones Frank posted and it would be of little use when the new rules come out. Same goes for a printable laid out version including a TOC.

I intend to update them once the new version of the rules are ironed out. If you want to submit art I´d be more than happy to include that.

I would prefer to not go that route because it would make listening to phone calls be a matter of lookup tables. See the MSPs would keep lists of these otherwise unbreakable keys and sell those lists to licensed law enforcement officials. Hackers would need to put together "clans" to collect these keys and disseminate them to other hackers, which means that just to spoof IDs and listen to commcalls you'd need to be part of a group, which I don't want.

The other thing that occurs to me is that having a symmetric key with your MSP would be pretty much pointless, because people could spam your Youtube account with messages of known content, intercept the encrypted versions the MSP sent to your commlink, and then subtract one from the other to get your key of whatever length. I am pretty sure that for a symmetric key to remain secure it has to be used only for private messages between individuals who already have the key.

-Frank

Yeah I fully realize that most of that was way off the deep end. I do think that a little more internal structure would have a big enough impact on the learning curve to make or break people learning and using the rule set, which is I assume the point

As for a request, something I would like to see is a little verity in program rating. Under RAW there is no reason to have programs with a rating less than your response. This means that all deckers with an r6 comlink should have identical loadouts; all relevant r6 programs. Including some reason to keep that from happening would be really nice.

A half baked idea I had to this end was to limit nodes to running r/2 programs rounded up at a time, but have software suites that counted as only 1 program. Suits would have a scaling cost depending on the total rating of the programs in the suite. If you have the source code, adjusting the ratings within a suit should be moderately difficult, but fairly trivial for a 400bp decker primary. I'm thinking about a logic + Software tests pegged to the build repair table. Just like pilots are restricted to one type of drone, agents are restricted to the 1 suite they are build around. The base cost per rating of an agent is greatly reduced, but is then multiplied by size of there integral. A really good search bot (is not a couple IPs away from becoming black IC, and it doesn't cost near as much. I'm not quit sure how to mesh this this Frank's program catigories, but I'm sure it can be done. Maybe you allow more programs, but suits must be from one category. Maybe just a +20% cost per category in the suite. I haven't looked at balance much, but if it isn't a deal breaker this does a couple cool things
-Agents loose functionality in a logical way, while gaining flavor
-Deckers have meaningful choices about there load outs
-Makes the software skill meaningful for a decker's who carrier, even in games with little downtime.
-Puts a hurt on script kiddies

Nope. Raising the cost of each unit even one bit will hurt bottomline much more than some people hacking it.

Hell, if they can manufacture contact lenses with static images like this or this that do not unduely impede vision, I can't imagine how doing similar with a dynamic display on the outside of the lens would.

You most certainly proved your point.

If you are going to use simple one time pads, and simple transforms (because the powerful transforms are broken) then you MUST use different keys every time. So, for that level of security you have to have exchanged LOTs of keying material. And then you use part of it for each message. Even with somewhat more complex transforms (although there are limits), current mathematics is such that if you use the same key for different messages you are very vulnerable to known plaintext attacks. One of the many tools the allies used to keep breaking Ultra was to use messages where they had good guesses about the content.

From the discussion, I had assumed that there were two things going on:
1) Most uses, including most Matrix commerce, used long keys with the "broken" crypto. That is good enough that it takes serious effort to get at the source.
2) Really secure mechanisms use a one time pad, where each part of the pad is used only once. But the transform is sufficiently basic (like xor) that the mathematics can not break it. This requires key material as long as the message.

Note that for storage encryption the second approach is basically useless. I need the key to read the content. And the key is so big that I have to store the key on the computer. So the key and the data are both on the same machine?

Note that one problem that needs to be avoided is inventing the details of any crypto system that is ostensibly used. If we try to invent such details, they will be wrong, and broken. (Inventing details of why something is broken, when we get to invent fictional math, is easy. Trying to invent anything beyond one time pads that actually works is very hard.) The answer therefore may be a whole bunch of fluff that says "this is the net effect, don't ask how" because we probably can not explain what we need to have happen to make the setting work.


Yours,
Joel

Well it has its uses. For example you can encrypt a file with a OTP, store the file in a place, and then everyone with the OTP, and only them, can decrypt it. In that case, the file will be stored in a node and the user(s) will have the OTP on his(their) commlinks.

Actually it's one of the few possible uses for OTP (even if they're often shown as the ultimate cryptographic method, they're pretty useless).

I don't think OTPs will be used very often, the amount of times you have to transfer them back and forth makes them at least as vulnerable as more sensible cryptographic systems.

So basically your choices are:

• Symmetric Key: Invulnerable to decryption algorithms, but broken instantaneously if a black hat gets a copy of plain text and the encrypted work. Must be shared before data transfer.
• Asymmetric Key: Can be broken with encryption algorithms, but completely blocks out casual listeners. Can be used with people for whom their is no prior contact; and gaining a copy of uncrypted text and a copy of the encrypted text is not helpful.

Regardless, hardware can be direct hacked at line of sight and forced to give up the keys if it contains them. Retransmitters like Matrix Hubs don't generally have keys, so you have to go on Shadowruns if you want to break the stronger encryption that corporations use for sensitive internal communications.

-Frank

OK, on the Technomancer thing:

I find the writing and terminology in the technomancy section to be extremely grating. Fortunately, I think that a big chunk of the terminology can be dumped entirely. Frankly, most of that stuff will never be visited in any meaningful fashion in later publications. So here's a list:

Networks: This is a perfectly acceptable name for technomancer "groups" it may or may not appear in later books, but it's fine. We can avoid going against the grain here and just throw up networks as the standard name. t works fine. As a caveat however, it should be noted that guilds and parties is insulting and retarded: that is the name for clans and teams respectively that people use in fantasy MMOs. Obviously some jackass played a bunch of WoW and forgot that groups who play in futuristic settings (like Unreal) or even modern settings belong to Clans and not Guilds. So the terminology of Guild and Party is right out the door. Technomancers are inherently futurists, not a bunch of World of Warcraft hangers on.

Dissonance: The entire tirade about how Dissonance Technomancers are totally of the dark side and wicked through and through has no place whatsoever in the shades-of-gray world that is Shadowrun. Fortunately, I seriously don't have to care about that because even having Catalyst subsequently print Dissonant characters who are irredeemably evil would just be one isolated case of bad writing and wouldn't be incompatible with Dissonance users as a whole being complex people with realistic goals. All the subgroups of Dissonance users have incredibly stupid names running from merely retarded (infektors) to downright religiously insensitive (Discordians), fortunately it doesn't matter at all because those streams don't actually have any rules or coherent philosophies attached to them so they are incredibly unlikely to come up importantly in ongoing plot materials. So I can quite happily drop all that and replace it with something that is less offensive and shitty.

Streams: I'm perfectly happy to name the traditions "streams" instead of "songs" to retain forward compatibility. The Streams themselves are annoying. No one is going to name their entire philosophy an inane pun like "Sourcery" that's lame. Putting elektro-puns into words stopped being cool in like 1985. So while none of the streams are going to be called "E-scapists" because that's juvenile, there are going to be some tradition equivalents which will suppose be named "Streams." I don't think that I will be handing out different drain attributes, because Sprite differences and Greatform power choices differentiate streams enough under these rules without making Elves even better at Fading Resistance.

Sprites: Sprite names are totally immaterial, and the very idea of playing enough WoW that you think that having a Paladin and Tank sprite is a good idea is offensive to me. Not only do I not have to roll the new sprites into the picture, I'm really happy that I don't have to use the new Sprite names.

Paragons: It may actually come up that the Mentors of technomancers are called "Paragons" so that terminology may as well be used. It works at all, so I'm actually fine with it. The presented Paragons themselves are by and large dreadful, especially the Dissonance ones, and will not be used.

I think that about covers it, terminology wise.

-Frank

i may not agree with a lot of frank's problems with unwired (but we've already been there), but i have to agree with you frank... some of the names are pretty lame...

i do have to say, the whole dissonance thing though, i'm not seeing how you're going to make that reasonable. and i'm not entirely sure why it would be worth bothering; it's not that they're evil, really. i mean, i could make a TM who uses a psychotropic blackout to program people to be his slaves, and he wouldn't be dissonant, just evil. dissonant TMs do stupid things like randomly infecting people's commlinks with a virus just to taint the matrix or whatever.

so yeah, i'm just not seeing how it's really salvageable to create reasonable PCs, NPCs, villains, contacts, etc other than essentially declaring it to be just another stream.

He doesn't have to make it reasonable, just not necessarily evil. Dissonance not as evil, but as chaos. There's good, fun chaos and bad chaos. When I think of dissonance I think of 4-chan and griefers.

Sorry, been spending my time updating software images on hundreds of switches, so haven' been paying enough attention to this thread.

Any cryptosystem that can be broken by one piece of chosen plaintext is worthless. People find attacks that that require only several hundred million plaintexts to be pretty clever. For example (stealing shamelessly from Wiki on AES)

"In April 2005, D.J. Bernstein announced a cache timing attack that he used to break a custom server that used OpenSSL's AES encryption.[10] The custom server was designed to give out as much timing information as possible, and the attack required over 200 million chosen plaintexts. Some say the attack is not practical over the internet with a distance of one or more hops;[11] Bruce Schneier called the research a "nice timing attack."

This was a deliberately crappy implementation of AES and still took over 200 million plaintexts. Well done implementations don't have this weakness. Good crypto systems that are well implemented are really hard to attack, as the people doing them are usually as smart and more experienced then virtually anyone who would attack the system and don't make the kind of mistakes that allow easy access. That's why everyone (not in management) in the computer industry tend to spit on vendors who offer "proprietary encryption" instead of modern well known systems, as there are lots of idiots who think they know what they are doing and produce crap.

Anything that a corporation is willing to pay professional criminals to steal from another corporation, if it's encrypted at all, is likely to be encrypted by a decent system. Not always, executives and salespeople are oftentimes are a really bad combination...

Anyhow, the key distro issue is a real problem and it's one of the reasons why very few companies or governments actually have good wide-spread crypto in place. It's hard and expensive to do this right. There is always a customer for the easy and cheap...

One thing I´d like to look into is having the rolls for techomancer exclusive complex be composed of Logic + Skill instead of Resonance + Skill. And by I, I of course mean you since I´m already liking the idea and haven´t seen any problems in the one (1) game I´ve tried it in. I regard to Stream or song names I´d rather have them be the same as the Mentors or if that´s out having them be in the style you had in the ends of the matrix.



In the interest of compatibility it probably wouldn't hurt to draw up an equivalency list. But since you´ll pretty much have to rebuild any technomancer and hacker that comes with a boxed adventure anyway that should be really low on the to do list. What would come in really handy is some guidelines to choosing your sprites. I had to draw myself a diagram to be sure I covered the required complex forms the first couple of times I made a technomancer. This gets easier once you are familiar with the rules. But a short descriptive blurb with each sprite still wouldn't hurt the reader. On related note, the ordering of the rules is something I noticed made it difficult to reference at the table. I have no idea what the solution would be though. Should a a draft of the revised rules becomes available, I can make one of the players in my group who only semiinterested in the matrix read through it and give comments on where he´d look for stuff if you are interested. The players actually playing deckers are eagerly awaiting any rules updates. Just saying.


no quibbles.

But I don´t want realistic encryption in a game I sit down to play on a Sunday afternoon. Having a system where you manage to trick your opponent into saying Beetlejuice three times and encrypting that with one of his OTPs, thus allowing to get into his secret datastore is fun. Having to do it 200 million times isn´t.

Using One Time Pads would allow you to have the electronic correspond to an actual physical fob someone carries in his pocket allowing the rest of the team to play a part in cracking the corp node by stealing the fob long enough to make a copy. This encourages teamwork and gives everyone his 15 minutes.


Which brings me to a different point.

A Decker who uses Intercept and Impersonate on a drone is in a position to hand off this information to the teams rigger thus allowing him to share his progress in a meaningful fashion. Now what would make the current rules three kinds of awesome for me would be:
Ways for nondeckers (who bring dicepools of 2-4 to the table) to help a decker doing matrixworks without resorting to teamwork tests.
Ways for the decker to enable others to do matrixwork so both parties profit, and are able to do things without the decker making all the decisions.

Dissonance is a belief or faith, exactly as Resonance is. There's actually a paragon that pretty much represents 4chan; Alias. Griefers are just people acting like people, taking enjoyment in being dicks to each other.

Dissonance, it's meant to be the Toxic analogy and, in SR, destroying nature is evil. Because the AmerIndians were right. Yup, that's the best reason I can find, white guilt is a founding part of SR.

You can do that by stealing someone's commlink. I don't know of anyone who actually really locks down their smartphone, though it's certainly possible. You swipe it for a few minutes you get their keys and login credentials. You might have to hack in right then, while he's "occupied", but it allows multiple people to get involved. I had a scenario I never ran where the Johnson wanted the documentation a guy who was a high powered security consultant had on a company's system, but also wanted nothing bad to happen to the guy and nobody to know it was stolen. Of course, he had a lot more than just that one file the Johnson wanted on his commlink.

I don't know of anyone who does either, but I don't know of anyone who uses it to pay either. They use credit cards to pay, and these credit cards need a 4 digit code to work.
A commlink isn't just a smartphone and if you add this to the fact that you can have easy user authentication (biometric data, thoughts commands...) I guess that commlinks would probably be locked down more often than smartphones.