Please bear with me as I am not certain that I have formulated the correct question and description.

As I ponder more and more work for the Technomancers at my table I have started to think about the presentation of the matrix more and more. For the past few days I have been stuck in a rut. Below is a description, likely inaccurate, of a event which occurs in the matrix and what I would imagine would be the ideal "perception". Where you see stars *** are where I am *not* trying to talk about rules but only what happens. The generic term "attacks the node" is meant to be abstract. Rules are another thread.

A Matrix gang has decided to attack and vandalize the public node of a corporate office in their geographical domain. The gang attacks/hacks* the node. Assume that the gang is close , that is to say that they are within signal. Now, there is a party member who is also nearby. When she looks around on the matrix, she can clearly see the public nodes.

Do the commlinks by the gang have icons?
Can on see the commlinks commanding persona?
Are the attacks visible?
Are the subscriptions to the node visible?

What can be seen? Is vision stuck inside a node?

BlueMax

From what I remember of the matrix chapter,
Yes, the gangers have icons, and yes, their attacks are visible, as some sort of thing - whereas a dragon icon might breathe flame, it'd do the same thing as an ant icon's bite. Also, I think it's more a 'sense' of noticing they're there (through overriding the gangers' matrix stealth?) rather than just SEEING the icons in the first place.
I think that's about right, anyways.

I recall the attacks visible "in node" but cannot remember anything about perception from outside the node. This being because one cannot "attack" a node. Though I would consider "Hacking on the fly" an attack, I do not think it is by rules.

BlueMax

Yes, definitely. They may be using Stealth and hard to spot, but they will have icons. I'm pretty sure icons only really exist inside nodes though, so you'd have to get in there to see them.

Yes, but (AFAICT) only if you're in the same node as one of its icons and can beat its Stealth. You can subsequently trace the icon back to its home node.

From within the node, yes.

Yes, by logging onto the node and using Analyze to scan the node for user icons. Each icon represents a subscription and can be traced back to its node of origin.

I think so. It doesn't seem that there's really much at all you can do in the Matrix outside of nodes apart from intercepting traffic and spoofing, and nothing in the section on Matrix Perception says you can use it on nodes where you have no icon. So to get any detailed info about what's happening in a node, I think you need to log on and get your icon in there.

Since you specifically mentioned a public node in this example, the bit about having to log on shouldn't be an issue in this case, but it's a consideration in more secure areas.

Bummer. I wanted to think I was wrong and that you can see the relationship between nodes.

Toolbox, thanks for the confirmation. If I sound down its not you.

Matrix hide and seek must be a tart.

BlueMax

This reminds me of a story of a little boy who lived in a house on the edge of the matrix. Forgive the 2050's-era Universal Matrix Specification iconography in the following, but the core of the lesson still holds true.


While I agree with what's been said earlier in the thread, that you typically have to be logged into a node to use Matrix Perception to detect the icons of other users in that node, in the end, it comes down to how the users of a node decide to set that node up to interact with the rest of the Matrix. You stated that the target was a corporation's public node. What is the purpose of that public node? Is it simply a place for them to display advertising for their particular product, or are they using the node to facilitate a virtual community among their customer base? Imagine Dumpshock as a public node.

Without even logging into Dumpshock, I can get a listing of board statistics, including which users have logged in in the past 15 minutes, and each name is a clickable link to a profile. From the "Public Account" however, my access to these "icons" of user-level accounts is highly limited. I can perceive certain aspects of them, but that's about it. When I do log in, with my own user-level account, the rights granted to that type of account open up my options: I can send Private Messages to any of those other icons, and I can edit files (board posts) that become visible from the node's public space. I still can't see another user's AccessID though, since that function has been reserved for the moderators with their security-level accounts. All these things that I can and can't do from both the Public and User-Level accounts, are the consequence of choices that the users with Security and Admin level rights made in setting up the node.

So, if a bunch of vandals came along to Dumpshock, and hacked themselves some security-level Moderator accounts, they could perform vandalism that's easily visible from public space (deleting and editing other users's posts ) and make their icons visible while doing so, because that's how the node was set up to be used. A different public node, one set up to display files to the public account but not allow any interaction, would be more limited: vandals could edit the files that are in the public space, but they themselves wouldn't be visible.

This brings us to the issue of how the normal workflow of nodes and these levels of privileges get configured in the first place, and whether or not such things could be changed on the fly. Presumably such a task would take Admin Level access, but the rules don't go into any sort of detail on this subject I'm afraid.