| From: | Max Rible <cheshire@*****.com> |
|---|---|
| Subject: | The Nature of Fake ID's |
| Date: | Mon, 07 Oct 1996 11:37:19 -0800 |
for them. However, there is no information given as to how you create one,
how you improve one, and how one might degrade, and there's no given method
to differentiate between a legitimate one and a fake one of arbitrarily high
quality. Any suggestions that might lead to coming up with a useful system
would be welcome.
Some speculation:
The most important question for fake ID quality is: How does a credstick
verifier work? The only thing that makes sense to me is that there are a
lot of databases that hold personal information that grant read access to
properly authorized search programs. The higher the rating of the verifier,
the more cross-correlation it puts in on the data it can find, and the more
databases it searches. (The problem with this is that there's
no point to having a Rating N credstick verifier in your shop. You just
get one that reads the right information from someone's credstick and
transmits it to a mainframe somewhere that functions as a top-rating
verifier.)
Presumably, the data that a credstick verifier looks for includes birth
and death records, medical records, credit history, educational history, and
miscellaneous financial transactions. A fake ID would be created by adding
the appropriate records to the appropriate databases. (A temporary fake ID
could be created by doing so in such a way that the backups for the
databases weren't altered, so that it would be cleaned up fairly quickly.
This would be the sort of fake ID that would blow up as soon as someone
figured it out, though, rather than one that degrades in quality over time
like the ones in Divided Assets.)
Given that megacorps often have their own housing, hospitals, and so on, I
expect it's quite possible for someone to have records only in a single corp's
databases and the UCAS birth/death records up through their entire youth.
(Though a few financial transactions representing leaving corporate housing
to spend your allowance might be good for verisimilitude.) This suggests that
any megacorp with a black ops division probably reports more births than
standard and quietly maintains their records for these "children" to grow
their own fake ID's that are basically legitimate (unless you crack into
the right computers with something a little more powerful than a mere
credstick verifier).
I would expect that if someone simply made use of a fake ID for a long time,
its rating would improve as more data accumulated around its use. (This
suggests that a fixer who supplies fake ID's would be in the habit of keeping
a few people on staff to simply wander around exercising these ID's for
trivial matters. You could have someone whose whole job was just maintaining
groceries for safe houses, picking up books, having meals and going to
movies on the various different credsticks...)
--
%%% Max Rible %%% cheshire@*****.com %%% http://www.amurgsval.org/~cheshire %%%
%%% "Before enlightenment: sharpen claws, catch mice. %%%
%%% After enlightenment: sharpen claws, catch mice." - me %%%
