From:	Master Hawk <fannicm%WKUVX1.bitnet@******.LOUISVILLE.EDU>
Subject:	deckers downloading ICe
Date:	Sat, 16 Oct 1993 22:17:34 CDT

Doctor Doom <JCH8169@*****.TAMU.EDU> writes:
>
>The Technomancer down-loaded a Black IC into his cyberdeck, from which he
>created Killer Attack Programs, which he brought to bear upon an Artificial
>Intelligence.
> Colonel Count von Hohenzollern und von Doom, DMSc, DSc, PhD.

The illustrious Colonel Count von Hohenzollern und von Doom, DMSc,
DSc, PhD reminded me of a problem I had with an over-intelligent player
(wierd complaint already). This fellow had a way of looking at things
in a manner that utterly confounded me, which was sort of OK, since it
worked the other direction at times.
Anyway, after successfully completing one jaunt through the matrix he
went back to a piece of Probe IC that he had surpressed. He then told
me that he wanted to browse the code, load it into memory, transfer it
to storage, and then jack out. I balked at this because I could see
some extreme potential for abuse here. However, I am a CS major (and so
was he), and had already determined that no form of copy protection
would prevent a decker from making a copy of the program, just accessing
it (i.e. the copy protection in an optical storage system couldn't be
based on a hardware 'problem' like programmers used to do with the
Commodore 64 [I don't think, anyway]). So when he brought that up, like
I knew he would, I was forced by my own sense of possible/impossible to
agree to his action.
Later, I was asked what the TN's would be to crack the copy
protection on the IC (by this time he had picked up an Access also). I
managed to evade the question for a while, but eventually came up with a
number equal to twice the rating or something like that. Anyway, he
then went on to load the Access into his active memory and asked me if
it would act as additional armor.
I decided at that point that it was time to avoid playing Shadowrun
for a week or two.

Anyway, the point of all this is, what would your reactions be to a
player like this and his plans. Oh, and he wanted to sell the IC on the
street and kept badgering me about how much would it net him and what
would his TN's be to put a different kind of protection on it....I had
no hair by the end of that month.

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