I'm not sure if I can't get a good read on the rules or if it's just not spelled out in them, but for the life of me I've never been able to figure out whether you can somehow pass along your awareness of hidden Matrix presences to others. Say you've detected a device's hidden node. Can you have your sprite spoof it? Say there are two IC patrolling a node, and one of them sees through your Stealth. Does the other one still have to succeed on an analyze to know you're there? If an Active Alert is triggered against you, does that negate your Stealth entirely? Are General Alerts good for anything whatsoever, crunch-wise?

Common sense would seem to dictate full systemic awareness: you're aware of what your agents/devices are aware of, and vice-versa. But is that borne out anywhere in the actual rules text? And what about other personas, or agents/sprites you've got running on other nodes? Is there a Matrix equivalent of pointing things out to them?

Sorry, I know it's a disjointed knot of questions, but I can't get a bead on this and I've been artlessly dodging the issue with my group's hacker for some time now. With the Matrix being this arcane and labyrinthine, who needs magic?

I am AFB (so no page numbers or quotes) but I beleive that Unwired states that active alerts give IC and Security folks a bonus against the person who triggered the alert.

Also the person who has the alert triggered against them now counts as having no account privlages and must make hacking + something rolls to do anything.

As far as I recall, Alerts are amazing. They strip user rights, and make everyone else able to see the user(in addition to the +4 firewall bonus for restricted alerts). yes, they are rather bad, and you should strive not to trigger them.

1) You don't have any rights, and have to rely in Hacking to do anything
2) everyone can see you
3) the system is calling for backup.

There's also this from the FAQ, for what its worth.

Yup, an alert is basically the node saying "That icon doesn't belong" Remember that stealth doesn't hide you, it just makes your icon seems like something benign that is supposed to be there. Everyone can see you, but few notice you. Once an alert is off everyone notices you, even if they don't know what you are. Aside from that do remember that a node alert only does once action, among them being try to kick the icon out, try to shut down, alert hacker, and launch IC.

However, if that one action chosen is Launch IC, the IC can be scripted to alert the on-call security hacker as its first action, and when that security hacker logs in, he can always take steps to kick the icon out and or shut down the node himself.