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Mailing List Logs for ShadowRN

Message no. 1
From: lordmountainlion@***.rr.com (Scott Peterson)
Subject: was radio check now wireless net
Date: Sun, 2 Mar 2003 10:47:46 -0700
And for those non technophiles, how do wireless nets work in the game and
how easy are they top crack. And what would be the procedure. Seems all
you hear in the news is how bad they are now rl.

Scott
Message no. 2
From: gurth@******.nl (Gurth)
Subject: was radio check now wireless net
Date: Sun, 2 Mar 2003 19:02:06 +0100
According to Scott Peterson, on Sunday 02 March 2003 18:47 the word on the
street was...

> And for those non technophiles, how do wireless nets work in the game
> and how easy are they top crack. And what would be the procedure.
> Seems all you hear in the news is how bad they are now rl.

This is covered in Matrix (at least as far as decking is concerned). I
don't right now feel like getting out the book to paraphrase it, though :)

--
Gurth@******.nl - http://www.xs4all.nl/~gurth/index.html
Monster zonder waarde
-> Probably NAGEE Editor * ShadowRN GridSec * Triangle Virtuoso <-
-> The Plastic Warriors Page: http://plastic.dumpshock.com <-

GC3.12: GAT/! d- s:- !a>? C++(---) UL+ P(+) L++ E W--(++) N o? K w(--)
O V? PS+ PE@ Y PGP- t- 5++ X(+) R+++$ tv+(++) b++@ DI- D+ G+ e h! !r y?
Incubated into the First Church of the Sqooshy Ball, 21-05-1998
Message no. 3
From: jzealey@***.edu.au (James Zealey)
Subject: was radio check now wireless net
Date: Mon, 03 Mar 2003 09:16:11 +1100
> "Scott Peterson" <lordmountainlion@***.rr.com>
>
> Good scared me thought my bouncing went to hell or my field expedition
> antenna died in the last storm. Which does bring up a good topic. Who's the
> rigger expert and who wants to teach me why flux and jamming is so darn
> powerful in the game mechanics?
>
> Scott
>
>

Are my corrections to your email correct?

What do you mean by "so powerful"? Are you asking why the overriding
factor in most ECM exchanges is flux? Or something else?

If that's your question, then the answer is that signal strength is that
the average reciever will only recognise (or be more likely to
recognise) the more powerful signal on a given wavelength. Jamming
basically overrides the real signal with crud.

> subject: was radio check now wireless net
>
> "Scott Peterson" <lordmountainlion@***.rr.com>
>
> And for those non technophiles, how do wireless nets work in the game and
> how easy are they top crack. And what would be the procedure. Seems all
> you hear in the news is how bad they are now rl.
>
> Scott
>

IRL, and also in game, wireless nets are bad because ANY network (more
or less) can be cracked given time. The only way to guarantee a secure
network is to isolate it from the outside world and hackers who want to
get in. A wireless network cannot be isolated in this way without an
awful lot of expense in shielding the building it's supposed to operate in.
Message no. 4
From: loneeagle@********.co.uk (Lone Eagle)
Subject: was radio check now wireless net
Date: Mon, 03 Mar 2003 19:14:46 +0000
At 10:16 PM 2/3/2003, James wrote:
>>Good scared me thought my bouncing went to hell or my field expedition
>>antenna died in the last storm.
>Are my corrections to your email correct?

Field Expedient antenna would be correct, an antenna created in the field
(rather than the set's original one).



--
Lone Eagle
"Hold up lads, I got an idea."

www.wyrmtalk.co.uk - Please be patient, this site is under construction

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GCC0.2: y75>?.uk[NN] G87 S@:@@[SR] B+++ f+ RM(RR) rm++ rr++ l++(--) m- w
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Message no. 5
From: ShadowRN@********.demon.co.uk (Paul J. Adam)
Subject: was radio check now wireless net
Date: Tue, 4 Mar 2003 23:21:40 +0000
In article <005601c2e0e3$d6677e60$c600f218@***.rr.com>, Scott Peterson
<lordmountainlion@***.rr.com> writes
>And for those non technophiles, how do wireless nets work in the game and
>how easy are they top crack. And what would be the procedure. Seems all
>you hear in the news is how bad they are now rl.

A lot less easy to break _usefully_ than some alarmists would have you
believe. Breaking a given communication is doable, but when it's an
enemy fire-support group being directed to shift fire to depth positions
while the rest of the company assaults... you either get that to the
relevant unit (assuming you know which unit is being attacked) within
seconds, or you file it as 'possibly of historical interest' because
it'll be too late by the time it arrives. That's the fundamental problem
of tactical COMINT... being able to find out who and where M30A and W41C
are, which of your units they're attacking, and getting some useful
information to a _very busy and scared_ subunit commander in time to
improve his situational awareness.


Being able to read VHF radio comms is no big deal, indeed it's taken as
a given: that's why significant traffic is manually encoded (contact
reports and interception of combat traffic is not a panic... yes, your
platoon at Grid 43219876 is being attacked, they're clogging up _your_
net shrieking for reinforcements and support, it's not exactly a
surprise that you're getting radio traffic indicating a threat to
them...) More encryption is nice, but the main focus is on preventing
the enemy from using direction-finding gear to triangulate your
headquarters and land artillery on it and on protecting comms that the
enemy could actually do mischief with.


COMINT can be very powerful, but its effect at battlegroup level and
below is often overrated. The worst case is an enemy that speaks your
language and is trained in your RT procedure (Chechenya) where the enemy
can, for instance, hijack calls for fire-support; where you have to
translate the traffic and aren't thoroughly comfortable with the RT
drills, it becomes much harder to make use of COMINT at the tactical
level.



--
Paul J. Adam

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These messages were posted a long time ago on a mailing list far, far away. The copyright to their contents probably lies with the original authors of the individual messages, but since they were published in an electronic forum that anyone could subscribe to, and the logs were available to subscribers and most likely non-subscribers as well, it's felt that re-publishing them here is a kind of public service.

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