One prime issue with keeping a factions stuff restricted is, in a very good example, Ageira itself. Ageira forces the leverage of "bend to what we want or we'll stop maintaining your networks" to make foreign houses change their laws. Now this is normal for a powerful company, but it is also normal for that house to be annoyed, and task it's corporations or internal agencies to find or create alternatives so theres no kind of corporate/foreign power breathing down their necks. That's the point where everything is simply justified and people will have the free ability to begin to muscle in on the megacorps.
The server is a dynamic RP environment, if a certain corp or faction ticks off people with the ability to adapt to their own needs and push out a different faction/corp, they will. It happens IRL every day. Sure companies won't get their hands on Ageira tech directly, but it's been quite a long time and with jump drive technology available to most house officials for study, another faction coming up with say, trade lanes and jump gates, docking rings etc of their own isn't far fetched.
There's a line you have to walk between just letting player factions sit complicit, like Ageira does, having 0 requirement to do anything to preserve their position, and not stiffling other peoples roleplay when it makes sense, I.E. a faction outside of Liberty beginning to muscle in on Ageira's business after being dissatisfied with how Ageira uses their comfy position to muscle in on foreign house laws.
(10-04-2018, 05:14 PM)Tenacity Wrote: Basically, ageira powergames their rp. U can no haz our stuffz
Could you be more specific whether you spit out this rubbish about player made factions or whole lore made by Digital Anvil and kept by Disco developers?
EDIT: To other people applies the same. Do put effort to specifically name what are you talking about. Ageira as NPC faction, or Ageira Innovations, current official faction.
Aw hell yeah, infosec discussion, time for me to shart my professional expertise into the playing field.
(10-04-2018, 03:43 PM)Aaron_Cianci Wrote: - The boxes are "tamper proof." I have a much bigger problem with this. How do you define tampering? What physical mechanism exists to detect tampering? If a shipping employee loading them onto a hauler accidentally caught his finger under the release for the box and pulled on it, would the box explode because it thought it was being tampered with? Without a technical explanation for how "tamper proof," the technology preventing tampering and a definition of "tampering," I think there is wiggle room here.
The exact anti-tamper mechanism I don't think has ever been explained but I wouldn't be surprised if the parts inside have a suicide circuit that can be ordered by the box's anti-tamper mechanism to be activated. And tampering is generally interpreted by even 2018 anti-tamper mechanisms as being an action intended to bypass the various layers of security mechanisms. Accidentally pulling an obviously locked release tab isn't tampering any more than accidentally trying to open the wrong front door with your own home key is.
(10-04-2018, 03:43 PM)Aaron_Cianci Wrote: - The boxes can only be opened with "complex biometric keys." Biometrics are really easy to bypass - bribe someone (or a group of someones) with the authorized biometric details (fingerprint, retina, etc.) to open the box for you. In the Freelancer universe, where corruption and bribery are rampant, this one isn't even a challenge to bypass.
I suspect that accounting for bribery is out of scope here due to the level of security involved in white boxes.
(10-04-2018, 03:43 PM)Aaron_Cianci Wrote: - The boxes "detonate if opened outside of an authorized facility." Again, same problem as with tamper proof. Explain that to me physically. Is it some equivalent of modern RFID technology? Some type of space GPS? Because both of those can be faked and bypassed, given the right resources and equipment.
This is a hilariously easy one to solve even with modern technology. I can have a device half the size of a credit card that I ordered off AliExpress attempt to connect to a single known WiFi connection that's authenticated via EAP-TLS, connect to a server accessible on that LAN that's secured via 4096-bit asymmetrical and 256-bit symmetrical encryption over TLS 1.3, verify its certificate to ensure that it's the real deal according to the CA certificates that are flashed into the thing as a non-erasable PROM, and hit the even bigger kill switch if there's tampering.
Hell, I can do this without any kind of research kit or defense labs. Except the explosive part. That would be greatly illegal.
(10-04-2018, 03:43 PM)Aaron_Cianci Wrote: - "Additional security measures are confidential." OK, fine. They're confidential - officially. But there's a lot of "confidential" information floating around in our role play universe that shouldn't be. Why would Ageira's secrets for how to protect white boxes be any different?
Details on security measures are often confidential. For example, the inner workings of the security of Apple's Secure Enclave coprocessors are basically unknown to people outside the team that works on the Secure Enclave. And on a lesser and more casual note, people were still picking copy protection traps out of the 1995 SNES game Earthbound for almost 20 years after its release, and there's still traps in the ROM that have been bypassed but are otherwise not yet analyzed.
TL;DR: Ageira White Boxes being tamper-proof as all hell is realistic even with 2018 technology.
Well, including my 2 cents here. In terms of lore, yes there are flaws. Aside from the huge cheap Gallia craphole with the technology the issue is that the jumpgate/tradelane technology is implemented as human tech based on k'vosh knowledge. Somehow it is unrealistic to believe the current backstory. Imo it is just written with a plothole.
It just needs to be clear. It's scifi and k'vosh were by lore near godlike. Just include an unreplicable key or registry to the lore that works as an activator. I mean the k'vosh language is near a melodic aspect. Add a kvosh song that needs to be sung to the technology in order to activate a gate or something like another unreplicable, unretracable and intouchable alien thing.
Factions specialising in certain things is good for lore and gameplay. It gives them a niche and helps define their identity. Can you imagine how boring it'd be if we had do-all Mary sue factions that never needed to rely on others to progress their roleplay?
I think factions roleplaying with themsleves to do everything is infinitely worse than factions flexing their niche to cling onto whatever little relevance they have left in the RP environment.
It's unlikely the erroneous docking rings will be replaced with atmospheric entry points, which I think would be a splendid way of dealing with them. Otherwise, I just see non-Ageria docking rings as terrible Chinese knock offs essentially - cheap, problematic, potentially unsafe, but practical nonetheless.
At least, by going with past technologies available for the houses before the exodus of Sol, inner system fast travel alternatives should be available, even if not as cost effective as ageira trade lanes. Where no plane lands or train track goes, people usually still have a road to use trucks.
Inter system travel that is automated and permanent is a bigger hurdle for non ageira groups, if you exclude any reliance on natural jump hole phenomenon. Houses and large corporations could arrange for jumpships that could ferry convoys across stars, or even a static jump catapult emulating jump gates, but it wouldn't provide the same ease of access as the well established infrastructure.
(10-05-2018, 12:27 PM)Lythrilux Wrote: It's unlikely the erroneous docking rings will be replaced with atmospheric entry points, which I think would be a splendid way of dealing with them. Otherwise, I just see non-Ageria docking rings as terrible Chinese knock offs essentially - cheap, problematic, potentially unsafe, but practical nonetheless.
The best would be to replace all docking rings with atmosheric entry points, because while they look cool, their concept makes as much sense as constructing giant "landing rings" inRL at airports and then forcing airplanes to fly through them as a measure to "control" the traffic. Keep mooring points, which are perfectly logical, and that´s it.
(10-05-2018, 12:51 PM)WPeregrine Wrote: Houses and large corporations could arrange for jumpships that could ferry convoys across stars, or even a static jump catapult emulating jump gates, but it wouldn't provide the same ease of access as the well established infrastructure.
Problem is that Disco never solved how to incorporate the mobile jump drives into lore, because they do not fit it at all. Especially when their limits were changed repeatedly for ooRP balance reasons. Otherwise Ageira would have quite a problem if their infrastructure could be bypassed by for example Bustards able to jump several trade ships over multiple systems.