The logistics of travel and immigration

JohnRoth wrote:

Silverwall wrote:As for faked biometric data and immigration this is a classic big numbers problem. Yes you can get hair/dna/biometrics etc but you then have to compare it to a database of hundreds of BILLIONS of entry. It is clear that this is a processing issue for Honorverse computers which seem to be significantly less capable than those Abby uses in NCIS. NCIS also shows the very real problem of multiple overlapping jurisictions and databases that need to be searched in parallel only the Solarian League is hundreds of times bigger than those of just the US.

You're making a classic mistake: assuming that you have to do a full compare to every record. That is, as you say, infeasible.

What happens is that you compute a "fingerprint" that reduces the search space by quite a few orders of magnitude. That gives you some potential matches, after which you do a more rigorous compare to find the right one.

That's what services like UTube do to catch people who are uploading copyrighted material.

False positives only happen when the comparison is deliberately using less than full information, for whatever reason. (usually cost).

And remember: it's 2000 years of development later. You're not going to spoof a decent system by holding up a picture of someone else in front of the camera.

This is already how facial recognition works and it is well established that response time is exponential with database size. e.g you can get 1 second response from a database of 100k faces, 30 mins from a database of 40 million and the estimates of time for a database of 4 billiion is in the range of Months. When talking about border security in Sol we are talking about a database in the 10s of billions.

I also disagree that the computers in the Honorverse are notably more powerful than the ones we currently have and it is very clear that they do not work on quantum computing principals so I see no reason to ascribe them miraculous levels of computing power compared to current tech.

Finally the differences between differences between your legit video of Auntie Nell falling into the swimming pool and an equivalent length music video is vastly greater than the differences between 2 sets of fingerprints or facial recognition scans. the more disdinct the two objects the easier it is to create unique digital fingerprints.

Current accuracy for the FBI factial recognition database is that it gives the 50 best result matches for a suspect and only 80% of the time is the suspect actually one of those matches, even when the suspect exists in the database somewhere. This is no-where good enough for border security checks whith thousands of people an hour flowing through. Note also that other reports suggest that the FBI database can carry out hundreds of simultaneous searches at the same time. Or to put it another way screening all the passengers from a single fully loaded Airbus A 380 arriving at New York would be dangerously close to maxing out the database capability.

As I said it is good for confirming the identity of a know suspect but bad for random fishing in a massive population pool for a potential bad dude.

See https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/ ... on/397289/ for a resonably decent summary of the current state of Facial Recognition and note that they are always referring to it in the "Who is this dude" mode not "did this dude just pass the camera" mode. That mode which is what is needed for border security and remains a hollywood myth.

There is also plastic surgery to alter someones appearance. Not to mention disguise technology would also have advanced to counter developments in technologies used to identify people.

Even with out the issue of corruption and competence history has shown that the various police and security agencies do not work well together even at the best of times. Then you have to add bureaucratic lag time in communicating information between them which at best of times can be painfully slow. On last thing is that most of the time is not the best of times when it comes to cooperation between them.

This raises another important question about the MA.

I would assume that DNA markers associated with Manpower's genetic slaves are well-known. In the textev, several times it has been said that Manpower's genetic engineering programs were often used as testbeds for enhancements to the Mesan Alignment's own development program.

So I would think that someone, somewhere, over the centuries, would have noticed that a great many highly placed people have "Manpower" DNA but no family history that easily explains that fact. Yes, there may well be ethical rules that prevent the abuse of medical information -- but it is hard to imagine that those rules were never, ever, broken on over hundreds of planets over nearly six hundred years.

drinksmuchcoffee wrote:This raises another important question about the MA.

I would assume that DNA markers associated with Manpower's genetic slaves are well-known. In the textev, several times it has been said that Manpower's genetic engineering programs were often used as testbeds for enhancements to the Mesan Alignment's own development program.

So I would think that someone, somewhere, over the centuries, would have noticed that a great many highly placed people have "Manpower" DNA but no family history that easily explains that fact. Yes, there may well be ethical rules that prevent the abuse of medical information -- but it is hard to imagine that those rules were never, ever, broken on over hundreds of planets over nearly six hundred years.

How many of you can name for sure the ancestry of all 8 or your great grandparents? I know for sure I can't and my mother is a geneology nut. Add in a few *anomolous paternity* situations which sociology studies suggest can be close to 10% of the population and tracking genetic traits that are not disease or abuse related becomes very challenging. Also with Gen mods being well established as a thing what does a group of gen mods comming from a well know source of gen mods prove? Specifically why would the evil genetic slavers not also be tweaking thier own genes?

Interesting discussion. Right now it is feasible for average people to have DNA analysis for either medical or personal interest reasons. I would imagine that in thousands of years time it will be even cheaper and quicker.I have been involved in this for both medical and personal reasons, as I developed an unusual leukemia that is restricted to males from a European Jewish background. First time I knew that I was one of the "Chosen People".
Anyway it appears that for 400 years not one of my
grandmothers+ on the paternal line had strayed. Quite unusual, and speaks well for the males on that line's ability to keep them happy.
So back to the Honorverse, while RFC has implied that computer science has not progressed much he implies that DNA science has, so it should be easy to check if Manpower DNA is present.

Silverwall wrote:

drinksmuchcoffee wrote:This raises another important question about the MA.

I would assume that DNA markers associated with Manpower's genetic slaves are well-known. In the textev, several times it has been said that Manpower's genetic engineering programs were often used as testbeds for enhancements to the Mesan Alignment's own development program.

So I would think that someone, somewhere, over the centuries, would have noticed that a great many highly placed people have "Manpower" DNA but no family history that easily explains that fact. Yes, there may well be ethical rules that prevent the abuse of medical information -- but it is hard to imagine that those rules were never, ever, broken on over hundreds of planets over nearly six hundred years.

How many of you can name for sure the ancestry of all 8 or your great grandparents? I know for sure I can't and my mother is a geneology nut. Add in a few *anomolous paternity* situations which sociology studies suggest can be close to 10% of the population and tracking genetic traits that are not disease or abuse related becomes very challenging. Also with Gen mods being well established as a thing what does a group of gen mods comming from a well know source of gen mods prove? Specifically why would the evil genetic slavers not also be tweaking thier own genes?

drinksmuchcoffee wrote:I would assume that DNA markers associated with Manpower's genetic slaves are well-known. In the textev, several times it has been said that Manpower's genetic engineering programs were often used as testbeds for enhancements to the Mesan Alignment's own development program.

So I would think that someone, somewhere, over the centuries, would have noticed that a great many highly placed people have "Manpower" DNA but no family history that easily explains that fact. Yes, there may well be ethical rules that prevent the abuse of medical information -- but it is hard to imagine that those rules were never, ever, broken on over hundreds of planets over nearly six hundred years.

As we know from the Winton family, discrete gene modding is something that, while not exactly common, is certainly not unusual among the rich and famous. I would also assume that the slave lines have markers specifically engineered to be recognizable as slave markers, markers that can be and are omitted when the successful upgrades are transferred into the MAlignment gene pool.

Finger printing seems to me to be much too low-tech in a technologically advanced society like so. Replacement prints, altered prints and other prints I'm too imaginary hampered to think of surely must exist to governments and their spies and to other resourceful, "successful" or "well connected" undesirables and or criminal elements where money or technological savvy is no object.

Certainly that means of identification, just perhaps, shouldn't be used by Customs on the capacities represented by freighters.

JohnRoth wrote:

Silverwall wrote:As for faked biometric data and immigration this is a classic big numbers problem. Yes you can get hair/dna/biometrics etc but you then have to compare it to a database of hundreds of BILLIONS of entry. It is clear that this is a processing issue for Honorverse computers which seem to be significantly less capable than those Abby uses in NCIS. NCIS also shows the very real problem of multiple overlapping jurisictions and databases that need to be searched in parallel only the Solarian League is hundreds of times bigger than those of just the US.

You're making a classic mistake: assuming that you have to do a full compare to every record. That is, as you say, infeasible.

What happens is that you compute a "fingerprint" that reduces the search space by quite a few orders of magnitude. That gives you some potential matches, after which you do a more rigorous compare to find the right one.

That's what services like UTube do to catch people who are uploading copyrighted material.

False positives only happen when the comparison is deliberately using less than full information, for whatever reason. (usually cost).

And remember: it's 2000 years of development later. You're not going to spoof a decent system by holding up a picture of someone else in front of the camera.

Silverwall wrote:This is already how facial recognition works and it is well established that response time is exponential with database size. e.g you can get 1 second response from a database of 100k faces, 30 mins from a database of 40 million and the estimates of time for a database of 4 billiion is in the range of Months. When talking about border security in Sol we are talking about a database in the 10s of billions.

I also disagree that the computers in the Honorverse are notably more powerful than the ones we currently have and it is very clear that they do not work on quantum computing principals so I see no reason to ascribe them miraculous levels of computing power compared to current tech.

Finally the differences between differences between your legit video of Auntie Nell falling into the swimming pool and an equivalent length music video is vastly greater than the differences between 2 sets of fingerprints or facial recognition scans. the more disdinct the two objects the easier it is to create unique digital fingerprints.

Current accuracy for the FBI factial recognition database is that it gives the 50 best result matches for a suspect and only 80% of the time is the suspect actually one of those matches, even when the suspect exists in the database somewhere. This is no-where good enough for border security checks whith thousands of people an hour flowing through. Note also that other reports suggest that the FBI database can carry out hundreds of simultaneous searches at the same time. Or to put it another way screening all the passengers from a single fully loaded Airbus A 380 arriving at New York would be dangerously close to maxing out the database capability.

As I said it is good for confirming the identity of a know suspect but bad for random fishing in a massive population pool for a potential bad dude.

See https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/ ... on/397289/ for a resonably decent summary of the current state of Facial Recognition and note that they are always referring to it in the "Who is this dude" mode not "did this dude just pass the camera" mode. That mode which is what is needed for border security and remains a hollywood myth.

Per the capacities represented by freighters - even one freighter when we all know there would be many arriving at Port X - it seems a daunting task.

I would imagine certain strategies such as manually limiting the search parameters via female/male? And of course the parameters can be lowered further by alphabet. Cachet = C.

Of course many would slip through the cracks of these methods. However, full database comparison would continue within the system throughout your stay and automatic APB's issued. Similar to entering Russia and Nazi Germany. Just because your papers are in order now, doesn't mean that they will continue to be, because we are continuing to reference/cross reference.

What about taggers placed into the bloodstream of off-worlders that would facilitate locating an individual if an APB is issued.

shrug

Also, computers themselves do not have to be that much more powerful to perform much better than our current crop.

Remember, what Honorverse tech does have is a handle on miniaturization and several cpu's can be utilized in parallel with parallel programming methods and search algorithms. Heat dissipation seems to be an area of great advancement.

At any rate, Mr. Weber has said that Honorverse computers haven't advanced that much? Well, that isn't to say that programming methods, languages, miniaturization, efficiency and heat dissipation hasn't. Our present programming skills, and heat generation, wastes our current capability.

Silverwall wrote:

drinksmuchcoffee wrote:...

How many of you can name for sure the ancestry of all 8 or your great grandparents? I know for sure I can't and my mother is a geneology nut. Add in a few *anomolous paternity* situations which sociology studies suggest can be close to 10% of the population and tracking genetic traits that are not disease or abuse related becomes very challenging. Also with Gen mods being well established as a thing what does a group of gen mods comming from a well know source of gen mods prove? Specifically why would the evil genetic slavers not also be tweaking thier own genes?

In the Honorverse, it seems that most genmods are kept quiet as the population as a whole still has many negative stereotypes with respect to "genies".

Let's ask the question another way. If you found out that a significant percentage of senior military officers, senior civilian government officials, prominent businesspeople, and media personalities all had unexplained or unaccounted for genetic modifications wouldn't that be awfully suspicious? Especially if they all appeared to be related to Manpower?

Even if Manpower pulled the copyright notices or whatever they put into junk DNA, if you had long base pair sequences that were identical between slave DNA and MA sleepers (and if you were making significant mods I would think that would be distinctly likely) that would clearly point at Manpower or the MA being involved with that individual's creation.

I could think of a planetary emergency (mainly a scary plague brought on by some hitherto unknown pathogen) where looking at your whole population's DNA records might be critical to the survival of the human population. That doesn't include cases where a paranoid, repressive, corrupt, or just plain crazy government gets into power and starts doing foolish things.

Hypothetically, the MA could compromise the medical records systems so this information can never be found. In practice, that would require repeated compromises of thousands of different systems on different planets over a period of centuries, and you can't ever fail once or you compromise your whole conspiracy.

drinksmuchcoffee wrote:

Silverwall wrote:How many of you can name for sure the ancestry of all 8 or your great grandparents? I know for sure I can't and my mother is a geneology nut. Add in a few *anomolous paternity* situations which sociology studies suggest can be close to 10% of the population and tracking genetic traits that are not disease or abuse related becomes very challenging. Also with Gen mods being well established as a thing what does a group of gen mods comming from a well know source of gen mods prove? Specifically why would the evil genetic slavers not also be tweaking thier own genes?

In the Honorverse, it seems that most genmods are kept quiet as the population as a whole still has many negative stereotypes with respect to "genies".

Let's ask the question another way. If you found out that a significant percentage of senior military officers, senior civilian government officials, prominent businesspeople, and media personalities all had unexplained or unaccounted for genetic modifications wouldn't that be awfully suspicious? Especially if they all appeared to be related to Manpower?

Even if Manpower pulled the copyright notices or whatever they put into junk DNA, if you had long base pair sequences that were identical between slave DNA and MA sleepers (and if you were making significant mods I would think that would be distinctly likely) that would clearly point at Manpower or the MA being involved with that individual's creation.

I could think of a planetary emergency (mainly a scary plague brought on by some hitherto unknown pathogen) where looking at your whole population's DNA records might be critical to the survival of the human population. That doesn't include cases where a paranoid, repressive, corrupt, or just plain crazy government gets into power and starts doing foolish things.

Hypothetically, the MA could compromise the medical records systems so this information can never be found. In practice, that would require repeated compromises of thousands of different systems on different planets over a period of centuries, and you can't ever fail once or you compromise your whole conspiracy.

That'd be like someone automatically arresting Michelle, simply because as an RMN officer, the very first time she went through a standard medical test, "GENIE ALERT! GENIE ALERT!" alarms go off, despite being a Winton and thus in the SKM since it began.

Which is almost exactly the same situation the majority of those Mesan Alignment infiltrators are, they've been on their specific worlds for so long, nobody would even think to cross-check against anything more than generic medical data, and not the separate "freed genetic slave" databanks.

Now when you couple the sleeper insertion data, with the information we got when the heads of state met with Detweiler? [Mission of Honor, Ch 39, not quoting simply to save space, will if desired] Some had a profound musical talent which manifested from singing to guitar playing, others have a tendency to sports from fencing to swimming, others were adrenaline junkies. Some were really tall and built like warriors, others were so petite to look like dolls.


That is a lot of variation, and given how long ago they inserted into those various worlds, you can be pretty darn sure those 'mods', were stripped out from the generic slave pool that gets sold, which means unlikely anyone has recent data on those mods outside of the family/families in question.

So you'd have to have medical technicians archiving centuries worth of slave mods, whether they're still active or not, AND then become suspicious enough to run a detailed comparison. Except why would you run a comparison on a family who's been on your planet doing X for literally centuries, against an archive of ancient freed slave genetic data?