[JoeNapalm]

In SR4A, it was generally a good idea to have a Hidden primary PAN commlink, then subscribe that to a 2ndary commlink for "Public" stuff.

Is that still a viable option in SR5?

If I had the cash, I'd get a Nixdor Sekretar and have the Agent watch my stuff...but that's going to have to wait for a couple runs...*grumble grumble* hobo starting level *grumble*

-Jn-

[Jack_Spade]

Having a second commlink is certainly an option, but running a secret PAN will need the aid of an Agent since you can have your persona only on one system at a time and you need to reboot each time you want to change that.

So if you want to appear in public with your crappy Metalink you can't control you Transsys, unless you modded a program carrier with an agent on to it which you command to do stuff for you.

[JoeNapalm]

Oh, yeah...hadn't thought of that.

I also hadn't thought that the Sekretar costs the same as my two commlinks, combined, anyway. 

I shall name my Agent "Puck" and he shall bring frustration and annoyance to those who hack me.

(Sleep deprivation incarnate, here...nothing to see, move along!)

-Jn-

[Jack_Spade]

The Sekretar only costs 1000, it's the R3 agent that costs 3000

Personally, I prefer to mod a high rating commlink with a program carrier (Virtual Machine). That way the agent can use another cyber program (Rating 1 Sleaze Dongle + Smoke&Mirror Program = super run silent)

[JoeNapalm]

The Sekretar only costs 1000, it's the R3 agent that costs 3000

Personally, I prefer to mod a high rating commlink with a program carrier (Virtual Machine). That way the agent can use another cyber program (Rating 1 Sleaze Dongle + Smoke&Mirror Program = super run silent)

I'll keep that in mind for when this hobo gets paid...

Now, the Agent on the Sekretar, you would just set that to watch your PAN and reboot it if things start to get suspicious, yeah? I mean, on paper, the Ikon is a more powerful commlink in terms of ratings and firewall, it's the Agent's ability to play watchdog that makes it worthwhile.

Or am I reading this wrong? 

-Jn-

[Jack_Spade]

Nope, you've read that perfectly correct. Also you can order your Agent to be constantly on full defense, raising your defense pool by 3

[JoeNapalm]

Okay, so I dropped the nuyen to set up a Nikdorf Sekretar, with a Transys Arthur secondary and ten (10) stealth tags.

While adding up the devices slaved to my PAN, I had a thought...

The Running Silent rules (Core 235) says:

Note that if there are multiple silent running icons in the vicinity, you have to pick randomly which one you're going to look at through the Opposed Test.

So, I can slave, say for example, five of those stealth tags to my PAN, making it less likely that a hacker would hit an actual device on my personal net...but wouldn't the other five make it even harder to identify my actual PAN gateway to begin with? What's to stop me from filling a pocket up with 100 tags to make my hub a needle in a haystack? Or everyone on my team from doing the same?

Heck, for what a deck costs, if I were a Decker, I'd have a pelican case full of these things. 

Did I miss where it says they have to be subscribed to a network? The stealth tag description says they're always sitting there, running silent. I guess if I wanted to go dark, they can't be shut off, but I have plenty of slots open in my coat to install a faraday pocket.

Secondary clarification question -- per the second post, I can now have my secondary commlink show my fake ID, can I not? Since I have an Agent on the PAN hub? I can always drop that Arthur if it's really useless, I just like the idea of a little defensive depth.


-Jn-

[Darzil]

It all comes down to how a decker is allowed to filter icons, which is unclear in the rules and so is up to the GM.

Agent scanning your device for marks is similar. How often do they check, what happens on a critical glitch. If they are checking once a combat turn, they'll generate many critical glitches per day even with a high rating Agent. Are those false positives ?

[JoeNapalm]

It all comes down to how a decker is allowed to filter icons, which is unclear in the rules and so is up to the GM.

I don't see the ambiguity. If the devices are running silent, the Decker has to randomly select one to look at.

They can't run a filter until they know what it is they're looking at.

Agent scanning your device for marks is similar. How often do they check, what happens on a critical glitch. If they are checking once a combat turn, they'll generate many critical glitches per day even with a high rating Agent. Are those false positives ?

Yes and no...mostly no.

That's not how game time works.

Yeah, you'd Crit Glitch within a few minutes worth of Combat Turns, but you're not using Combat Turns all day long. Or at least you really shouldn't be -- by the logic you're suggesting, trying to drive a motorcycle across town would be suicide.

If anything, it's an Extended Test.

More importantly, even if the Agent did roll a Crit Glitch, all it does is reboot the device. If you're not in combat, this is pretty much a non-event. The device comes back online after a couple of seconds. In combat, yeah, a false positive means that my Agent hard boots my PAN unnecessarily, taking my primary stuff offline "until the end of the next combat turn"...but I've got analog backups (yay redundancy!) and Critical Glitches happen, no matter what you're doing -- the only way to avoid ever having one is to never roll the dice.

-Jn-

[Novocrane]

If you know at least one feature of an icon running silent, you can spot the icon

... the first thing you need to do is have some idea that a hidden icon is out there. You can do this with a hit from a Matrix Perception Test;

asking if there are icons running silent in the vicinity (either in the same host or within 100 meters) can be a piece of information you learn with a hit.

If you already have information on the icon running silent (assuming feature & information are interchangeable), then you can attempt to spot it. Further assumption would lead one to believe that if this information likewise does not produce a unique result, the icon you attempt to perceive will be chosen from the list at random.

There was a brief time when hackers thought they could confuse security by flooding hosts with dozens of RFID chips running silent, but once they figured out that demi- GODs knew enough to design their scans to screen for icons that were running silent and were not RFID chips, the days of that trick were numbered.

That’s the part of Matrix security that too many people overlook—it’s not about just looking at reality, it’s knowing how to define reality so that what you want to see comes to the fore.

No matter how you twist it, you can't use a bag of RFID tags against corporate security. Whether you can use it against other matrix entities is another question.

by the logic you're suggesting, trying to drive a motorcycle across town would be suicide.

When a character is piloting a vehicle in non-combat, or everyday situations, no test is required (unless the character is Incompetent, and then hilarity ensues).

[JoeNapalm]

If you know at least one feature of an icon running silent, you can spot the icon

... the first thing you need to do is have some idea that a hidden icon is out there. You can do this with a hit from a Matrix Perception Test;

asking if there are icons running silent in the vicinity (either in the same host or within 100 meters) can be a piece of information you learn with a hit.

If you already have information on the icon running silent (assuming feature & information are interchangeable), then you can attempt to spot it. Further assumption would lead one to believe that if this information likewise does not produce a unique result, the icon you attempt to perceive will be chosen from the list at random.

There was a brief time when hackers thought they could confuse security by flooding hosts with dozens of RFID chips running silent, but once they figured out that demi- GODs knew enough to design their scans to screen for icons that were running silent and were not RFID chips, the days of that trick were numbered.

That’s the part of Matrix security that too many people overlook—it’s not about just looking at reality, it’s knowing how to define reality so that what you want to see comes to the fore.

No matter how you twist it, you can't use a bag of RFID tags against corporate security. Whether you can use it against other matrix entities is another question.

by the logic you're suggesting, trying to drive a motorcycle across town would be suicide.

When a character is piloting a vehicle in non-combat, or everyday situations, no test is required (unless the character is Incompetent, and then hilarity ensues).

Okay, the flavor text is nice, addressing the specific issue, but that doesn't illuminate how you actually counter that approach. The actual rule seems to state that you can't know what the icon is without inspecting it, and you can only choose which one to inspect at random.

Until then, they just know there are silent icons in the vicinity.

Per the Matrix Perception rules and the Running Silent rules, this seems to hold true. You have to scan for icons that are running silent -- once you have done that, then you roll an Opposed Test vs that icon to interrogate it, one net hit for spotting and every one after that for analysis. But you have to do that for each silent icon, at random, one at a time.

Really not debating the flavor text -- I just want to grok how this would work. It's all well and good to say "filter out the RFIDs!" but until you've done the above, you wouldn't know what is an RFID and what isn't.

A non-Decker isn't going to stop a dedicated hacker. But I don't have to outrun the bear, I just have to outrun the guy next to me. My logic is, if the Decker has to individually mark each icon on my PAN, and my Agent is scanning along like Patrol IC and then rebooting the PAN any time it sees anything that isn't supposed to be there, they're either going to move on to an easier mark or they're going to get tunnel vision while our team's Decker hunts him down and stakes him out for the ants.

As for the motorcycle thing, that just illustrates the point -- in an everyday, non-combat situation, you're not going to have to worry about Critical Glitches if you ask your Agent to keep an eye on your PAN for you.

-Jn-

[Novocrane]

You have to scan for icons that are running silent

Debatable.

"If you know at least one feature of an icon running silent, you can spot the icon."
Running Silent is a single hit of information given on Matrix Perception tests vs nearby icons, after you ask "are icons running silent in the vicinity (either in the same host or within 100 meters)"?
That info is useful if you haven't done any prep or work to know other features of the icon(s) you're looking for, but what about when you do? What happens when you know a feature of the icon?
"...You can spot the icon" - sounds like time to roll dice to me.

[JoeNapalm]

You have to scan for icons that are running silent

Debatable.

"If you know at least one feature of an icon running silent, you can spot the icon."
Running Silent is a single hit of information given on Matrix Perception tests vs nearby icons, after you ask "are icons running silent in the vicinity (either in the same host or within 100 meters)"?
That info is useful if you haven't done any prep or work to know other features of the icon(s) you're looking for, but what about when you do? What happens when you know a feature of the icon?
"...You can spot the icon" - sounds like time to roll dice to me.

That rule you're quoting is from a sidebar, and you left off the part that says "Running Silent, see below."

This is on Core 235.

Per those rules, yes, you get to make a roll -- just as I've described in the previous couple of posts.

First Matrix Perception test tells you that yes, there are silent icons. Second Matrix Perception test is vs one of those icons, at random, to analyze.


-Jn-

[Darzil]

And the reason many gm's allow an amount of filtering is that otherwise that completely breaks the matrix game.

[JoeNapalm]

And the reason many gm's allow an amount of filtering is that otherwise that completely breaks the matrix game.

No.

No no.

Let's be perfectly clear, here -- this does not break the Matrix game. This merely demonstrates how the Matrix game is broken.

Look, say you allow your filtering, even though it is explicitly against the rules and effectively make Running Silent next to useless (you get a single hit on an unopposed Matrix Perception roll to eliminate all benefits). I can just as easily do the exact same thing with a pocket full of cheap commlinks, and your filters would do exactly nothing. They'd still be left to find my actual devices at random. The only functional difference is that it costs me ¥1000 instead of ¥10.

As a non-Decker player, this creates a whopper of a conundrum. If I ignore the Achilles Heel they built into the system, I'm basically hacker bait -- the best I can do is throw up a pathetic firewall that any weefle hacker can walk through like a cobweb, meanwhile there is no end to the ridiculous and punitive measures taken to ensure that I leave my wireless connection on.

So, I will acknowledge that the Matrix rules are awful, and take the steps to defend myself against the idiocy of the likes of "the interwebs makes your gun work faster" while still taking the high road and not dropping a C-bill on Stealth Tags to line my coat with.

(Until such a time as my GM can houserule the everloving @#$^ out of this drek.)

-Jn-