uwtartarus wrote:

I thought Stenography made detecting bad software incredibly difficult, and that the vetting tool to make sure you were not some TITAN malware being broadcast was that whoever sent you was supposed to verify you weren't deadly poison, and that an Ego all zipped up and non-instantiated couldn't be detected as bad. The fiction implies that the best way to test possibly-infected egos is to upload them in an air-gapped simulspace and then see if they try to break out or infect things. Maybe I misunderstood how the farcasting stuff works.

Hmm, according to Firewall, the Neural Verifier "...is plugged into the access jacks of a pod or synthmorph or establishes a wireless connection with the target morph’s basic mesh inserts." That does seem like it excludes infomorphs, though I would think that there is a real need for infomorph scanning. As far as egos in simulspace, that's probably a decent way of detection, but it leaves a couple of issues. Exsurgents can be pretty darn smart, so they might be able to find signs of simulspace and play nice for the time being. In addition, they could be programmed to go off after specific stimuli that the simulspace might not have.

Some rules suggestions for this would be perfect for that supplement on crime I hope we one day receive.

I expect it is normal and expected for people to encrypt their data for privacy while egocasting. The only way to access that data would be to instantiate that ego and interrogate/torture it for the password, or spend weeks on a quantum computer cracking the data. If using a one-time-pad, neither of these options might be possible. Torture and/or interrogation is pretty rare among civilized habs; the ones it occurs in, most Sentinels won't want to egocast to anyway. Using a quantum computer would only occur when the hab knows the data is valuable enough to justify the investment of computer time beforehand. A clever infosecurity specialist can make quantum decryption even more expensive than normal, too (for example by layering multiple encryption techniques, or using multiple keys for different parts of the data). The hab could require that all extra files are transmitted in-the-clear, and delete any encrypted data that comes with an ego. However, this would be extremely impractical as it basically shuts down all encrypted communication off the hab, which in turn shuts off any kind of commercial activity, access to reputation networks, and the numerous other advantages of an encrypted lifestyle. I am sure that the heavily-educated people of the EP universe value their privacy and encryption even more than modern Internet users, not only because such things are one of the main protections against TITAN remnants and other similar threats.

SquireNed wrote:

So I just was reading Fukuda's Cube, and I came across this: (quote cut) Clearly there's a way to scan for exsurgent infections in non-instantiated egos.

And yet, not to be too spoilery, they miss an infection. Plus, Watts-MacLeod exists. So at least some strains of exsurgent virus are undetectable with transhuman levels of technology. Given post-fall paranoia, presumably a fair amount of trust can be maintained by verifying the sender. Habitats and cities are in constant (if delayed) communication, so if there is news of a TITAN scare, you can hold all ego traffic until they give an all-clear. Data luggage is a hard problem though. The habitats which are paranoid about infection or data piracy (the PC and Morningstar, basically) have no real reason to let large, unidentified programs in. Maybe they only allow verified legal software, or instantiate an ego in simulspace and require them to decrypt and demonstrate the data before sleeving; so a VR baggage search. These could be defeated by Masking Software, or social engineering, or old fashioned bribes.

Armoured wrote:

Data luggage is a hard problem though. The habitats which are paranoid about infection or data piracy (the PC and Morningstar, basically) have no real reason to let large, unidentified programs in. Maybe they only allow verified legal software, or instantiate an ego in simulspace and require them to decrypt and demonstrate the data before sleeving; so a VR baggage search. These could be defeated by Masking Software, or social engineering, or old fashioned bribes.

The data "luggage search" is a method that could work under a few, very limited circumstances, but in general I think it is unlikely to succeed. There are a few reasons why: First, by instantiating an ego unnecessarily (and especially against their will) in simulspace, you are risking psychological damage to that ego. They will suffer the usual penalties for an instantiation, and may even go insane in particularly bad cases. This won't look good for that hab. Second, any real criminal will be able to defeat such search, using the methods mentioned, so this technique won't capture anyone "serious". Third, if that data contains proprietary information belonging to a company or organization (say, the ego is a salesman for the latest and greatest blueprints for whatever product), or contains other very secret information, that company or organization isn't likely to be favorable to such a search. A lot of pressure would be put on habs to put an end to this kind of behavior. Finally... what about normal encrypted data? We know that data is passing between habs all the time, just the normal equivalent of data searches or conversations between people in different habs, and almost all of it is going to be encrypted. There is nothing stopping anyone from having their data transmitted separately from the ego. Is the hab going to insist that ALL data entering the hab is unencrypted? This is unsustainable, and would completely shut the hab off from commerce and reputation networks. They would become a pariah in the system. So, for all these reasons I think it is impractical for a hab to conduct data searches. What do they do instead? I would guess they look at the reputation of the sender and/or receiver. A good reputation and you'll have no problems. Bad, and you might get a more serious search. Scanning egos for exurgent infection is an obvious thing to try, though that won't catch everything. Keep an eye on your local networks for signs of strange behavior that might signal exurgent/TITAN activity, and keep a fast response team in place to handle anything that comes up.

Madwand wrote:

First, by instantiating an ego unnecessarily (and especially against their will) in simulspace, you are risking psychological damage to that ego. They will suffer the usual penalties for an instantiation, and may even go insane in particularly bad cases. This won't look good for that hab.

Uh... If at any point you instantiate someone and immediately delete the copy of their ego you instantiated them from, you are an idiot. You know, because even routine instantiation can go Way Fucking Wrong, so you want to be able to undo it and try again. So you can instantiate someone a hundred times simultaneously, run them through a hundred different simulspaces simultaneously to test their reactions to everything from boring routine normalcy to being caught in an obvious EXSURGENCY OUTBREAK. (*Great* way to catch Firewall/Ozma/Other operatives, throw them into this scenario and see who they try to contact/what kind of emergency procedures they begin following/otherwise what they begin doing.)

ShadowDragon8685 wrote:

Uh... If at any point you instantiate someone and immediately delete the copy of their ego you instantiated them from, you are an idiot. You know, because even routine instantiation can go Way Fucking Wrong, so you want to be able to undo it and try again. So you can instantiate someone a hundred times simultaneously, run them through a hundred different simulspaces simultaneously to test their reactions to everything from boring routine normalcy to being caught in an obvious EXSURGENCY OUTBREAK. (*Great* way to catch Firewall/Ozma/Other operatives, throw them into this scenario and see who they try to contact/what kind of emergency procedures they begin following/otherwise what they begin doing.)

I'm confused. What's your point here? I never claimed otherwise. *Of course* harsh ego interrogations are a nearly perfect method of finding anything you want out about anyone. What does that have to do with the discussion? We're talking about data luggage here. The implicit assumption is that data luggage search is only a concern for habs where ego interrogation isn't going to happen (which would be most of them IMO, because who would want to live on a hab with that kind of tyranny is posssible?), because data luggage search is irrelevant when your ego is being interrogated. We know this, and the methods for defeating the two kinds of search are entirely different. My preference for defeating habs that interrogate egos is an antimatter warhead missile.

My current solution probably isn't going to make me popular with my players. Drawing from my experience with current 3d printers, off hab-blueprints are going to work fairly poorly. You're either going to have to spend some time tinkering with the fabber to make them work or source locally. Either way, it reduces the 'nuclear blueprint' danger.

R.O.S.S.-128 wrote:

Of course you can make quite a lot of very nasty things with just carbon and hydrogen, and even more nasty things with oxygen and nitrogen (which will conveniently happen to be in just about any human-safe atmosphere). But at least you don't have to worry about nukes.

Of course, one of the things about that is that there's a certain drama value that people tend to go for. While people often think of WMD's as being dangerous, there are a lot of things that are not even controlled here on earth that could be devastating to a habitat. My guess is that anyone with fabber access is a threat to habitat security (for reasons that I don't want to go on a watch list for), and even restricting "dangerous" compounds means restricting them to two or three chemical reactions at best.