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[Ruski]

anyone got any data security jobs now that the new wave of hacker-heaven has hit the screamsheets?

here's a couple i've been hit up with.

1) protect generic suit A's comlink. walk arround 'near' them, and make sure you crash any hackers that look to interested in what he's carrying.

2) setup corperate army security. the dull job of building "unhackable" comlinks for the security force to use, protecting them from runners and the like.

3) hackproofing vehicles, by putting radio absorbant materials in the frame, and looping the external antena through a series of firewalls.

I think it just got a whole lot more expencive to live in the new world.

-RuskiFace the Pirate

[Retread]

You could always, you know... Disconnect your commlink...

[Ruski]

Well, while you can un-plug yourself for personal security, it's kinda rude to ask your protect-ee to do the same for his own security... expecially seeing as how he's paying you to protect him from the riff-raff.

-RuskiFace the Pirate

[Retread]

Yeah, I suppose so. But the whole Commlink thing always occurred to me to be a goofy little liability. I mean, if you find out that your commlink is being hacked, can't you just turn it off right then? Of course, being a good hacker means not having that happen, but it still seems odd to me.

If your charge needs to be protected and his life was on the line, seems like he would be more than willing to go without his e-mail for a little while...

[Gabriel]

Actually, you bring up a good point, Retread. Just how long could an average person in 2070 go without media/information immursion??? Think about it. That would be something akin to you or me leaving a city and sleeping in a tent in the middle of a forrest for several weeks at a time on multiple occasions, then trying to reintegrate with what's going on in the world as soon as we get back. I wonder just how long that would take to drive a person to do stupid, unsafe things, like leaving on a hacked commlink and just hiring a runner to "fix" it?

Gabriel

[Retread]

Well, it sounds like the Matrix Addiction Flaw to me.

[Gabriel]

See, that's the problem, how would someone like you or I really know just how immersed in the matrix culturu would be 70 years from now. To give an example, do you think anyone could have forseen the width and bredth of the television industry in 2006 from thier perspective in 1936?

Gabriel

[kv]

Yeah, but haven't you ever had a job that required you to know what was going on, 24/7? I used to run a theater, and they would call me pretty much any time, day or night, if there was a problem. I mean, they would call me at 3am because they couldn't figure something out, and then I would drive in and fix it, and then go home and go back to sleep.

I think of Shadowrunning as a profession like that- you have to be in the know at all times, otherwise you might call up your good  Yak buddy Tetsuo, and find out that he's out of favor, and they're killing all of his contacts.

So... yeah.

   -kv

[Retread]

The interesting fact about this is how it affects the Magical World in Shadowrun. If mana is psychosensitive, what happens if it starts taking on the appearance of what people are thinking about when they are using their commlink? So what happens when astral space starts to look like the Augmented Reality?

[Gabriel]

Well, to a mage who is percieving, it probably already does. But you have to remember, AR has been around since BEFORE shadowrun. In fact, all of the visually interactive cyberware is based on AR. A smart link is a specialized program output through dedicated AR. Cyberoptics are describes as being "overlaid" on top of normal vision and all options are symultaneaous (sp) which means that AR is continuous for anyone with an eye job.

I had been developing a new kind of AR interface in my game that linked to a person's P-Sec or headware memory that would work like an optic adress book. Anyone entered into the d-base would be recognized via cyberoptics and then have relevant information listed in the user's field of vision. Talk about handy in every-day life. And I could see it being a MUST for corporate ladder-climbers.

Gabriel

[Retread]

I thought Augmented Reality was the overlay of a virtual environment on the level of an interactive computer simulation. I always thought a smartgun was not a "camera" but rather a simsense rig designed to capture muscular movement and find range to calculate firing solutions.

[Gabriel]

Well OOC, I've been reading articles on AR for years, and it is already here, it is just that SR took it further by integrating it into cybernetics. For instance, a helmet-mounted HUD for your average marine is considered AR because it overlays data into his field of vision without actually having to recreate that field of vision as you would with a camera fed point of view (like a tank driver might have to use). In SR, you you have the exact same thing, only hooked into your body instead of a CPU mounted in a head band. All augmented reality does is add to your environment instead of recreating it in a different form, i.e. smartlinks, select sound filters, cyber-optic vision enhancments, etc.

I realise this is getting a bit petty, but I think this tech has been massivly understated in SR up to this point, and having it brought out as a "new technology" is a bit stupid. Of course they were probably just looking for a cool term to use with the wireless matrix concept and Augmented Reality sounded like a neat buzz-word.

Gabriel

[Retread]

Well, keep in mind that SR also has its share of global disasters to mitigate the lack of advancing tech. I mean, sure, at the rate the world is going now, it's not that far-fetched, but you throw in all the VITAS-3 plagues, Goblinization, global magical awakening, two horrific economy-devastating computer crashes, SURGE, and near nuclear-annihilation, you can see why things slowed down a bit.

[Gabriel]

True, but by the very nature of cybernetics, AR was not one of the thechnologies taht was lost. It was alive and well in the 2010's as well as the 2030's. I have a smartlink that I got in 2051. Seems to me that AR was alive ans well if a smartlink even existed.

However, that having been said, you can't forget, NEVER forget, that the original Crash Virus targeted high security files and used their own security measures against them. The more secure the file was from standard tampering, the easier it was for the virus to destroy. So not only did you have some really high tech, cutting edge bits of research wiped out, but also all of the ground work for them. It's not as hard to reinvent something as it is to invent it, but it still takes time and background work. And that's assuming you can get the same teams to work on the projects. So I can see how there are a ton of "holes" in the SOTA curve. I can see how AR didn't achive global saturation until now, but I still thing packaging it as something new is just silly.

Gabriel

[Retread]

Well, it sounds like a gimmick since it's still the Matrix, it's just they made it more prominent in connections to cybernetics and gear. Personally, I don't think I'd want my bank account readable through a radio signal, let alone my neuro-muscular Skillsoft Wires...