This is so very, very true...



Not having a hard time with it, I just don't like a lot of it. There is a difference there. Of course, I did not like the Matrix in SR's 1-3 all that much either, so...



Because Characters don't tend to go up against the stupid stuff. They go into Corporate R&D Systems lokking for the multi-million (billion) Nuyen paydata where the opposition SHOULD be throwing 16 Dice with DR 5+ Cyberdecks. At that point, opposing them with a Security Decker that is throwing 7 Dice on a DR2 Deck is ludiocrous.

Yeah, with the wireless 'bonuses' stripped out, SR5's seems pretty playable and somewhat reasonable.

Even for someone like me who would prefer all technomancers swallowed their own tongues and died in the night.

Point of order: Were that the case, the log file could not be generated.

Incorrect my good man.
Have you never heard of being able to add to a Log File but not remove anything from said Log File, not even the Admin Boys. Many businesses (that rely upon an unbroken log of events) are set up so that they function this way.

Seconded!

Although, I kinda liked the crazy/unknown mysterious kid Otaku that you coulndn't play and weren't really defined. And Deus.

But once they became a real 'thing' I really didn't care for 'matrix mages'.

Maybe that was a result of how you perceived them? I never saw them as Matrix Mages, personally, even if they do use many of the same mechanics.

not only should the tough systems be guarded by highly skilled and well-equipped hackers, but the simple fact is that with a simple direct connection, a hacker can hack from anywhere on the planet with no noise penalties. which means you can have a security building in the middle of a country or continent loaded up with skilled deckers and their equipment that, with the flip of a switch, can connect to any number of important secure facilities (for security reasons, i would expect that they don't have all facilities connected to the same terminals at the same time... in fact, i would expect those terminals to only be able to connect to one facility at a time).

in short, you can take your 10 best deckers, put them in a centralized location, and have them on-call to go wreck people in any one of hundreds of possible locations at a moment's notice. if they happen to be logged in and waiting, the amount of time between an alarm going off and several expert security deckers being in the host could be less than 5 seconds.

you can't do that with physical adepts. you can't even do that with conjured spirits for the most part (and at least those conjured spirits will generally have to put themselves into a location where you theoretically could harm them before they can harm you; security deckers only ever really have to worry about the team's decker).

in short, it's entirely possible that various security corps (and especially the megas) have a crack team of extremely skilled deckers just waiting to show up on site and wreck anyone stupid enough to have wireless-enabled devices running, because those deckers could be covering hundreds of locations at the same time. no, they aren't going to have 10 prime runner equivalent deckers sitting around in every host, just like a corp facility won't have HTR teams at every security checkpoint. but a security guard could call in an HTR team, and a regular decker could call in the crack team of super-deckers... except the regular decker only has to wait a few seconds before reinforcements start showing up.

You'd have to have something that doesn't have any sort of an edit function to allow for updates to an existing log as data becomes available, and an infinite size (otherwise you could just push on every single element other than the ones you want to remove, and the others would fall off). If there's any sort of editing functionality, the super-user by definition must be able to access it.

Remember that SR4's admin is not a configured admin, but super-user privileges - if it is possible, they can do it.

Very likely, regardless I don't like em. Personal opinion and all that.

I think 2nd had the virtual dungeon.

Yes...



Wrong... You can remove access even from Admin... See Unwired.

Of course, all of that is for naught if you can directly edit the memory or contents thereof. Ans as for removing access from admin, I've seen nothing in Unwired to indicated it.

How easy is it to brick a device? I'm still in my initial readthrough of the PPF, so I'd like to know what to anticipate during our test plays.

Tough systems, sure. But runners don't raid Ares corporate hosts every day.



This is one way of doing things, but every site doesn't warrant full coverage. Also, with hundreds of sites to cover at once, you've got to expect that other sites will occasionally draw off these resources. Further, every tripped alarm can't summon the cavalry. There would need to be some sort of on-site analysis done to determine if a threat is real, faked, or what (otherwise, the easiest way to compromise a site's security would be to hit a ton of different sites at once to mask what the real target is).

The best security would involve an "on-site" (not necessarily in the building, but in the area) decker that can make that analysis and handle light threats, with the ability to kick major breaches up to the Matrix equivalent of an HTR team.

Correct, however, every tripped alarm will let a Decker know to Release the swarms of IC into the system to defend it, then look in on it later to see if the person has been dealt with or not, also...might as well trigger the silent alarm alerting the physical security.

A host automatically launches IC anyway. A decker showing up is usually Plan B. Decker swarm is somewhere about Plan D.

Also, why trigger the physical alarm? The hacker could be anywhere on the planet. Again, that would be a great way to throw security into chaos -- you trip alarms on several hosts, causing physical security at the relevant sites to go on alert everywhere which without a verified threat inevitably leads to confusing or incorrect assessments on the ground, which in turn leads to mis-applied HTR teams.

Also, hosts aren't necessarily tied to a physical location. One host could handle multiple sites hundreds or thousands of miles apart.

except that there has to be a reliable method to access the alarms for any given facility in a host, otherwise, you're relying on the physical security to trip their own alarms, which IMO seems a bit silly.

sure, i'm not suggesting that you replace the on-site (and probably less skilled) hacker, or that the matrix HTR team responds to every single problem. i'm just pointing out that it is not hard to set things up so that you can call in some very scary cavalry, and that said cavalry can arrive in potentially a couple of seconds. and these people can immediately start wrecking the gear of anyone foolish enough to be online when they arrive.

that said, i *do* think it would be available to many companies. not every security company will be able to offer a team of hacking adepts with maxed-out skills and attributes boosted as high as they can go (in fact, while a mega probably *could* manage something that, they probably have better things for those guys to do than sit around waiting for an emergency, so even they most likely don't do it), but pretty much every security company can offer something similar in concept if lesser in scale. and you can bet those ares matrix HTR teams are available to knight errant, as well, and knight errant offers security for anyone, not just as a police force. even other security companies can reasonably expect to offer *something* (even if it's just a half a dozen guys with rating 3 decks showing up to brick every wireless DR 2 or lower device the intruders have, it's still a powerful option against anyone who hasn't shut down their wireless or at the very least significantly boosted their defences).

Your prior suggestion was that a matrix attack in a host should trip a physical alarm at a site. Whether or not sites access their alarms on a host is sort of irrelevant to that from a Matrix security standpoint.




Gear attacks are something entirely different from Matrix host defense. A team of deckers in a comfortable office in New York can zip over to a host on the Seattle grid and act as the Matrix cavalry as if they were sitting in the host's mainframe room, but they can't just as easily zip over to the site and start wrecking gear. Those devices that are wirelessly connected to the Matrix, no matter where they are physically, aren't going to be inside the host. That means the room-o-deckers has to

1) Find the targets with Matrix Perception, and

2) Fight through distance noise and cross-grid penalties.

So your team of uber-deckers will probably be taking at least -7 penalties (-5 from noise with a satellite link, -2 cross-grid) on all their actions. To do any better, they'd need to be within about 6 miles of the target site.

Did you forget he postulated in his first scenario sketch, that the matrix HTR team will have zero noise connections to all their relevant locations? Forget satellite links, these guys have their dedicated lines.

Yeah, but I'm pretty sure what Epicedion is saying is that it doesn't matter if they have dedicated lines to their locations as the gear you're looking at bricking (the sam's gun, the rigger's rcc etc) aren't at that location. They'll be in that physical location, but unless the hacker is also in that physical location then they can't hack by direct connect. When a PC hacker accesses the host they're trying to breach, that doesn't mean all the other PCs have their gear hooked up to the host. They're probably just on the local grid, which meant matrix perception to locate them.

I suppose (just thinking this through) that IF the decker had the other PCs devices slaved to his deck (protecting them) then a security hacker could mark his deck and access the devices that way without penalty, maybe???

I love the idea of hackers hacking gear and implants, but I hate that the new edition forces this upon you. So if logical inconsistencies are fixed, it's going to be a lot harder, if a viable tactic at all.

The way they have the rules set up for hosts, your persona is either "in" or "out" of the host. You get a mark on it (legally or illegally) and then perform the "Enter Host" matrix action. Once you are inside the host, your persona is no longer visible from outside the host, and any matrix icons outside the host are no longer visible. You cannot interact with them, they cannot interact with you - except that a decker whose persona is inside the host could still send messages to his buddies outside.

So, while your team of deckers in New York could access a host of a building in Shanghai, and have no noise penalty at all, and proceed to attack the persona icon of any shadowrunner decker who has also gained access to the host, if they wanted to brick the gun of a samurai who was physically in Shanghai, they have to deal with the noise penalties (and also have to find the gun's icon with Matrix Perception).

"The virtual space inside a host is separate from the
outside grid. When you’re outside of a host, you can’t interact
directly with icons inside it, although you can still
send messages, make commcalls, and that sort of thing.
Once you’re inside, you can see and interact with icons
inside the host, but not outside (with the same caveat for
messages, calls, etc.).
When you enter a host, your persona actually enters
the host icon. This can be through a door or other portal,
but some hosts let you just pass through its outer skin."

Marks make some sense but the core rules only apply them In the most basic potential. What if a the character was on a host they owned, slaved to it or just 'in' the host.
That might imply a higher level of marks on/by devices they owned including the host...

As far as bricking What else can you do? SR4 had every device a potential target of matrix theft by a high skilled hacker. The combination of OS sores and bricking attacks makes Matrix usership sane while still allowing for information retrieval...

I think you said the same thing as me, but better and easier to understand

Are you saying that I'm incorrect on that last bit? I wasn't sure about that.

Who said the off-site decker was going to be bricking gear?
I figure they could be there with the sole job of kicking the runner decker out of the system (Cybercombat is a bitch).

Jaid did. And it was his original premise about off-site security.

It does work as you suggested, a method for attacking the decker, but it was still worth pointing out that remote bricking wouldn't be simple.

Bad Latin is bad



It wasn't the hackers who recoiled in horror from the concept, it was the sams (and every other cyber user, i.e. everybody) who considered the mere possibility an abomination. Give anybody an SR4 rulebook, one of the first questions will be "they can hack my arm? WTF?!"

Anecdotal LINKEH

Just add 62 years and some techno-magic ... sprinkle some paranoia to taste

et voila !

Bricking congress

now remind me again, surely someone TODAY thought about the possibility of hackers .. and yet this is still a thing

So, I'm sorry but we cannot direct a boat load of hate at CGL for writing this stuff !!

WE did it .. to OURSELVES first !

As regards bricking gear, I don't believe most things should be brick-able.

Cyberware should not be hackable at all unless the target somehow establishes a connection to the person's internal network, which might happen wirelessly if they have an implanted commlink, but otherwise will likely require them to access their skin somehow. Cyber should not under any circumstances be brickable, and the effects of hacking should be solely limited to being able to read information from someone's cyber that they might otherwise rather you could not read, such as getting the feed from their cyberears.

Commlinks shouldn't be brickable unless they're R3 or below; R4 or above might be potentially fuckable so bad you'll have to start them in safe mode or start them in their factory settings, which might cost you your data until you have time to fix it, but they should work. (I refuse to acknowledge the existance of "Cyberdecks" as so-called in SR5.) Internal commlinks shouldn't be brickable at all, though why you'd spend essence on a Rating 3 or less commlink is beyond me.

The software functions of physical gear should be brickable, but they should still operate manually. So you may be able to brick the smartgun functions of that guy's Ares Predator, but if he pulls the trigger, the sumbitch still fires. Electronic-only external gear (like AR glasses,) should be brickable, however, and replacing them should be cheaper than repair unless you're doing it yourself.

"Bonus" isn't a Latin word. It is derived from the Latin "bonum" which would pluralize to "bonums."

e.g. "This thread is giving me a stonking Bonum, right now!"

functionally, the crack hacker team i postulated is able to get themselves to be "in" the facility. they aren't using wireless to access it, they're connecting their device in to that area. there's no noise for the same reason there's no noise when you run a wire directly to a device.

effectively, their cyberdeck is physically "in" the facility they would be going to defend. or at least, a part of it is.

I have no idea what you're talking about here. There's nothing in the rules that even comes close to implying that you can connect a cyberdeck at one location to a universal data cable that goes to some other location and connects to a device, where that device now becomes the effective new location of the deck for wireless purposes.

what exactly do you imagine a direct connection is? somehow i can have zero noise from myself to the device with a direct connection, but as soon as i try to talk to the thing 2 inches away from that device my signal magically stops being able to travel through the wire and must go through the entire wireless matrix?

I believe the misunderstanding is this: Once inside a Host you no longer have noise penalties as the Host is everywhere & nowhere, it is its own location. Noise comes from trying to connect to a device over long distances such as being on a New York Grid & trying to connect to something on the Seattle Grid. So the Crack Team as mentioned, once inside the Host can influence any Device inside the Host with relative ease.

Which would not include devices in possession of runners.

That's.. exactly what happens. Because you don't have a wire to the second device, which is crazy far away. Do you think that your signal somehow breaks out of the wire and magically becomes wireless at the endpoint?

You're connected to a location very close to the runner team with zero noise. Since there is wireless stuff everywhere, you would obviously connect from THAT location directly with the runner team's devices via an antenna on site and thus only be subject to the same level of noise that you would have if you were physically present at that very location.

Frankly i don't care if the rules specifically allow that, logic dictates it must be so (once we accept the possibility of a zero noise direct connection to said location).

These are my thoughts on it.

I also feel that the cyberware itself was nerfed; making the bonuses feel a LOT less like 'bonuses.' If they wanted to give them bonuses, they should have had the 'ware act as is normally, with extra bonuses if you wanted to risk taking it online. I think drones and such? Sure, that's pretty sensible, and riggers at least have ways to defend against it(well, so do other people-it's called feed your stuff through a commlink to the hacker.)

I'm not against giving the hacker something to do in combat(okay, this is where I pull out my Old Person Card and say 'back in our day, if we wanted to decker to act in combat, we gave them combat skills' ), but at the end of the day, I feel these rules were not implemented as well as they could have been. I've been working on adjusting the bonuses in houserules(to be actual bonuses) for SR5 games. The idea of it wasn't bad-but yes, as many have said, they were implemented strangely/not as good as they could have been.(Oh yeah, and I also believe cyberware shouldn't be brickable; simply tinkered offline for a certain amount of time. Oh sure, that will suck major ass in the middle of a firefight, but it won't be like 'welp, this is useless now because I rolled bad!' I don't mind risk/reward-hence I don't mind there being the concept of the wireless bonus-I don't mind stuff having a price-though I think that's a sufficient price if they did it with actual bonuses instead of nerfing the piece-but yeah.)

The thing is, you're probably not connected via a cable to a location "very close to the runner team". You're connected to a host, which is an entirely virtual location. To be connected, via a cable, to a physical location with an antenna would work, but at that stage the thing become unfeasible as you're talking thousands of miles of direct connections in a world that is moving towards being entirely wireless. Effectively what you're suggesting is that each multi-site corp set up it's own telecoms grid (physical cabling infrastructure) on the same scale as the currently used landline ones, just to connect security hackers to physical device antenna. This would have other benefits: secure data transfer and such, but it's not been done as part of the setting currently. It's changing the world as written to add in this sort of thing.

Edit: I've been thinking about this some more. I suppose, as the tripA's already have global grids, they would have the infrastructure in place. However it still doesn't work, I don't think. The connection to a Host is direct (as it's virtual), but to connect to any physical device requires the that you use the antenna from your own device. Talking RL, and antenna at the end of a 2000 mile cable would still 'lag' just the same as a wireless signal. Distance is still a factor, connections aren't instant.

Well i was simply working with the postulation of a zero noise connection to the HTR hacker team's base given earlier in the thread.
As you can see from my comment ("once we accept...") I'm also not completely convinced that such a situation is likely, but THAT postulation hasn't been attacked, only the consequences.

I'm merely stating the consequences are simple logic, so if you wish to attack the concept, start with the zero noise direct lines.

Although, i admit, i can easily imagine the AAA companies having their own backbones.

Hehe. As you quoted me before I got my edit in, I'll post it again here:

Edit: I've been thinking about this some more. I suppose, as the tripA's already have global grids, they would have the infrastructure in place. However it still doesn't work, I don't think. The connection to a Host is direct (as it's virtual), but to connect to any physical device requires the that you use the antenna from your own device. Talking RL, and antenna at the end of a 2000 mile cable would still 'lag' just the same as a wireless signal. Distance is still a factor, connections aren't instant.


I'm sort of also questioning the zero noise direct lines. I don't think they apply to physical locations, only virtual ones.

The disconnect comes with how Hosts work.

They are this magical creation of Shadowrun that you just have to sort of nod and accept it, as the writers have handwaved it.

For instance, the way the rules work, a Host has no physical location. There is no noise penalty for distance connecting to it, because that would involve measuring distance from your deck or commlink's physical location to the physical location of the Host - but it has no physical location. It is entirely a construct of the Matrix. It is simply "in the Matrix floating in the sky." The host for the Space Needle isn't physically IN Seattle.

Now, that means that I can go online and access the host of the Space Needle, and it doesn't matter whether I am standing next to the building or if I am in Berlin - there is no noise penalty because the host is not the building, the host is a construct of the Matrix, and I am connecting directly to the Matrix.

Now, here is where it gets weird. As currently written, nothing actually determines the limit of how many devices can be connected to the host, nor the distance apart those devices could be, except a sort of fluff "you don't want more devices than you could physically protect." It also means that once inside the host, as you have a "direct connection" to all devices slaved to it, you gain zero noise when you connect to those devices.

So, imagine a restaurant that had one location in Los Angeles and another in New York. One host could be set up and have all the devices from both locations slaved to it. Once you are in the host, there is zero noise when you try and interact with those devices. Thus, if I am a decker in Denver, I can EITHER:

a) Go online, and, as long as the host isn't running silent, automatically find the icon (see page 235) and then hack the host - with no noise penalty, and if successful, you now have a direct connection to ALL devices attached to that host. So if I now want to hack the refrigeration unit in either location, I have no noise penalty.

b) Go online, have to attempt to find the refrigeration unit icon using Matrix Perception (including noise penalties), and then attempt to hack the refrigeration unit, which would use the defenses of the host, and I would need to include noise penalties. Note that if I do not enter the host, the ability for me to hack the New York refrigeration unit is impaired more because I am physically closer to the refrigeration unit in LA than I am to the one in New York.

Now, assume the decker went route A above. He is now in the host, and can freely access all devices connected to the host with no noise at all, but remember, he PHYSICALLY still is in Denver, so if he wants to hack any device NOT connected to the host, he has to take noise penalties to do so (and he has to leave the host to do so as well). So if someone tells him that there is a guy with all sorts of secrets on his commlink standing inside the New York location,

a) He cannot even see the commlink without leaving the host
b) Once he does leave the host, he could attempt to find the commlink using Matrix Perception (including noise)
c) Hack the commlink (including noise)

If instead, he wanted to take control of a camera connected to the host that was PHYSICALLY 1 foot away from the guy in New York, and the decker was still IN the host, he could attempt to do so with no noise whatsoever.

We can debate whether or not any of that makes sense, but that is the way it works in the rules.

This is wireless?

Bonum = neuter, bonus = masculine. And the plural of "bonum" would be "bona".

And yes, I am fully aware that English doesn't decline loanwords in their own grammar. But "bonuses", "focuses", "radiuses", or "doppelgangers" sound dumb enough to let me ignore that.

Kudos. Well said. This is exactly what I was trying to say, but much easier to understand.

But if that Individual is also in the Host (say as a Guest) then you could hack him directly, with no noise penalty, since he is in the host. Right?

That is exactly correct.

the device on the other hand that has an antenna is wireless. as has been pointed out, if i have a direct connection (which has zero noise) to a device in a location, then the only noise i should have to deal with would be based on that second device's location.

noise isn't caused by mere distance. it was something the megas built in to the matrix as an added thing to keep you from being able to easily hack the commlink of a corporate executive from the other side of the planet. it was actually added in deliberately to make it harder to hack from range, not just as a metagame thing, but as an in-setting explanation.

here's the explanation of noise in the matrix jargon list (p. 216):

"noise: Unwanted data or wireless signals that make using
the Matrix slower or more difficult."

from page 230, where noise is defined, we get:

"Noise is the static on the wireless Matrix. There are a
lot of things that can mess with your signal, like nearby
electronics, natural and artificial dampening, and even
cosmic background radiation."

from page 231, on the "Noise and Matrix Use" table, we can see that the Noise Level for: "Directly connected (any distance)" is zero. *any distance*.

if you are not running the signal over the matrix, there is no noise. period. host or no host, it doesn't matter, because when you have a direct connection, regardless of distance, there is no noise along that connection. you are not using the matrix, and noise only causes problems when trying to use the matrix.

as to infrastructure, it's already there. has been for years. even the wireless matrix of SR4 assumed wired connections as the backbone of the whole thing. the megas are known to have global grids in place. all the old telecom lines are still going to be in place as well. pretty sure the core book mentions somewhere or another huge telecom cables going across the ocean as well, though i would generally assume that most of these corp matrix security sites won't be covering the entire globe (more likely you'll have them covering a few cities at most). basically, it's just a matter of maintenance, and when the benefit is effectively multiplying the number of security hackers you have by however many sites you make them able to connect to, the cost suddenly becomes a lot more reasonable. putting in the wires is annoying, time consuming, and most likely not very cheap (though i would expect they have drones and such doing the work, making it cheaper than it would be today)... but compared to the problems involved in getting a team of uberhackers for every single secure facility you have, it's peanuts.