Hijacked journals. Those existed way before internet. And I know that books can be hijacked. It's not that hard to do. You simply set up parallel publishing, or, if you are interested in altering contents, you enter the publication chain. You have a very rose-tinted view of publishing process. If anything, online material is harder to hijack for a prolonged perido of time, because it's easier to set up systems monitoring for said hijacking.
My friend, your citation proves my point.
Every example there is Internet fraud, achieved by setting up a website for a journal without a robust electronic presence and soliciting payments from people seeking to publish manuscripts.
Journal publishing =/= Book publishing. Book authors expect to be paid, not to pay. Books are published in print runs of a given number(hundreds to tens of thousands) at a time, and checked over before being dispatched.The author gets copies to look over, both proofs to confirm before printing and complimentary copies after printing.
There's a lot more due dilligence involved, and less opportunity for post-facto alterations.
This isnt like internet stuff, where the contents of publishing can be altered as soon as someone gets access to your server without you noticing, and where major sites suffer system breaches without noticing for weeks to years.
Not at all comparable afaik.
Suffice to say that if you can't do mass causality events with commonly available electronics and chemicals. you are just not curious enough.
Mass casualty events are easy in principle, harder in execution; Aum Shinrikyo homebrewed double digit liters of sarin but were unable to kill more than twenty or thirty people in sepearate attacks.
However.
Killing double digits on the one hand, and five digits of people on the other hand may both be mass casualty events, but they are nothing alike in impact.
Lack of knowledge of the Laws doesn't stop you from breaking them, as Molly demonstrated. If, when rolling 15+ successes, we can't impress the need to follow sa
Most people dont awaken with a gift for mind magic. Most people dont break the Laws.
Many people who do break the Laws dont get caught.
And Molly explicitly had the idea of using mind magic planted in her head by a "lady" who subsequently vanished.
15+ successes. If we can't get our message out in a safe-ish way, that would be strange.
Learning a knowledge/skill does not impart ethics. Or caution.
Why would you assume that a person with a Derangement or a mental illness of some sort would interpret things like a rational person? This is not a white room where we get to act unimpeded. This is a setting where other factions have agency. Where NPCs have agency. And we would be providing information, not indoctrination.
don't need broadband. You need an internet connection (dial-up would do), and an interest in watching / listening to the lessons.
You want to watch video lectures, you absolutely need broadband. That I can assure you.
I used dialup in the 1990s, with the familiar screeching as the modem would attempt to connect to the ISP.
When you had to share internet with the phone service, hard drive capacity was measured in gigabytes, and CDS were useful for storing data.
Its not a coincidence that Youtube was set up in 2005 and acquired by Google in 2006.
Or that Spotify was set up in 2006.
Not in the 1990s, but when broadband connectivity was beginning to get traction.
Mass ignorance benefits monsters more. And causes more casualties than increased awareness would.
Until your first major Outsider-involved incursion happens, and then you get to compare a century of drips to a sudden tsunami.
Or people try to capture the Little Folk as collectors items/exotic pets until they actively begin to react with hostility.
And the Fae Courts with them.
If I was to make an analogy, it would be along the lines of epidemics being so long ago that people are complaining about vaccine reactions because they have no bone deep understanding of what the disease would entail.
Note that at least one of the orthodox dharmas makes it a religious duty for their elders to stay up to date with technology, including computers. They also have a ritual to learn those skills from the souls of people (ideally the worst sinners) they've eat
^^^
Ghost Hunting Morons would be less likely to occour if they knew more about ghosts though.
If ghosts were a generally well-known phenomenon, people would treat them with more respect.
I dont believe that.
We can barely get large sections of the population to empathize with other people today.
We literally had people refusing to take Covid precautions while others were dying, even their loved ones.
Lots of governments, agencies and NGOs who would try to exploit it for an edge against enemies, not to mention individuals.
How many people would try to interrogate ghosts for the whereabouts of inheritances or money.
How many governments would want to interrogate the ghosts of dead enemies. Journalists and authors.
Teenagers on a dare, and influencers chasing clout, or tourists chasing a thrill.
The reality of climate change has not deterred corporations who see shortterm benefit from making things worse.
The death of species has not deterred poachers and overfishers and overuse of groundwater.
I dont see any way the prospect of consequences to other people would deter people doing what they want.
Until there's a major reaction. Too many people refuse to learn until they are burned.
The Idea that ignorance somehow protects people in DF is laughable, any individual with enough basic magical talent to actually use magical instruction is already a target. All giving them information does is help them avoid some of the most straightforward problems, like going insane from using black magic.
And ignorance doesn't in anyway help all the non-magical people that various monsters murder on a regular basis either. Further most of the monsters are vulnerable to regular humans actively trying to kill them, if the knowledge is available a lot of nasties are going to have serious problems.
1)*points at the Oblivion War*
My friend, the very fact that the Oblivion War has been ongoing for at least
five thousand years, and victories are measured in getting Humanity to forget about a variety of Old Gods and their agents, proves this assertion.
Knowledge in the Dresdenverse does not necessarily confer safety.
And there are specific threats that target you if they become aware that you are aware of them. Thats literally why the Native Americans decline to speak of the naagloshii in the series.
2)How many people do you think monsters murder?
Do you have a ballpark figure? How does it compare to mundane human activity like, say, road traffic accidents?
Or public health issues, like smog and pollution in the West or malaria in Africa?
Im not defending supernatural homicides, but its worth keeping the threat in perspective.
Knowing about computers and having the kind of institutional and logistical capabilities to manipulate the Internet is vastly vastly different things. We are young and our cyberdevils aren't trapped in a hell to interact with the Internet. We can Corner the Internet before they have any chance of establishing their own control and then just obliterate any effort that they try to take control.
We could most likely figure out some kind of cyber magic that wards the entire Internet even. A GREAT WORKING that would signal the birth of a new age and a realm controlled only by the humanity(and us). Hell we can get the crafting perks and awaken a major god of the Internet. Imagine the power such a being would have, imagine how powerful such a ally will be and imagine how powerful it will grow. We could singlehandedly give every person with a cellphone access to a god, imagine the thaumturgy of a hundred million people running reality reinforcing programs, servers that run dream realms of nevernever for human use. We could win everything forever for humanity.
Imagine summoning reaper drone spirits to hunt vampires or recreating the reality reinforcing commerce of Exalted but through digital means. Optic cable ritual circles that can bind and kill gods.
I will suggest you look at the Soul Treatments available to Greater Akuma.
The Yama King Mikaboshi in particular has had cyberware since at least the 1980s. We are nowhere near the biggest fish in this pool, nor are we the first. We didnt invent institutions or logistics as a concept.
I mean, we summon cyberdevils from the Wicked City.
Do you think there arent bigger, badder technology spirits around, or older spirits who've adopted some tech as an aspect of their portfolio? Just look at Porter, who predates Chicago by a lot, and yet loves trains.
This is a WoD cross. Technology spirits are a thing in the WoD setting.
Isabella's Uncle Leinth recognized the origin of our cyberdevils when we summoned them.
Dont make the assumption we are the first, or the only person who recognizes their potential. That way lies ruination.
But evidently there is no such tradition in Canon. Bob is a knowledge spirit and he would have mentioned if there was mass Internet warfare. Especially as Harry made paranet and that seems to be first of its kind.
Also I now think we should buy or co opt Microsoft and embed magical code into the next Windows that we use excellence to design. Each person using the new window will be like a prayer wheels, generating power for our god of the Internet while they do their work, each good search a cry for intercession each picture posted a dedication to a god.
1)Bob does not know everything, and until he went to live with Butters, he had no interest in the Internet.
2)Thats as foolhardy as putting in backdoors to software apps and expecting that noone else will find or use them.
Besides, thats not how magic or prayer works in the Dresdenverse.
