comStar Firewall alert - PhaseThrough

Matrix overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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who cater to special interest groups have to really watch their toes
now, because too many votes against their constituencies’ wishes
means they won’t get re-elected. Or worse yet, the scandal will get
them shunned by the rest of Congress … and the special interest
group nuyen will all dry up.
> Kay St. Irregular
Voting, at least in the UCAS, is done via encrypted transmissions
of an individual’s votes within a voting “window”—generally
a week long period that the virtual voting booths are open. Other
governments that rely on a voting system follow similar structures,
although the time required to transmit and count the votes varies.
Generally speaking, though, to register to vote you need a SIN
and a certified electronic address. Some governments, more security
conscious than the UCAS, send voters a biometrically keyed
encrypted ballot. It requires that the voter provide biometric
verification, such as a thumb print or retinal scan in order to fill
it out. In the UCAS, the system is pretty much that each ballot is
provided with an encryption system for when it is returned via the
wireless Matrix. Voters are required to sign electronically that they
did, in fact, fill out the ballot themselves. How’s that for trust?
> And remember, in the UCAS, it’s One SIN, One Vote. That means
if you buy multiple SINs, you get multiple votes. Now go out there
and do your civic duty.
> Snopes
> It seems like it’d be easy to rig an election just by hacking voters’
commlinks, or intercepting the wireless transmissions, decrypting
them, and editing the votes as you’d like. However, the system actually
works pretty well (for that part, at least). Since every citizen
sends their votes in individually during a week-long voting window,
the votes come trickling in during the entire Election Week. To make
a measurable difference in the results, you’d have to hack tens of
thousands of commlinks (hoping they hadn’t already mailed the
vote) or attempt to intercept the transmissions—easy for maybe
a handful, but hard to coordinate large scale. If you want to screw
with elections, you have to do it at the vote-tally office and ever
since the California Magestone debacle, UCAS keeps their voting
results ICier than Antarctica. It’d be possible to screw with a minor
election, or even a major one with enough nuyen and backing, but
it’d be easier—and cheaper—to just hire a PR firm like Charisma
Associates to convince folks to vote the way you want.
> Kay St. Irregular
HackerS, riggerS, and SpiderS
With the world’s reliance on the Matrix, people who can
manipulate it are a corp’s worst nightmare and biggest asset. To
a corporation, having someone who can protect their data while
stealing their competitors’ gives them the advantage. To the
average citizen, hackers and riggers are mostly known through
sims and newsfeeds. An employee probably only interacts with
someone at an outsourced helpdesk, never actually meeting the
security hackers that work for his company unless he screws
up. Likewise for corporations that employ spiders, riggers who
hook into a building or campus and “wear” it like a second skin.
Most employees probably don’t even realize they’re in a spidercontrolled
facility. Runners better know, ‘cause that’s the kind of
ignorance that’ll get you killed.
In the media, hackers are portrayed as either scummy identity
thieves who rob innocent bystanders to feed their drug habit or
brainy, socially inept members of a runner team—the teammate
that solves complex puzzles but can’t speak coherently in front of
the opposite sex. There’s little of the romanticism that you see with
mages, more’s the pity. And even more unfortunately, the wildly
popular EpSin-Team trid show has cast-type riggers such as Jerry
Drone, the surly dwarf with a creepy spider-like drone always
clinging to his shoulder, a man who can hot-wire a tank or crash a
747 with a few wild waves of his short arms.
> Well, there’s public opinion and there’s fact. Hackers today need
to be more than just brains. You can’t hide in a basement and do
overwatch anymore. IC or a bad biofeedback filter used to be the
worst thing a hacker came up against. Now, a hacker who doesn’t
know how to handle themselves in a fight—or at least how to duck—
isn’t going to last through the first run.
> Glitch
But the public spotlight certainly isn’t on hackers and riggers
anymore. With the unveiling of technomancers, AIs, and sprites,
suddenly hackers don’t seem quite so threatening or interesting.
Combine that upstaging with the fact that hackers have taken a
lot of the heat directed towards technos, and there’s been a large
upswing in the amount of animosity between the two groups.
The threat of technomancers has led to a new crackdown on
hackers and an increase in the punishment for electronic crimes.
Hackers have been mistaken as technomancers and given radical
Unwired
Simon Wentworth (order #1132857) 9