| From: | Avenger <Avenger@*******.DEMON.CO.UK> |
|---|---|
| Subject: | Re: Fw: Newbie92739434 |
| Date: | Thu, 19 Feb 1998 22:27:58 +0000 |
100000@****.ugcs.caltech.edu>, Jeffrey Mach <mach@****.CALTECH.EDU>
waffled & burbled about Fw: Newbie92739434
>Huh? So, let me get this straight:
>
>The Newbie is a kid, and a little one at that. (Another little kid posting
>to Shadowland Dear Lord Almighty please tell me when will it stop? =) )
:)
It will never stop. Shadowrunners, deckers and so forth must originate
from somewhere - they were all children once, many of them from gangs,
some from other walks of life. <g>
Part of the current situation is my fault. Karl asked if there was any
plot information that I wouldn't mind leaked to the list. We talked
over a few mails regarding Otaku and wiz kids and suchlike, and I
allowed the kid to get the information from the node. I must confess
that I was unaware that he was posting from /inside/ Ares, but that was
probably me misreading something. You know what I'm like :)
Even so, it is not completely beyond belief that the kid - one brought
up with the matrix, inside a Megacorp arco, wouldn't be familiar with
the place. Kids get into all sorts of places and up to all sorts of
tricks. For example (not related) Newt from Aliens - surviving because
of her knowledge of the stations' ventilation systems and drainage
ducts, not as unreal as you might think. There's a couple of old
Victorian gun emplacements a few miles from where I live, One of them is
a rats warren of tunnels descending nearly 200 feet through the cliff -
the kids of the area, and a few others know the place like the back of
their hands - I know, I was one of those kids. We spent months
exploring and scaring the shit out of each other in the place, before
finally we were caught by the National Trust, and "educated". :)
Kids at school with access to computers, whether it be middle/high
school, college or uni will always try to hack the system. Play games,
store software for their mates, or just for the hell of it. Most of the
software transmitted across today's internet, is from students hacking
their college/uni system and allowing others to store software on it
until sysadmin returns on Monday morning - or whenever. It's a cool
thing to do, it's fun, it's a little bit dangerous. Kids are like that.
They climb cliffs that no-one in their sane mind would go near with a
ladder, because of a dare, and a multitude of other reasons that make
sense to them at the time.
As I explained to Karl, my take on the Otaku, was not so much as an
evolved species - I always find that excuse somewhat daft, it takes more
than a couple of decades for evolution to alter a person sufficiently to
allow what FASA have invented. Anyway, the way I see these Otaku, these
wizards of the Matrix, is as entities introduced to the matrix as soon
as they are capable of coherent thought, maybe even before then.
Perhaps virtually from shortly after birth. Their parents are offered
sufficient money and reassurance that this is an attractive prospect,
their children will receive the best education the corporation can
offer, good accommodation, good food, work, security etc etc blah blah -
all for furthering the corporations' interests and research - and none
of it will harm their child, they'll even be able to visit him/her.
The early introduction to the matrix creates a creature that considers
the place home, and the Otaku are born. The thing that gave me the
inspiration for that concept was the story in Virtual Realties (first
ed). I know many people are of the opinion that the child in that story
is a fledgling AI, but I find that a little passe and trite, but as an
explanation of a child awakening to the illusion of the matrix, a home,
their lives, I can swallow that. :)
The post was suggested by me and written by Karl. It was designed to
provoke exactly the reaction from Lynch that it got. Ideally what would
have happened is that both Achilles and SIGA would head off in a search
for newbie9, followed by the shape of Belial and his cronies, they
would attempt to create a fear of the feds in Newbies mind, a fear that
would cause him to run and hide, allowing Belial a chance to interview
him, assess the situation and possibly even hire the character. Then
Belial, Achilles etc would discover that he was a kid. What to do?
Ares will not give up their project, not and reveal to a greedy material
world what they're doing. So, Belial would lose his prey, not being in
a position to negotiate, and without sufficient power to crack Ares and
either extract or kill Newbie9. Achilles, or Seneca would negotiate
with Ares for access to the boy, for interview. He still holds
sufficient knowledge of the encryption he cracked that it would be
useful for the Feds in their search of Chronos.
The results of this would be that Ares would pay more attention to
Newbie9, and the other kids - but like any caged animal, once you've had
a taste at freedom. :) As regards bypassing the Ares protection,
firewalls and encryption routines. That's not really so unbelievable.
How long has Newbie been at it? He did admit that the encryption -
which I described to him as "heavy" - around the datastore took him a
week to break, and he believed that there was an easier way to do it,
plus he only got a little of what was there. Ares may have taken the
boy a year or more to break out of. But it's far easier to break out of
a system that is designed to keep people out, not in, as you're working
with the routines, not against them.
It was a way to introduce a new character that might prove interesting -
even 11 year olds can be surprisingly mature about things, and I fully
expect Newbie9 to react in much the same way as Matthew Broderick in
WarGames - complete panic, ignore it and maybe it will go away. :)
Maybe after the heat has died down, he would venture forth again, but
this time much more wise, and with an idea who was out there.
Shadowland would become his little secret so to speak. A place of
wonder that made him feel like something important. Secretly I dare say
the boy is pretty proud of himself, though right now in terrible fear.
He hacked a system, gathered some information, and it was something the
Feds were interested in. The Black Suited heroic crime fighters of
Trid. We've all seen the Untouchables, imagine the 205* version of that
sort of program. :) Ordinary men and women fighting massive
cyberzombies and organised crime gangs with enough power to crack the
world. You know the sort of sensationalist tripe that kids love.
What I didn't foresee, and I don't think anyone could, would be the
sudden unmitigated intervention of another character, one who walzed
through the Ares system and now has the child secured in a safe area
within that complex - somehow. I'm still trying to figure that one out.
I don't know how Binder managed what he did, or how this can be
explained. There might be a way around it, but it's a small indication
of action before discussion, something that's happened before, and even
to myself and Paul on a recent occassion. :)
>And he's inside the Ares arcoplex. And he's been "monitored" as a "pet
>project" by Ares matrix security. Ares, the North American military-
>industrial complex megacorp has an interest in this kid, he posts to
>Shadowland with a message thet gets the FBI and SIGA interested, and he is
>still going to school, as opposed to a vault deep somewhere with fifty
>tons of the latest in military harware between him and the outside world,
>while the lawyers figure out the extraterritorial mumbo-jumbo with the
>Feds.
Again, Ares will need to identify the boy. The project may require that
the children are introduced to normal life to see how they interact with
others of their sort, and with normal children, nothing is sacred in an
experiment. In this situation, it is possible that for a very short
time the kids are left unattended - maybe for a few hours at night while
they sleep. How many kids living in dormitories in residential schools
don't test the security of their enclosures, by talking, playing games,
sneaking out of the window. To a child there is no danger, only
adventure, and the fun in the adventure is the evasion of their adult
overseers. Again, I don't find it unbelievable that he could be free
within the Ares complex for a short period.
As soon as the Feds manage to lock his location down, Ares are going to
light up like the fourth of July, and they're going to be seriously
interested in the situation, and the culprit. Not only must he be
protected - he cracked their system, how? - but they can't just hand him
over to the Feds, he's not actually broken any laws. Plus, this is
interesting. How many other times have their subjects broken free of
the system unnoticed. It may be that newbie9 used a channel that has
been built by other children of the "Experiment".
>And they don't know about it because he uses his homebrew deck that said
>megacorporate security a) doesn't know about, b) didn't bother to bug, and
>c) didn't keep an eye out for with frames on any and all of the access
>points the kid would be able to get access to.
Difficult, but a challenge and an adventure. It would not be easy, but
newbie9 has displayed patience and skill, but especially patience. He's
not a "beat the door down" hacker, he's a nibbler, someone who
investigates the puzzle from all angles looking for a crack in the
armour and exploiting it.
>Right. "Hey George,
>somebody in #th Grade is punching out into the open matrix and just
>bypassed our lockdown." "Is it Timmy's computer?" "Nope."
"Guess its
>not him, lets go have a brew."
How many children are there in the Ares Arco, how many of those are
subject to the Experiment? Newbie9 has a number, what part of the
number indicates his position in the "class". A class of today in the
UK, is 36-45 pupils. They manage to do things that the lecturers never
notice or find out about. For example, I and two others during a lunch
break, chained the whole lecture staff into their staff room, using high
tensile steel chain stolen from the Engine Technology labs. It took the
fire brigade 20 minutes to cut them out, and that only after a lecturer
had scaled the wall from the first (US second) storey window. I was
never caught, but was a suspect. :)
>And BITD has, in about one day, managed to
>infiltrate the same school as the "pet project" past security that, after
>a recent spate of terrorism should be "tighter than a nun's habit" as they
>say.
Ah, yes. Hmmm. Can't help you there, that happened rather too quick
for me, and I'm still trying to understand it.
>Not to say that any of things are impossible, but they shouldn't be made
>to sound so trivially easy.
Once achieve, the child will think it was trivially easy, and it would
appear to be so. I can't offhand think of a way the difficulty could be
described, except in later conversation between the people involved.
The boy has succeeded in avoiding the grups. Once he's had a bit of fun
with it, he'll show it to his friends, and eventually it would be
realised and shut down by Ares, followed by whatever punishment they
deem fitting. As for the seemingly instantaneous infiltration by
Binder. Well. I can't comment.
But I recall that even Karl found this hard to believe, and was somewhat
puzzled about it. :)
--
Dark Avenger -:- http://www.shalako.demon.co.uk/index.htm -
Unofficial Shadowtk Newbies Guide, Edgerunners Datastore &
Beginnings of the Underseas Sourcebook.
http://freespace.virgin.net/pete.sims/index.htm - Alternative UK Sourcebook
(U/C)
