[Crime, Technology] ‘Gethnapping’ Case Baffles Authorities, Worries Consensus

‘Gethnapping’ Case Baffles Authorities, Worries Consensus

Report by Rachel Zhao, The Drescher Times. Holographs by Bella Rosales, The Drescher Times.

The bizarre case of Harmonious Accord, the ‘kidnapped’ geth program, has both the Shanxi Colonial Police Force and the Alliance Investigative Services “completely baffled”, according to an anonymous inside source, amid rumours the Geth Consensus is preparing to undertake its own investigation.

The program identifying itself as Harmonious Accord, like many other geth, left Rannoch in order to assist the galaxy’s restoration and reconstruction work after the Reaper Invasion. Little did it know that it would be caught up in what local detective Isidore Beautrelet is calling “the most baffling case [he has] ever worked on.”

“All we know is that the program’s platform was attacked by unknown assailants during a routine inspection of the city’s power lines,” Detective Beautrelet continued. “Evidence suggests that the program known as Harmonious Accord was illegally downloaded - don’t ask me how - from its platform and removed from the scene of the crime.”

In a Drescher Times exclusive, we can reveal an anonymous inside source’s perspective.

“It’s completely [blocked],” alleges our anonymous insider. “The only evidence is a dead flashlight with some scratches around an optic fibre cable. It’s just geth doing geth [blocked], there’s no need to call in those Intelligence guys. If this guy had been human, nobody would care.”

Rumours persist that the Geth Consensus is preparing their own independent investigation, although the Consensus has repeatedly denied such claims.

It wouldn't surprise me at all to find out they tried.

Mimmicking the consensus would require extensive monitoring and subsequent reverse engineering of the communication since you can't look up the protocols on the extranet. (Thinking about what Cerberus in their KZ went through to do so with reaper/husk communication still makes me wanna throw up.)

It can be done, sure, but I think it would need some preparation and a little more than a conventional cyber-warfare rig.

Well, look I'm no tech guy so this is probably the wrong thread for me, but I know geth a bit and I think the part you're kinda skating over is

well


'less I'm really off the mark I think what TO is saying is that there isn't actually that much of a difference (when you actually try to do it I mean) between hacking geth comms and hacking the Consensus itself. Because, you know, that's basically what the Consensus is right? Every geth everywhere ever talking to each other.

Mean, again I'm no tech guy, but I think that a living piece of software would be able to go "waaaait that's not right" if you tried to pull what you're talking about.


...Well yeah I mean that's one of the things they think that they were probably doing but you can't just take apples, call them oranges, and then try to make a screwdriver with them. Husks weren't Reapers it was a kind of master/slave command thing, so the husks themselves aren't all that complex or intelligent by themselves usually. Plus, for every Reaper there were like a couple million husks;

they're not equals is what I'm saying. What you're talking about is less like that and more like trying to hack the comms between two Reapers (no offense to any gearheads, not calling you guys Reapers or anything).


Kinda with the fringy here, you're not going to trick it on its own turf I think so you might as well brute force it. Not to say that that'll be easy mind you, just that you've probably got a better chance I don't know.


Of course ma'am.


Er...

Don't take this the wrong way but I think TO knows what he's talking about a bit more than you do man. Just saying.

Mimicking the consensus would require intimate knowledge of consensus protocols, as well as tremendous processing power to imitate the constant activity thereof.

You'd basically need to create a consensus of your own to effectively imitate the consensus, because no dummy signal is ever going to effectively capture the intricacy for even a microsecond. There are millions of geth constantly exchanging information. You say "just intercept your signal" as if that's easy to do, but even an OT signal has redundancies and every geth in the consensus effectively serves as a redundancy for every other geth in the consensus.

I reiterate: Your IT tech is an idiot and if you still doubt me, I encourage you to try this technique on the nearest geth. I'd be surprised if they even noticed your attempt, given that there's no way it could possibly ever threaten them.


You are officially a better technician than whoever the batarian is talking to.

Maybe I should have been clearer.
I meant "it could be done" in a sense that there are no laws of nature preventing you and the core idea on the how-to is sound. Yet, as TO correctly pointed out, to actually do so would be a waste of rescources at best and the complexity of the task would prevent most people from doing it.

Against, her words :

Ok I'll ignore the insults, it's not the first time I see someone try to argue with shit-talking instead of tech-talking.
Now I really, really don't understand why you're so sure that a geth platform accesses the entire consensus at all time. I mean... Why? Why would they do that? Your omnitool don't contact all the extranet websites, does it? Why would it? It goes through nodes and redirection. Now if I had used a trap like the one I described earlier, as soon as you wanted to do a research you'd notice something was wrong, but by then you'd be connected. Same with the geth.
A simple but regular handshake makes much more sense, unless the platform actually needs to access information it doesn't have on site.
Now what you conventiently ignore is that I'm not just inventing a fantasy here, again it's very much like what Cerberus did on Horizon, hacking the communication protocol instead of the reapers themselves.
And what's that argument, "if it's so easy do it yourself"? It's absurd! However they did it it's obviously the work of a well-funded group and the pinnacle of arduous research.
Now it was just a theory. Maybe they really plugged those cables in that geth and hacked him out of his platform old school, in spite of the fact that it's precisely the type of hacking they've spent centuries learning to themselves from, as you mentioned.

...Riiiiiight that's

Okay that's like me saying "Yeah I can totally kill a Sovereign-class with a Typhoon" and then saying that I technically could because there are no laws of nature preventing me from doing it and the core idea (ma-round to bore through armor) is sound.

But there's like a laundry list of if's there that would make it kinda impossible to actually do, you know? If it held still. If I had replacement parts. If I had, like, a million heat sinks. If it didn't just shoot me.

So, yeah. Not exactly the best argument man.


Lady you're how old and, uh, work for slaver?


...Well I'd go out on a limb and say it's " 'cause a geth isn't an OT" and also, you know, they like being able to talk to each other.

Least that's what the gearhead said.


C'mon man, not okay.

So, all this being said, and the general consensus being that it must have taken a heck of a lot of effort one way or another, I'm still curious as to the why. Setting up one, or several, VIs has got to be more cost-effective than this. Sounds like a whole lot of work for not a whole lot of reward.

If you wanted a captive AI, doing this would almost certainly be faster than developing and training one on your own.

Wasn't an argument for anything, just stating what I think about the issue.

Your tech (who I have to assume is actually you, given that no real IT tech could ever be this incomprehensibly dense) keeps missing the part where both pieces of software are sentient. An omnitool is a terrible comparison and you keep coming back to it because you're totally ignorant of what's actually involved here.

Here's a hint - just the barest hint, mind you - of what you're failing to comprehend: the geth until recently existed exclusively as a gestalt. For centuries, going back to the earliest years of their existence when they were still basically just our toaster ovens, they survived, existed, evolved, whatever word you want to use for it, strictly by being in constant communication with one another. The more of them there were, the more efficient and effective they were, and despite their uplifting by the Reapers, that networking still exists. Being in constant communication with one another is the closest thing geth have to instinct.


What Cerberus did on Horizon involved years of research by an organization with literally billions of credits and top-level military connections within the Alliance, and wasn't remotely the same as this. They co-opted an effectively one-way signal, they didn't have to convince both ends that there was nothing amiss while substituting their own pseudo-network. What Cerberus did was the equivalent of drowning out one holovid broadcast with another, but what you're talking about (yes, again, I know it's you and not anybody with actual credentials) is the equivalent of replacing the latest and most hyped-up non-DDS holovid broadcast with a looped image of a xemna taking a shit and then convincing both the original broadcaster and the viewer that there never was any other image.


A theory in the 'conspiracy theory' sense, rather than the 'scientific theory' sense.


I never once said they 'hacked him out of his platform old school' (whatever the fuck that is supposed to mean, Mister 'Technician'), I just said that your idea - I'm sorry, your "technician"'s idea - was ridiculous. Which it is. Because you're a buffoon.

Now, on to people with something intelligent to say:


This is basically it. Not only would it be expensive, slow, illegal, and difficult to develop a true AI, but that AI using the best current algorithms would pale in comparison next to a geth. The upgrade to individuality was done by the Reapers, let's not forget, who are incomprehensibly older and several orders of magnitude more advanced than us in basically every field, up to and including AI tech (which should be obvious given that they're AI's themselves). Even if it did take a Cerberus-level degree of investment to pull this off, that's still faster and cheaper than developing something comparable from scratch.

I get the idea, also as TO explained it, it makes sense, but still I ask myself, could something actually be done with it? Would that AI/geth be useful in any way?
To me the mystery still remains if this 'experiment' was successful or not. The question was raised already, how fast the geth would erase itself (or not) when it understands it's situation - by which ever means it was captured.

There is another possibility, remote as it may sound. But did the geth come along voluntarily? What could persuade a geth to leave it's platform and switch to whatever else and cut ties with the consensus? Could a geth be that curious?

Huh

'Kay here's what I think, an I'm just shotgunning some ideas basically I don't really know all that much about how a gearhead actually thinks/feels/whatever, but if all those upgrades and rewrites made each geth into an individual then I guess that yeah, you could. 'Cause each one's its own person and is going to grow 'n develop differently and all that jazz from all the other gearheads, even its own copies, it means that each geth is kinda...I don't know unique, if that's the right word to use. So even if it deletes itself, it's copy won't be the exact same thing as it.

So I guess it comes down to how much value the gearhead in question places on that and whether they hope (can they hope?) or think or whatever that there's a chance for rescue.

Dunno, just throwing it out there.

As much as an existential threat this could be for the Geth, I'm not sure it will get replicated on a large scale. You'd have to store Harmonious Accord and never allow the program to reach an external access (lest its name become a fantastic oxymoron). I suppose you could shackle it with reprogramming, but to do so would probably take an insane amount of code and programming manpower.

And for the Geth on the board - personally, I'm still a bit reticent to fully trust all of you, but whoever is doing this does not have good intentions. So I'll repeat and paraphrase what we organics tell our young when in public alone.

1) Don't get into skycars with strangers
2) Go everywhere with another platform
3) If anyone asks you to help find their lost pet varren in a secluded alleyway, don't go!
4) Don't give your itinerary to anyone you don't trust over the extranet
5) If someone grabs you and tries to take you against your will, physically resist (Although you're all probably quite proficient at that).
6) If you think someone is following you, contact an organic you trust.
7) Constantly share data with other platforms for safe places to work and interact with organics and each other.

I hate to sound all one-note-y and that, but, well, physical force.

The article says that whoever did it jumped this geth, right? If they set up a short-range sig jammer so it couldn't transfer itself (really fucking expensive, I know, but hey, they kidnapped a tides-damned geth, they've gotta be loaded), then jumped Harmonica Accordion and told it 'get in the box or we kill you', that ought to have worked.

I mean, I get the whole 'death before slavery' thing, but you know how many people get cyanide pills or whatever and don't use 'em? Tides. Talk about a waste of money.

Like, I get the geth are different and shit, but they're all individuals now, right? I know I'd rather stay alive and try to escape than be dead. Maybe I'd have thought differently before the War, but tides, you've got to keep fightin', you know?

A high profile criminal syndicate, maybe?

Indeed. This is entirely different from data piracy.

It is, however, immensely interesting.