this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2023
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Cyberpunk 2077
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I just think it's weird that so many people's gadgets, weapons, and cyberware is accessible through the Internet and vulnerable to cyberattack.
That scene where Meredith has her goons hold you down and jack into your neural port to run some lie detection? I would have custom firmware designed to prevent intrusions like that. None of my cyberware would even have wireless capability; I'd do all of my updates using physical media. I'd do whatever it took to make me immune to netrunners. It blows my mind how nobody else in CP2077 thinks that way and how it can't be that hard to use gear without Internet connections.
When I started playing Shadowrun, I was confused about this as well. Why can I remote access someone's cyberarm to begin with? The damn thing should have exactly one data connection: To the user's nervous system. That's it.
Now that I work in IT, I can tell you that it's actually extremely realistic.
Most of these systems (yes, even "hardened milspec stuff") are highly complex tech that only megacorps can design. They aren't designed for security. They're designed to sell fast and with the minimum necessary design/production investment.
That wireless access you're highjacking? It's probably a maintenance access / private data siphon with a known unpatched CVE. Or an underpaid, overworked designer/dev forgot to remove the wifi module from the prototype spec and fixing that is "somewhere down the roadmap".
If you try to flash your 'ware with secure FOSS software, you have to overcome safeguards that are designed to prevent it and risk bricking your own arm / inviting an armed "patent protection" corpo squad to your door.
Truly secure custom-build 'ware does exist, made by a small community of independent tech nuts, but making it without a full factory/devteam requires a hideous amount of work and they're just plain-out inferior than the highly-funded, mass produced corpo crap that doesn't bother with ITsec.
Most professional runners just have a good decker of their own who will run interference for them (increase RAM cost) or try to trace the hack and disable the source before it completes.
In-universe that's what ICE is referring to - Intrusion Countermeasures Electionics
Realistically how many people use electronics today with zero wireless capability and do only updates with physical media? A tiny minority of highly security conscious people, the vast majority of us use wireless smartphones and an increasing number of IoT smart devices, because the convenience.
It's mindblowing that we use facebook and allow devices with multiple cameras, GPS tracking, and microphones into our house.
We still do it though.
Some people do
Most people do.
Some people don't.
I actually don't know how pervasive these things (smart home assistants) are. Sure, they're popular, but "popular" and "ubiquitous" are not the same.
For example, my family (counting parents, siblings, first cousins, and their spouses) runs from lower middle-class to upper-class. In that set of 8 households, there are 16 adults and 6 children (under 11); only one household has an Alexa. The rest have no surveillance home devices, (excluding smart phones, which all have). As for smart phones, 3 of those households have people in them who at least occasionally use Siri, and one uses Google (Hey, Google). The rest, as far as I know, don't have voice activation configured or enabled on their phones. So, 3/8 households have some invasive surveillance listening devices - fewer than half.
If we ignore the possibility that Big Brother is using all the smart devices surreptitiously to surveil the owners, then in my tiny sample, it's not "most" people buy and use these; it's well less than half, and if we only count the people actively using voice control, it's more like 1/4.
Now, nearly every person, including the children, use a smart phone or tablet nearly every day, and most adults, several times every hour. And none of these (AFAIK) are jail-broken and running Tails-like OSes. So, it depends on how you want to define the parameters.
in any given random sample where an average person could own both or either: An Alexa/Google home is better for privacy, in general, than a mobile phone.
ChangeMyMind.webm
To be fair alot of infrastructure is pretty vulnerable today
You dont want to use all that cool tech in your body to look up something on wikipedia? Idk if it would be practical to completely cut yourself off from the 'Net.
There could be reasons though. Maybe assholes like Microsoft introduced stuff like secure boot or crypto certs for the firmware to obstruct adoption of open standards and customisations. Maybe the tech is very difficult to master and people doesn't generally have much tIme to learn it. Maybe widespread usage of AI makes the type of security we know today obsolete, as they can find and exploit vulnerabilities in realtime. I dont know, just playing devil's advocate, and if it was any of these reasons it would be nice if they were at least alluded to.