Cyberpunk Fantasy Heartbreaker: Magic and Technology

[Username17]

EUE works just like a one time pad except that you don't ever have to worry about it running out. It might even be a system for generating look-up tables for quasi-one time pads out of available data. I don't know or even care. SE and EUE are like that because it makes for a better game.

SE is completely ubiquitous to the point that it is applied automatically on your behalf by every computer. So we don't have to worry about anything weaker than that. And it is as strong as current modern public key encryption, which is to say that it will keep a normal computer from cracking it for millions of years and will keep a quantum computer from cracking it for a few seconds. That makes it essentially worthless against hackers and essentially unbeatable to everyone else - which is what we want for an entry level encryption protocol.

EUE is unbreakable with current math in currently usable time periods even with a quantum computer. But since it is symmetric, compromising either end of the messaging compromises both ends of the messaging. Plus, you have to share the key securely to begin with because both sides need a copy. That means that there are like couriers with microchips with codes on them and shit, which is what we want for high level communications.

If EUE offered significantly less protection than one time pads, people would use one time pads for all secure transmissions. That would actually be OK for banking, since it would be an excuse for your credit module to have an expiration date where you had to go to the bank and get a new one. But for every day player use, worrying about whether a one time pad fell out of sync or ran out is book keeping that I don't want people to have to do. Giving people a symmetric effectively unbreakable and stable cipher provides basically all the same plots but has less book keeping, making it fundamentally superior as an option.

If public key encryption was or even could be as good as EUE, then we'd lose a lot of plots. Code couriers would not exist and compromising one drone on a network would get you basically nothing. That would be bad. So the fact that it is theoretically possible that in 2075 asymmetric encryption will be weak to high-end hacker ware and symmetric encryption will still be strong is nice and all; but even if that was completely fucking absurd, things would still work that way because it tells better stories than other setups.

-Username17

[Vebyast]

I agree with all of that. Maintaining a key infrastructure is not something players want to deal with, and the SE/EUE system makes for lots of awesome macguffins.

[Draco_Argentum]

"because the key the unravels it is different" second the = that

Also you used the "lets wait for Moore's law" tag line twice.

[jadagul]

The only thing I disagree with in all of that, Frank, is that I think distributing one-time pads is way easier than you think it is; that in practice it wouldn't be harder than EUE, because you'd reset keys more often for "what if it's been compromised" reasons than you'd run out your one-time pad anyway; and therefore that everyone would just use one-time pads anyway. The one-time pad I could seriously fit on the flash drive I bought at Target for five bucks will last for years and years of text transmissions, which is most of what people would pipe through EUE anyway.

That said, I did say "go ahead and ignore this if it makes for a better game." In that case, I just want to make sure your fluff all matches up, and make sure you never imply that NP problems are solvable in Asymmetric Threat.

Grek: feel free to PM me. I can sketch out a proof (I think--I haven't written it yet and sometimes the devil's in the details) but you're right that that doesn't have to happen in this forum.

[Username17]

The only thing I disagree with in all of that, Frank, is that I think distributing one-time pads is way easier than you think it is; that in practice it wouldn't be harder than EUE, because you'd reset keys more often for "what if it's been compromised" reasons than you'd run out your one-time pad anyway; and therefore that everyone would just use one-time pads anyway. The one-time pad I could seriously fit on the flash drive I bought at Target for five bucks will last for years and years of text transmissions, which is most of what people would pipe through EUE anyway.

The issue is that people are going to be using it for real time sensory and motor control of military drones. And I honestly don't want to have a discussion about exactly how much bandwidth that is or how fast it chews into one-time-pad-space.

I agree that OTP works just as well for banking, the issue is the @man and Puppeteer.

-Username17

[Vebyast]

The issue is that people are going to be using it for real time sensory and motor control of military drones. And I honestly don't want to have a discussion about exactly how much bandwidth that is or how fast it chews into one-time-pad-space.

We don't need to have that discussion. You can buy petabyte hard drives; one of those is enough to log Google's entire pipe, upstream and downstream and including Youtube, for an entire hour. You could run your body for decades off of one. It's just nitpicking, though, and the original formulation works well enough.

[sabs]

One of the Important Premises of the game, is that.
Real time Hacking is possible.

Now maybe hackers can pull it off, because they have their friends steal them an entire shipment of commlinks, which they then cluster into a megacommlink of doom allowing them to run 200 decrypt algorithms at once, against the 'data'. And regular folks just can't do that.

But decryption happens, people's drones get Pwnd, peoples cellphones get turned into bitches for other people. Someone comes into your building, and takes over your security from some closet somewhere.

These are things that are possible, because it's Cyberpunk. Not, Corporategiggle.

So you're 'matrix security' has to allow for that.

[Username17]

OK, here's a thing that's been bothering me lately: why would it in any way be a bad thing for P to equal NP? I really see only positive results from that.

The P = NP (at least, within a quantum computing space) doesn't mean that you have all the answers or even that you know how to get all the answers. It just means that you know in principle that given the right algorithm you could solve any question in a reasonable amount of time.

Any problem that you don't want people solving can just not be solved. If you don't actually know Shor's Algorithm, simply having a quantum computer doesn't make you factor all numbers. A P = NP proof within a quantum computing space wouldn't cause anything to come crashing down except the idea that research into math is finished.

So enlighten me: how would it not be a 100% boon to the game's storylines for P to equal NP and for people to be working on algorithms that will wildly change what computers are capable of in the near future?

-Username17

[CatharzGodfoot]

It would be awesome if P = NP in real life. It's pretty damn' near certain that it doesn't, though. It's also pretty damn' near certain that quantum computers can't solve NP complete problems in polynomial time.

The great thing about NP is that if you have an algorithm for solving just one NP problem in polynomial time, you can (fairly easily) translate it into an algorithm for solving any other NP problem in polynomial time. That is, in fact, how NP-completeness is usually proven.

That said, in a world with magic elves, you can also pretend that P = NP, and that having an algorithm for one NP problem in P time won't let you trivially solve all of them. Maybe it's a magical effect of goblinization changing how math works.

[Vebyast]

OK, here's a thing that's been bothering me lately: why would it in any way be a bad thing for P to equal NP? I really see only positive results from that.

In the long term, yes. It would be a huge step toward strong AI, and I hope that it's true. It's unlikely, but I hope that it's true.

In the short term, though, a program that solves NP-complete problems in polynomial time would be the single most disruptive piece of technology since the internet, nukes, or fire. Even worse, it could happen almost overnight. Given how fast the stock market is these days, you could wake up on Monday to someone publishing their code and go to bed Friday with the economy in the crapper.

The P = NP (at least, within a quantum computing space) doesn't mean that you have all the answers or even that you know how to get all the answers. It just means that you know in principle that given the right algorithm you could solve any question in a reasonable amount of time.

That's actually not the case, and it's one of the reasons that P = NP is such a hugely important question. A problem is NP-complete if it is equivalent to - not just similar to, or just as hard as, but actually the same problem as - every other NP-complete problem. Say I have a knapsack that I want to fill with as much value as possible. I can convert that into a series of cities that I want to visit each of as efficiently as possible, or into a graph that I want to color in using as few colors as possible, and a solution to any one of the three is a solution to all of them. A solution to even one NP-complete problem doesn't just show that other NP-complete problems can be solved. A solution to a single NP-complete problem actually is a solution for all NP-complete problems.

So enlighten me: how would it not be a 100% boon to the game's storylines for P to equal NP and for people to be working on algorithms that will wildly change what computers are capable of in the near future?

It's a very cool story, and a bunch of books have been written about it, but it's such a strong story that it dominates ever other story that could be told using the setting. It is about as strong and deterministic a railroad as you can get, on par with the setting being "Skynet woke up ten or fifteen seconds ago; survive the next two hours". It's one thing for it to have happened far enough in the past for things to have stabilized. It's another thing entirely for the players to be stuck in a pre-scripted World War WWW .

[jadagul]

Yeah, Catharz and Vebyast have it right. If you can solve any NP-complete problem you can solve every NP-complete problem, and every other NP-class problem. And if you can solve every NP-complete problem you can solve the specific NP problem of "crack this encryption scheme which is theoretically crackable." In theory you could just keep coming up with new encryption schemes that no one has written the translation layer for, but new encryption schemes take months and the translation layer would take days, so that's really really unsustainable.

So you can't solve NP-complete problems if you're going around saying that "yeah, this code could be broken in theory but it'd take wildly implausible amounts of computing power." So if you want to go around saying that, you can't claim to solve NP-complete problems--which is fine, because it doesn't really affect most of the rest of the game in a super-noticeable way.

[Username17]

Remote Operations
“Spooky action at a distance.”

The existence of machines and wireless computing is ultimately futile unless it actually does something. Machines do many things: they store and process data, they move from place to place, they allow and deny access, they even perform physical tasks. But they only do those things if they are told to do them, either ahead of time through programing or directly with commands. In 2075, commands are almost never issued through crude anachronisms like “pressing buttons” or “pulling levers”, commands are issued with software. Every device has its own operating system, or “OS”, that allows it to operate.

While the OS handles all instructions for a device performing any operation within its capabilities, the user still would like to issue some of those instructions. Communications travel over wireless connections at the speed of light, which over distances that don't involve planetary orbits is close enough to instantaneous as makes no odds, and in 2075 it is normal for people to interact with an OS at a distance.

The Anchor
“Between Actus et Potentia, there is a login screen.”

Your credit module, the maglock on your apartment door, your bus pass, your social networking, your cloud memory storage, and everything else that you have access to through The Network has its own OS. And all of these things have their own encryption and passcodes and unique interfaces as well. If all of these things interacted with your brain through a DD, you wouldn't be able to see. Heck, you probably wouldn't be able to smell with all the sensory overflow you'd be subjected to. And so what society has done is to create systems to block all of it out and bundle all of that crap together. This system is called an “Anchor” – originally because the cacophony of demands for attention from the various OSes was likened to stormy seas washing the user this way and that.

A user's Anchor is an OS that operates operating systems. It has a unified user interface and runs a single set of sensory impulses into a DD in order to allow the user to see what's going on (at least, the “important” parts of what is going on) without being overwhelmed. Your Anchor will also try to block out DD impulses from other sources, which is really helpful if you don't want blipverts beamed into your brain, and is even of some defense against basilisk hacks.

Lots of different Anchors are available, and they have different looks, themes, and feels. Since most people live with their Anchors, it is not unusual for people to be so used to the user interface their Anchor provides that they seriously don't know how the “default” UIs that many of their systems use work. Almost no one loads their credit module directly through a DD into their brain, and the result is that it pretty much doesn't matter whether the user interface provided by the bank is smooth and intuitive or a clunky garish thing that looks like it was cobbled together with fake 3d effects from the 2020s.

[Lokathor]

In the short term, though, a program that solves NP-complete problems in polynomial time would be the single most disruptive piece of technology since the internet, nukes, or fire. Even worse, it could happen almost overnight. Given how fast the stock market is these days, you could wake up on Monday to someone publishing their code and go to bed Friday with the economy in the crapper.

Given that we want various parts of society to collapse, maybe we want this to happen to our alternate earth.

[Vebyast]

Are we using anchors primarily for flavor, primarily for character advancement, or for both? It's a good candidate for character advancement, since you can't lose it (it's the single most well-backed-up thing you own) and a really well-customized personal setup can do amazing things for your productivity and skills. Also, do you have to manually customize your Anchor, or does it actively learn your habits as you use it more and more? If they learn, how smart do they get? Are there people walking around with Anchors that can pass limited Turing tests?

---

In the short term, though, a program that solves NP-complete problems in polynomial time would be the single most disruptive piece of technology since the internet, nukes, or fire. Even worse, it could happen almost overnight. Given how fast the stock market is these days, you could wake up on Monday to someone publishing their code and go to bed Friday with the economy in the crapper.

Given that we want various parts of society to collapse, maybe we want this to happen to our alternate earth.

We do want something like it to happen, yeah, but we want it to happen way in the past. A major bank being compromised by someone with a qomputer might do it; if you set up the political climate right that could cause a bank run and stock market crash.

[Username17]

Puppetry
“Robots dance on wireless strings.”

Operating things through your Anchor is entirely possible. It's even the norm. Your Anchor gives you the information it is set up to think you need, you give instructions to the Anchor, and it relays those instructions to lower level operating systems in a language they can hopefully understand. This multiple layered command hierarchy is called “puppetry”, and someone who does it called a “puppeteer”. It's important to note that basically everyone does puppetry on some level, even if it's only really simple things like interacting with their own Anchor to tell it to set the microwave for two minutes of medium heating. However, while it would be technically correct to call such people puppeteers, in practice people are not called that unless they are using puppetry to pilot robots or move large amounts of data.

Most puppetry is done through an AR medium, but in principle there is nothing stopping people from shutting out the DD altogether and performing puppetry by interacting directly with holographic images or shutting out the real world and going full ZR to do one's puppetry.

Avatar and @man
“My will drives the machine. The machine is me.”

Impulses pass through a person's neurons much slower than communications pass through wifi space. Sensations and commands can pass between objects faster than they can travel up and down a human leg. Using a deus deceptor and a motor shunt, a person can sense what a machine senses and cause the machine to act as they would act. If sensations and motor commands are being sent with a sufficiently clear signal within a reasonable distance, the controlled machine can be as much “you” as your own body would be without those devices. When a machine is a surrogate “you” in that manner it is an “Avatar”. The person whose self is transferred in that manner is called an “@man”.

The terminology originally comes from Hinduism, where the atman is the self that incarnates through a series of bodies in life after life, and an avatar is a specific body that represents a single incarnation. Once that concept hit Network culture, atman became “@man” and the plural became “@men”. Most people in 2075 think that it's an English word and refers to the fact that the person is essentially emailing themselves to the location of the device. Some people even go out of their way to make it less “sexist” by referring to the people as an “@peep”. This has not caught on.

An @man is also someone who uses a DD and a motor shunt to translate their consciousness into a purely virtual space. There are ZR games, meetings, and data manipulation jobs that @men log into, an the digital representation of their selves are still called avatars. Some people distinguish between transferred consciousness into a robot in realspace as skin avatars and transferred consciousness into a virtual space as a virtual avatar.

[RiotGearEpsilon]

Looks cool. DD's are the direct sensory induction devices, right? How cheap/easy/common are those, again, and what's DD stand for?

[Username17]

Looks cool. DD's are the direct sensory induction devices, right? How cheap/easy/common are those, again, and what's DD stand for?

The Computers chapter is going to have to begin with a tech glossary.

DD stands for "deus deceptor" Those are the things in Cartesian Philosophy that have the power to alter your sensory inputs such that you cannot determine whether you are in the real world or the Matrix.

-Username17

[RiotGearEpsilon]

Cute. (Edit: not sarcasm. I like the term.) In terms of cheapness and ubiquity, are they akin to laptops, expensive smartphones, cheap cell phones, or USB memory sticks? Likewise, are these things I can use to send someone in to a coma from across the room, from across the table, from sneaking up behind them, or while I sit on them and hold them down?

[Username17]

A Cacophony of Echoes
“OK. Everyone who agrees that I'm Jennifer Woodyard, raise their hand.”

Your address, your driver's license, your Lifenet account, your medical records, and really every other thing about you is stored electronically in The Network. It's like your credit report today. And like your credit report (or wikipedia), pretty much anyone can put stuff into the data stream at any time. You can challenge the data in court and maybe get it changed, but by and large stuff just accumulates in the data stream. Because of the fact that things aren't always correct and some people are total tools, the system is equipped with failsafes to try to weed out incorrect data. Data which is repeated many times in many places (or in important or "trustworthy" places) is considered to have a high veracity. Data which shows up only a few times or in very sketchy places is treated as having a lower veracity. If data conflicts, the system automatically chooses to believe higher veracity information at the expense of lower veracity information.

An example of this in action might be someone getting your name wrong on a delivery of twinkies. Your name is something like Chris McGee, but on the invoice it says Chris Maggie. Now off in The Network somewhere there's a little piece of data that your name is in fact Chris Maggie. But fortunately for you, your Caldonian driving license and your high school diploma are both in your real name. So in the future when machines check your name, the right name will have a higher veracity and (presumably) displace the wrong name. The Chris Maggie typographical error will only show up again after low intensity searches which stop after the first couple of hits. So the "Chris Maggie" spelling may continue to haunt you for the rest of your life, getting picked up by cheap companies that purchase sales information from NERPS distribution; gradually gaining veracity as it is passed from company to company and appearing in more and more places in The Network – but it probably won't. The typographical error will probably just be copied into archive after archive and remain a low veracity artifact of no import but to be a minor irritation to data miners.

Keeping Secrets
“Three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead.”

Actually preventing information from getting out is quite difficult. Blogging and retweeting caused stories to reverberate around the world in the early 21st century, and in 2075 The Network itself spreads information around without even requiring a horde human of typists to be interested in things. Each Local Network grabs copies of stuff on Mirror Networks whenever there is free bandwidth on the satellites, meaning that any information that exists anywhere will quickly have dozens, hundreds, or millions of copies all over the world. Keeping information from getting everywhere pretty much requires keeping it from getting anywhere.

And this is more than the fact that anything you ever put on any social networking host or message board or submit to a corporation in any form is likely going to be findable by people who dig deeply enough in the future, although that is essentially the case. This is that the simple fact of accounts an actions being done through the same Anchor is potentially traceable, even years after the fact. The fact that information was sent to the same SE number from your LifeNet Account and from the microwave in your apartment and a computer that was being hacked into means that potentially, a dataminer could turn up a connection between that computer crime and your home address and all your friends. Even if months or years have passed. Hackers don't like that, which is why they normally maintain multiple Anchors. If you want to keep your identity clean, you have to make sure that there is full segregation between identities. And that can be extremely difficult to do in a world where every device is constantly trying to make friends with every other.

Assets with limited computer skills can either dispose of their things and get new Anchors periodically or have other assets with better computer skills set up a multi-layered Anchor system. A multi-layered Anchor is one where the Anchor maintains distinct virtual Anchors with their own SE numbers. Depending on how well the Anchor is set up to anticipate which virtual Anchor to use for each contact, this can work pretty well. Still, tech savvy assets tend to keep multiple separate Anchors and manage the connections themselves, dumping Anchors when they feel they have become too exposed.

Destroying News
“I don't want that story broken, I want it destroyed.”

Because of the complete lack of a central authority of Truth©, you can actually create truths that happen to suit you. If you treat something as true long and loudly enough, everyone else will treat it the same way. While archaic considerations like "statute of limitations" are out the window, the fact is that if you can fool the world into believing that you've always lived in Nag Kampuchea for a while, the world will continue to believe it pretty much indefinitely. The world of 2075 has an extremely short attention span and you actually can reinvent yourself with sufficient effort.

But actually removing data from The Network is nearly impossible. Too many Mirror Networks have too many copies of basically everything to allow anything to fall all the way into the memory hole anymore. You can get Channel Sn4+ to proclaim a fact to be false, and you can get the fact that the fact you don't like is false to get a high veracity. And you can get a fact to become low veracity by having it not get talked about. And that's it. If you don't get a high veracity denial out or get a story buried by other, more interesting stories, it'll get more veracity behind it simply by reposting.

The third possibility, is to get a news story to become “old news”. A fact that is generally accepted as true, but also uninteresting, has little consequence. This is a dangerous tactic to take with volatile information, but potentially the most rewarding. The news is accepted, afforded a high veracity by all interested parties and then the consequences are ridden out. Historically this has proven to be the most effective technique for dealing with sex scandals that break into the news cycle, which by no means should be taken to mean that everyone actually does that. People still try to issue mealy mouthed non-denials and cast aspersions and so on and so forth when they get caught with their pants down. It will probably always be thus.

[Draco_Argentum]

"This is that the simple fact of accounts an actions being" an = and

[vermithrx]

Some trends that might be worth extrapolating from:

How much of the world is designed more by the algorithms and magic rituals people are using, than by the people themselves? (P=NP might have interesting implications for this)

How can you justify an underutilized workforce and global resource shortage if you can bootstrap a modern civilization from one network connection (or terabyte USB drive + XO laptop + hand generator) given 5 well armed and motivated people, 10 years and 2 acres of land? (Assuming linear recruitment and expansion, which is conservative.)

Actually, that could be a good premise for a post-apocalyptic cyberwestern setting.

[kzt]

In the short term, though, a program that solves NP-complete problems in polynomial time would be the single most disruptive piece of technology since the internet, nukes, or fire. Even worse, it could happen almost overnight. Given how fast the stock market is these days, you could wake up on Monday to someone publishing their code and go to bed Friday with the economy in the crapper.

Given that we want various parts of society to collapse, maybe we want this to happen to our alternate earth.

NP=P would allow things like would take a lot of computer time to be solved quickly. Things like analyzing huge datasets. Like the entire set of video feeds in a major city for the last year looking for a face or a license plate. Or interesting financial transactions buried in the noise of billions of other transactions. Or accurate predictions of the future behavior of individuals. Somehow I don't think that having Cyberpunk Fantasy Heartbreaker be a mashup of ShadowRun and Minority Report would work well.

[Vebyast]

Question about cheap orbit: would Rods from God available? If so, they'd handily explain why people use heavily-cybered ogres rather than tanks.

[Username17]

Question about cheap orbit: would Rods from God available? If so, they'd handily explain why people use heavily-cybered ogres rather than tanks.

Project Thor and the Mass Drivers should both be a thing. And yeah, the existence of such things strongly favors light mecha, which I think it what everyone wants out of futuristic war.

Fallout style powersuits, ospreys, and small unit APCs.

-Username17

[Stahlseele]

Question about cheap orbit: would Rods from God available? If so, they'd handily explain why people use heavily-cybered ogres rather than tanks.

Project Thor and the Mass Drivers should both be a thing. And yeah, the existence of such things strongly favors light mecha, which I think it what everyone wants out of futuristic war.

Fallout style powersuits, ospreys, and small unit APCs.

-Username17

Yes!
Very much Yes!