Thought the crew here would find this interesting... https://www.axios.com/cybersecurity-insulin...f549c8ded5.html

This is a problem.

Corporate Open Source has already decided they can't trust critical projects to hobbisyt coders, no matter how long they've been doing it.

It also isn't a recent discovery.

Too bad Cheney is too retarded to understand how FUN combat hacking is.

Even the US is throwing malware at enemies now, so is it a big stretch of the imagination to say the rush towards open source by private companies is just ammo against threats like these?

If 5th edition is any guide......
Devices like these in 6e will have more than just all deckers to worry about. Mages and Technomancers will be able to influence devices too. *Sick*

in fairness, technomancers actually being able to hack things (rather than needing to rely on a sprite to do everything for them) would count as an improvement

I was sure Technomancer gained some ability to do so without sprites.
I have not looked at 5e rules for some time now, but if I come across it in the near future I'll post it.

well i mean, it's technically possible. but the cost of building a technomancer is so high that it generally works out to petnomancer being the only build that works well at all, last i looked. they did eventually get around to making some changes that help somewhat, but considering the quadruple nerf beatdown they got to kick off the edition, a couple of small buffs was never going to be enough.

so, yes, they gained a few extra points of skills in chargen, which makes them less incapable of doing things themselves than prior to that buff... but they're still far behind a decker (which started off in a good position and got buffed by the addition of new gear, new rules, etc) and should frankly probably still rely on compiled/registered sprites for doing most actual hacking.

EVEN the US?

And probably, yes. Though i they have the quality and quantity of personnel to adequately develop these remains to be seen.

Considering the state of the US education system, I would be very surprised that the US could mount an effective cyber defense. Full disclosure, I'm an American and I think that until we fix our adult daycare system (AKA Colleges) then we're going to get our asses kicked by all and sundry.

I've said it to my friends, in a Cyber war verses NORTH KOREA, I fear we would get beat. While NK makes their students WORK 18 hrs a day, our students argue who can use which bathroom.

For the longest time, throughout the tech boom, the US relied on immigrants to do that for them (I mean, look at the average tech entreprenneur - precious few actual, born Americans there). According to my sister, who is in Stanford a month a year for professional reasons, American-educated students stop to be relevant in US science from doctorate level up - precious frew MINT professors, scientists, researchers and even administrative people are US natives. This worked for as long as the US was very accomodating to immigrants. It stops ... well, you said it.

As I see it, though, the problem is earlier. Grade and High Schools. I have no idea what you do during High School, but you manage to drag an equivalent to a middle school degree (9 to 10 years) to 13 years. From what little I know of the US school system, though, deprivatizing the curricula, standardizing and strictly regulating learning materials and significantly tightening schedule and curriculum to the level of a prep school as the standard would probably work to get US schools (and graduates) to competitive standards again. Do away with standardized testing, offer left-behind students special counseling instead of making them the determinant for progress speed, and make learning materials transparent and ban the secrecy currently prevalent. Of course, as with everything in the US, this means fighting powerful and entrenched oligarchs and their pet corporations.

While a vast amount of products are actually produced outside of the US and Europe, there has of yet been no competitive equivalent to, say an SAP, Microsoft, Google or AT&T to give examples.
While foreign workers are about at less than half of what they were at their heights and some technical fields in the US only employ about a third of what the peaks were.

You do know where SAP comes from, right?

Yes, an American equivalent of SAP has yet to develop.

That aside, Google and AT&T are more a product of the US' leniency towards uncompetitive monopoly markets than technological ingenuity. And Google especially was built at every level primarily by immigrants. The rise of pure-scam "innovators" like Uber also speaks volumes about what the american tech scene really is good at.

Down with the Imperialists Indeed!

It seems as if the options are steal secrets or look for an unfair competitive advantage, or at least it always comes down to those options.

Am I too late to say "trees"?

Agreed. My 11th and 12th grade year were completely worthless. I would have loved to graduate High School at grade 10 and then go to Community College.

I wish they would just skip the last two years, but the Teacher's Union would fight that tooth and nail. It IS getting a tiny bit better with High Schools though.

It's neither innovative new algorithms (like google) or economies of scale (like amazon) with Uber, Lyft et al. They tried to make an uncompetitive, less efficient than traditional competitors product that also causes great harm to society into a global monopoly by utilizing the wellspring of venture capital and comparatively loose monetary policies in the US back then. It's basically capitalism according to Karl Marx. Blatant idea theft from evil megacorporations that at least are actual innovators is the icing on the shitcake.


May I ask what you did, curriculum-wise? Also, efficiency-wise, a jump to an open, free, general prep school (basically operating like today's high schools) and abolishment of the current system of colleges altogether (which exist only to fleece students and make education unavailable to the lower classes anyway) would be best, imho. A vocational component - like the German dual system Melania Trump, of all people, is taken by - would also be a good addition, coupled with a middle school degree at 10 years.

Unsurprisingly, my idea is a euro-style school system.

I remember when the the word was that the next big microprocessor company cannot be in the US, or the next big operating system cannot be from a US company.
Has not happend that way at all. So the US education system must be doing something right.

Not really.

Over 57% of STEM jobs in Silicone Valley are being filled by workers from abroad, because they can not fill those spots domestically.

And with the current administration tightening the visa rules, even for STEM related hirings, many tech companies in the US are expressing concerns about being able to fill the expanding demand for this skillset as they point out domestic education is not properly preparing students for STEM jobs, or even letting them know those options exist.

One student survey had 64% of them not even knowing there were Math related jobs available. So it is not just a question of education, but also actually a need for better encouraging students to look at STEM options that they might not realise exist.

Uhm, no. Immigrants have. Americans don't exist much either in Tech R&D or university research in the US. The current idiocracy is just digging your country's grave. Besides, the last big tech and microprocessor companies were all Chinese. All the US managed was pie-in-the-sky-companies like tesla, and scams like Lyft or Uber.

There are some incorrect statements here about the microprocessor market. Intel, the largest microprocessor chipmaker in the world, is an American company. Samsung, the second largest, is Korean, not Chinese. ARM, which arguably has a bigger footprint on the catalog/OEM microcontroller market than Samsung through licensing agreements on the ARM architecture, is British. AMD, the second largest server/PC supplier (ARM architectures dominate the mobile market), is also American. NVIDIA, which competes with AMD in the GPU (no longer microprocessors, but whatever) market, is also American.

It's true that many employees of these companies are immigrants (~20% generalizing from a Pew Research thing here), but more are American citizens, including second generation immigrants. So I don't think this industry in particular reflects particularly poorly on American engineering education.

Mainland China doesn't have a particularly successful track record of semiconductor (including microprocessor) manufacturing, but they're trying to change that. On the other hand, TSMC (in Taiwan) is one of the largest fabrication (but not design) houses in the world. A Chinese state-backed venture fund recently bought Imagination Semicondutor which might give Chinese companies access to the somewhat popular, but dated, MIPS CPU architecture IP. There are legal questions about that deal.

All this said, I agree that there are problems in the American education system and workforce. Colleges do cost too much, which does seem debt driven, and there is some evidence that they don't improve critical thinking or writing (though that study didn't look at other educational outcomes). I think more sever problems are systemic, unequal educational outcomes and a failure to provide the workforce with sufficient robotics, AI and computer security professionals. I'd argue that these problems problems have a similar root, which is a lack of universal pre-K and understaffing/undertraining at the elementary school level. Educational research has been way ahead of classroom practice for decades, and I think much of that has to do with the lack of time and teaching resources, and other research suggests that students start identifying themselves as STEM-capable in 7th and 8th grade, which is where I think the supply is drying up.

It's not just their number but also the jobs they fill. The janitors, asisstants and management are much less crucial to innovation, research, design and implementation of new technologies than the respective specialists, and it'S there that many non-Americans or naturalized first generation immigrants make their presence felt.

It'S true though that China has no major microprocesor/semiconductor producer. That was sloppy of me. Still, Samsung isn't American, neither is ARM, so my point versus nstol_whisper still stands.

And no one mentioned Intel? Motorola?

Read before you reply.

And that 20% is I think the high end of the estimate as the total percentage of workers. As that total has been going down every year since 1990 or so when the percentage was about 25%. And that was from a high of 30%+ in the 80s.
So I think the system here is working. My Opinion.

That may be your opinon, but that doesn't make it fact. Fact is: your claim all major programming and microtechnology companies are American is wrong, as is your claim that the US educational system is working better than those of other developed countries, because it isn't, no matter what metric you use. Problems don't go away no matter how much positive thinking kool-aid you guzzle. Closing your eyes to them to feel good about yourself will only make them worse.

One thing to look forward to is how much more aggressive deckers will be when it comes to takng down wireless devices.
Switching guns takes a minor action I would guess so deading a smart gun for instance......

Except when you played 5th, you may have noticed most folk simply turned OFF wireless while on a Run so avoid the detection and bricking function, so much so that it was actually pretty much standard on even Missions adventures.
Which should tell you something when the semi-official games set up turn if OFF rather than incorporate it into their tables.

Maybe this has been addressed, but it will be a tough one to fix.

The core problem is that combat hacking takes away all agency from non-decker mundane augmented characters, and players, unsurprisingly, do not like it. Despite some authors' insinuations, this is not the result of deficiencies in brain development, but because, essentially, they want to preserve the agency of their characters.

In a game where the playing field between NPC and PC is pretty even - whatever can affect NPCs can affect PCs in the same way - this is impossible to solve while both preserving aggressive combat hacking and player agency for cybered characters. And players WILL opt out of this to preserve agency, even foregoing boni like the substantial +2 dice from a smartgun, because players need agency for the basic concept of an RPG to work.

It is a conundrum that is impossible to solve, a circle unsquarable. No matter how much authors insist it is a good idea. When in two consecutive editions palyers went to substantial lengths to reject your idea, maybe it is because that idea isn't as good as you think it is. You could say combat hacking is Shadowrun's Hard Brexit. A dumb idea at face value, doubled down on out of a combination of stubbornness, false assumptions and plain old arrogance.

As a note from industry: It is vastly cheaper to recruit foreign-educated postgraduates because their schooling is vastly cheaper, meaning they will accept lower salaries.

A US-born doc with 300k in debt isn't going to take a gig that pays $75k a year if they can help it.

Same for a lot of the tech industry, either through vendor companies or h1b visas, they hire credentialed people in from abroad because they have lower salary expectations than US-educated nationals who have debts to pay. If a process can be made into a runbook and done remotely, they will often instead outsource entire departments, mostly to India as there is a glut of 'trained' people there and several major vendor companies who do this professionally.

One more way the US educational system fucks those who absolve it over, I guess. Though outsourcing doesn't work real well with actual tech tech companies that produce actual products; this is how you end up with suicidal "autopilot" systems on cars and planes.

Same drek I did in 10th grade, but more "advanced". I also agree with you about college being a scam. I am a LOT more proud about my Associates degree that I got a local community college, then the Bachelors degree I got at a more expensive college.

I can Imagine well armed and armored groups moving between defensive positions just to look for an advantage gain......
If you had no clear advantage before you moved and you suddenly have a huge Edge advantage after, with cover giving the same bonus defensive rating or less. Maybe the other group turned a smartlink off.......

eh, doubt it'll be *that* big a deal. we've recently found out you're apparently capped at 2 edge per round (ie everyone taking a turn), so i'm anticipating that at least some groups won't even care about cover *or* armour, they'll just walk in and start shooting because they already have maximum edge gain from their own actions.

some will still take cover anyways, of course, simply for RP reasons. but it would be nice if the rules of the game supported their assumption that cover is actually an important thing for keeping you alive.

I hear that China, India, Japan, to give examples, have great school systems. Maybe people should migrate to those countries and seek education and a new life. They are very competitive.

Sorry, but no. I might not like the education system, but I love my country... warts and all. Only country on the planet where you can tell your elected officials to frag off and they can't lay a finger on you.

it is a great thing about your country that you can do that. it is not even a tiny bit close to being the *only* country on the planet where you can do that. there are in fact *many* countries that enjoy freedom of speech, though not necessarily exactly the same way you do (for example, in my country the courts have not ruled that corporations have a constitutional right to bribe elected officials into doing their bidding, which generally means i don't need to tell my elected officials to frag off quite as often, and at the very least reduces the size and visibility of the bribes that can be offered. i'm sure there are still corrupt politicians that are essentially taking bribes from corporations, of course, but at least if they get caught they get in trouble for it).

Pretty sure you'll face consequences for telling elected officials to frag off, depending on how insulting you express it. Or any other person, for that matter.
Freedom of speech does not give freedom to badmouth anyone, and having consequences for that is also not a lack of freedom in general and instead a reaffirmation for the recipient's freedom to not be slighted. Or in short: My freedom ends where your nose starts.

However, paraphrasing recent ludicrous statements made by a certain orange monster is pretty uncool, especially if you consider that loving your country and wanting to change it for the better is not at all exclusive, but rather an expression of that love. Warts can be removed with a little bit of work.

Indeed, it is funny to hear folk who say if you don't like it here to just leave leave, but will in the next breath tell folks wanting to come in because there are problems in their homelands that they should stay there and fix it first.

My apologies. I should have looked that up before opening my yap. There are a couple of other countries with a guaranteed Right of Free Speech.

And if I had MY way, politicians would only have one term in office and were barred from being lobbyists for a decade... and the penalty for bribery would be 20 year minimum.

Yeah, they prefer to just shoot you and then claim self-defense. Your president bragged he could do excactly that. Unless you are Canadian, of course, then it's valid, though not the only country where you can do this (barring commiting a crime against said official, as bannockburn noted).

well, presuming we mean *literally* telling them to frag off... not really, no. not legal ones, anyways. you might face social consequences as other people disapprove of your actions, but it isn't libel to just tell someone to frag off.

Please, I don't want to get into political discussions. Every leader has their screw ups. Does Trump have them? Of course he does! Does that make him a evil person? No. Only makes him human.

<citation needed>

Trump is cheerleading for his administration running literal concentration camps with a double digit and rising death toll due to the conditions people are being kept in.

The 57% sounds really bogus (maybe it isn’t there are stem companies that are not Software after all) I currently work as a developer at arguably the most diverse of the t2 tech giants. I literally had a meeting today about how to hire more diverse candidates. My current team is over 60% male white dudes from the US, closer to 80% if you want to count Eastern European white dudes. There are more diverse teams than mine but there’s also some without any diversity. Silicon Valley (HBO) pretty much nailed my experience over nearly two decades with four white dudes and the token Indian. (Hooli)

Please, let's not get into political discussions. This will not be fun for anyone. I won't be able to convince you on anything about Trump, and vice versa.

Hence why I said "depending on how exactly you express it" And of course depending on your country's laws on insults. Libel is also a whole different beast.

But KCKitsune is right, political discussion is a great way to get a thread shut down, and I think we're waaaaaaay off from the original topic, so I'll excuse myself from this thread now

There are alot of STEM jobs that are not directly software, it's baked into the name after all: Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math.
These sort of jobs to try to understand how the world works and to solve problems.
Most lists usually go by the set of 46 STEM occupations that are classified into four different categories: computer and mathematics; engineering and surveying; physical and life science; and managerial as designated by the Department of Commerce list of STEM occupations.
The demand for STEM related jobs has been steadily increasing and even the government has been pushing the Dept of Education to try and ramp up more STEM related training to try and plan for this demand. Which they will need to do as they continue to tighten the rules for F-1 and H-1B visas.

The areas of Higher education, health care, and social scientists are sort of a grey area as they certainly require advanced skills, but on many lists are not counted as STEM for number crunching purposes.

And Eastern European white dudes still count as being from abroad, unless your own definition of immigrant/foreign worker only counts those of different skin tones.