Spam in the 3I

[Blue Ghost]

Just thinking outloud, at the higher than light minute level, I can see someone one trying to do advanced fee, or putting a bot into a spam burst that would tell some bull pucky story about how so-and-so is alone on a world and needs funds to get home. Maybe there's a holovid file attached that's been Photoshopped, showing a lone belter or something camping out on an asteroid. That kind of thing.

In fact, I may write that one up.

 

[Ulsyus]

I’ve always had a hard time imagining how something like the “internet” would work in the far future settings (particularly MTU) like Traveller.

Maybe more datasphere than internet, it could be both more expansive and deeper, and so take longer to navigate, while being a more pervasive part of life. If kids have been exposed to it throughout their lifetimes, learnt about it with friends at school, and been exposed at times to examples of those falling foul of it, then they'd possibly be far more savy about it than an 80 year old in 201X.

I also had some T5 hacking rules but lost them them in computer crash.

Is that ironic? Or did I just ROTFLMFAO from a twisted sense of humour?

 

[aramis]

I also had some T5 hacking rules but lost them them in computer crash. But again if the local starport gets hacked all bests are off.

Is that ironic? Or did I just ROTFLMFAO from a twisted sense of humour?

Both, perhaps?

I must admit I found ita delicious bit of irony as well, and find myself a bit ashamed of my laughing at another person's expense.

It does, however, make me think of a TED talk about a guy who engaged with a spammer... James Veitch. https://www.ted.com/talks/james_veitch_this_is_what_happens_when_you_reply_to_spam_email

I can see a patron encounter where PC's are hired to engage with, locate, and punish some spammers.

You do already have the ultimate spam in the Imperium, the "VIRUS".

The ultimate would be a thermo-dynamics-breaking jump-capable grey-goo replicator which can infect makers remotely. The TNE one is slightly less efficient.

 

[Ulsyus]

I must admit I found ita delicious bit of irony as well, and find myself a bit ashamed of my laughing at another person's expense.

Yeah, losing things because of no backup is not much fun. I certainly wasn't laughing at his ill-fortune.

Sometimes losing something that's been created from scratch can be a good spur to redo it but in better form with all the ideas that have cropped up in the the meantime since originally writing it.

One of the players in a T group used to referee Shadowrun for the group some time ago (when it first came out). We tried the rules for hacking and netrunners and all of that, fiddled around with the CP rules for the same thing, and in the end just avoided characters that had that bent. I think playing in cyberspace is, like other environments in RPGs, something that both a ref and a player both have to want to do.

 

[nobby-w]

Is there spam in the far future? When the captain or whoever checks the ship's logs or mail are there lots of solicitations for advanced fees and free cash?

I think in a traveller-style universe there won't be an interstellar internet like we see today, as the propagation delay for data is limited to 1 week jumps. You won't get spam with links to prosthetic enlargement devices as anything relying on click-through is a non-starter on an interstellar scale.

Interstellar email and news could propagate using a system that works a bit like old-school UUCP store-and-forward or FIDOnet, where the Xboat takes the traffic for a system to its destination, and then the mail hub there routes the email to the next hop along the way. This mechanism could be used for propagation of e-mail or news. However, it is going to have a certain amount of latency due to the nature of the transport medium.

Individual worlds may have a public internet much like what we have today, but the reach of this is only going to be as far as high bandwidth signals can be transmitted. Nodes in orbit or on local moons could exist, but to from (say) earth to mars you would be back to some sort of store-and-forward system.

I think on an interstellar basis spam would not be viable or would be marginally viable at best. Even if your ship could log onto a local internet when it reaches port you would only get spam if you had a permanent public mailbox there. You may get folks spamming these mailboxes.

Ships systems (possibly including logs) will be safety-critical code running on dedicated systems, and will be (for purposes of reliability) isolated from the public internet facing systems even if you did have systems on board your ship that could log onto a public internet service. Flight systems will (to a greater or lesser extent) be running on systems that are dedicated to running those applications. For certification purposes, exposure to data from a public internet source would be considered a safety hazard.

Even the in-flight entertainment systems on airliners are built in this way.

 

[welsh]

Bearing in mind the nature of the Imperium, with varying TLs and governments etc., the interstellar computing environment likely resembles the 1980s' jumble of incompatible operating systems, with a number of competing OS-independent file formats. Even file formats can hardly be universal ... try viewing streaming video on a 1981 Osborne 1 running CP/M with a whopping 64k of RAM.

For this reason I see spam & virus propagation as a mostly local problem in Traveller rather than a universal, sector-wide thing.

 

[Nathan Brazil]

Bearing in mind the nature of the Imperium, with varying TLs and governments etc....Even file formats can hardly be universal...

Two things as far as the OTU goes.

• The Imperial xBoat network.
  This is essentially a file transfer network. Yes, messages, but besides that all sorts of data. In all manner of formats which may all be incompatible with each other.
• The Office of Calendar Compliance (OCC)
  From T4, we know there is The Office of Calendar Compliance, which enforces standards Imperium-wide with the ability to impose extreme penalties to non-compliant systems. The purpose of which is to encourage trade between systems. Specifically listed in the text is the standard Imperial Calendar and weights and measures.

HOWEVER
I see the OCC as the ISO, but with teeth. From my computer work experiences which stems from the '80s to the '10s I add this.

One of my previous jobs was to write file transfer scripts to send expense reports and files from Chase Bank to Federal agencies and groups like the Deparment of Energy, NASA, and a portion of the US Senate. Federal accounts using Chase bank. My NDA is long expired so no worries. The files were being sent to in all combinations of EBCDIC or ASCII from Chase mainframe systems or Chase Windows Servers to a gobblety-gook of government destinations. Despite that there were two unifying elements.
One was the software used to perform the transfers, something called Connect: Direct. C: D has been around since before the '90s when it was called Network Data Mover (NDM). It is written for different platforms and also performs EBCDIC or ASCII (or the reverse), CRLF add/removes and some other basic translations. It also provides unified logging/messages of every single bit of minutiae involved in the transfer to sender and receiver.
The other is the standards the Internet itself uses for comunication.

 

[Nathan Brazil]

My longwinded previous post shows an example of this all coming together. I hope it makes sense. The point is that the xBoat, to work quickly and efficiently in service to the Imperium, must use some universal standards.

Who set the standards? The OCC.
Want to use the XBoat network? You must comply with some standards that allow you send data packets via the xBoat network. To make the network accessible, the standards must be published for others to "comply" with.

It doesn't matter what your data is. Viruses, spam or useful data that only matter to group of local star systems, as long as you don't mess with the xBoat network, you avoid...Imperial Entanglements. But from there, like our planet has in only 40 years, there are less commercially competing standards compared to the '80s. The OCC has had almost 1105 years to work on this.

Because of the force of the OCC in trade and the xBoat network utility in data, I see these as unifying. Want to watch Season 7 of Galaxiad and the Black Fleet? Send it via xBoat in a standard format and let the locals worry about translation...

 

[Blue Ghost]

Bearing in mind the nature of the Imperium, with varying TLs and governments etc., the interstellar computing environment likely resembles the 1980s' jumble of incompatible operating systems, with a number of competing OS-independent file formats. Even file formats can hardly be universal ... try viewing streaming video on a 1981 Osborne 1 running CP/M with a whopping 64k of RAM.

For this reason I see spam & virus propagation as a mostly local problem in Traveller rather than a universal, sector-wide thing.

*nods*

If you search YouTube you can find people trying to run browsers on 286s and Commodore 64s. Apparently there's a whole cottage industry / hobby around people keeping old tech alive and useful.

 

[Blue Ghost]

Just another thought, I think a ransom-ware via a private X-boat like network could be a thing. Some hacker in Efate conjures up a bot and disguises it as a "hot babe" pic, and sends it either via private network, or encrypts for X-boat transport, and then the victims a jump or two over can either reply by coughing up the money or report the thing. All the while those that do fall for the scam, or see that they have no other choice, send the money, and said hacker has already changed his identity, DL'd virtual "bit coin" like credits to his device, and he's off world on the next cattle boat to some world where he hides out in the Vargr or Droyne ghetto.

 

[kilemall]

Two things as far as the OTU goes.

• The Imperial xBoat network.
  This is essentially a file transfer network. Yes, messages, but besides that all sorts of data. In all manner of formats which may all be incompatible with each other.
• The Office of Calendar Compliance (OCC)
  From T4, we know there is The Office of Calendar Compliance, which enforces standards Imperium-wide with the ability to impose extreme penalties to non-compliant systems. The purpose of which is to encourage trade between systems. Specifically listed in the text is the standard Imperial Calendar and weights and measures.

HOWEVER
I see the OCC as the ISO, but with teeth. From my computer work experiences which stems from the '80s to the '10s I add this.

One of my previous jobs was to write file transfer scripts to send expense reports and files from Chase Bank to Federal agencies and groups like the Deparment of Energy, NASA, and a portion of the US Senate. Federal accounts using Chase bank. My NDA is long expired so no worries. The files were being sent to in all combinations of EBCDIC or ASCII from Chase mainframe systems or Chase Windows Servers to a gobblety-gook of government destinations. Despite that there were two unifying elements.
One was the software used to perform the transfers, something called Connect: Direct. C: D has been around since before the '90s when it was called Network Data Mover (NDM). It is written for different platforms and also performs EBCDIC or ASCII (or the reverse), CRLF add/removes and some other basic translations. It also provides unified logging/messages of every single bit of minutiae involved in the transfer to sender and receiver.
The other is the standards the Internet itself uses for comunication.

I helped kill Connectirect at my site.

 

[coliver988]

IMTU part of the interfacing with local starports maintained by the SPA is data transfers. Your ship not only carries its own ship logs, but the basic transit information from the last port you went to. This applies to class A, B and C ports. Data includes all the ships last port of call and their intended next port of call, as well as any monthly payment information.

It's a SPA encrypted blob that your ship does not have direct access to - it is part of the transponder system.

The data is available for port use and used to track ships and help identify those skipping out. It is much more limited than the X-Boat system in terms of what it carries, but is much more relevant to the SPA, which charges a nominal fee to the banks for tracking payment information. It also gets delivered in places where the X-Boats may not be going and has a wider diffusion of data. The data goes back as far as my plots require...

Having digressed a bit: this system is ONLY used for SPA / Imperial ports, and it has its own set of Imperial protocols. In theory this could be hacked if you allow players to hack transponders (if you even have transponders...) But while not exactly spam, if one wanted to give false information and had enough forgery, computer and probably admin skills, you could try to do so. There are some strong encryption and checksum factors for that data. A sort of blockchain technology as well.

The file format has been around for several hundred years and so seems stable enough.

 

[welsh]

Re the X-Boat network: let's bear in mind that only a small percentage of Imperial worlds are on the X-Boat network. The remainder rely on scout/courier runs and merchants carrying messages. So this isn't in itself going to drive an Imperium-wide standard. More likely you have several competing standards, of which the X-Boat standard is one.

Second: while all X-Boat communication may use Imperial General Markup Language 1105, this doesn't imply that X-Boats built in yards on opposite sides of the Imperium use the same computers or even run the same OS. Computer Model 4 is a performance standard (this much CPU, this much storage), not a specific product. The only thing that's required is that they can talk to each other.

In short: everyone can send e-mail, whether they're running Windows or Mac or Linux or whatever, but the guy running that 286 isn't susceptible to email-borne viruses designed for Windows 10. And plenty of people don't have computers at all.

The business world today does not have a single file interchange format, and we are much more homogeneous and much less chaotic than the OTU. The thing about the OTU is that the far future and the present day and the past all exist within the same Imperial polity and at the same time.

 

[welsh]

IMTU part of the interfacing with local starports maintained by the SPA is data transfers snippety snip....

I like this.

 

[aramis]

IMTU part of the interfacing with local starports maintained by the SPA is data transfers. Your ship not only carries its own ship logs, but the basic transit information from the last port you went to. This applies to class A, B and C ports. Data includes all the ships last port of call and their intended next port of call, as well as any monthly payment information.

In the 3I, even D ports should have beacons which the Transponder logs. D ports might even have ATC & OTC .

E-Ports in the 3I are "Essentially a marked spot of bedrock with no fuel, facilities, or bases present." Mention was made in one adventure of a beacon marking it. Locals would know to watch for a ship there, and Bk7 gives a different set of mods than for an X, as well...

So, if there's a beacon, it's likely to trigger the transponder's logging, as well.

 

[coliver988]

snip
The business world today does not have a single file interchange format, and we are much more homogeneous and much less chaotic than the OTU. The thing about the OTU is that the far future and the present day and the past all exist within the same Imperial polity and at the same time.

it's been mentioned before and bears repeating: https://xkcd.com/927/

Or in a more Trek-like saying: Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations.

I imagine after 1000+ years there are nearly an infinite number of protocols, markup languages, and all that. Most systems are probably powerful enough to just use virtual machines - need to run that old program - spin up a VM with the appropriate OS and there you go. Works now, and even with traditional Traveller computer standards I don't see that as an issue there. It just is another program like Navigate or Evade.

 

[coliver988]

In the 3I, even D ports should have beacons which the Transponder logs. D ports might even have ATC & OTC .

E-Ports in the 3I are "Essentially a marked spot of bedrock with no fuel, facilities, or bases present." Mention was made in one adventure of a beacon marking it. Locals would know to watch for a ship there, and Bk7 gives a different set of mods than for an X, as well...

So, if there's a beacon, it's likely to trigger the transponder's logging, as well.

I sort of see those as read only - they log everything coming in and the SPA (or retired Scout) goes through & collects the data sporadically. My assumption is that memory is basically infinite (it is getting scarily close here as a 400GB micro SD card is now available).

edit: but I can also see them transmitting as well, so the same thing as the other ports.

 

[welsh]

Most systems are probably powerful enough to just use virtual machines - need to run that old program - spin up a VM with the appropriate OS and there you go.

But more likely, don't bother. An advanced system can handle any simple data interchange format in common use, so why bother running obsolete programs? The problem arises when a more primitive system has to read something more advanced, as when you try to watch YouTube on your Commodore Pet -- which is what dictates the simple interchange format.

This isn't a point about the possibilities of high tech so much as the limitations of low tech.

Getting back to the original point: virus propagation via spam isn't going to be a sector-spanning problem in this kind of environment.

I sort of see those as read only - they log everything coming in and the SPA (or retired Scout) goes through & collects the data sporadically.

One of the common tasks of Naval Intelligence and the Scouts is going to be simply logging comings and goings, and collating that data at a subsector / sector level. It would not be in the least difficult to reconstruct all the movements of a ship, assuming it always travelled port-to-port.

 

[Nathan Brazil]

..So this isn't in itself going to drive an Imperium-wide standard. More likely you have several competing standards, of which the X-Boat standard is one.

Second: while all X-Boat communication may use Imperial General Markup Language 1105, this doesn't imply that X-Boats built in yards on opposite sides of the Imperium use the same computers or even run the same OS...

I disagree. They are Imperium-wide governmental standards used throughout the Imperium. They have to be due to avoid possible misues. Agent of the Imperium shows that the Imperium has standardization in Imperium-wide governmental groups.

Joslin recited rote. “It requires assistance,” he hesitated and restated, “unlimited assistance, to the holders of specific documents, written, oral, or electronic, without regard to rank, privilege, station, protocol, or security. Holders are the equivalent of the Emperor himself.”
“Am I a holder under the edict?”
“Yes, sir you are.” - Agent of the Imperium, pg. 14

A clear indicator is the override algorithm Jonathan Bland uses on different Navy ships across different centuries in different sectors to gain/regain control of ships. The fact that the same formula and effect is the same implies that the Imperial Navy uses the same software or routines across sectors and time.
Another is the mere existence of the five wafer personalities. Each Agent when activated is empowered to use Edict 97 if necessary. You are going want those to be tamper-proof and therefore have fewer competing standards. In addition the wafer interfaces have to be the same to be used across all the "similar human" races across the Imperium. This also comes about during one Bland wafer's constant body jumping on Reference.

Finally, it is likely the Scout Service uses the same wafers as the ISS Talon activates Bland during the "Wave of Craziness" chapter.

 

[nobby-w]

Just another thought, I think a ransom-ware via a private X-boat like network could be a thing. Some hacker in Efate conjures up a bot and disguises it as a "hot babe" pic, and sends it either via private network, or encrypts for X-boat transport, and then the victims a jump or two over can either reply by coughing up the money or report the thing. All the while those that do fall for the scam, or see that they have no other choice, send the money, and said hacker has already changed his identity, DL'd virtual "bit coin" like credits to his device, and he's off world on the next cattle boat to some world where he hides out in the Vargr or Droyne ghetto.

Anything like bitcoin requires both sides of the transaction to be online. You couldn't do that over interstellar distances via a disconnected service like the X boats. You couldn't run a service like SWIFTT or BACS over Xboats either. There is too much opportunity for a man-in-the-middle attack as you can't do an on-line verification of the source of a transaction. All you get is a message turning up out of the blue and you have to rely on the message header to tell the truth about its origin. You can't interactively query a certificate authority to validate the identity or signature of the message.

Interstellar funds transfer is going to rely on something like bearer bonds, bank drafts or good old cash that is designed to be hard to forge. You couldn't run a secure banking network over the Xboat service.