Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

Exactly. Monofilament wire does exist, but it's not the omni-lethal "cut-through-anything" superweapon that cyberpunk fiction makes it out to be. (At least, not yet...)

Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

I believe that it causes more problems than it solves and also doesn't fit the TL of the SR universe and also would require immense effort on the part of the GM to keep from overpowering the setting in the party's favor.

I also doubt its possible from a technological standpoint, especially to the degree mentioned. Unless of course the decker has compartmentalized mind and such things as that.

However, I do like the page in the article with the cyberdecks. Seems neat how easily that was worked up and how cheap they are as well. And however circular the discussion was thanks for the entertainment for the day.

Anyone have any inclinations on how to work out rigging? It may be possible that I'm missing something obvious in the GURPS books at this point as I am having another bout of sleeplessness but I'm interested in everyone's take on it.

Having never played a rigger before its an interesting topic to see how it could be done in GURPS.

Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

Not possible now. Will it be in 10 years? 20? 50? 100? I don't know ... but it's at least as plausible as anything else in Ultra-Tech.

And again, Van Eck Phreaking (a scanner to analyze the bit-states of an electronic target) is real, not superscience.

Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

I never said it was lethal yet *chuckles* just that it existed :)

Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

Buy possession with machine only, maybe gadget limitations if it's part of your deck, design the drones either as vehicles or PCs, and you use your mental attributes but the drone's physical attributes when you're jumped in. Take penalties for jamming, etc.

Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

At the fringes, it can be blurry. Spaceships uses 'limited superscience' to refer, if I understand correctly, to things that are physically possible but technically problematic.

But the distinction isn't arbitrary. If you call antigravity and reactionless engines realistic, you're using some definition of 'realistic' that doesn't concern itself with not flagrantly contradicting known physics.

The 'I don't know what's wrong, so there's no such thing' argument really holds no water.

Magical precision induction might be limited superscience. But even before getting into the problems of creating the desired field, we're talking about performing low-level hardware manipulation on unknown hardware, that you can't precisely locate, while it's moving. How are you even getting started? If your setting has sensors that can analyze the guts of someone's cyberware in realtime mid-firefight, that's got a lot of implications before we get into trying to hack them.

Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

I totally get that argument, and I certainly don't begrudge someone using the elements of a game that they like, and ditching the ones that they don't. For example, wizards in my DF games can cast Healing spells, D&D Purism be damned. Why? Because I said so.


Cool! :D

I've been giving this some thought as well, though I haven't written anything down yet. Transhuman Space has a bunch of stuff about teleoperation and robotic drones ("cybershells"), which seem a good fit.

Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

.....and this was pointed out in the Shadowtalk in the very first edition of the Street Samurai's Guide. :)

Monowire edges actually had a very modest effect in the game mechanics too.

Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

Just incidentally, EM fields aren't going to effect the photons in a fiber optic system anyway. I don't know of anything that would.

Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

Yeah, but wasn't the damage code for monofilament whips like 10S?

Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

Yeah, but that was based on Gibsonesque coolness factor, not on science :P If I could find my copy I'd watch Johnny Mnemonic right now...

Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

Not in GURPS game mechanics! Armor Divisor (10) renders most TL9-10 armors virtually worthless.

Ugh... the movie version of monowire (or some kind of glowing "laser wire" or something) was even more egregious than the version in the book....

Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

They put an LED on it to make it visible more or less.

Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

That seems like a useful distinction. I like it.

Not completely arbitrary, no ... but the operative term there is known physics. Our understanding of the universe has been increasing exponentially; many consider quantum mechanics and string theory to be "metaphysics" rather than science, because of the sheer volume of untestable claims they make (especially the various permutations of string theory). And virtually every ultra-technology that isn't a conservative extrapolation of current tech relies on presumed advances in scientific knowledge.


My point exactly.


If we're simply talking about an issue of processing/analyzing speed, that can easily be hand-waved by the (quite reasonable) assumption that ultra-tech computers will be orders of magnitude faster than contemporary computers.

If we're talking about a problem with detecting the bit-states of a piece of electronic equipment, I again have to refer you to Van Eck Phreaking (I see what Godogma was saying about circularity in this discussion ... I think that's the 5th time I've had to point out that remote viewing of a computer's electronic state is possible in the Really Real World.)

Overall, I don't find it any less plausible than blasters, SAIs, and nanomachines -- all of which have serious "bootstrapping" problems given our current understanding of physics, but are assumed by futurists, sci-fi writers, and gamers alike to be possible.

Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

Remote viewing of a computer monitor as television is possible in the real world, not what the computer is doing on the inside. Since most of those nifty cybernetics don't have a screen to emit the electromagnetic stuff for it to read and neither do guns if you're using the Van Eck theorem as the entirety of your hypothesis the only thing you're going to be manipulating/viewing is the HUD.

But that's neither here nor there. I'm going to try and attain unconsciousness, that beautiful thing called sleep that has thus far eluded me.

Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

Again, not yet. However, the bit-state ("what the computer is doing on the inside") also produces an electromagnetic signature; that's how it's possible to read a harddrive even after it's been erased. Hell, that's how it's possible for an electronic computer to do anything -- the manipulation of electrical charges. Extrapolating current computing, wireless, Van Eck, and similar technologies forward, it's not hard to conclude that reading the internal state of a computer, from a distance, is well within the realm of "realistic" future technology. But it's definitely futuristic, in that we can't do it now.


Good night! :)

Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

No, I'm talking about detecting the basic hardware structure of your target electronics. Never mind phreaking out the 'bit-states', you can't even talk about getting started until you know exactly how the circuitry runs. (You also probably can't meaningfully read the bit states until you've done that.)

If you can trivially scan something right down to its microchips in real time, I hope you're not having anyone bother trying to spot things with mere vision instead of instantly analyzing the entire area with an ultrascanner.
...Uh, say what now? Bootstrapping problems? Physics issues with SAI?

Blasters, at least in these parts, tends to mean particle beam weapons. Which are not physically problematic at all, though there may be issues with man-portable versions.

SAIs really aren't anything physicists are positioned to comment on in practical terms. We do lack any theory of how to build one other than uploading, which isn't yet viable.

Some versions of nanomachines are physically impossible. Some not so much. Not sure what bootstrapping has to do with this either...self-replicating nanomachines are a pretty poor basis for nanomachine technology in any case. But we can't design them anyway, so the difficulties of producing them are still a ways off.
I'd think if your EM generator is magical enough, you could in fact interfere with fiber optics as well. Light is an EM wave, after all. Though I may be missing something there.

I don't think you'd be able to read the fiber optics by any analogue of Van Eck phreaking, though.

Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

A hard-drive stores data in the magnetization state of the ferromagnetic material of the disk. Erasing it for practical purposes won't necessarily totally wipe that clean. I don't think that's got anything to do with the rest of what you're talking about...

I have seen things about the possibility of phreaking RAM, I think.

Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

As a thought experiment (with the disclaimer than I'm not a 2070-era computer engineer): use high-sensitivity EM scan to get an internal "map" of the target electronics over the course of about a second -- which, with an arbitrarily fast system, will represent umpteen kerjillion individual bit-states. My computer has a program which will statistically extrapolate (and update, based on incoming data) the hardware's physical structure from this information. The program has access to a database of common electronic system configurations, from smartguns to cyberware to network firewalls, and an expert system that will fit the closest analog to the data I have, giving me at least a "rough sketch" of the remote system, based on where the EM fields emanate from.


"Something" in this case has to be an electronic device or system; optics still have a place, although sophisticated AR setups might well overlay the EM maps onto the user's vision.


"Bootstrapping problem" being a metaphor for "trouble getting things started" -- e.g., lacking the ability to design nanomachines being an obvious obstacle to eventually creating them. Hopefully, that clears up my position -- virtually everything you just said was in agreement with it.

Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

Nor will erasing it an arbitrary number of times. There exist technologies -- right now, destructive of the drive and quite expensive -- to retrieve data from a harddrive that's been "zeroed" (low-level format, writing all sectors to 0) an arbitrary number of times. The only sure way to destroy the data on a drive is to completely destroy the platter; however, writing random data to every sector several times over makes it impossible for any but the most advance procedures (which involve dipping the platter in liquid nitrogen to increase its conductivity, IIRC) to retrieve anything useful.

What has this to do with the rest of what I'm talking about? Simply that electromagnetic fields in computers and electronics can be detected, and useful information can be gleaned from this.


That seems familiar, although I can't recall the source off the top of my head. If you find a source, let me know, I'm definitely interested!

Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

It's been awhile, wasn't there a former Army cowboy in one of those three books?

Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

Probably. I re-read Neuromancer not too long ago, so it's fresher in my mind than the others. But you're right in that military hackers were the first wave of netrunners, and remained baddest-ass ones.

Oh, I remember one ex-military hacker, from Johnny Mnemonic (the book version; I don't recall if he was in the movie) ... Jones the dolphin.

Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

Photons are indifferent to electric and magnetic fields. You can absorb a photon with an atom or electron, you can bend its' course by passing it through a refractive medium, you can reflect it and you can annihilate it with another photon of equal energy/frequency and opposite phase.

That's everything that comes to mind off-hand and I really don't see how you can arrange to do this remotely from a distance.

I finally went back and hit that link about the ubiquitous "Van Eck Phreaking". I had never heard that phrase before but i was pretty sure it was otherwise known as TEMPEST and is in HT as "Computer Monitoring Gear" on p.215.

Nothing magical here. It's just radio frequency emissions from electronic devices. Anything that stops radio stops this and you're very unlikely to get usable emissions from a device's guts as opposed to its' peripherals (like the monitor). There is essentially no way to run this in reverse.

In particular, photons (in the form of radio waves) are what makes up the emissions used by the Van Uck thing. Photons are emitted by some (but not all physical processes) but photons don't emit other photons when they travel through fiber optics.

So move along now or I'll go and get a real physicist and he'll inflict math on you. :)

Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

Yeah, I'd be at a loss to explain how it might work with fiber optics. In a game where this kind of hacking was possible, fiber optics might be an effective countermeasure... or, saying that fiber optics are ubiquitously used in electronics and computers could be used to totally rule out this kind of hacking.


Van Eck phreaking is indeed one of the primary technologies of interest to TEMPEST, although TEMPEST also looks at other forms of "compromising radiation."

Nope, nothing magical at all; common (and effective) enough, in fact, to have influenced various eavesdropping laws. Currently, I don't think they can get much useful information from the guts of a machine (although Ulzgoroth mentioned, and I seem to recall, something about RAM phreaking) ... but that's why we're talking ultra-tech.

As for no way to run it in reverse... is talking the reverse of listening? Or are they separate processes that we integrate into two-way communication? Point being, you don't have to be able to use Van Eck Phreaking to control the computer to use the information it produces.


Well, I can't promise I'd be able to follow a bunch of raw equations, but I'd love it if someone could explain it better! I'm going off of a layman's understanding, but it's a topic of perennial interest for me.

Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

Photons are electric and magnetic fields. If you can induce those fields with sufficient flexibility, you can generate photons. Or cancel them out.

I do not assert that it's actually possible to manipulate the fields that way at a distance, but it's not much different from what the whole remote induction hacking thing would require to begin with.
Of course that's what it is...though TEMPEST mostly refers to countermeasures from what I've seen.

But...not much stops radio completely, reliably, and without massive inconvenience. Signal from the guts of the device will be partly screened by the case and each other, and probably confused by all the bits massed together, but I don't see any reason you wouldn't be able to see it, whether or not you could actually use it.

And if by 'run this in reverse' you mean creating precisely controlled effects in the target...that's pretty much what I've been saying. But yes, you can influence the electronics, by just the reverse of the path by which you detect them. That which emits EM also absorbs it. You can pick up interference on a speaker cable...which is why high-end ones often have some kind of shielding.
Anything a real physicist wants to add would probably be interesting. I don't do too well with wave-related stuff.

Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

Oooo-kay. PM sent to lwcamp. No promises as to his reply.

Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

I am not a physicist, but I did study Electrical Engineering, computer engineering, and wave transmission theory.

I would say the idea of directly modifying a computer/electronic device is theoretically possible, however the requirements would limit it from being used 'on the go'.

How it could be possible:
with an advanced enough computer system and a large enough antenna array, you would be able to do enough signal processing to ferret out the data to to read the individual bits flowing through a computer. By using low power transmissions from this same array, you could cause wave form interference that could cause a localized fluctuation strong enough to flip a bit.

The problems:
1) The reading computer would have to be multiple magnitudes more complicated then the device it is reading to be able to process all radiation coming out of the device. (so any similar powered devices wouldn't be able to read each other in real time or likely at all)

2) Any meaningful amount of shielding would make it almost impossible to pin point individual signals from inside the shielding.

3) The antenna array would likely not be man portable unless you planned on near direct contact if the antenna array with the target object. (just optical lens is limited to the resolution it can pass, the antenna array would be the "optics"

---

What I know of current TEMPEST/Van Eck phreaking is that it works because the cable between the CRT/LCD is NOT shielded (or insufficiently shielded) and acts like a broadcast antenna (all electronics do this to some extent). With special antenna arrays and signal processing, you can recreate the signal. The solution is to limit the amount of signal radiated and to make sure there is random noise radiated with it.

Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

Carbon nanotubes.

They don't behave like cyberpunk monowire, though. A nanotube thread will not effortlessly slice through steel, for example. They do have an extraordinary tensile strength, and have a number of unique physical properties that could lead to some pretty neat stuff in the plausible near future.

Luke

Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

I'm not going to touch string theory - but anyone who thinks that quantum mechanics is metaphysics rather than science doesn't know much about quantum mechanics (or maybe they don't know much about science, or metaphysics). Quantum mechanics is a model of the way our world works driven by observation, which makes definite predictions that have been validated by experiment to very high accuracy. If not for quantum mechanics, for example, digital electronics simply would not work.

Luke

Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

Light is a linear wave phenomenon. Which means that two light waves just pass through each other rather than messing with each other. (Okay, at extreme intensities there are Q.E.D. processes that are though to allow light to interact - but these have not yet been observed, and at those intensities your fiber optics would not remain solid matter for long).

There is also the problem of how to get the light signal from outside the fiber inside the fiber, especially with an opaque coating.

Luke

Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

Whether it makes sense to me and Albert Einstein or not. I try and accept it even if it doesn't make sense. :)

Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

You wouldn't consider things like Penrose's "Quantum Consciousness," Everett's "Many Worlds," or other interpretations of QM to be metaphysics (as in, beyond the present understanding of physics, or even the ability to test)? Even the Copenhagen interpretation makes statements that sound an awful lot like "observable reality arises from the process of observing reality," which is the very poster child of a circular definition.

There is indeed a core of testable predictions made, and many resulting useful applications, but there's plenty of metaphysical speculation (and downright wankery) as well.

Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

That was about a thousand times more articulate than my feeble ranting, but yeah, that's what I was trying to get at. Reading and changing the state of bits isn't superscience (as in, it relies on Inverse Tachyon Fields and Frombotz-Wave Generators), but plausible ultra-tech.

Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

An electromagnetic wave cannot resolve details smaller than its wavelength (at least not in the far field region, and in the near field you need those freaky metamaterials that are the hot thing right now). So modern transistors on an integrated circuit board with 100 nm length scales could only be discerned by radiation that had a 100 nm or shorter wavelength. If you had 100 nm wavelength EM radiation for scanning, you would still need to bring your antenna within one antenna distance of the thing to be scanned (shorter wavelengths would allow longer ranges - in general the minimum size you can resolve is approximately the wavelength of the light you are using time the ratio of (the distance from antenna to subject) to (size of antenna)). 100 nm wavelength EM radiation is in the vacuum ultraviolet - it cannot propagate through air or any form of matter because it causes ionization so rapidly. If you want scanning radiation that can propagate through air, the shortest wavelength you can use is in the near ultraviolet, at around 200 nm. The problem is that most stuff is opaque to ultraviolet light - most people will not be making the casings to their computers out of fused silica or diamond. The opacity problem will continue through the far infrared, although once you get to THz rays you can see through some (non-conductive) matter. The problem with THz rays is that they are easily absorbed by moisture in the air, limiting their range to a few tens of meters - plus THz rays have wavelengths of around 0.3 mm to 30 microns, so even if you are within an antenna width of the electronics, you still couldn't make out how they are put together if they have components the size of modern integrated circuits. You only start getting useful ranges of stuff that can see through matter at millimeter wavelengths or longer - and these have far to crude of a resolution to see how a chip is put together.

It works in reverse, too. If a chip is emitting THz radiation, you can't see how it is put together at length scales smaller than about 0.3 mm to 30 microns, and even for that you need to bring your receiving antenna to within one antenna width of the electronics - and the THz radiation will be attenuated by moisture in the air.

The Van Eck scanning that people are mentioning works based on interpreting the time structure of the radiation, not the spatial structure. With chips that have different parts radiating at the same time, you would be hard pressed to make out the time structure of the radiation - the chip as a whole would look like a source of noise.

Luke

Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

It's the whole manipulate fields at a distance that is problematical. You can create photons locally. You can cancel them locally (it is usually called "absorption" though). But how do you get a locally created photon to the inside of a fiber? (Well, other than pressing the end of the fiber up against your photon generator, of course - that's how they are used, after all).

Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

Except that the part you snipped was all reasons why it isn't remotely practical, making the plausible ultratech version a supercomputer attached to a vehicular-sized antenna array, which still can't scan hardened systems.
What happens if you generate an electric field across a fiber, oscillating at a visual-light frequency?

Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

Making the plausible contemporary version a supercomputer attached to a vehicular-sized antenna array, which still can't scan hardened systems.

Once you start looking at ultra-tech, plausibility becomes an estimate, depending on what other assumptions you make. If you don't assume a mature nanotechnology, for example, certain developments become impossible. If you assume that electronics keep getting smaller, a "supercomputer attached to a vehicular-sized antenna array" might become a "backpack computer attached to a hand-held antenna array."

Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

Well, you can invoke quantum mechanics to fuel your metaphysical speculations (like Penrose). I wouldn't, however, call QM itself metaphysical. Just like you can invoke classical electromagnetism to fuel your crackpottery, but electromagnetism is still on a firm physical foundation.

The Many Worlds interpretation and Copenhagen interpretation are just that - interpretations (along with the transactional interpretation, the Bohm interpretation, and probably others). To a physicist, this means that they give identical physical results, and there is no way to meaningfully distinguish between them. Their main benefit is offering a way to think about what is happening, so you can intuit things that you later go back and verify by calculation or experiment.

Luke

Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

Whew! I think I kept up with that moderately well. Active scanning won't work, because "pinging" with any wavelength too large to resolve the components yields nothing but fuzz.

...and passive scanning won't work for essentially the same reason, the radiation won't reveal structures that are smaller than its wavelength; more fuzz.


Not as clear to me, but let me take a stab... interpreting time structure is comparing each successive "screen refresh" to the last one in order to form a dynamic image of the information on the screen; this isn't possible with a microchip because of the above-mentioned problems with image resolution at scales below the wavelength of the radiation you're trying to read. Am I close? :)

Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

I don't think so.

You'll still need a supercomputer, because the systems you're targeting are more complex more or less in proportion to how much more capable your supercomputer is.

You'll still need a huge antenna because that relates to physical resolution constraints, not level of detail in the antenna.

You'll still be unable to read shielded systems because it's about as hard as before to read unshielded systems, and the shielding has improved.

Ultratech doesn't justify furiously handwaving whatever you want. It's artistic (or authorial, or GM) license that does that.

EDIT: And of course lwcamp seems to be saying that for the most part you can't get the spatial resolution you'd want regardless.

Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

The visible light frequency changes in the field would be screened by the fiber cladding, just like visible light.

Luke

Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

Crackpottery? LOL! Indeed, I'm nothing if not a crackpot, holding forth on things about which I know precious little! Good thing there are such level heads to set me straight.


And that's distinct from metaphysics in what way?

Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

It sounds like you understand the basics.

Luke

Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

Yeah, I think lwcamp's prohibitive factors trump yours ... antenna size needn't be vehicular, it simply limits the effective distance (although Van Eck Phreaking works over "large distances," according to Van Eck's testing. (How large, exactly? Not sure....)

Assuming that your computer must be more complex (and larger) than the target only limits you to scanning smaller computers... it doesn't mean that it's impossible.

Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

Hooray! Okay, now I'm ready for the 201 version.... :)

Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

Heh. I wasn't actually thinking about this thread, more about people freaking about orbital mind control lasers and wearing tinfoil hats. Which, come to think of it, is quite similar to what people were discussing in this thread.

Hmm, I'm not entirely sure. Is metaphysics about ways of intuiting the physical world so you can verify it by physical means? Usually when I try to make sense of metaphysical philosophy, it seems like they are talking in circles without actually saying anything of substance, so I tend not to pay much attention to it.

Luke

Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

There was some tinfoil hattery in this thread, no doubt.... shooting "hackers" on sight, because they might BSOD your brain? Yow.


While I'm no expert on either metaphysics or QM interpretations, they seem more-or-less identical to me....

Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

If you're talking about using a high-performance cyberdeck to hack an pocket calculator at contact ranges, I drop my objections. But that seems like moving the goalposts a very, very long way.

Van Eck, it seems, wasn't using spatial resolution. So not so much need for a big antenna.
Not sure how that's tinfoil hattery if they can BSOD your brain. In the usual sense. It might result in wearing tinfoil hats as a preventative measure, but when they actually have mind control lasers that's not so crazy.

Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

I certainly wasn't talking about so trivial a task at the time, but it sounds like that's about as far as our present understanding of physics can take it. In light of a detailed explanation of exactly why it's problematic at our current TL, I'd agree to this being filed as (what was it?) "marginal superscience."

EDIT: Although, hacking a smartgun with a high-performance cyberdeck at tactical combat ranges is only slightly more cinematic than "pocket calculator at contact ranges," and that was the initial case under discussion....


Well, but I interpreted lwcamp as saying that the limitations on time relation were essentially the same as those on spatial relation -- a resolution problem based on wavelength vs. component size.

(And, stripped of layman's fumbling, my initial "though experiment" was a time-relation reading -- capturing and comparing bit-states over time, and using them to derive the architecture.)


1. How do you tell a hacker from a non-hacker "on sight?"

2. How can you tell "on sight" whether a given hacker has the ability to BSOD your brain? Do you assume that every hacker can?

3. Shooting any broad category of person "on sight" -- or burning them at the stake, etc -- strikes me as being a bit 'round the bend.

Maybe "tinfoil hattery" isn't the right term; maybe "naked psychosis?" ;)

(Note: I'm not calling anyone a naked psycho; I realize it was said in the context of a very hypothetical situation. It just struck me as a pretty reactionary argument: "This idea scares me! It makes me want to kill!")

Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

You can't capture bit-states in the first place without the spatial resolution. The signal is generated by electrical currents, not bits.
I'd interpret it as being more like what happens when someone turns up in a civilian environment armed to the teeth with lethal weapons. Only not just lethal weapons, lethal and horrifying weapons.

So imagine the likely response to someone who wanders around a city carrying a flamethrower, several large and nasty looking blades, and hand grenades.

Now make it worse, because all of that nasty hardware is concealable.

Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

If you can gather data based purely on time domain information, the restriction of resolution of component sizes goes away. For example, take a screen with a 60 Hz refresh rate, and 1920 x 1200 pixels (2.3 megapixels total). Each pixel needs an instruction in the 1/60th of a second between refreshes, so you need to transmit data at a rate of 140 million bits per second for a simple pixel on/pixel off display. In reality you probably want 16 bits per pixel, so this increases to 2.2 billion bits per second. This is a 2.2 GHz signal, well within the microwave region of the spectrum, so it should have no difficulty propagating through drywall, wood, or air. You just need a large enough antenna to boost your signal strength enough that you are well above background noise. Then every one of those 2.2 billion bits per second you are receiving can be used to fill in one pixel on your screen. Since these bits are coming sequentially as part of a time domain signal, rather than having to resolve every pixel in space on the target screen you can just read them off like a ticker tape (again, assuming a strong enough signal, a big enough antenna, and a low enough background noise).

Luke

Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

But that objection would rule out Van Eck Phreaking... you're capturing the electromagnetic radiation generated by the bit-states of the image being sent to the monitor, and comparing it to previous bit-states in order to form an image. In no case is an abstract "bit" being measured, but the radiation generated by the electrical currents that represent the bit within the signal.

The reason it won't work on microchips (according to lwcamp; and I find his explanation plausible) is because the components are smaller than the wavelengths of the radiation. So I agree that, if we take lwcamp's explanation of the problematic properties of nano-scale wavelength radiation as given, it couldn't work at "long distances" like Van Eck Phreaking.


I understand where witch-hunt mentality comes from; I still think it's reactionary. Which isn't to say that it wouldn't happen, if such a technology emerged... but if it did, I'd find it distasteful, for reasons that are entirely out of the scope of this thread.

Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

Uh-oh, that just ruined the tentative understanding that I thought I had ... why couldn't that process be applied to imaging the internal state of, say, a smart phone or laptop computer? Is something like the "RAM Phreaking" that Ulzgoroth mentioned earlier possible? What kind of setup would it take?

EDIT: Is it the wavelength of the radiation coming off of the video signal vs. that coming off of the microchip components?

Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

The problem comes that at each point in the clock cycle, any or all of the transistors can change state, and they will do so at the same time. Because you cannot resolve the spatial size scales of the transistors, you can't tell which ones changed state, only that some transistors in the device did change state. So you might be able to detect if the device was active, but unless there is some sequential mechanism you can exploit, you can't tell what it is doing.

Even if you knew that only one transistor changed state with each clock cycle, without spatial resolution, you wouldn't know which one. What you would need would be to have each transistor addressed in sequence (and know what that sequence was),

Also, if the circuit runs on, say, a THz clock speed, then it will be emitting THz waves, which will have the aforementioned problems of getting through humid air. That's a separate issue, though.

Luke

Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

At least for a CRT screen, all of that data is to some degree being processed serially. Which means there's a single time-modulated data stream. (It's probably more complicated than that for a non-monochrome display, but apparently not intractably so.)

The internal state of a smart phone is not a single data stream. It's tons of things going on across multiple components, and most of them don't mean anything unless you know where they are as well as when.

My vague recollection is that RAM might be vulnerable because it has a refresh cycle that systematically read-writes all the stored bits, potentially spewing a serial read-off like the one from the monitor. I'm not very confident in this...
Do you think it's reactionary not to want people wandering the streets with flamethrowers and hand grenades? Or maybe nerve gas grenades?

The problem with brain hacking is not that it's new. It's that it's an appallingly dangerous and insidious weapon.

Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

Ahh, okay, so it's the sequential nature of a screen refresh that makes it easily distinguishable, as opposed to the simultaneous state-change in a CPU. Still, assuming that all of the bits probably won't change at the same time, particularly in RAM, wouldn't it be possible to gather enough information over time to get a general picture of the architecture?

Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

No. You might have a chip running on a GHz clock emitting GHz radiation, which would be the same frequency as the GHz signal coming from a monitor - but because you know the sequence at which the pixels in the screen are being given their information, you can decode the signal to the monitor.

Here's an analogy. I have a tube containing 10 marbles. 9 of the marbles are white, but the 7th one is black. I go to 10 of my friends, one after the other, and give each one the top marble in the tube. If you were watching me meet my friends, you know know which friend has the black marble, even if you can't see which marble I hand each of them.

But suppose instead of meeting them one after the other, I gathered them all together in one place. We huddle together and I give each of them a marble. Now you don't know who has the black marble.

Luke

Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

Okay, that's consistent with my understanding. In short, the answer to the question "Is this kind of hacking possible," the answer is "No, not really, but yeah, sort of." I'm still happy with the "marginal superscience" designation.


No, I don't think it's reactionary not to want those weapons around, I think it's reactionary to express the desire to kill anyone who might be carrying such a weapon, or have the ability to carry such a weapon.


Exactly: very scary, and (much like other concepts, such as "witchcraft" or "terrorism") capable of inciting people into behavior that is at least as appallingly dangerous and insidious as the thing they're railing against.

Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

You can probably gather some information. With an antenna quite close to the device (say a 1 meter wide antenna 1 meter away), in principle you could make out millimeter-size details of the chip, so you might know crudely how it is arranged, and what areas tend to be active, and when they are active, and maybe even what those areas do.

You can't tell the state of the chip, however, nor can you remotely affect the state of the chip over length scales smaller than a millimeter. And as you get farther away, your resolution gets worse.

Luke

Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

I'm with ya. (And I meant to say frequency, not wavelength, even though both were wrong.... :)

Why only millimeter-sized detail? With enough clock cycles, couldn't you map it out in arbitrarily fine detail? Not the present bit state, but enough information to know where to apply a state change to get a (fairly) specific effect?

Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

Because if, for example, it has a 300 GHz clock rate, the radiation it emits will have a wavelength of 1 millimeter. So you can only figure out where things are within one millimeter at best. (Again, if you have a metamaterial lens and can get it within a few wavelengths or less of the chip, you could in principle make out smaller details - for mm radiation this means you need to get within a few mm or less, though).

If it has a much slower clock rate, you can always actively scan it with 300 GHz microwave radar to get details of the size of its components down to about 1 mm - assuming that there is nothing in the device that blocks 1 mm wavelength microwaves. Actively scanning like this will not tell you what it is doing, however.

If you go much above 300 GHz, you start getting into the region where your signal starts getting absorbed by matter. Maybe it would work at close ranges with THz radiation, but that seems kinda iffy (actually, using mm radar to map out the internals of an electronic device to 1 mm already sounds pretty technologically demanding, and I expect it would require substantial increases in signal processing - but this is the future we are talking about so we can assume that they have made these advances).

Luke

Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

And the whole idea assumes that there is no electronic hardening to interfere with the signals you're getting out - if such technology existed hardening would be the wave of the future and nearly everything would be offered with a hardened version at a increased price and most likely since everyone would want it not too much of a terribly increased one.

Another reason why using the Van Eck method works is because the emissions from a monitor are NOT shielded, they all have to fall under civilian legal technology laws and have to accept interference from class ... something or other devices.

Now, you may not even be able to shield a monitor effectively to stop Van Eck Phreaking (you have to be able to read the screen) - that's a hypothesis based on how its supposed to work. If it were shielded however you'd have to be pointing your device directly at the user's viewscreen unless I'm way off base.

(As a side note I'm back!)

EDIT: Actually, the TEMPEST project does exactly what I was talking about but also tampers with the radiation; just looked that up.

Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

Okay, so it is limited by the frequency/wavelength vs. component size relationship in this case; it's the serial nature of monitor refresh data which makes that irrelevant and allows Van Eck Phreaking to work. Only if the internal data of a computer passes through some kind of "serial bottleneck," at least 1mm away from other radiating components, can you determine with any certainty what it's doing at any given time.

So maybe reading (and manipulating) the state changes in the serial buses....

Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

lwcamp thanks for donating your knowledge to our thread, I thought it had a population explosion when I woke up. :)

Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

If I understand it correctly, it's not the radiation from the image on the monitor that you're reading, but from the stream of data through the video cable; the process works because you have (a) an emission that's not closer to another radiating component than the wavelength of the radiation it's emitting, and (b) a signal presented in a known sequence, so that you can determine which bit goes where based on their order, as long as you know the resolution and refresh rate of the monitor it's being displayed on.

As to hardening components to resist it ... in a setting where this kind of hacking was about as common as guns, I'd expect electrical shielding to be about as common as body armor -- most "average" people won't expect to be hacked any more than they expect to be shot, simply because they don't spend time around people who are apt to shoot or hack them.

It does introduce a new dimension to the PCs' equipment-buying needs, but if that dimension is simply "buy hardened versions of all electronic gear, so that remote hacking attempts are rolled at a penalty," it's not that huge a hassle.

Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

Yes, and thank you for answering my incessant questions; it was enlightening. :)

And with that, I'm off to bed myself.... 'night all.

Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

Goodnight, sleep well.

Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

If anyone wonders, as a typical (in at least some respects) middle-aged American I would be unlikely to do my own dirty work unless a known hacker with a suspicious box was in the same room with me.

I might even give him a verbal warning although if decks are truly concealable and operated by wireless neural link I could not _safely_ do even that.

In such a case though I'd probably get away with it as self-defense, much the same as if I'd shot a mafia hit man with his hand in his pocket holding a suspicious bulge.

So cyberdecks that function as death rays don't get policed as illegal instruments used in economic crimes. They are policed as if they were terroristic weapons and all raids to apprehend a suspect hacker are carried out by a Homeland Security SWAT team who probably do my shooting on sight for me.

You also don't get on an airliner or into any secure building with any electronic device that might in any possible way be concealing a cyberdeck. You hope that the security of the time is not only better but faster and more convenient to deal with than today's too.

So, a technology capable of producing this extreme level of danger is extremely unlikely to produce a situation where the technology is universally adopted and everyone takes moderate precautions according to their personally evaluated threat level.

Instead this is a technology that very, very probably gets stomped on with hobnailed boots even if you have to issue those boots to stormtroopers.

So if I was setting up a cyberpunk setting I'd make sure that "cyber" part still left the users being considered as "punks" who potentially threaten no more than the bottom line of giant, faceless corps rather than direct and immediate threats to the life and safety of human beings within visual range of them.

Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

How are you identifying this known hacker, and how is his box suspicious if the only thing that makes it different than the one you're carrying is some illegal programs?

Well no, no more than you could safely warn a man with what you suspect to be a gun in his pocket pointed at you.

If this hacker was on some kind of wanted list, probably. If your excuse is "he had a computer on him" you'd probably be going to the looney bin. Unless he was SINless and you weren't, in which case they'd probably agree he was a threat, make a note in your file for your corporate boss about paranoia, and you'd be free to go. Or if he DID have brainhacking stuff on his deck (and wasn't licensed to carry it) and you just got lucky.

You do realize that in 2075, everyone is carrying a cyberdeck, don't you. It's how you broadcast your SIN, interact with stores, social media, gridguide.... NOT carrying a cyberdeck is a sign you're a societal outcast.

Unlikely. They probably just have a couple people with guns on the plane and a fairly high quality firewall defending it. If it registers an attack, it traces you and you get shot by the air marshals. Unless you're very, very good.

I think that's a very large stretch. But if it works in your games, whatever.

.... unlike people with guns?

Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

I'm glad I could help!

Luke

Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

They must have initiated that silliness in 4th edition. I've only played 1st through 3rd.

Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

Quite, since only deckers carried decks last time I checked. And much like my Social Security Number I'm not "broadcasting" my SIN in SR at ALL. Especially since its even easier to steal because of uber hackers with brainwave boxes.

A cyberdeck is a high end tool designed specifically for decking - most people in SR would have no use for one, they aren't a decker. A hand computer or the like would suffice for their shopping needs and other necessary things and a game terminal is much cheaper than even the cheap decks from the cyberpunk pyramid article (for playing VR games and the like).

Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

The basic idea is everyone has a VR capable "commlink" (I still prefer cyberdeck). Yes, it was introduced in 4e. Running hot VR still requires a (illegal) modification to the deck.

As I recall it's verified via biometrics that you're the one whose SIN you're using. It's laid out in much greater detail in that PDF I linked around page 6.

The basic change to decking in SR4 is that deckers are not guys using completely different machines than everyone else. They're generally using souped up machines in a way that could easily fry thei mind if they screw up, but mostly what distinguishes them from your average corporate secretary is their high level of skill and suite of illegal programs.

Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

I read the first 10 or 20 pages of that pdf you linked, and much like the original 4th edition system I just wasn't interested. You take all the mystique out of being a decker if everyone IS a decker, and the only thing separating you is the fact you have pricier programs.

In GURPS, the deck that does full VR costs more that's all, and its not anymore dangerous than the others from what I can tell. Granted, I'm still not sure how you accomplish walking around and chewing bubblegum when you're effectively asleep(which is how GURPS describes what your meat bod is doing while you're in the matrix) without having Compartmentalized Mind. (How do you accomplish that anyway?)

Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

I don't "need" a supercomputer, but my desktop machine is probably pretty close to comprable to the performance of a supercomputer 20 years ago.

And using the pyramid stats as a guideline, the higher end decks are still in the millions of nuyen.

In this particular case, I think it's far easier to say "hackers in sr are just very savy computer users, just like today" than it is to make up some special class of machine only they use.

Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

So, you are replacing the terminals and everything from the UT book with cyberdecks just to make it ubiquitous? Especially when a regular computer that would do anything anyone needed to do that's *not* a decker (since it would give a decker some fairly hefty penalties) and costs $50 or $100 with a machine that costs that much more?

Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

Do you correspondingly take all the fun out of being a street sam if the only thing seperating you from a wageslave with a streetline special is the fact that your guns cost a lot more and you're a lot better with them?

You can hack in AR without multi-tasking penalties, full vr leaves you twitching on the floor like normal jacking in in 3e. If you're in full vr, you get substantial bonuses. I only allow technomancers to take compartamentalized mind so they're hacking in full vr and still walking around.

"The matrix" is no longer a separate place from physical reality, but layered on top of it, much like astral space.

Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

Well, actually, they initiated that silliness when they started talking about Augmented Reality and Ubiquitous Computing. ("They," in this case, being "futurists and sci-fi writers.") Transhuman Space has similar silliness, and I think they actually adopted the idea before SR4 came out.



That might have been the case in SR, but in most cyberpunk (and other "near-future" sci-fi where decks exists), "deck" is roughly synonymous with "computer." Old fashioned terminal-interface computers are archaic and rare, much like command line interfaces are now. Augmented Reality, in particular, requires a computer in constant interface with its surroundings, and either with your brain, or with a HUD visor (or phenomonoscope, or whatever you want to call it).

Perhaps not everyone carries a deck with them all the time, any more than everyone carries a laptop or smart phone with them today... but killing everyone with deck is going to turn out to be an essentially random shooting spree, taking out far more legitimate businessmen and coffee-house hipsters than potential brain-hackers.


Another thought experiment, this one with two parts.



1. It's 2075, you're in an airport, and there's a guy with a laptop computer sitting across from you. You've heard of this thing called "brainhacking," which you have good reason to believe is deadly and horrible. This guy across from you looks pretty shifty to you; he keeps looking at his watch and glancing around impatiently. You're pretty sure that his computer could run brainhacking software.

Do you try to kill him on the spot?

Do you warn him, "Hey, pal, you better not be thinking of brainhacking me!"?

Do you fetch security? What do you tell them?

Do you, at that moment, decide that in a world with brainhacking, you'd like to turn your freedom -- and everyone else's -- over to the Jackboots, just in case this shifty-looking guy (or any other suspiciously computer-bearing characters) might have one?



2. It's 2010, you're in an airport, and there's a guy with a suitcase sitting across from you. You've heard of this thing called a "suitcase nuke," which you have good reason to believe would kill you and a whole lotta other innocent people. This guy across from you looks pretty shifty to you; he keeps looking at his watch and glancing around impatiently. You're pretty sure that his suitcase could contain a suitcase nuke.

Do you try to kill him on the spot?

Do you warn him, "Hey, pal, you better not be thinking of setting off a suitcase nuke!"?

Do you fetch security? What do you tell them?

Do you, at that moment, decide that in a world with suitcase nukes, you'd like to turn your freedom -- and everyone else's -- over to the Jackboots, just in case this shifty-looking guy (or any other suspiciously suitcase-laden characters) might have one?

Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

Well, I'm probably gonna adopt the rules from that pyramid article, where "cyberdecks" are computers with an extra complexity slot specifically designed for running VR. Most tech-savy folks have one of those. But a lot of people get by on a normal terminal computer that can run the VR software, it just takes up one of their higher complexity slots.

Either way, it's nowhere near the tens of thousands of nuyen I remember SR 3e cyberdecks costing, unless you're really getting into the high powered decks.

Of course in SR the answer to this is often "yes." But due to the fragmentation of power, there's no unanimous consent about who the jackboots smoosh, and runners are almost prototypically those who think that the freedom to do whatever the frag they want trumps the fear of all the nasty things that can happen to you in the awakened world.

Re: GURPS Shadowrun
 

Well, before this circular argument gets started again I'm simply going to elucidate that hacking people's brains and the corresponding idiocy aren't going to be in any game I play or run; wirelessly jacking into the matrix is going to take fairly substantial penalties and is going to require very high end relays (because frankly I'm going for the feel of SR1,2,3, not SR4 or Transhuman Space to start with).

Also, hacking everything that's electronic by whatever super-science methodology isn't going to be included even if you can wirelessly deck. You'll be restricted to computer networks not cyberware/firearms even if they are wireless (which most aren't they're linkages of fiber optic cables and firmware).

A decker is a member of a TEAM, his place is to jack the valuable data/stop security from being called/disable cameras etc. Not take over some poor schmuck's cyberware in the middle of a firefight or eject his magazine or whatnot else.

Computing can be ubiquitous WITHOUT everyone carrying around a deck, hell most cell phones are minicomputers now. Augmented Reality (not sure where that term came from as its not used in GURPS and I've blanked out what I read of SR4 deliberately) seems to make several assumptions, (namely that everyone and everything can be hacked wirelessly) that I really don't want included in my games.

As for a command line interface being rare? Are you for real? Every instance of Linux whether it has a GUI or not is run on a command line interface, not to mention Unix.