Make QM console packet-based

[Dabir]

Have the QM's ordering stuff send packets to the comm dish. This would bring many benefits such as the ability to sabotage QM by cutting the dish, and letting Mechanics fuck with them, and well that's actually it. But that's important.

[Sam Guivene]

Have the QM's ordering stuff send packets to the comm dish. This would bring many benefits such as the ability to sabotage QM by cutting the dish, and letting Mechanics fuck with them, and well that's actually it. But that's important.

What if we could send false transaction information to commit tax scams or sender scams so the money went to an individual instead of the merchant, you know, good ole embezzlement/fraud.

[Frank_Stein]

^Have the Space IRS come and perform an "audit" as an event if someone does too much of that

[Sundance]

All of my yes. All of nanotrasen tech SHOULD be included in a network somehow.

[rulib]

It's really tough to packet spoof stuff that goes through the mainframe, a device seemingly wise enough to know who its real friends are. Makes spoofing teleman very difficult.

[Paineframe]

Sounds like this would make it incredibly easy to empty the shipping budget at will without even needing a head ID, and there would be literally nothing whatsoever the QMs could do about it?

[Dabir]

It'd take a while to do, and you know who to blame when crates start ordering themselves. And that kind of behaviour should be antag-only. Considering that an antag could subvert the AI to have them do it, emag a borg and suggest that the borg do it, break into the HoP's office and embezzle the budget, just blow the place the hell up...

[Paineframe]

A subverted AI takes effort, and can be discovered and unsubverted. An emagged borg needs to have line-of-sight at the start and can easily be tracked down and beaten to death. Either of those are also super easy to discover because the QM console's state is shared between everyone using it, and therefore two people using it at the same time get nowhere fast. HoP embezzlement requires an HoP or above ID and is easily reversible if you don't spend all the money quickly.

Packet spoofing, on the other hand, takes basically no effort, and there is no way to locate the perpetrator (who can be practically anywhere in the station) or to block, resist, or undo his dirty deeds.

[Amelorate]

You could require it to have the auth_code string like what is in the packet used to call the emergency shuttle.

[Dabir]

I'm thinking each crate type would have a randomly-assigned ID in the packet, so to get any spoofing going you have to monitor the powernet and wait for the QMs to order something, or go and do it yourself.

[APARTHEID]

Packet spoofing, on the other hand, takes basically no effort, and there is no way to locate the perpetrator (who can be practically anywhere in the station) or to block, resist, or undo his dirty deeds.

Why the heck can't folks fight back against a spoofer? Cursory walks through maintenance aside, with how easy it is to cyberjack your Wishmaker 5000 into the station's network, shit like the packet sniffer ought to be able to ferret out hackers with some sort of decipherable tell: trigonometric coordinates, Cartesian planes, whatever the heck. Some sort of GPS "I'M RIGHT HERE!" bits of data encoded along with the sent data.

[Dabir]

Or you ask the AI where the mechanics are.

[Paineframe]

Or you ask the AI where the mechanics are.

Mechanics aren't the only people who can do packet shenanigans, and I'm honestly not really sure why people have that impression. Everything needed for abusing packet shit is publicly or almost-publicly available, and in fact none of it even comes from Mechanics in the first place, except that they start with the network tools PDA cart while others have to buy it.

[Dabir]

But this would be shenanigans over the powernet, which is very much a mechanics thing. Besides, just because you CAN get to it doesn't mean it's your thing. Mechanics start with the tools to mess with networks, ergo messing with networks is a mechanics thing.