SDN Worlds 4 Commentary Thread III

[Ilya Muromets]

Goddamn! Malachuschus! What shit timings!

I will misses yous!

*hugs*

v____________v

Well, I won't be completely devoid of Net time. I can drop by every now and then. I'm planning on finally getting something going after I manage to hash out that whole missing files thing (seriously, what kind of university has such crappy document-keeping that they lose a part of my enrollment documents?) with the university authorities tomorrow. Hell, maybe I can post The Lament of Byzon in installments rather than a long whole.

[Shroom Man 777]

I placed Cananaan near the R'nish so while the Klavostanis and Byzantines play, you might also join ins!

^_____^

*EDITED HUMILIATING TYPOS*


^___________________^"

[Simon_Jester]

I placed Cananaan near the Refuge so while the Klavostanis and Byzantines play, you might also join ins!

^_____^

For clarity, when he says "Refuge," this time he means the "R'nish." Ilya's guys, not Mayabird's guys...

[Shroom Man 777]

Oh shit, yes. That's what I meant. Aw shit, what's wrong with me!

By the way, can anyone tell me where Hanson is and how close it is to Pendleton?

[Steve]

Well, it's been a couple weeks since I last posted. But got a new one up.

[Shroom Man 777]

Hail your GLOURIOUS RETURN!

And, damn, that was great mang!

"And nobody cared. That was the worst part. The local powers were too busy exploiting the system to care for the lives of those stuck here. The sheer apathy the civilized galaxy presented to the planet was an act of malevolence far in excess to any act of corruption by Shroomarcos and his lackies."

Truer words have never been spoken.

This is good stuff. I love how shitty you portrayed the expy of my home country, it is suitable. The only oddity is the football field (we're more basketball people).

But man, that was excellent. I love the, ah, explosive ending. Goddamn, R. Julia. Nobody fucks with him! Man.

[PeZook]

*sigh*

A one pound note from her pocket gave her entry to the small stadium. She was, in fact, overpaying - the price of the ticket in pisos was worth only about twenty-five pence, but she hoped that the presence of the note would keep attention away from herself.

Really, Zara? Really?

[Steve]

*sigh*

A one pound note from her pocket gave her entry to the small stadium. She was, in fact, overpaying - the price of the ticket in pisos was worth only about twenty-five pence, but she hoped that the presence of the note would keep attention away from herself.

Really, Zara? Really?

For the moment. Just for that lone moment, because the cashier and his buddies will be paying more attention to the pound note than to the person who gave it to them.

[Simon_Jester]

*sigh*

A one pound note from her pocket gave her entry to the small stadium. She was, in fact, overpaying - the price of the ticket in pisos was worth only about twenty-five pence, but she hoped that the presence of the note would keep attention away from herself.

Really, Zara? Really?

For the moment. Just for that lone moment, because the cashier and his buddies will be paying more attention to the pound note than to the person who gave it to them.

Meanwhile, the Umerian Agent Lily, watching the whole sordid affair from three rows up:

"Tsk, tsk. You girls really need to work on your tradecraft, you know that? You're so used to being able to tell other people what to think, you forget what happens when you can't..."

[Shroom Man 777]

That is what I thought too.

Oh well, even in death Mr. TURGID HARPER will have his uses!

Thanks Steve for allowing me to further the societal deterioration of the Feelipeenis!

[Siege]

It's not very smart of an infiltrating agent whose main advantage is in psionics to run under the cover of a Blitzschlag field, is it?

[Simon_Jester]

That's pretty much what Lily would say.

Esper agents must be good at tradecraft or they shouldn't take chances like this. Unfortunately, the Order has the wrong institutional mindset to study tradecraft; by instinct they are warrior-mystics, not real spies.

[Steve]

Yes, she should have left immediately and found another way to look into things. But if characters were perfect, they wouldn't be fun.

Besides, Zara's not really the stealth type, and she's got a Death Wish with capital letters anyway.

On top of all that, the plot demanded she be captured and I couldn't think up a better way, so I smacked her in the head with the Plot-Induced stupidity stick. Still, this gives me fodder for the next bit.

[PeZook]

It's perfectly explainable. Hell, even seasoned spies make dumb mistakes ; the nature of the business is that you need to track so many details that it's easy to miss something. In fact, with prevalence of computer controlled security and monitoring measures, I'd imagine purely organic intelligence officers (especially "illegal" ones) simply don't operate without AI support of some sort, at least not in civilized areas: at the very least, AIs can help them remember where all six hundred twenty two cameras monitoring the meeting place are pointed.

Even today, without such advanced technology, failures are common. That's why "legal" spies are preferable to illegal ones wherever possible.

Anyway, just have a villain comment on the mistake

[Simon_Jester]

Absolutely.

Though it seems to me that if your espionage techniques rely on never being seen on camera, you're screwed almost regardless of how much computer support you have; doing the job right requires that you be so unremarkable that someone looking right at you won't see you for what you are, even if they do have a camera trained on you.

Basically, the lesson of this comic.

With sufficient AI assets, this can theoretically be made impossible, but at that point you're pretty much doing massively invasive data-mining and monitoring on all citizens. And your false positive rate will skyrocket; for every person who really is a spy you'll encounter ten or twenty or fifty who cannot be proven not to be a spy, and who doesn't fit the patterns.

To make matters worse, if there are any significant number of preprogrammed blind spots in the coverage (social classes not watched, places not watched, legal modes of communication not intercepted), you're left right back where you started. It would take really intense commitment to security at the expense of privacy to accomplish that, and my feeling is that most of the cultures portrayed in this game simply don't have that.

[Steve]

New post up. Shroom didn't want to read what I had in mind so I posted it without input, but if he and Shep wish to lodge a protest at how I wrote R. Julia I'm open to edits.

[Shroom Man 777]

I didn't want to spoil myself, and wanted to wait till you post it completely.

It was the right choice.

Goddamn, man. That was brilliant. R. Julia, what a bastard. What a monster.

Good post, Steve.

[Simon_Jester]

Indeed. Good post.

He would make a mighty Boskonian.

[PeZook]

Absolutely.

Though it seems to me that if your espionage techniques rely on never being seen on camera, you're screwed almost regardless of how much computer support you have; doing the job right requires that you be so unremarkable that someone looking right at you won't see you for what you are, even if they do have a camera trained on you.

It's not "never be seen on camera", it's more like "never be seen on camera doing stuff you shouldn't be doing".

For example, it would be trivially easy to program your capital's monitoring system to track moements of all foreign diplomats ; Then if you see them sitting down on a park bench with someone, set it to track that someone and *BAM* spy ring cracked.

So logically a lot of effort would go into spoofing, circumventing or outright avoiding such security measures ; And it wouldn't be enough to just find an unmonitored spot, since an extensive system would also be able to tell "This diplomat went into that seedy bar in the bad part of town and returned two hours later ; Flag him, he's obviously a spy.", you'd need to be able to hide in plain AI assisted sight, so to speak.

Of course, some techniques would be pretty much immortal, like the "bump drop" where you bump into somebody in a crowd at a predetermined spot and drop something into his pocket. Others would die out quickly due to extensive monitoring networks, and you'll see a lot of virtual communications, temporary wireless networks (like you meet a contact by renting a hotel room, setting up a network outside of local infrastructure, conduct the meeting with a guy sitting in a cafe across the street and scram), data mining, lots of virus/countervirus planting etc. (Legion likes to corrupt every network he can with programming "for later", for example)

Funny question: if a Umerian embassy AI corrupts a Solarian CI into being an agent, does he get diplomatic immunity?

[Shroom Man 777]

For example, it would be trivially easy to program your capital's monitoring system to track moements of all foreign diplomats ; Then if you see them sitting down on a park bench with someone, set it to track that someone and *BAM* spy ring cracked.

[PeZook]

I suppose I should've added "And then see if that someone does something suspcious", but this doesn't hold true everywhere. Like Bragule.

[Siege]

(Legion likes to corrupt every network he can with programming "for later", for example)

This strikes me as a really bad idea; it only takes one programmer / guardian CI to post "hold on a second... guys, anybody else seen this?" on the future equivalent of a web forum for security software and your worms are all blown. If you have a way to corrupt a network, best not to do anything that could expose your backdoor 'till you actually need to plant a worm there.

[PeZook]

True in some cases, not in others. Obviously a worm won't be able to remain hidden forever, just like a dead drop will eventually be cased by counterintelligence people: it's still a good idea to have a nice selection of drop-boxes cased all around the city you operate in.

It's a question of managing your worms. In many cases it doesn't matter if the backdoor got found out, since it was planted just for a single operation, or a weeklong stay somewhere etc, so if he, say, left a worm at a freight terminal somewhere so that he could arrange a covert shipment of materiel and never used it and the hole was found and patched, no harm done (more likely, worms will have a set time after which they delete themselves, or even more complicated procedures in case of discovery).

Obviously if he knows a weakness in some important and secure system, he won't just barge in, since those systems are better watched. Just like a spy won't leave a dead drop in an FBI office, even if he knows of some critical security flaw, but might scatter fake documents, money etc. when moving into a city.

Of course, he's Legion, so he's kind of an ass, and sometimes wrecks a system for the hell of it. Mostly on the fringe, though, he doesn't usually operate in high-security core worlds (look what happened when he tried )

[Force Lord]

So the Feelipeens are that bad huh?

[Shroom Man 777]

Yep.