JeffEngel wrote:Bluestrike2 wrote:But I don't think that's what will happen. I think that Owl, as a military AI, or Merlin as the ranking naval officer on Safehold will be able to take command of the computer via military override codes. Weber already did just that in Heirs of Empire in the Dahak series when Sean uses his Imperial codes to deactivate the quarantine systems on Pardal. It's easy, it's clean, and it lets the Inner Circle gain access to the command staff's records with minimal risk. Not to mention that they'd get to interrogate any virtual personalities present under the Temple.
Military systems would have some pretty strict protocols hardwired in place to protect them against outside threats. Protocols along the lines of recognizing higher command authority, wiping systems and destroying hardware if at risk of capture, etc. Everything on Safehold was built with military fabricators, so it's logical to assume that such protocols were in place and that they were automatically applied to any new tech that was fabricated.
The Temple was built by the winning side at the end of the War Against the Fallen. The other side in the war was predominantly the military and police forces of Safehold before the war. So specifically military protocols would be the
least secure option for the Temple's builders - unlike the quarantine system and associated hardware on Pardal.
Also, there'd been no small amount of wartime experience and expedients applied. The information security habits represented by the Temple's designers will have diverged considerably from Owl's in ways they can't predict without exploration.
It wouldn't matter who won. My point was that any TF industrial hardware would have been hardwired to include its security protocols in anything that it was used to produce. Otherwise, the entire point is moot: bad actors would just have to build a new fabrication unit and *poof* they can get around lockouts and limitations. That might not apply to combat remotes (fear of hacking, like you pointed out) because they can't reproduce or build other bad things, but it would certainly apply to AIs, fabrication units, etc. If security protocols like these exist, they'd have been developed to protect against the best black hat hackers of humanity as well as the Gbaba's own cyberneticists and refined over years of attempted intrusions. I sincerely doubt any of the anti-tech members of Langhorne's faction would have been able to do what those sorts of individuals couldn't. Simply put, the angels really wouldn't have had much of a choice in the matter.
During the war, there are a few possible explanations for why they might not have been able to do anything. Access is the biggest one, since the Angel's industrial infrastructure was in orbit. There might not have been any officers of sufficient rank left alive, or those left might not have known any override codes or that they existed. Finally, the administrative council (or what was left of it) was still technically the duly constituted government of Safehold, despite the fact that they abandoned the colonial charter and effectively committed treason. That might have been enough to keep the lights on, so to speak.
The Temple was built well after the last of the Fallen were murdered. To the surviving command staff, they won. Their enemies were gone after they were carefully hunted down to the last man and their plan for Safehold was back on track. Given how damaged their psyches were, it's a safe bet that their paranoia shifted from the threat of any surviving Fallen (since they knew there were none left) to eventual violations of the Proscriptions. Human memory and cognitive biases would take care of the rest. Aside from the basic security settings (firewalls, access permissions, etc.), most of their efforts would focus on protecting against a low-tech opponent rather than a high-tech one. And even that would probably be a bit iffy, since they were supremely confident that nothing could derail their plan (refer to the administrative council meeting at the beginning of OAR when Bédard and Shan-wei argue about Egypt).
Even paranoiacs have biases and mental blindspots.
