Oops

n7axw wrote:The thing that I've wondered about is why SS was so poor with its computer security. On Tepes, Harkness was able to slice into its systems with only minimal trouble, although it has to be remembered that he did get some help from those goons who were supposed to be watching him.

In Forackers case at Lovat with those SS ships watching the PN, there is no way that input from PN sourses should even have been possible. The PN was the "enemy" according to SS institutional paranoia. But institutional paranoia apparently did not translate over into the area of competence with computer security.

What happened was almost the equivalent of having the Mantys hack the systems of PN warships At the beginning of a battle.

Don

n7axw wrote:The thing that I've wondered about is why SS was so poor with its computer security. On Tepes, Harkness was able to slice into its systems with only minimal trouble, although it has to be remembered that he did get some help from those goons who were supposed to be watching him.

In Forackers case at Lovat with those SS ships watching the PN, there is no way that input from PN sourses should even have been possible. The PN was the "enemy" according to SS institutional paranoia. But institutional paranoia apparently did not translate over into the area of competence with computer security.

What happened was almost the equivalent of having the Mantys hack the systems of PN warships At the beginning of a battle.

Don

Sharp Claw wrote:All computer systems have low level commands that perform basic functions, i.e "read" the data in location A, store it in "memory", copy it into location B. A lot of computer actions are talked about from an anthropomorphic viewpoint to help humans understand what is going on. Computers don't really read, write or remember anything and they certainly don't understand what is going on. They just react to "commands" and open or close switches controlling a flow of electrons, 1 or 0 state, just like flipping a light switch on or off.

Computer security systems, such as logonid and password, are built at higher levels to prevent unauthorized users from accessing low level commands. There are likely several layers of security for sensitive systems to compartmentalize and track even authorized users and prevent them from performing some actions. The essence of hacking is to bypass these security safeguards and get access to the lowest possible level of commands so you can control the basic actions of a computer system such as turn off containment fields or turn on a pinnaces wedge.

Shannon Forraker probably already had access to the system as an authorized user so all she had to do was expand her user id to have unlimited access or create a new id like Joe Hacker, Chief Engineer that did have authorization for actions that could destroy a ship. She could have done this over a period of time while she helped StateSec solve their software problems and update their software so she became a trusted person. SS probably had enough institutional arrogance to think it impossible that a mere Naval tech weenie would dare to try to hack their systems and enough ignorance of what Shannon was actually doing that they were just happy to have a computer glitch fixed and their boss off their back and they didn't look too closely at her code.

Or Shannon just knew the system so well that she was able to access it directly to plant logic bombs and give herself low level access,even remotely, to access the commands to destroy a ship. I don't find this at all implausible.

Shannon_Foraker wrote:My headcanon is that Shannon did some IT support for SS, who accepted it, as while Shannon wasn't good politically, she was tech-wise, and sometimes you need a tech wiz to fix your computer.

tlb wrote:

Shannon_Foraker wrote:My headcanon is that Shannon did some IT support for SS, who accepted it, as while Shannon wasn't good politically, she was tech-wise, and sometimes you need a tech wiz to fix your computer.

When I originally read that there were destruct mechanisms planted during refit in the State Sec ships, that were to be used against Torch; I was thinking actual bombs. However with To End in Fire, we now see the sort of software destruction possible; whether with background modules or patches to existing code.

The Oops ships had been ordered to be a part of the Twelfth Fleet, which would have included allowing Shannon to download operation plans.

Shannon_Foraker wrote:My headcanon is that Shannon did some IT support for SS, who accepted it, as while Shannon wasn't good politically, she was tech-wise, and sometimes you need a tech wiz to fix your computer.

tlb wrote:When I originally read that there were destruct mechanisms planted during refit in the State Sec ships, that were to be used against Torch; I was thinking actual bombs. However with To End in Fire, we now see the sort of software destruction possible; whether with background modules or patches to existing code.

The Oops ships had been ordered to be a part of the Twelfth Fleet, which would have included allowing Shannon to download operation plans.

Louis R wrote:By this point, Shannon would probably not only have heard what Harkness did to Tepes [I doubt that there was much effort made to conceal it, even if it wasn't spelled out on the PMV citation], but worked out exactly what he'd bypassed to make it happen. And the tactical system is going to reach much deeper inside the net that the "games computer" ever did. As well as having direct communications with the most powerful explosive devices on the ship.

tlb wrote:The problem with that is Harkness caused many problems with software; but his actual destruction of Tepes required a hardware component: cutting the external sensors in the pinnace, so that it would think it was okay to bring up its wedge within the boat bay. So I expect that Shannon's solution was much closer to what was planned for the ships tasked to attack Torch.

tlb wrote:The problem with that is Harkness caused many problems with software; but his actual destruction of Tepes required a hardware component: cutting the external sensors in the pinnace, so that it would think it was okay to bring up its wedge within the boat bay. So I expect that Shannon's solution was much closer to what was planned for the ships tasked to attack Torch.

Loren Pechtel wrote:He shouldn't have been able to pull that off, period. It's some pretty sloppy design for a failure of that type to be possible. Even on a warship you engineer things to fail safe, not fail deadly.

However, we have seen a perfectly good way the Oops could have been pulled--turning off the fusion bottle containment.

tlb wrote:

tlb wrote:The problem with that is Harkness caused many problems with software; but his actual destruction of Tepes required a hardware component: cutting the external sensors in the pinnace, so that it would think it was okay to bring up its wedge within the boat bay. So I expect that Shannon's solution was much closer to what was planned for the ships tasked to attack Torch.

Loren Pechtel wrote:He shouldn't have been able to pull that off, period. It's some pretty sloppy design for a failure of that type to be possible. Even on a warship you engineer things to fail safe, not fail deadly.

However, we have seen a perfectly good way the Oops could have been pulled--turning off the fusion bottle containment.

I think people with evil intentions could have managed to trick the sensors, despite failure safeguards. For example replacing the sensor feed with a recording of the main ship's external sensors. The more layers of protection that you add, the greater the probability that a minor problem would keep the pinnace from working when needed. Given the level of maintenance ability in the People's Navy, you have to take a chance at some point.

In Enemy Hands wrote:


"My God."


Shannon Foraker's hushed whisper seemed to echo and re-echo across Count Tilly's flag deck as PNS Tepes blew apart.


No, Lester Tourville thought shakenly. No, she didn't blow apart; she simply came apart. She . . . disintegrated.


And that, he realized, was precisely the right word. The battlecruiser's fusion plants blew as their mag bottles failed, spewing white-hot fury amid the wreckage, but it didn't really matter. Nothing could have survived that dreadful, wrenching blow from inside her hull. All the fusion plants did was vaporize a few score tons of wreckage and silhouette the rest of it against a star-bright fury, like snowflakes in a ground car's headlights.


He stared in awe at the visual images of the carnage transmitted from their RD to the main view screen, and he knew how it had happened. He'd never actually seen it before, but there was only one thing the Manties could possibly have done to produce that effect, and a corner of his mind wondered distantly how they'd gotten past the fail-safes that were supposed to make it impossible.


Everard Honeker stood before him, even more stunned than any officer on the flag bridge, and Tourville drew a deep breath as he looked at the People's commissioner's back. He glanced around at the rest of his staff and their yeomen—every one of them as hypnotized as Honeker. All except Shannon Foraker, still bent over her display, seemed unable to think beyond the stunning shock of what had happened, but Tourville could, and a strange, vaulting exuberance warred with his horror at so many deaths. He knew he should be as numb as the others, as incapable of thought, but he couldn't help himself, couldn't keep a single thought from tolling through his brain.


Cordelia Ransom was dead. And so was Henri Vladovich and all the other people aboard that ship who'd known what Ransom had planned for Lester Tourville and his staff. No one else knew, for they'd stopped nowhere between Barnett and here, and Ransom had taken too much pleasure out of keeping them dangling in suspense to tell anyone what she intended. But now she was gone, and all her files and her entire personal staff were gone with her, and if it was wrong to rejoice when so many people had died, he was sorry, but he just couldn't help it.


And then he saw Shannon Foraker's right hand come out of her lap and move slowly, almost stealthily, towards her panel. Something about its movement caught at his attention, and he crossed quietly to stand behind her. She heard him and looked up, and her hand moved away from the "ERASE" key even more slowly—and far more reluctantly—than it had come.


Tourville gazed down over her shoulder at the tactical recording she'd been replaying, and his jaw clenched as he saw what she'd seen: two pieces of wreckage, larger than most of the others, and on a vector which had clearly taken them away from the murdered battlecruiser before she exploded. A vector which just happened to look very much like an unpowered reentry course.


He looked at them for another long moment, rubbing his fierce mustache with one finger. Shannon's drone had seen them, but it was highly unlikely Hades' EMP-blinded sensors had picked them up in time, and with the destruction of the "fleeing" pinnace, no one would even think to look for them. He felt a deep flicker of admiration for whoever had thought this one up, but he knew what his duty required of him.


Yes, I know what "duty" requires, he thought, and reached down past Shannon's shoulder to press his own finger firmly on the "ERASE" key. He heard Shannon inhale sharply, saw her head twitch, but she didn't say a word, and he turned away from her panel. He walked across to where Honeker and Bogdanovich stood, both still staring in awe at the visual imagery of the spreading pattern of wreckage relayed by Shannon's drone, and cleared his throat.


"Too bad," he said gravely, and the sound of his voice startled Honeker into turning to look at him. "There can't be any survivors," Tourville told his commissioner, and shook his head regretfully. "Too bad . . . Lady Harrington deserved better than that."

Ashes of Victory wrote:"Jesus Christ!" someone yelped, and Tourville spun his chair in the direction of the shout, then froze, staring in disbelief at the main visual display.


Twelve glaring spheres of unendurable brightness spalled the velvety blackness of deep space. They were huge, and so hellishly brilliant it hurt to look at them even with the display's automatic filters. And even as he stared at them, he saw another ripple of glaring light, much further away. It was impossible to make out any details of the second eruption, but it appeared to be on the approximate bearing of Javier Giscard's flagship . . . and the StateSec battle squadron which had been assigned to ride herd on him.


Lester Tourville wrenched his eyes back to the fading balls of plasma which had been the ships of Citizen Rear Admiral Heemskerk's squadron. The silence on his flag bridge was total, like the silence a microphone picked up in hard vacuum, and he swallowed hard.

Ashes of Victory wrote:Benjamin nodded. "Which is one reason we're concerned about the second point I was going to raise. You know that Pierre's financial reforms actually brought about a significant improvement in the Havenite economy."


He made the statement almost a question, and Honor nodded back.


"Well, we've been doing our best to evaluate just how much their economy has improved. Obviously, it's a matter of guess piled on top of conjecture, particularly given the fact that any officially published figures on the Peep economy were completely fabricated to hide the rot for at least four or five decades before the war. But we've run our models backward and forward, and they all agree that there ought to be more cash in the Republic's budgets than is being publicly reported."


Honor looked a question at him, and he shrugged.


"We know what their tax structure is, and we've managed to come up with a ballpark figure for their total economy which we feel is probably within ten or fifteen percent of accurate. And even taking the lower limit we've been able to postulate, the revenues they say they're collecting and spending are low to the tune of several hundred billion Manticoran dollars per year. And if our higher limit is closer to correct, the discrepancy gets much, much worse."


"Several hundred billion?" Honor repeated very carefully. She tried to remember if any of the High Ridge Government's intelligence types had ever expressed any qualms about the announced budgetary figures of the new Republic to any member of Parliament. Right off the top of her head, she couldn't think of a single time they had. For that matter, she admitted, it had never occurred to her to ask them about it or to suggest that anyone run the sort of analysis Benjamin was suggesting Grayson had made.


Which, she reflected, was uncommonly stupid of me.


"At an absolute minimum," Benjamin told her. "We haven't been able to find out where the money's actually going—not with any degree of certainty, at any rate. Part of the problem is that the Republic's so large and constitutes such a huge internal market that virtually all of it could be being plowed back into the domestic economy. More to the point, so much of their economy's been so distressed for so long that it's literally impossible to single out all of the perfectly legitimate places they could be pumping funds back into it. Unfortunately, we don't think that's the case. Or, rather, we're afraid it is the case, but that we wouldn't like the place they're spending all of that money if we could confirm it."


"And that place is?" Honor prompted as he paused.


"We don't know," Benjamin admitted, "but we have two straws in the wind, as it were. One is the existence of some top-secret project, one that was apparently launched under the Committee as much as several years before the McQueen Coup but which has been continued under Pritchart and Theisman. All we know about it for certain is its codename: 'Bolthole.' That, and the fact that Pierre and Saint-Just funneled huge amounts of money into whatever it is even at the height of the war and despite their worst financial problems. We don't have confirmation that Pritchart and Theisman have continued the same level of funding, but the discrepancy between what their revenues ought to be and what they're reporting certainly seems to suggest that some 'black project' is continuing to siphon off an awful lot of cash.


"That's straw number one. Straw number two is the name of the one officer our sources have been able to identify as being closely associated with whatever 'Bolthole' is since Theisman's little revolution. I believe you know her."


"I do?" Honor was startled and it showed.


"Oh, indeed you do," Benjamin said with something almost like grim amusement. "Her name is Vice Admiral Shannon Foraker."


"Oh, my God." Honor abruptly sat all the way back in her chair. "Foraker? You're sure?"


"We can't be one hundred percent positive. All we can say for certain is that her name appeared on the promotion lists, that we haven't been able to find her anywhere else, and that at least two separate sources within the Republic have suggested that where she disappeared to is wherever 'Bolthole' hangs out." The Protector shrugged. "There's no possible way to confirm it, but if I were a secretary of war who had some sort of high-cost project in applied research and development going on somewhere and I had someone of Foraker's demonstrated abilities to put in charge of it, I know what I'd be doing with her."