I've got a question about Hacking a comlink.
I'm pretty sure they only have an Admin Account but you don't need to take the +6 Mod to hack that account.
But I can't find where that is written exactly.
Can You help me ?

HokaHey
Medicineman

Pretty sure that we always took the +6 Modifier for the Admin Account...
Did not really matter all that much...

I guess you got the rules on peripheral nodes into this: The Precious pg. 225, Access Accounts, last paragraph. I don´t remember such a rule for only-admin devices.

(Edit: The same rule can be found in Unwired in the section on Nodes (Peripheral), pg. reference for the English version currently unavailable.)

Nope I know that peripjeral Nodes are definitely NOT comlinks
but I'm quite sure that comlinks only had an Admin account but I can't find it ...

JahtaHey
Medicineman

You can have plenty of accounts on commlinks: you can create accounts for your friends to be able to have access to your pictures, some of your sensors or other stuff like this.

I, too, seem to recall that, though I might be thinking of Eclipse Phase.

I'd say that with commlinks, they can be Admin-only devices, but they don't have to be. I mean, only a paranoid lunatic would set his device up so only an admin account can do anything, right? Riiight?

Basically, yeah. As with most IT things, there is going to be a broad gulf between the kind of security that is technically possible, and what actually gets implemented on 99.99% of most devices. So your average Joe on the street is going to have a commlink which has not been properly configured to absolutely never under any circumstances even consider listening to anything that doesn't have admin-only properly configured. Corp, government, etc, IT departments will have commlinks they issue set up with the full range of accounts, specifically so they can set the end-user as only a luser and keep the admin functions for themselves.

Paranoid lunatics (IE, Shadowrunners,) will have insane, hidden device rules set up specifying that admin accounts are only valid if they were set up on 7 March, 1274 A.D. by an admin account which was itself set up on February 31st, 2205, and that the device should cut wireless and begin screaming its head off if any account which does not meet those criteron attempts to login or access any files.

I like the way you think.

Realistically it would be the other way round: Security-conscious folks set up their devices to use normal user accounts for nearly everything, switching to admin rights only when absolutely necessary.

Windows before Vista was (mostly) a system with only admin accounts. The problem with this is that every program runs with the privileges of the user who started it. If an admin user starts a browser, the browser runs with admin privileges, and if an attacker uses a vulnerability in the browser to execute malicious code, that code runs with full admin privileges, too.


Ingame, hacking an account is an abstraction for overcoming several restrictions to create an account or gain access to it, even though the attacker normally should not have the rights to do so. Any additional restrictions like admin accounts being only created on a full moon are part and parcel of the restrictions overcome by the hacking action.

Commlinks should be able to have all kinds of accounts, even if restricting yourself to admin only is a way of increasing security (ruleswise, don´t do that in RL).