Caution: This discussion may be a bit Meta, poking at things behind the scenes.

I guess this my one real question about the wireless effect/bonuses. I understand that hooking into the greater wireless gives us access to more information/processing/oversight on our equipment. But from where?

I mean, if I go onto the matrix looking up some information, I have to do a search of some form, maybe even have to subscribe to certain nodes to obtain this information if its readily available (we will be assuming nothing classified or locked down by someone).

Now obviously our wireless connected item probably has preset addresses it will search to for its information/boost/etc or some sort of parameters of what sources it will look for.. Your smartgun scans the local weather and compiles target telemetry, your medkit probably has a medical resource site on tap, etc...

But who watches the providers of this treasure trove of data? Or rather who CAN?

I mean, lets say I have a little late night exercise involving a few Halloweenies and a in depth discussion concerning the ancestry of their bloodline and how farm animals may have played a significant role.

After this lively debate I limp away sporting a few new perforations (but you should see the other guys!). Once I return to my domicile, I pull out the medkit and set it up. Feeling a bit woozy from the recent chat along with possibly some internal bleeding, I set the machine to consult it's online database and follow its prompts to augment my own first aid skills.

Meanwhile an eager young KE rent-a-cop comes across the scene and reports the incident. Normally it might not draw much notice, but the new KE is eager to make his mark so he can get promoted and needs some action under his belt to make the resume look good. Examing the crime scene he ascertains that the number of participants present do not match with his figure of who all played, plus it is apparent that the absent attendee went off a bit worse for wear. A quick call into the local hospitals turn up the usual lot of fights, cuts and similar but none that match up with his particulars. Likewise leaning on a few contacts who know the local street docs come up with zeroes.

Playing a hunch that this wayward soul must be having to treat himself, could the KE put in a request to query the local medical databases known to service the medkits and see if anyone has accessed them within the rough window. While we may run normal or silent, if our items are connecting somewhere for that wireless bonus it has to be handshaking with some level of system, and this in turn might be logged in some format. Now obviously there will be tons on pings on the medical information provider, but since the KE knows his mysterious man didn't go to the hospital he can narrow the search to remove these, likewise knocking off the known street docs his sources say had nothing to do with this one. Following this he narrows it down to 8 possible candidates who utilized a medkit that requested information on treating cuts and bleeding within the timeframe he was looking within. 8 is still a bit to go around and check on by himself, plus he doesn't have their actual addresses, but he has the MAC or similar for the devices so could turn this over to a KE decker who he has been chatting up afterhours to try and narrow this down as well and try and get locations for these. Supposing he gets lucky and can rule out a few possibles he could potentially convince the med system to ping the remaining medkits in question, masking it as an update (You DO update your systems yes? Wouldn't want to use Fix my Ass 2.5 when 3.0 is out and running) it could be used for a trace by the decker buddy of our cagey KE. That could be an unpleasant knock on the door for our hero, especially if it comes in the form of kicking the door in and said hero being doused with pepper punch.

Now some will say this is well outside the capability of the KE- especially a rookie, and maybe that is true. But is it true for everyone? It's well and good to run dark while on the run itself , but sooner or later some gear goes online when you are off the clock and it still has to hook into their respective bits of the Matrix.

I am just asking how secure are these sources? Who has nominal access to these? They are providing info to any relevant system requesting details so getting in doesn't seem to bad. Now actually tapping into these may well prove more interesting as basic access is one thing, but checking the logs quite anothers. Especially if it turns out someone else is tapping into these to peek in on us. Look at our systems today, every site vying to stick cookies on , your spam ads listing your town thanks to seeing the IP of your computer, it all adds up and someone could make good use of it.

Again it is probably outside the prevue of the game, but still just a thought.....

The simple answer is as the GM you decide how secure they are. Who do you WANT to be watching them.

One important component of answering this question is addressing one of the fundamentals of Matrix Implementation: What degree of anonymity is afforded to users?

I would propose that some degree of passive anonymity is necessarily baked into the underlying implementation and that queries for distributed resources do not require the full disclosure of the source of those queries, nor the purpose/intent.

A real life analog would be The Onion Routing. It shouldn't be hard to extrapolate something similar 60 years out into the future.

This, of course, needs to be coupled w/ active counter measures that can be employed by GOD to address online subversion of the system. This could be gleaned from side channel information of the anonymous system, and the two could exist side by side.

-Wired_SR_AEGIS

My guess is that none of the corps want their own activities traced, so there are common workarounds available. Shadow data havens could even be in place to mirror legitimate databases and scrub user data.

Using your example of the medkit and KE, I don't think it's unreasonable for something like that to happen. Sure, it would be a matter of KE having to FIND you first, but it's at least theoretically possible. I kind of think of it like the way certain web browsers "track usage statistics". Supposedly this can be done anonymously, but I don't think your average person is really in a position to check the code themselves to be sure... For me, the question would come down to what you want out of the setting and how much effort you want to put into it. Sure, you could have a system where each "anonymous usage statistics" report was tied to a given unique RFID inside of a particular medkit, and Knight Errant could use some form of Matrix search to pick up that RFID's GPS coordinates at the time it was transmitting. It just depends on whether the players and GM are interested enough in the idea to put the effort into developing it (or if the writers implement it at some point).

As for who has access to that data? Officially, I would think the service provider that collected the data has access to it on an everyday basis, with various cases of "this is Knight Errant, we're subpoenaing your records" and agreements to share data between corps. Unofficially, well, just depends whether your hacker was good enough to get in and find everything or the contact you bribe was in the office that day. Being able to sift through the sheer volume of stuff to come up with something useful might actually be more of a challenge than getting into the system in the first place, depending on whose system it is.

In principle, though, the question kind of reminds me of some of the shadowtalk in the Japanacorps section of Storm Front - the part where Turbo Bunny's gushing about how awesome her Renraku retreat was and Icarus is going "yeah, that's because they built a profile on you first". Is it possible? Absolutely, maybe even reasonable with the way you suggested it. I don't know if it would be easy enough to narrow the information down that it would be useful to an individual runner, but I don't see any reason it couldn't be a viable tactic for the megacorps and governments with the processing power to take advantage of it.

I admit that it would be extremely unlikely for this to be used against the players under normal circumstances or for the players to try and use this against other just due to the sheer volume of data you would have to sift through and if it even would connect all the dots sufficiently to be of use.

But I think this struck a chord in me as we are always talking about being secure on the run and going dark during the mission, but how secure are we being the rest of the time? Or for that matter short of running dark all the time, how secure CAN we be? Running that second 'fake' commlink during off run hours is a good start, rotating it out occasionaly probably even better. Just thinking of all the tiny bits and nibbles that this system is taking out of us and storing away and what it could do with this given sufficient resources and reason is staggering.

Bit o' the old paranoia I know. But still an good mental exercise I guess.

I think 8 matching the particulars in the window of time is lowballing it by a goodly margin.

Yeah, especially when you magnify it with the new "wireless all the things" concept...

"How the hell did you know where my ammo dealer hides out?" "Oh, I hacked your rifle and got the RFID of one of the rounds, then backtraced it to the most recent time when it wasn't in the same location as your commlink." "... seriously?"

Edit: Of course, you kind of deserve it if you're not using a tag eraser, but the point stands.

Actually, at that point, your ammo dealer kind of deserves it... "Here! You can have your RFID tags back!"

The entire system is designed by the megas, for the megas, to suit the megas.

Why would they want to allow privacy for the sheep? Look at the attitude of Google's CEO on privacy 'If You Have Something You Don't Want Anyone To Know, Maybe You Shouldn't Be Doing It'.

*chuckles* yes it was pulled out of the air, but we also did say the search was refined to skip known medical facilities and similar parties. Also we don't know how far out into the Matrix the medkit would go for searching, but I would think it would stick with the closest local grid to operate on, why bother accessing the Medical university of Japan medical request if the Seattle Webnurse was 'closer' so more likely to be the one supporting my medkit. Also the trail was not that old. Had it been days later it would have been a lot harder.

As Freya pointed out the level of data to be sifted thorugh would be problematic for any reasonable search, but the potential is still there.

Because having allowances for anonymity is very valuable to them.

They have the resources to achieve this. Sheep don't.

I'm just saying, how many times in the very densely packed sprawl do you think a first aid kit gets used in a minute? Even eliminating those sources, it's still going to be a mountain of information.

It's not just for themselves. They want to have their black bag teams be able to do so without the need for identifying gear, and they want runners to be able to do work for them.

And the cookies. I do a nominal sweep nightly to clear cache and cookies, then when I go onto google or even my bank I get the pop up stating how they use cookies and is that okay with you? In the UK they have to say this now, not sure how it is back home in the US since I been in britland a few years now. Just so much you never think about otherwise.

They don't really have a choice in the matter. If everyone is using the same matrix then everyone gets the same underlying implementation.

If that underlying implementation does not provide a mechanism for anonymous interactions, then that means that the Corps must find alternate tools to establish anonymity -- This is likely presented in a cost benefit analysis. I would suggest that the cost of using secondary anonymity tools would become prohibitively expensive relative to the simplicity of baking it into the core concept.

-Wired_SR_AEGIS

Cookies... Yep, I clear them whenever I close out my Browser (for those that are authorized, the Unauthorized ones are not even accepted). Makes surfing a challenge (and annoying), sometimes, but it is the only way to be sure.

Nope, because they mostly don't care and they are sending aggregate traffic. So you can see what Ares employees like to look at that Ares security considers unimportant (like sports). For stuff they care it can be resolved at a reasonable cost because it's spread over tends of thousands of their millions of employees. For example, I have a large pile expensive network security hardware and systems that looks at our internet traffic and drops/blocks evil traffic. You could have this at your house too, but I bet you don't. Mostly because you don't have tens of thousands of people to help pay for it or a team of people to run it.

But would they be using the same matrix so to speak? I mean the Azzies would have their own grid where their systems are operating. An azzie employee using azzie equipment probably gets his bonuses/online resources from their shared systems within that grid. These devices may have proprietary chips that allow them access to said resources and likewise alert HQ if misuse occurs. So a medic working inside the Pyramid would have his company supplied Medkit drawing upon AzMed files and not the Seattle WebNurse resource most likely. If I had gone to my Azzie buddy for some off the clock sewing and bandaging the KE search would have been stopped cold as he would not have been able to query AzMed at all without serious paperwork and a damn good reason (and even then probably would have been denied on general grounds just because the corp can)Remember the KE was just looking for possibles so wouldn't even have probable cause to try and bother a Multinational with.

I remember FastJack gave an example of similar when he was discussing the advantage of building your own deck versus buying. You buy the Novatech model, but unless you do some digging inside, you may not realize it has additional chips that react if you cross into Novatech cyberspace and perform actions without submitting the appropriate codes to convince your own deck you are acting in Novatech's best interest. Suddenly your own deck could shut down or stay live but send a secret alert to the Novatech security forces.

So they would be on a whole different system of tracking, by the corp for the corp in this situation. As to anonymity there would probably be certain levels/backdoors built in for this as to allow for deniable assets & operations, but that would require high level access and probably from again dedicated systems to get into.

Well, except that if you're talking about Matrix 3.0, there's no Gateway architecture to speak of. The benefits of gateway architecture have been replicated into a distributed, peer based system. The only allusion to gateway architecture that I've seen is when JH mentioned that being within 100m of a Samurai meant you can access him directly instead of needing grid transit -- So, there is some implication of communication that isn't strictly 100% horizontal but it's far, far, far, far, far from emphasized.

Regardless, I think even with gateway architecture you are dramatically underestimating how thoroughly saturated Matrix aware devices are throughout society.

We're not talking about what people like to browse. We're literally talking about nearly everything that a person interacts with down to their ball point pens. Distributing solutions to afford privacy to that is ridiculously expensive. Additionally, the relationship is not a balance of symmetry between Corps. For every 1 Megacorp, there are 9 other Megacorps who would like their data.

I think the incentives to analyze here are whether a Corporation would rather spend less to protect their own data, or spend less to analyze the data of other Megacorporations. I suspect that each Corp would probably rather keep their own agenda hidden, and therefore all agendas hidden, than each Corp biased to exposing all agendas, and therefore exposing their own agenda.

Assuming that there is no free lunch, and all actions are associated with a cost, their choice must emphasize one or the other of the above, and I suspect the final implementation would be heavily polarized to either full anonymity or full disclosure.



In a number of respects, yes. For this entire Matrix construct to work, there must be a degree of standardization of interfaces.

-Wired_SR_AEGIS