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As a matter of fact, this is one of the problems I face each time I design a security system. Using wired connections to prevent easy wireless hijacking just seems too obvious for the corp techies not to go that way.
Unwired does. SR4 Core Rules did say differently. But yes, I see your problem. I have it too.
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But yeah, the books explicitly say there are still backbone lines, maintained by MCPs. And of course, evil, evil people are eavesdropping there!
Unlike the wireless Matrix?

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Astral mages are just more rarely needed, while hacking is "let's play this tiny subquest for each action your party members are hoping to take".
That very much depends on your players really.
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I did not get that impression from the books. Could you please point out a specific quote?
SR4 core book, game concepts and changes section and IIRC, Matrix. Don't have by ebooks on me and the computer my PDF are on died today, so sorry, pages will have to wait. NOT SR4A, nor Unwired. It was fixed with Unwired, as I wrote.
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Lol what. If you're hacked on the fly, it's Hacking+Exploit vs Analyze+Firewall extended tests, with thresholds comparable. Your software has every chance to succeed against most common hackers.
The programs do not get several kinds of boni a hacker gets. The hacker gets VR and Hot Sim boni on anything if he's any good, so that's +4 dice, or one more statistical success, in a contest with equal program ratings, with no further optimisation. You can further push this up with qualities, commlink modding and by teamworking with agents. All you can do on the defense side is put agents in your commlink, and those things both cost and slow down anything else you do. Unless you abuse the hell out of software options, you're always on the weaker end as a defender in SR4.
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Basically, it's easy to make it a ridiculously slow affair, enough to make it a tool too cumbersome to be actually used against you.
Yeah, I mentioned hard encryption. Slaving can be spoofed though, which is another of these unfair contests.
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Show the value, let them decide. I agree that the benefits outweight the risks to the point of a "forced" decision.
It's so easy to kill your characters, then, that it's hard to reason why corpsec never does it.
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Matrix supervision is a task for the groups hacker.
Because there is no such thing as triangulation and rifles?Not to mention, of cours,e everyone trusts their real, business commlink to a stranger, crook and murderer.