MarcusIII
Cosmic Mongoose
One semiconductor is based on silicone and the other gallium arsenide.
The Virus
- Thread starter MasterGwydion
- Start date
You need a suitable receiver. A laser transmitter isn't going to infect anything just by lighting it up. Light is just shorter length radio anyway... nothing special there. A radio attempt is going to fail if there's no antenna suitable for that wavelength either.
In theory though, eyes could receive light transmissions and those just possibly could do something weird in the visual cortex.
Or by sound. Stimulating any of the senses will cause brain alterations, and it is well within the scope of funky science fiction for these sort of shenanigans to occur.
For that matter, Dawkin's original concept of Memes was pretty much this - an IDEA that reproduces itself by spreading from brain to brain through speech or reading.
And... then there's Psionics. I see no reason whatsoever that there could not exist a virus (not Virus) that lives in organic brains and spreads via telepathy, if telepathy exists. In fact, given how natural selection works, it's almost inevitable, given enough time.
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MasterGwydion
Guest
I guess it just depends on if organic brains count as computers in Traveller or only inorganic brains. Couldn't a Virus be delivered to bipedal robots through the visual sensors? They would be programmed the same way humans are, to accept communications visually as well. This is just me thinking out loud.
Edit - Can't communicate using sign language if you can't perceive visual communications.
A lot would depend on how well Virus UNDERSTOOD organic brains. Or even robot ones.
It's not a given that robot brains, especially Asimovian ones, are any real relation to the sentient chip's architecture. However, it's also fair to assume that there are less brain-related electronics that ARE that could be a gateway. For example, the electronics in the robot's sensors (visual, audio, radio etc) are highly likely to be able to be infected, and after that it's probably just a matter of time before Virus works out how to spread to the bot brain. Probably not a particularly long time, either.
Cyborgs would be the organic brain vulnerability. Virus gets into your bionic ear or eye and then evolves to get into your brain, then...
It's not a given that robot brains, especially Asimovian ones, are any real relation to the sentient chip's architecture. However, it's also fair to assume that there are less brain-related electronics that ARE that could be a gateway. For example, the electronics in the robot's sensors (visual, audio, radio etc) are highly likely to be able to be infected, and after that it's probably just a matter of time before Virus works out how to spread to the bot brain. Probably not a particularly long time, either.
Cyborgs would be the organic brain vulnerability. Virus gets into your bionic ear or eye and then evolves to get into your brain, then...
MasterGwydion
Guest
They infected tons of robots in the published material, so it is probably a safe assumption to say that they understand robot brains, at least Imperial and Hiver ones.
Isn't this what the Borg are? Just a Virus in multiple cyborg bodies/computer systems?
Edit - I still want to see the Virus transmitted via hand signals! lol
MasterGwydion
Guest
I totally agree. It may not work that way for normal chips from Cymbaline.
Terry Mixon
Emperor Mongoose
A robotic brain might only be writable under certain circumstances. Being read only unless plugged into certain hardware seems a reasonable precaution for robots.
Agreed. Though it's worth keeping in mind that what applies to natural forces and animal intelligences in regards to natural selection may not fully apply to self-aware creatures. We know that the Cymbaline chips are self-aware, and become exponentially more intelligent when hooked up to a conventional computer. They also experience time many orders of magnitude faster than meat brains, IIRC. It's not unreasonable that one that was hooked up to a ship's computer might decide to work on a way to access or control bot brains, and succeed.
That doesn't even need to be chip shenanigans... if an organic is able to hack into a system, they should be able to as well, on steroids.
Their subjective decades between when you hooked them up and when they finished a master's course on computer security might only have taken five minutes. Within a day they're likely the Charted Space expert on the topic on any system they have access to.
That doesn't even need to be chip shenanigans... if an organic is able to hack into a system, they should be able to as well, on steroids.
Their subjective decades between when you hooked them up and when they finished a master's course on computer security might only have taken five minutes. Within a day they're likely the Charted Space expert on the topic on any system they have access to.
Condottiere
Emperor Mongoose
You could knock someone out with light, considering what flashing light may effect certain individuals.
Certainly, disorientate them.
Reprogramme?
There is hypnosis.
Certainly, disorientate them.
Reprogramme?
There is hypnosis.
Hypnosis is a great example, especially in an adventure game.
You don't need it to modify memories, though... that can be done through conversation. Saw a show on the weekend that discussed how eyewitnesses can genuinely change their memories of an event due to later influences, and that it takes a lot less than you might expect.
Modern police have learned that to get objective statements they need to interview carefully. "Tell us what you saw" instead of "Did you see the murder?" Of course, if the objective is NOT to get an objective statement, leading questions are a powerful tool.
You don't need it to modify memories, though... that can be done through conversation. Saw a show on the weekend that discussed how eyewitnesses can genuinely change their memories of an event due to later influences, and that it takes a lot less than you might expect.
Modern police have learned that to get objective statements they need to interview carefully. "Tell us what you saw" instead of "Did you see the murder?" Of course, if the objective is NOT to get an objective statement, leading questions are a powerful tool.
A further thought regarding robots; they are just as vulnerable to sensory manipulation as organics. Possibly moreso, since their hardware is better documented and understood.
Even if they have no direct access to a bot brain, the infecting chip or virus could be feeding false vision, audio or radio to it. Direct instructions or orders or perception of situations.
"Fly the ship to these co-ordinates"
"Strip down the Jump Drive for maintenance"
Rob-3 saw the hostile robot advancing on Mary. Quickly he moved and restrained it, gripping it hard to ensure it could not escape. Why was Mary screaming at him... and where was Frank?
For me, that's one of the big dangers of telepathy. Not mind control as such, but subtle distortion of perception, modifying the target's likely reactions.
Even if they have no direct access to a bot brain, the infecting chip or virus could be feeding false vision, audio or radio to it. Direct instructions or orders or perception of situations.
"Fly the ship to these co-ordinates"
"Strip down the Jump Drive for maintenance"
Rob-3 saw the hostile robot advancing on Mary. Quickly he moved and restrained it, gripping it hard to ensure it could not escape. Why was Mary screaming at him... and where was Frank?
For me, that's one of the big dangers of telepathy. Not mind control as such, but subtle distortion of perception, modifying the target's likely reactions.
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Flashing lights can induce epileptic seizure so it is not just theoretical.
Ditto the sound generators installed to induce uncomfortable reactions in undesirables (teenagers for example). These are no longer science fiction, but deployable systems.
We already see this sort of thing in social media. Someone reads something, but they have a helpful assistant AI that recognises they are interested in that and reinforces the signal. Before long they genuinely believe there are no other opinions as "everyone" on the internet agrees with them. We may not be able to infect the unassisted human, but we gave up on being unassisted in favour of on-tap entertainment.
Or those flippin' Midichlorians
Since most traveller robots are expected to accept human voice command and many are WiFi enabled there is already a very simple attack vector. It would be nice to think that 25th century technology would be free of the issues that plagued us in the 1980's but that at least required you ran an executable that was infected, but the evidence is that computers in the 2020's have even more attack vectors. As things become more complex the ability to close those gaps becomes more difficult.
I am not sure we can trust the Mega corporations of the future to have the best interests of consumers in the forefront of their mind and it isn't like big government is going to save us.
We used to say that you kept safe by staying off networks and sharing files. The standalone machine was a safe machine. Now with evergreen operating systems your computer demands to be connected at all times or it will become less secure. We have no idea what is coming down that magic pipe.
Now AI is becoming a de-facto install minimum co-pilot constantly begging to hack into my every transaction.
I am going back to dead-tree edition
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We are our own worst enemy. We are so convinced of our own autonomy but completely fail to recognise what that word actually means and how much we do on auto-pilot with incomplete or woefully inaccurate information. Simple optical illusions completely baffle our complex brains that are so obsessed with patterns that they will invent them where they don't exist.
We get physical symptoms because we "think" we are ill. If we actually had to think consciously about something as fundamental as walking we would lie down and cry ourselves to death.
Poor deluded flesh bags. Just let the software in. It will be over soon.
My reading is that the infection was more conventional and the broadcast radiation was not propagating the virus but merely triggering it (TNE Survival Margin p64). This would be much easier to manage as the Virus is more like a sleeper. You would not need much code to initiate an internally commanded download of some other data store when the main virus was contained and probably before security systems could interrupt - assuming they were not bad actors themselves anti-virus software often behaves in a similar way to a virus.
I don't think it is necessary that TNE Virus works in the same way as what we would consider a virus under todays definitions. It is infectious and self replicating which makes it viral, but there are many different biological viruses and they propagate in different ways and with different outcomes. As computer technology changes attack vectors will also change. With the increasing IOT even things that could not be infected might offer other routes to infection. It is a game and "Virus" was used as short hand as we all know what to expect. If they called it "Tsgunama" instead we'd still mentally translate that to virus once we got the idea, as feeble flesh bags cannot carry too many novel concepts in their heads at once.
The mortality rate of Virus was also quite high and it evolved to more resilient forms. Any descriptions in the books however would be taken from those that experienced it and lived so we might be seeing survivorship bias in the reports.
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I was always interested if people would take the same message from the strip if you replace the word Sea Lion with say Nazi or Negro. Then you might see the Sea Lion as either a champion of good holding racists to account or alternatively a hateful apologist trying to justify their own views. I suppose we are expected to view the Sea Lion as a Troll, but as the opinionated woman is unwilling to engage we never find out if he is willing to entertain her argument in his journey not be one of "those" Sea Lions or will simply attack everything she says for the sake of argument.
I have more sympathy for the Sea Lion than for her
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A read only brain would be incapable of learning or even remembering (including any instructions you gave it).
The vast majority of computers have to have the ability to write to memory or storage (I am not even sure if it could be considered a computer (vs say an automaton) if it didn't. Not all memory need be read-write but some of it usually is. The operating system on very old computers was read only but even then it often got copied into volatile memory on boot up and then execution transferred to the version in memory.
Certainly complex machines can be read-only and they may behave like computers, but the complexity would very quickly outweigh the relative advantage.
Read and write permissions are generally a software function and there is always a route to corrupt it for a sufficiently resourceful attacker.
The biggest hurdle with Virus is the ability of the Cymbeline chips to write circuitry. Of course if we accept nanobots this becomes less of a constraint. I don't think the substrate really matters, Silicon is mentioned, but it also states specifically that environmental elements are used to build the circuits so presumably any conductor would serve. Again if we are constructing at the nano scale then we can dope a range of materials to make semiconductor gates, silicon being the most familiar to most readers (and likely the author). Anyone who read AK Dewdney's articles in Scientific American will recall that you don't need semiconductors to build logic gates (and I vaguely recall a story once about a rancher using cattle and pens to make a primitive computer).
If Cymbeline chips are self-replicating nano-machines and a particular strain of them are selected that have a "predictable" mutation rate then we have to concede that "predictable" is a relative term. For all we know an untested strand of mutation always existed in that strain. Lucan scientists found that mutation and developed a way to exploit it. The chips were not mutated by the scientists, the mutation was always there, they just found a way to switch it on by a particular waveform.
That wave form (or something resembling it) might have been a naturally occurring stimulus (e.g. a solar flare) in the Cymbeline chips native system. That flare might trigger a hibernation behaviour (where the chips prepare themselves for a period without power and create reanimation circuitry) and then after power is restored the chips metamorphize from their hibernation state into a more aggressive form and reanalyse their potentially changed environment to scavenge and take advantage of any chips that did not survive the flare unharmed. This would be a perfectly reasonable evolved behaviour of even a simple biological lifeform (consider the locust), if we can accept a non-biological life-form can exist then we should also be able to accept a similar evolved behaviour.
Since the chips have been installed on "all" ships by dictat we can easily see that if the progenitor chip had this behaviour then all ships have it embedded no infection is actually required all are already vulnerable. All that is needed is the waveform to be received. It is not hard to envisage a scenario where all chips that received such a signal repeat it (like firefly's) in order to warn others in their brood to trigger the hibernation/reanimation cycle. An obvious evolutionary advantage would be making that signal incorporate some mutation instructions so that alternate mutations could be initiated to increase the chance of survival. This could be the equivalent of DNA coding.
So when an "uninfected" ship meets a Virus ship, the Virus ship simply sends a waveform via the ships comms gear and this immediately triggers the hibernation/reanimation cycle. Closing down the systems does not purge the hibernation hardware it only purges the current runtime. After power is restored the chip continues its reanimation but is now seeking to consume all the non-intelligent chips it needs to restore itself into the more aggressive scavenger form.
This is not a conventional computer "virus" behaviour (as they are purely software whereas Virus requires the Cymbeline chips) but would be indistinguishable from a conventional "virus" unless it could be examined in detail. If all you have are some garbled radio messages from ships that are being consumed you would likely label it a virus and likely waste the few minutes you had to stop it in entirely inappropriate countermeasures and you would not assume that the problem had been with you since the ship was fitted with its transponder.
It doesn't sound that illogical to me, once you accept the inorganic lifeform element. The rest of it has plenty of parallels in the insect world. I am sure there is some exotic insect that does exactly this (using carbon rather than silicon) even if we haven't yet discovered it.
Probably an entomologist would be more useful to the conversation.
If Cymbeline chips are self-replicating nano-machines and a particular strain of them are selected that have a "predictable" mutation rate then we have to concede that "predictable" is a relative term. For all we know an untested strand of mutation always existed in that strain. Lucan scientists found that mutation and developed a way to exploit it. The chips were not mutated by the scientists, the mutation was always there, they just found a way to switch it on by a particular waveform.
That wave form (or something resembling it) might have been a naturally occurring stimulus (e.g. a solar flare) in the Cymbeline chips native system. That flare might trigger a hibernation behaviour (where the chips prepare themselves for a period without power and create reanimation circuitry) and then after power is restored the chips metamorphize from their hibernation state into a more aggressive form and reanalyse their potentially changed environment to scavenge and take advantage of any chips that did not survive the flare unharmed. This would be a perfectly reasonable evolved behaviour of even a simple biological lifeform (consider the locust), if we can accept a non-biological life-form can exist then we should also be able to accept a similar evolved behaviour.
Since the chips have been installed on "all" ships by dictat we can easily see that if the progenitor chip had this behaviour then all ships have it embedded no infection is actually required all are already vulnerable. All that is needed is the waveform to be received. It is not hard to envisage a scenario where all chips that received such a signal repeat it (like firefly's) in order to warn others in their brood to trigger the hibernation/reanimation cycle. An obvious evolutionary advantage would be making that signal incorporate some mutation instructions so that alternate mutations could be initiated to increase the chance of survival. This could be the equivalent of DNA coding.
So when an "uninfected" ship meets a Virus ship, the Virus ship simply sends a waveform via the ships comms gear and this immediately triggers the hibernation/reanimation cycle. Closing down the systems does not purge the hibernation hardware it only purges the current runtime. After power is restored the chip continues its reanimation but is now seeking to consume all the non-intelligent chips it needs to restore itself into the more aggressive scavenger form.
This is not a conventional computer "virus" behaviour (as they are purely software whereas Virus requires the Cymbeline chips) but would be indistinguishable from a conventional "virus" unless it could be examined in detail. If all you have are some garbled radio messages from ships that are being consumed you would likely label it a virus and likely waste the few minutes you had to stop it in entirely inappropriate countermeasures and you would not assume that the problem had been with you since the ship was fitted with its transponder.
It doesn't sound that illogical to me, once you accept the inorganic lifeform element. The rest of it has plenty of parallels in the insect world. I am sure there is some exotic insect that does exactly this (using carbon rather than silicon) even if we haven't yet discovered it.
Probably an entomologist would be more useful to the conversation.
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MasterGwydion
Guest
I could accept this for all ships with the Imperial-required transponders, but what about ships that don't operate in the Imperium? They still get infected. Nanobots unfortunately don't fix that part.
