g-net could be on the future equivalent of a darknet. after all even today we have the ability to do white list only access devices

Do keep in mind you can have multiple profiles. If you tie your g-rep to your main identity, yes people are going to see it. But you could have an identity under a street name, with your g-rep there, and switch which one you're displaying depending on what kind of people you're with.

ShadowDragon8685 wrote:

But, of course, nobody would want law enforcement to be able to see you bragging on g-net about the heist you just pulled.

That actually happens. All the time. A good example of it is the gang activity in Chicago. Criminals post pictures of their contraband on Facebook, tweet their exploits, and upload Youtube vids of themselves rapping about kills they want to make. Terrorist insurgents in the Philippines and Nigeria have been quite open about the crimes they have committed on social media. Narcocorrido is a genre of Mexican music that recounts actual crimes, in addition to being quite catchy they are also on Soundcloud. An entire magazine and newspaper industry in Japan is devoted to the Yakuza. Korean cinema glorifies the Kangpae. Of course, there are criminal organizations that are more subtle and many aspects of publicized organizations that are kept out of the lime-light. The Pink Panthers, a Bosnian crime network, is very elusive and does not participate in social or entertainment media. The Italian crime families in Canada rarely appear in media. I-rep is directly related to Firewall and The Eye, but g-rep is a combination of many different (and possibly distinct) profiles, organizations, forums and levels of privacy. I see Guanxi as the pulse of the criminal community, instead of its heart. The Yakuza Buraku network and the Italian Cupola network are important to their respective groups, but internetwork traffic flows through Guanxi. P2P networks like myApollo may be the right direction for the public levels of Guanxi.

I know I also struggled with this question. I think the conclusion me and a friend reached was that it was easier to think of it as being mostly hidden from others. Even at low rep levels, you can't really tell the rep of other members, but you will potentially be reached out to by others with requests of favours. Your networking is thus slightly limited to those you know yourself, your own personal contacts. As your rep level increase you will eventually become trusted enough to become aware of much more other criminals and thus your networking opportunities will increase. This would make it hard for a law enforcement agency to simply gather a tiny bit of g-rep in order to find high-ranking criminals. They would need to work for quite some time to gather rep and in the meantime pass a lot of screening processes. Just like today.

I don't have a fully fleshed out fluff explanation, but a simple houserule for "secret" rep-networks like g-rep and i-rep is that you can only see other people's rep if it is lower than your own. Higher rep gives greater access to the hidden network, and because people with lower rep can't even see you, only higher rep members (who have already been vetted by the network) can increase or decrease your rep. This means that the only way to gain rep is to do something that catches the attention of someone higher up (or to be working for them directly). It makes infiltrating the network much harder, requiring effort analogous to undercover police work in the real world. It also provides an interesting distribution of rep scores: assuming that low end thugs (like the ones that post robberies to Facebook) are more likely to (somewhat stupidly) give out rep to anyone with a suitably intimidating morph; it would be easy to gain low (1-20) levels of secret rep, and there are probably lots of small-time criminals in that range. However, to get into the upper levels of the conspiracy, you have to be smart, talented, and dedicated - so there are far fewer big players. This of course lacks the sort of non-hierarchical setup that is the core function of @-rep or r-rep, but I think that's a good thing; a criminal or conspiracy rep network *should* be fundamentally different than an anarchist one. It's the same idea behind u-rep (or whatever Ultimate rep is), which is directly tied to your rank within the Ultimate's organization.

Wait, what? Where does it say that Project Ozma uses The Eye? I have [b]never[/b] seen that!

ORCACommander wrote:

unfortunately this is the downside to trying to simplify the number of rep entries to keep track of :/ theoretically ozma and firewall should not share the same rep score but alas they do.

^^^^^ That was what I was referring to.

eh i think your right about that not being in the books. I may have just seen that on here as people's homebrewed solution to often :/

I think i would go with the "you can't see it untill you are in it" solution. that way you can recognise a Don when you see one, but only if you know what to look for.

Kremlin K.O.A. wrote:

Another flaw is that it means that Dons and Kingpins can't leverage their rep to get their underlings to do anything.

Eridan wrote:

I think i would go with the "you can't see it untill you are in it" solution. that way you can recognise a Don when you see one, but only if you know what to look for.

Eridian's solution is what I had in mind. The don or whoever could choose to reveal their score to their underlings. I like this because it reinforces the hierarchy: the big players at the top work through intermediaries. The Don doesn't go directly to the dumb muscle, the Don goes to a trusted Lieutenant, who goes to his Sergeant (who only knows the Lieutenant), who rustles up the muscle (who only know the Sergeant). Sure, a smart observer could put data together and surmise who's who, but that's the point - they have to actually observe and put it together, they can't just look it up on the Thugbook. This also works from a game mechanics perspective: if your g-rep is crap and you want to talk to the Don, it'll take some good role-playing to develop the contact with the Sergeant, then work your way up the chain to find the Don. If you've got the g-rep, you can take abstract that all away in the roll.

I tend to think of g-rep as a signifier of criminal association which just isn't conclusive - it's like having gang tattoos; yeah, cops will look at you funny if you have g-rep, but it's not like a number on a distributed social network run by criminals is admissible in court, except perhaps in the most wildly paranoid habs. Plus, if all you can see is that someone has middling g-rep, that doesn't inform you whether he's a hardened mid-level criminal, or just a small-time businessman who pays his protection money on time every week. Just like i-rep shouldn't be mistaken for one's actual position in Firewall, g-rep shouldn't be mistaken for actual affiliation in a criminal cartel. A highly respected and competent freelance wheel man and a Nine Lives middle manager with a reputation for being a hardass might have the same g-rep, but the latter is a major target for law enforcement while the former, depending on location, might not even be worth prosecuting. And just like you can wear a long-sleeved shirt to hide your gang tattoos, you can always just opt to dissociate your mesh profile from your physical identity, so it won't pop up on people's AR; nobody is pointing a gun to your head and forcing you to broadcast your Guanxi profile to everyone who can see it. Hell, Guanxi might not even have that functionality. When you need to, it's pretty trivial to prove that you're really DarkMoriarty451 and not some rando - Crypto, secret passphrases, and the time-honored tradition of Tweeting "Yes, this is me" all work. Sure, the guy you just revealed yourself to is now a witness linking your physical identity to your real identity, but that's what anonymous morphs, beta forks, and comical Richard Nixon face masks are for. Presumably, infiltration and monitoring of Guanxi is a key component of law enforcement strategy. Careless criminals who tweet about their every job eventually wise up or get caught. Guanxi is probably just secure enough that the networking benefits outweigh the risks, and anyway, petty criminals are hardly known for their risk aversion. Top-level criminals probably rely more on their personal connections as the entrenched leadership of a criminal cartel, than on the actual reputation network, anyway. The made men all have ties to a hierarchical, corp-like organisation that provides them with resources and employs them. The people really relying on g-rep to get by are the freelancers, the drifters, and the small-time crooks - those people might in fact have higher g-rep than major cartel bosses, because g-rep is their meal ticket, whereas cartel bosses aren't exactly relying on the kindness of strangers. A corrupt cop might have g-rep only in the form of an anonymous profile whose rep is high because it takes anonymous cred payments to make evidence in police custody "disappear," and is never actually tied to a physical identity. Or they might not have g-rep at all, and instead just be taking money on the side for one individual boss or a small group of contacts. Or they might just be extorting and brutalising the population they're supposed to protect, with no stable relationship to any criminal group. The MO of bent cops, in general, is not to simply set up shop and invite criminals to pay them off for favours - that would just result in an IA investigation, even in a world without ubiquitous sousveillance. The MO of bent cops is to be paid off to look away, or to force people into paying them to do their jobs. They don't need g-rep to prove they're good for either service - the badge and the collapsible baton do the talking.

[i]Eclipse Phase[/i], p 251:

Quote:

It is important to remember that not everything can be found online. Some data may only be acquired (or may be more easily gotten) by asking the right people (see Networking, p. 286). Information that is considered private, secret, or proprietary will likely be stored away behind VPN firewalls, in off-mesh hardwired networks, or in private and commercial archives. This would require the character to gain access to such networks in order to get the data they need (assuming they even know where to look).

Do the rules say anywhere explicitly that reputation network profiles are always publicly linked to someone's ego ID or physical identity? I just assume g-rep profiles don't necessarily have someone's actual name or biomorphic information on them. In fact, I assume that this is true of all rep networks; an anarchist wrench-thrower might be "James Carter" to his hypercorp employers and c-rep, but "Monkeywrench_616" to @-rep. Especially given how easy it to fake actual identities, making online profiles that can't be trivially traced back to you seems pretty obviously like a thing. If the rules disallow that somehow, it strikes me as an omission and not RAI.

I've been giving this some thought, and I think I've come up with a solution for my own games. Essentially, every rep score is (potentially) a fake ID. Eventually that fake ID could come to be associated with you (i.e. if you call in massive, connected r-rep and @-rep favours on Locus in a short span of time you'll be found out easily as being the ego behind those particular RNA/Circle A profiles), but unless you opt-in to connecting your main profile to a particular rep network, it's basically a username associated with activity. Maybe you're an elite criminal who lives on and operates out of your particular criminal org's hab and never leaves, so you opt-in to g-rep connecting to your main profile, unlike most people on Guanxi! I sort of imagine this working like so: a blank trunk that can be identified with your ego, and if you're most citizens of the Inner System, you have no problem with a username on CivicNet that is just your name and a direct opt-in link to that blank trunk of basic info...but hey, maybe you're a Jovian agent deep undercover in an anarchist milieu! Maybe your deep cover requires you to be honest about coming from the Jovian Republic and even about who you really are...but you're pretending that this person you really are has defected and been blacklisted by the Jovians and PC alike, and 75 c-rep just doesn't make that much sense, making the 75 c-rep a fake ID that you have access to, but that you wouldn't risk using for a massive datacache on the upcoming gate address from the Pathfinder hypercorp when you're waiting in line at the Fissure Gate with your anarchist gatecrashing team (any more than a Shui Fong Triad member would feel comfortable using a g-rep favour to order a crate of munitions to his co-ordinates in a heavily policed, high-class, shiny-gleaming Planetary Consortium residential district populated by the glitterati and favoured children of important oligarchs). I think that Firewall giving you a fake ID to operate under makes a lot of sense, but even for non-conspiracy/everyday reasons a fake ID for each network can totally make sense (i.e. a citizen of the Inner System who regularly travels for either business or pleasure to/resides primarily in the Outer System who wants the "authentic experience" and doesn't want to get pegged as a CivicNet tourist). Thoughts?