8 ms·

The US Secret Service mistook a cyberpunk RPG for a hacker's handbook

242 points by molecule 7y ago

jfalcon 7y ago
aka: Operation Sundevil - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sundevil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sundevil which was actually a multi-year hacker crackdown in the early 1990's. -pours one out for all the homies-
- ObsoleteNerd 7y ago
  They were definitely interesting times. Ripe for a documentary on all of the ridiculousness. To a large extent, it never really ended.
  - njharman 7y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hacker_Crackdown https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hacker_Crackdown
    - ObsoleteNerd 7y ago
      Great book, but I was more thinking along the lines of all the absolutely insane nightly news clips and TV stuff talking about how hackers can basically destroy the world if they’re even allowed to touch a computer etc. The media were absolutely rabid through most of the 80s and early 90s. I distinctly remember them acting like hackers were worse than terrorists, worse than anything humanity had ever had to deal with. Looking back, it’s almost funny, except many lives were ruined and hackers raided and/or imprisoned because of media hype and fear.
  - ethbro 7y ago
    Show Hackers to kids these days, then tell them essentially all the law enforcement stuff was true. (To say nothing of the unrelated Hackers 2)
    - VRay 7y ago
      Some of the exploits that've come to light in the last decade are pretty mind-blowing too If you sent a security expert from today back in time to the 90s, they could basically pull the same ridiculous shenanigans that the characters did in that movie
- teilo 7y ago
  The EFF claims that the SJG raid was unrelated to Operation Sundevil.
- thenewnewguy 7y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GURPS_Cyberpunk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GURPS_Cyberpunk > This raid is often wrongly attributed to Operation Sundevil, a nationwide crackdown on illegal computer hacking activities that was occurring about this time.
- loydb 7y ago
  The SJG raid had nothing to do with Sundevil. Totally different crew. The LOD raids (which SJG got caught up in) were driven by an ambitious district attorney from Chicago.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
rizumu 7y ago
A discussion with Steve Jackson on the 20th anniversary of the raid: http://www.sjgames.com/SS/ http://www.sjgames.com/SS/
anikan_vader 7y ago
I can't be the only one who finds it disturbing to abbreviate the Secret Service as the SS.
- wrs 7y ago
  Considering this is a description of a raid conducted by government agents in order to damage innocent peoples’ property and livelihood and strike terror into others, that abbreviation may be intentional.
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago
  Ironically enough they're probably the branch of federal law enforcement that has that comparison made the least frequently. Compared to ATF, FBI, DHS, ICE, etc, the Secret Service seems to run a pretty tight ship. When you hear about them doing dumb things it's usually just unprofessional shenanigans as opposed to completely neglecting to do their jobs properly and killing or imprisoning people in the process which is what the others are known for.
  - thephyber 7y ago
    Note that the a Secret Service, ATF and ICE are all sub-departments within DHS, although there was talk as recently as this month to move Secret Service back to Treasury Dept. It does seem clear that some of these departments have lesser tarnished reputations than, say, CBP (which generally struggles to recruit anyone literate, let alone the standards of the FBI or Secret Service).
- pvg 7y ago
  If you want to be further meta-disturbed, the literal meaning of "Schutzstaffel" (protection squad/unit/whatnot) describes the best-known part of the Secret Service's job better than it describes that of the Nazi SS.
- perl4ever 7y ago
  SS has long been used to mean "Super Sport" by GM. I feel like it didn't used to have bad associations for virtually anybody, but like an unwanted immune reaction, first someone says it makes them uncomfortable, and then another person who is antagonized by everything being attacked as racist or fascist declares that they think it's fine, and then a third, possibly just a troublemaker, defends the person who thinks it's ok and associates it with fascism as if that should be positive.
karmicthreat 7y ago
Hah! This is what originally got me interested in learning to program at 12 or 13.
vmarshall23 7y ago
Not really on topic, but Steve Jackson has made great games for years: http://www.sjgames.com/ http://www.sjgames.com/
- CapricornNoble 7y ago
  I've been digging into GURPS Vehicles for worldbuilding. What a great system.
protomyth 7y ago
They put out a game called Hackers[1] that was inspired by the raid. Its a pretty fun game, but it does inspire some ribbing and directly adversarial moves. The currently ahead player is called the "Net Ninja". Our group called the currently losing player "Net Poser" (thanks Tom). That set the correct attitude at the table. 1) http://www.sjgames.com/hacker/deluxe/ http://www.sjgames.com/hacker/deluxe/
pmoriarty 7y ago
This is a charming time capsule from a more innocent age, when us geeks could chortle smugly at how clueless government security agencies were about technology. Since then, with the advent of the likes of Stuxnet, the NSA's ubiquitous surveillance apartus, and the Great Firewall of China, we've been taught a hard lesson that governments are perfectly capable of developing technology expertise or contracting it out, if need be. It's even a truism now that computer defence against a well funded nation state is hopeless. This was not the case back in the old Steve Jackson Games days, when it seemed that the entirety of computer power rested in the hands of a relatively small number of idealist academics. Rember John Perry Barlow's A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace? "Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather." What once sounded almost like prophecy has come to sound more like a sad, deluded joke.
- dmix 7y ago
  > It's even a truism now that computer defence against a well funded nation state is hopeless. It's interesting how many of those same early hackers [1] went on to working for those same governments or selling them exploits/offensive tools to make sure this stay true. None of that could have been accomplished by any gov without real legitimate talent joining on. Especially in the early days. Largely because the governments of the world decided they were far, far more interested in the offensive side because of the mountains of intelligence they were getting. Which then filtered down to industry to where all the money, fun, and very importantly, how much easier it is to break something than to protect it. Or maybe it was a side-effect of all the vast majority of talent/money going into the intelligence community and defence contractors instead of just the "government" in general. Probably a combination of both. The talent that did end up working on the defensive side (that was actually useful) was, and is, usually some super complicated and expensive systems that only big companies could afford. And/or you have a major budget to hire, or pay consultancies, with equal/superior talent than the adversary. Which leaves out the vast majority of companies and almost all civilians with useless or negative utility anti-virus software, or nothing at all besides the odd operating system, software, and public crypto progress. That's not to say great strides haven't been made on the civilian side in recent years, since the public has caught on to the true scale of the surveillance/offensive stuff and the implications that has given the general weakness of the technology we use everyday. The significance of WhatsApp adopting Signal's E2E, Telegrams popularity, and people moving to iMessage and other encrypted non-SMS text, emailing properly adopting transit encryption, and the Google TLS charts [2] reaching ~90% from around 40-60% only 7yrs ago is a really, really big deal IMO. [1] https://www.wired.com/story/cult-of-the-dead-cow-at-stake-hackers-excerpt/ https://www.wired.com/story/cult-of-the-dead-cow-at-stake-ha... [2] https://transparencyreport.google.com/https/overview?hl=en https://transparencyreport.google.com/https/overview?hl=en
pg_is_a_butt 7y ago
I ran an online multiplayer drug dealing game in the 90s similar to dope wars. The DEA contacted me to let me know they spent a month investigating me, and that it was probably not smart for me to do something like that, but that a lot of the agents were playing the game and enjoying it and I was cleared.
- perl4ever 7y ago
  I read about something the other day where someone had a bag labeled "big bag of drugs" or something like that, and it was in fact full of drugs. But it was actually a commercial product intended to be ironic. This is why the police are always going to seem dumb and literal, because if something is "obviously" a joke, it can be used as cover, and even if most criminals are more conventional, it will look particularly bad if they ignore something obvious when it was real.
  - pg_is_a_butt 7y ago
    Every single page included a literal statement that this was just a game and nothing illegal was going on. I don't even see why they contacted me. I thought it was a prank, so I got their contact information... DC phone number and .gov email address, both went back to the same guy.
trollied 7y ago
Things were different before the internet was a big thing. Did anyone else find a BBS file or get passed a disk copy of Jolly Rogers Cookbook back in the day? Something that seemed so innocent at the time has got people locked up for terrorism offences recently.
maerF0x0 7y ago
The whole country has been made criminal by over policing and security theatre. https://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent-ebook/dp/B00505UZ4G https://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent-eb... comes to mind.
mgarfias 7y ago
Old news
dunsany 7y ago
Yeah, anyone remember this book about it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hacker_Crackdown https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hacker_Crackdown
ineedasername 7y ago
It's kind of funny how outsider's looked on RPGs. On the one hand in this example law enforcement saw a computer/hacker themed game and thought it was a real pathway to that activity. Then on the other end of the RPG spectrum, Fantasy based RPGs that dealt with magic, supernatural, demons, etc were similarly taken seriously by some in the religious community as actual guides to such activity. Are there any RPG topics I'm missing here that had the same type of treatment from their respective antogonists believing the RPG content authentic material?
- hutzlibu 7y ago
  Then on the other end of the RPG spectrum, Fantasy based "RPGs that dealt with magic, supernatural, demons, etc were similarly taken seriously by some in the religious community as actual guides to such activity." But there is a transition in both areas from just RPG to reality. People playing cyberpunk hackers often want to be able to hack and crack in the real world. And some games did at least teach some basic concepts about hacking. And from the fantasy area lots of people got into real paganism, witchcraft, occultism. (even though no one did succesfully invocated a major demon as far as I know ...)
  - pferde 7y ago
    "(even though no one did succesfully invocated a major demon as far as I know ...) " There's a Trump joke in there somewhere. :)
    - hutzlibu 7y ago
      Well ... possible, but do you know Illuminatus! from Shea and Wilson? Well, in that book(from 1975), there is an old demon trapped in the pentagon. And when terrorists blew a hole in the pentagon, he came out ... so, 9/11? And the ever lasting war on terror that followed? In other words Trump would be just a minor puppet of the grand demon behind ...
webel0 7y ago
> ate jelly beans off someone's desk. Bush might have been President but this was Reagan-era stuff.
tempodox 7y ago
> The Secret Service agents ... ate jelly beans off someone's desk. I would sue the government for the unlawful acquisition of jelly beans.
- knodi123 7y ago
  Use the government's math - don't just charge them the cost of the jellybeans, charge them for the jar, the desk, and add in the hours you spent buying them multiplied by your wage.
- loydb 7y ago
  They also put a quarter-million copies through the crazy expensive (at the time) laser jet printer that I'd just bought a few months prior, paying over $3,000. They kept it for 4 years, 364 days, the longest they could legally hold on to it without charging me with anything.
neurobashing 7y ago
I’ve noticed that Cyberpunk games REALLY lean on the mainframe, “hack the Gibson” model, and it turned out to not be how it all turned out. A few recent cpunk RPGs (Carbon 2185 comes to mind) basically ignore deckers/netrunners. I’ve been noodling some ideas but everything is off in terms of balance or fun at the table.
- scbrg 7y ago
  I haven't kept up to date with recent RPG:s, but I played Cyberpunk 2020, GURPS Cyberpunk and a few local non English equivalents back in the day quite a bit. The main problem with deckers/netrunners wasn't how (un)realistic they were - but that they were simply... boring. It's an enforced split party model where one player has a very limited role and virtually no interaction with others. I can see why modern games (hopefully wise from the mistakes of their predecessors) ignore that part.
  - acdha 7y ago
    I was thinking about that while playing that recent Shadowrun cRPGs: you’re right on with the boredom factor. It added a separate combat system which was both obviously not how it’d really work and not more fun than the primary system. I disagree a little on the split-party aspect but that requires careful DMing: it can be an interesting goal to synchronize real-world activities or need to protect someone who is completely exposed while they work. If you don’t overuse that and have a good mechanic for why the hacker needs to be in the combat zone it can work, but it’s easy to fall short.
sbisson 7y ago
As documented (among other events) in Bruce Sterling's The Hacker Crackdown. The book is online here in various formats: https://github.com/bdesham/the-hacker-crackdown https://github.com/bdesham/the-hacker-crackdown
caymanjim 7y ago
This was obviously an overreaction, and 30 years on, the Secret Service looks laughably incompetent, but it isn't that outlandish in context. Blankenship was in Legion of Doom, which was deeply inside critical computer systems for most of the 80s, including banks, military facilities, telcos, and other vital infrastructure. They published and disseminated how-to guides for infiltrating systems, and they were active on underground BBS systems. Blankenship may have moved away from illicit activities, but he still communicated with the same people, and SJG's BBS was swarming with elite hackers. Yeah, the Secret Service should have been savvy enough to figure out that it was a harmless game, but they were still playing catch-up. Given Blankenship's history and the cross-section of criminal hackers and the SJG BBS, it doesn't surprise me that they raided them. During the glory days of 80s hacking, groups like LoD and a handful of others had access to things that would scare the hell out of the public today. Imagine what a huge news story it would be today if it was announced that a single group of hackers had access to systems that control power grids, telcos, credit bureaus, banks, military bases, and all manner of other corporate and government entities. That's really what it was like back then; a bunch of teenagers infiltrating everything plugged in. Most hackers back then were just exploring and learning. I'm not suggesting that Blankenship or LoD did anything all that nefarious; they certainly weren't out to bring the system down, and they didn't take advantage of their access for any financial gain that I'm aware of (discounting theft of services to the tune of a few hundred thousand dollars worth of phreaked phone calls). It's a funny story about an interesting time. I'm inclined to cut the gov't a little slack for overreacting because the potential for harm (from hackers) was high, even if few of them harmed anything. If Blankenship had been a known criminal in meatspace, and was hanging out with his criminal buddies at their social club, you might not be surprised if the feds raided them once in a while.
- loydb 7y ago
  > SJG's BBS was swarming with elite hackers. Untrue. The BBS the hackers all hung out on was the one I ran called the Phoenix Project. There may have been a couple of people who were also gamers that hung out on IO, but they were there for the dice. Source: Hi, I'm Loyd.
  - 7y ago
codesections 7y ago
Rick Cook's book Wizardry Quested (2002) depicted a fictionalized version of this raid/resulting lawsuit — I had no idea it was so closely based on a true story!

242 points by molecule 7y ago

aka: Operation Sundevil - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sundevil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sundevil which was actually a multi-year hacker crackdown in the early 1990's. -pours one out for all the homies-

ObsoleteNerd 7y ago
They were definitely interesting times. Ripe for a documentary on all of the ridiculousness. To a large extent, it never really ended.
- njharman 7y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hacker_Crackdown https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hacker_Crackdown
  - ObsoleteNerd 7y ago
    Great book, but I was more thinking along the lines of all the absolutely insane nightly news clips and TV stuff talking about how hackers can basically destroy the world if they’re even allowed to touch a computer etc. The media were absolutely rabid through most of the 80s and early 90s. I distinctly remember them acting like hackers were worse than terrorists, worse than anything humanity had ever had to deal with. Looking back, it’s almost funny, except many lives were ruined and hackers raided and/or imprisoned because of media hype and fear.
- ethbro 7y ago
  Show Hackers to kids these days, then tell them essentially all the law enforcement stuff was true. (To say nothing of the unrelated Hackers 2)
  - VRay 7y ago
    Some of the exploits that've come to light in the last decade are pretty mind-blowing too If you sent a security expert from today back in time to the 90s, they could basically pull the same ridiculous shenanigans that the characters did in that movie
teilo 7y ago
The EFF claims that the SJG raid was unrelated to Operation Sundevil.
thenewnewguy 7y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GURPS_Cyberpunk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GURPS_Cyberpunk > This raid is often wrongly attributed to Operation Sundevil, a nationwide crackdown on illegal computer hacking activities that was occurring about this time.
loydb 7y ago
The SJG raid had nothing to do with Sundevil. Totally different crew. The LOD raids (which SJG got caught up in) were driven by an ambitious district attorney from Chicago.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

rizumu 7y ago

A discussion with Steve Jackson on the 20th anniversary of the raid: http://www.sjgames.com/SS/ http://www.sjgames.com/SS/

anikan_vader 7y ago

I can't be the only one who finds it disturbing to abbreviate the Secret Service as the SS.

wrs 7y ago
Considering this is a description of a raid conducted by government agents in order to damage innocent peoples’ property and livelihood and strike terror into others, that abbreviation may be intentional.
dsfyu404ed 7y ago
Ironically enough they're probably the branch of federal law enforcement that has that comparison made the least frequently. Compared to ATF, FBI, DHS, ICE, etc, the Secret Service seems to run a pretty tight ship. When you hear about them doing dumb things it's usually just unprofessional shenanigans as opposed to completely neglecting to do their jobs properly and killing or imprisoning people in the process which is what the others are known for.
- thephyber 7y ago
  Note that the a Secret Service, ATF and ICE are all sub-departments within DHS, although there was talk as recently as this month to move Secret Service back to Treasury Dept. It does seem clear that some of these departments have lesser tarnished reputations than, say, CBP (which generally struggles to recruit anyone literate, let alone the standards of the FBI or Secret Service).
pvg 7y ago
If you want to be further meta-disturbed, the literal meaning of "Schutzstaffel" (protection squad/unit/whatnot) describes the best-known part of the Secret Service's job better than it describes that of the Nazi SS.
perl4ever 7y ago
SS has long been used to mean "Super Sport" by GM. I feel like it didn't used to have bad associations for virtually anybody, but like an unwanted immune reaction, first someone says it makes them uncomfortable, and then another person who is antagonized by everything being attacked as racist or fascist declares that they think it's fine, and then a third, possibly just a troublemaker, defends the person who thinks it's ok and associates it with fascism as if that should be positive.

karmicthreat 7y ago

Hah! This is what originally got me interested in learning to program at 12 or 13.

vmarshall23 7y ago

Not really on topic, but Steve Jackson has made great games for years: http://www.sjgames.com/ http://www.sjgames.com/

CapricornNoble 7y ago
I've been digging into GURPS Vehicles for worldbuilding. What a great system.

protomyth 7y ago

They put out a game called Hackers[1] that was inspired by the raid. Its a pretty fun game, but it does inspire some ribbing and directly adversarial moves. The currently ahead player is called the "Net Ninja". Our group called the currently losing player "Net Poser" (thanks Tom). That set the correct attitude at the table. 1) http://www.sjgames.com/hacker/deluxe/ http://www.sjgames.com/hacker/deluxe/

pmoriarty 7y ago

This is a charming time capsule from a more innocent age, when us geeks could chortle smugly at how clueless government security agencies were about technology. Since then, with the advent of the likes of Stuxnet, the NSA's ubiquitous surveillance apartus, and the Great Firewall of China, we've been taught a hard lesson that governments are perfectly capable of developing technology expertise or contracting it out, if need be. It's even a truism now that computer defence against a well funded nation state is hopeless. This was not the case back in the old Steve Jackson Games days, when it seemed that the entirety of computer power rested in the hands of a relatively small number of idealist academics. Rember John Perry Barlow's A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace? "Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather." What once sounded almost like prophecy has come to sound more like a sad, deluded joke.

dmix 7y ago
> It's even a truism now that computer defence against a well funded nation state is hopeless. It's interesting how many of those same early hackers [1] went on to working for those same governments or selling them exploits/offensive tools to make sure this stay true. None of that could have been accomplished by any gov without real legitimate talent joining on. Especially in the early days. Largely because the governments of the world decided they were far, far more interested in the offensive side because of the mountains of intelligence they were getting. Which then filtered down to industry to where all the money, fun, and very importantly, how much easier it is to break something than to protect it. Or maybe it was a side-effect of all the vast majority of talent/money going into the intelligence community and defence contractors instead of just the "government" in general. Probably a combination of both. The talent that did end up working on the defensive side (that was actually useful) was, and is, usually some super complicated and expensive systems that only big companies could afford. And/or you have a major budget to hire, or pay consultancies, with equal/superior talent than the adversary. Which leaves out the vast majority of companies and almost all civilians with useless or negative utility anti-virus software, or nothing at all besides the odd operating system, software, and public crypto progress. That's not to say great strides haven't been made on the civilian side in recent years, since the public has caught on to the true scale of the surveillance/offensive stuff and the implications that has given the general weakness of the technology we use everyday. The significance of WhatsApp adopting Signal's E2E, Telegrams popularity, and people moving to iMessage and other encrypted non-SMS text, emailing properly adopting transit encryption, and the Google TLS charts [2] reaching ~90% from around 40-60% only 7yrs ago is a really, really big deal IMO. [1] https://www.wired.com/story/cult-of-the-dead-cow-at-stake-hackers-excerpt/ https://www.wired.com/story/cult-of-the-dead-cow-at-stake-ha... [2] https://transparencyreport.google.com/https/overview?hl=en https://transparencyreport.google.com/https/overview?hl=en

pg_is_a_butt 7y ago

I ran an online multiplayer drug dealing game in the 90s similar to dope wars. The DEA contacted me to let me know they spent a month investigating me, and that it was probably not smart for me to do something like that, but that a lot of the agents were playing the game and enjoying it and I was cleared.

perl4ever 7y ago
I read about something the other day where someone had a bag labeled "big bag of drugs" or something like that, and it was in fact full of drugs. But it was actually a commercial product intended to be ironic. This is why the police are always going to seem dumb and literal, because if something is "obviously" a joke, it can be used as cover, and even if most criminals are more conventional, it will look particularly bad if they ignore something obvious when it was real.
- pg_is_a_butt 7y ago
  Every single page included a literal statement that this was just a game and nothing illegal was going on. I don't even see why they contacted me. I thought it was a prank, so I got their contact information... DC phone number and .gov email address, both went back to the same guy.

trollied 7y ago

Things were different before the internet was a big thing. Did anyone else find a BBS file or get passed a disk copy of Jolly Rogers Cookbook back in the day? Something that seemed so innocent at the time has got people locked up for terrorism offences recently.

maerF0x0 7y ago

The whole country has been made criminal by over policing and security theatre. https://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent-ebook/dp/B00505UZ4G https://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent-eb... comes to mind.

mgarfias 7y ago

Old news

dunsany 7y ago

Yeah, anyone remember this book about it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hacker_Crackdown https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hacker_Crackdown

ineedasername 7y ago

It's kind of funny how outsider's looked on RPGs. On the one hand in this example law enforcement saw a computer/hacker themed game and thought it was a real pathway to that activity. Then on the other end of the RPG spectrum, Fantasy based RPGs that dealt with magic, supernatural, demons, etc were similarly taken seriously by some in the religious community as actual guides to such activity. Are there any RPG topics I'm missing here that had the same type of treatment from their respective antogonists believing the RPG content authentic material?

hutzlibu 7y ago
Then on the other end of the RPG spectrum, Fantasy based "RPGs that dealt with magic, supernatural, demons, etc were similarly taken seriously by some in the religious community as actual guides to such activity." But there is a transition in both areas from just RPG to reality. People playing cyberpunk hackers often want to be able to hack and crack in the real world. And some games did at least teach some basic concepts about hacking. And from the fantasy area lots of people got into real paganism, witchcraft, occultism. (even though no one did succesfully invocated a major demon as far as I know ...)
- pferde 7y ago
  "(even though no one did succesfully invocated a major demon as far as I know ...) " There's a Trump joke in there somewhere. :)
  - hutzlibu 7y ago
    Well ... possible, but do you know Illuminatus! from Shea and Wilson? Well, in that book(from 1975), there is an old demon trapped in the pentagon. And when terrorists blew a hole in the pentagon, he came out ... so, 9/11? And the ever lasting war on terror that followed? In other words Trump would be just a minor puppet of the grand demon behind ...

webel0 7y ago

> ate jelly beans off someone's desk. Bush might have been President but this was Reagan-era stuff.

tempodox 7y ago

> The Secret Service agents ... ate jelly beans off someone's desk. I would sue the government for the unlawful acquisition of jelly beans.

knodi123 7y ago
Use the government's math - don't just charge them the cost of the jellybeans, charge them for the jar, the desk, and add in the hours you spent buying them multiplied by your wage.
loydb 7y ago
They also put a quarter-million copies through the crazy expensive (at the time) laser jet printer that I'd just bought a few months prior, paying over $3,000. They kept it for 4 years, 364 days, the longest they could legally hold on to it without charging me with anything.

neurobashing 7y ago

I’ve noticed that Cyberpunk games REALLY lean on the mainframe, “hack the Gibson” model, and it turned out to not be how it all turned out. A few recent cpunk RPGs (Carbon 2185 comes to mind) basically ignore deckers/netrunners. I’ve been noodling some ideas but everything is off in terms of balance or fun at the table.

scbrg 7y ago
I haven't kept up to date with recent RPG:s, but I played Cyberpunk 2020, GURPS Cyberpunk and a few local non English equivalents back in the day quite a bit. The main problem with deckers/netrunners wasn't how (un)realistic they were - but that they were simply... boring. It's an enforced split party model where one player has a very limited role and virtually no interaction with others. I can see why modern games (hopefully wise from the mistakes of their predecessors) ignore that part.
- acdha 7y ago
  I was thinking about that while playing that recent Shadowrun cRPGs: you’re right on with the boredom factor. It added a separate combat system which was both obviously not how it’d really work and not more fun than the primary system. I disagree a little on the split-party aspect but that requires careful DMing: it can be an interesting goal to synchronize real-world activities or need to protect someone who is completely exposed while they work. If you don’t overuse that and have a good mechanic for why the hacker needs to be in the combat zone it can work, but it’s easy to fall short.

sbisson 7y ago

As documented (among other events) in Bruce Sterling's The Hacker Crackdown. The book is online here in various formats: https://github.com/bdesham/the-hacker-crackdown https://github.com/bdesham/the-hacker-crackdown

caymanjim 7y ago

This was obviously an overreaction, and 30 years on, the Secret Service looks laughably incompetent, but it isn't that outlandish in context. Blankenship was in Legion of Doom, which was deeply inside critical computer systems for most of the 80s, including banks, military facilities, telcos, and other vital infrastructure. They published and disseminated how-to guides for infiltrating systems, and they were active on underground BBS systems. Blankenship may have moved away from illicit activities, but he still communicated with the same people, and SJG's BBS was swarming with elite hackers. Yeah, the Secret Service should have been savvy enough to figure out that it was a harmless game, but they were still playing catch-up. Given Blankenship's history and the cross-section of criminal hackers and the SJG BBS, it doesn't surprise me that they raided them. During the glory days of 80s hacking, groups like LoD and a handful of others had access to things that would scare the hell out of the public today. Imagine what a huge news story it would be today if it was announced that a single group of hackers had access to systems that control power grids, telcos, credit bureaus, banks, military bases, and all manner of other corporate and government entities. That's really what it was like back then; a bunch of teenagers infiltrating everything plugged in. Most hackers back then were just exploring and learning. I'm not suggesting that Blankenship or LoD did anything all that nefarious; they certainly weren't out to bring the system down, and they didn't take advantage of their access for any financial gain that I'm aware of (discounting theft of services to the tune of a few hundred thousand dollars worth of phreaked phone calls). It's a funny story about an interesting time. I'm inclined to cut the gov't a little slack for overreacting because the potential for harm (from hackers) was high, even if few of them harmed anything. If Blankenship had been a known criminal in meatspace, and was hanging out with his criminal buddies at their social club, you might not be surprised if the feds raided them once in a while.

loydb 7y ago
> SJG's BBS was swarming with elite hackers. Untrue. The BBS the hackers all hung out on was the one I ran called the Phoenix Project. There may have been a couple of people who were also gamers that hung out on IO, but they were there for the dice. Source: Hi, I'm Loyd.
- 7y ago

codesections 7y ago

Rick Cook's book Wizardry Quested (2002) depicted a fictionalized version of this raid/resulting lawsuit — I had no idea it was so closely based on a true story!