I was watching Alias again last night, and a classic gimmick caught my eye. Alias isn't the only show to use it, of course, it just happens to be where I saw it.

It's the kind of situation where you need information off an isolated system. Sydney Bristow (superspy mundane or close physad, you choose ) doesn't have the skills to hack the system; Marshall Flinckman (hacker extraordinaire and all around genius) doesn't have the skills to sneak in past the security.. So Sydney does the B&E, hooks up a little gadget to the computer, bingo, Marshall has remote access. I'm guessing it's via satellite or some such.

Now, i don't have the Matrix book (and with SR4 on the horizon I admit I won't be getting it) so this may be covered in there, but is this stunt replicable in SR?

Either a really long male-to-male section of datacord, or your favourite wireless utility from Matrix.

~J

yep. all you need is a dataline tap and a wireless uplink. install the tap, plug it into the uplink. voila.

Yup it is.

Infact I've recently done excatly the same thing with my Adept (Invisable type) but had a Laser hook up to the van out side.

I have stats kicking around for a set of small flying toasters that relay a laser link through a building to a large rotodrone with a full-sized satellite dish. Impractical, but neat.

~J

Impractical i'd say. Wouldn't have to be like VERY steady which small roto drones won't be??

I can imagine someone walking upto to one, while it's there "doing nothin" and giving it a prod....

Though the idea is very cool

Well, within the building you use wire-guided spider drones to kick around the connection from floor to floor within the ductwork; it's only on the roof, from the small wheeled carrier drone sitting on the outside of the air duct it just opened to the Condor flying high overhead (and from there to the riggermobile where your decker is sitting) that you need the laser/microwave connection.

All covered in the elaborate dance concocted by the Infiltration Challenge people.

Standard tactic in my group: Dataline tap with a wireless uplink, picked up by a rigger blimp with retrans unit. The decker doesn't need to be within a few miles of the area, but can still do the whole thing remotely.

In fact, because our group doesn't have a rigger or decker, that's how I deal with decking. There's an NPC rigger/decker married couple that handles everything remotely... if the team wants decking support, the B&E type has to figure out how to get the dataline tap installed. Once that's in place, the decker and rigger handle the rest, without ever even seeing the team in person.

JaronK