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Comment by mcv | Hacker News Reader

> "the internet when he first conceived it, he thought it was a place that we would all leave the world and go to. Whereas in fact, it came here."

Somehow this reminds me of the difference between various editions of Shadowrun, a cyberpunk-fantasy rolepalying game in a dystopian near future where magic and dragons returned (though the magic is irrelevant to my point here).

In the earlier editions, from 1989 through the 1990s and early 2000s, the Matrix (their 'internet') was all virtual reality, and the 'Decker' using it would disappear into that world and barely interact with the rest of the team.

In more recent editions, written after smartphones and wireless internet became common, everything was connected. Everything is connected to the Matrix. In combat, a Decker can hack the opponents' guns to disable them, for example. It's not a world to disappear into; that world has come to the physical world and merged with it.

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There were also gameplay reasons behind that for flow. One of the criticisms of the newer model is that the needless connectivity without so much as a logistical benefit doesn't make the decker/hacker feel smart so much as make it feel like the world is set up by colossal idiots who would think giving the army hand grenades which are always remote detonatable without a manual safety fuse would be an excellent idea and be utterly shocked that their entire army got blown up by one hacker.

Whoever paid for that grenade doesn't trust the soldier / mercenary they gave it to very far, that's why the network connection exists in the first place, hackers can exploit that.

At least that's the reason I just made up.

More likely it needs a continuous connection back to the license server for GaaS (grenades as a service).

(This kind of cyberpunk dystopia is very plausible from the intersection of military contracting grift and lowest-bidder IoT design!)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M7_Spider

This shows how hard it is to write sci-fi when I was joking about "grenades as a service" - someone's gone one better and made a wifi mesh network of landmines!

And then converted the landmines to remote-operated as part of a legal fiction about victim-operated devices. Which is the military version of the concern about robots taking jobs: to what extent is it acceptable to have munitions making their own decisions about taking lives?

Anyway, in the Shadowrun universe you'd definitely be able to hack the mesh network of landmines.

I figured you were joking, sadly I just figured something like that had already been thought up and deployed.

+1 for 'intended to replace the Matrix remote trigger system'

"You throw 'em, We blow 'em"

If your army doesn't continue paying their license for their weapons, the weapons stop working just when you need them.

Did You Forget Anyone? Militant Flowers can help.

> More likely it needs a continuous connection back to the license server for GaaS (grenades as a service).

The US allegedly has something like this for MANPADS missiles given to not-so-trusted allies.

https://media.ccc.de/v/36c3-10642-harry_potter_and_the_not-s...

It’s so you can’t throw the grenade back at the manufacturer.

ID-tagged soldiers carry ID-tagged weapons, use ID-tagged gear. Nanomachines inside their bodies enhance and regulate their abilities.

Genetic control, information control, emotion control, battlefield control… everything is monitored and kept under control.

War… has changed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUf_8jyxbiM

War. War never changes.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=C2Pt-LnQ2po

Sounds about right.

I think this was done as much for gameplay flow as anything else. The main criticism of the older model was that you had to manage combat in 3 separate, and only mildly overlapping, planes which made combat a time-consuming pain to track. Lots of playgroups would discourage people from playing deckers or mages just so they wouldn't have to deal with astral plane/matrix stuff.

And then I look at IOT and weep.

One would think that way, right ? Stuff like this in SF always felt unbelievable to me in the past, especially coming from the technical/IT background. No one would be THAT stupid to have their stuff so wide open for anyone to hack into.

Well, then future came and with all the insanely insecure IoT devices all around I'm no longer so sure. :P

That's an interesting example, because it's something of a case of convergent evolution.

The earlier Matrix rules had two big issues. First, the pace was wildly different — Matrix turns took like a tenth of the in-game time of meatspace turns. Second, deckers wouldn't share the same space as the rest of the team, so you had two separate, barely interconnected spaces.

The new rules both match how real world technology evolved, but also, and more importantly, solve the pacing and separateness issues.

>"the internet when he first conceived it, he thought it was a place that we would all leave the world and go to. Whereas in fact, it came here."

Eloquent way of saying that normies ruined the internet.

Serial Experiments Lain seems to be kinda happening.

>that world has come to the physical world and merged with it.

One could argue that, in some aspects, it has substituted it.

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