What he said. Also, it can appear as whatever you want it to in your AR view, but others won't see it (actually, I assume it could have its own representation in, say, a simulspace that others could see, and if it is 'answering your phone' for you it can no doubt put on a professional (or totally unprofessional) digital appearance). It's a limited AI program. It mimics a persona that does all the detail-work of handling your accounts, keeping your local mesh implants synced up and happily running, and occasionally counsels you when you're going off the hook (all muses have accounting and psychotherapy skills. ;D ). Think of it as your own little secretary, in your head, which occasionally mouths off to you if it thinks you're feeling too sorry for yourself, and appears however you want it to in your AR.

could a muse control a physical body like a robot or something ? sure you have to buy it skills via programs and etc.

From p.300 of Core: Cranial Computer: This computer serves as the hub for the character’s personal area network and is home to their muse (p. 264). I would presume that SOP would be to back up the Muse at the same time the Ego is backed up. I would be leery of running backups (of Ego or Muse) over the Mesh, because that renders such a backup vulnerable to potential interception and editing, or just plain corruption if you're in a place where the Mesh is extremely iffy. The amount of data transfer involved for either is staggering by current-day views, I imagine. So returning to your original question, the Muse that was attendant to that body IN the cranial computer would be destroyed, but when the character was restored from backup, their Muse would similarly be restored from backup. I can't think of any examples in EP fiction where the character is restored from backup with a Muse that has more recent 'memory' than the character, so I'm imagining that the backups are paralleled.

Yerameyahu wrote:

Eh. The encryption options are pretty much bulletproof.

There's no such animal as bulletproof encryption. There's only encryption that stops the little guys and the majority of people with private-sector-level tech. As an example, PGP means very little at the level of the NSA. I'll note that even in EP, there's no 'bulletproof encryption'. There's only encryption that takes special equipment and a fair bit of time (for the players...Which means post-player-level-tech eats it as an appetizer. Your encryption means diddly to a TITAN and possibly many exhumans as well.).

I was thinking of farcasters, myself. At least as far as the book is concerned, they're utterly bulletproof. Limitations, yes.

Re-Laborat wrote:

Arenamontanus wrote:

Not if it is a one-time pad. (In reality, people often tend to handle their one-time pads in sufficiently insecure ways that devious TITANs could hack them, but the math is pretty clear: a properly managed OTP is unconditionally secure)

Point. [i]If[/i] as you say, security is maintained. 1TP security demands reasonably short messages. The longer the message, the higher the likelihood of being able to decrypt it.

Wrong. The Security of OTP is not dependent on message length. If you have large enough pad, you can easily send Egos without any problems. The Limiting factor is that you can use the pad securely [i]only once[/i]. If you run out of pad, you're SOL and storing a pad is a vulnerability (if someone hacks your pad storage, you're also SOL). Pad distribution is one of the bottlenecks that make OTP difficult to use; pros used to send couriers with sealed and tamper-evident suitcases shackled to courier's wrist...

Re-Laborat wrote:

Given what psychosurgery is portrayed to be, I'd suggest that the Ego in EP has recognizable, mappable symbol sets which have enough commonality for people at the level of the typical psychiatrist to grasp problem-patterns in an Ego. That would seem to make it likely that a quantum computer could crack a 1TP transmission of an entire Ego or Muse (even simpler to crack, one presumes, since it would use a computer language). Of course at that point, I'm arguing on the basis of fictional things, so it's easily questionable.

What you are talking about is referred to as Known-plaintext attack and it doesn't help against OTP.

babayaga wrote:

information unavailable to the public

Admittedly, as to method it's only asides and innuendo circulated by the federal recruiters around DEFCON, but some of the people involved are certainly in a position to know-it-not-say-it. Then again, some of the people involved are certainly in a position to be disseminating chaff. But having said that, if you're recruiting people to do sensitive work, you don't start out by bullshitting them about the very technology they'll be working with, and the word from the bird (or the Owl, if you prefer) is that PGP is crackable, it just takes effort...And they've got the machines and cycles to task to it. Cracking the human side is almost always easier even now. Oh, and as far as encryption in EP (popping up a level to more relevance) isn't quantum encryption a case of 'the machine giveth and the machine taketh away'? In the sense that a quantum computing system can still (eventually) crack said encryption? The big safety of communications in EP seems to be quantum entanglement. No intercept possibility unless you have enough access to effectively bug one qubit communicator or the other...And if you have that access, you have anything you need, anyway. Physical access is all access.

OrangeRequired wrote:

As far as the corebook is concerned, public key encryption is crackable with a quantum computer and a lot of time, but [i]quantum[/i] encryption is completely uncrackable, because quantum encryption uses entanglement as part of the encryption.

There are some interesting possibilities for quantum hacking, where an interceptor uses quantum computers to catch part of the message and to fool the sender and receiver into thinking they are having a secure channel (I posted about it in the off topic section months ago). I think this has largely been dealt with by 10 AF, mostly because sending sufficiently large amounts of entangled data likely can overload the capacity of the quantum computer and force it into a revealing collapse.

Quote:

Which is something I've wondered about for a while; egocasting uses quantum encryption, and quantum encryption requires entangled computers which are then separated and transported to their intended locations. Does this mean, then, that the places you can egocast to from a location are limited by the "directory" of quantum computers present at that station? To put it simply, if there's a remote, little-used location which nonetheless has ego receiving capability, will it be hard to find an egocasting station which has the 'computer' for that location?

There is a difference between quantum entanglement communication (QE) that requires pre-made qubits, no beam, and is entirely science fictional (fill in my obligatory rant about superluminal communication here), and just sending entangled photons using a laser. You can easily make as many entangled photon pairs as you want using a fairly simple setup. The problem is that you need to send them to the receiver at mere lightspeed. In reality quantum encryption is mainly suitable for exchanging encryption keys: the bandwidth is not great, so you just send enough bits to safely encrypt your big data package classically. Of course, if you are worried about enemies using quantum computers against you, then you want to switch keys often so that only part of the data can be easily revealed (and you might transmit the data in a way making a partial reveal fairly useless - imagine first sending bit 1, 11, 21, 31, ... encrypted with key 1, then bit 2, 12, 22, ... with key 2, then 3, 13, 23, ... with key 3 and so on).

Personally, I think a Muse's backup is stored also in he cortical stack, so retrieving the stack also retrieves the muse (aside from the regular ego backups, where the muse is also backupped) I think all this theoreticall discussion, while fascinating, should have some details into consideration, like: * Player's backups are secure, unless the game requires it for some concrete reason. However, the stealing/manipulation of egos is the exception. * Stores with morphs to sell have all what they need to make a safe backup (regardless of the backup's insurance details)... or to steal an ego's copy if they want. For that reason, they are usually controlled by legal representatives or "watchers" in the case of less bureaucratized habitats (a microcorp in Titan, for example, or a group of "concerned citizens" inside an autonomist's habitat). Of course, I'm talking about habitats with more than one bodyshoppe XD. This control is less related to the possibility of the shop being "corrupt" than to assure the users they are not risking their existence. Of course, darkcast nets are something else entirely... * Morph Stores can have their own rep scores, like restaurants... * Farcasters are not really impossible to intercept, they just are the way with more assurances that your ego will reach the backup storage. As I see it, to intercept any ego backup you need to stay tuned to precisely one frequency at the transmission time, which is hard for morph shops (they will transmit several egos at once, with garbage data to increase to the max the possibilites that the intercepted ego will be a vapor at best, and they tend to make the transmissions at random times), but nearly impossible for farcasting. Unless you are "listening" all the time in the right frequency... which requires, I bet, one receiver per frequency, and there should be a lot more freqs than we can think of.

Yerameyahu wrote:

It doesn't matter if you intercept a farcast (neutrino, radio, whatever), they're unbreakably encrypted.

Nine lives thanks you for your patronage... XD Now seriously, it can happen, specially if I need it to put my players into a rescue mission because a copy of an ego carrying critical data has been intercepted and it's a matter of time before the copy is decripted and "sleeved" into an infomorph, then exprimed of all known data... But I digress from the OP.

Yerameyahu wrote:

It's just what the book says, man. Farcaster-secured comms are uncrackable. You can't *get* a copy to decrypt, it's not a question of the copy 'having' encryption on it. It's not file encryption.

You are always so doctrinaire about what the book says. Consider real world security instead: you can have an unbreakable code (like one time pads or quantum comms) and still get your communications cracked because you did not pay enough attention to other ways of hacking it. It could be social engineering or evil maids getting access to a mesh node where the ego was temporarily stored upon receival. It could be subverted hardware or certificate authorities. It could be a bug, user mistake or sheer sloppiness making the encryption weak - all these things have happened. For most purposes egocasting is very safe. But that is because few groups go to the effort to subvert it - it takes a significant effort, at least in well-run parts of the solar system. So unless a pretty powerful group is out to get you personally you don't need to worry. But if you are not paranoid about the possibility you will get a nasty surprise one day... "Hello, Mr Anderson. It seems that you've been living two lives..."

My question is much more simple: When you use egocasting, does your muse automatically get transmitted with you? When you are resleeved, does your muse get 'resleeved' as well into your new morph's mesh? I looked for mention on this in EP Core, but couldn't really find anything. If I've spent a good part of my life developing a close relationship with my muse, believe me- its coming with me no matter what morph I'm in.

That's what my research said as well. The book just never came straight out and said it about transmitting and sleeving.

It generally take a few minutes after resleeving before the Muse come online. That's why getting sleeved in a new body can be quite traumatic one second you're somewhere, with your muse, in a body you've grown accustomed to, then the next you wake up either in a tank, bathing in a jelly material, or laying on a cold table, in a whole new (figure of speech) body, sometimes very different than your previous one, and you're alone... scary, isn't it?

Depends on method of death, but if the head is mostly intact I'd say the cranial computer has a few minutes of activity for the muse to send messages or distress calls before everything shuts down. As for muse backups, in my games the critical muse settings and personality profile are backed up the the cortical stack along with the character's ego, but in a separate 'folder'. Under standard resleeving the muse details get reinstalled and activated with the ego but because they're stored in discrete files, the people resleeving you can opt to not restore your muse if they have reasons or ulterior motives.

Hey t-hummies! What about a muse searching for it's "host's" killer/kidnapper (the muse got separated from its' t-hummie & believes it dead/kidnapped, seeks help from the PCs)? Is this feasible? SF