Huh... I see what you mean. One potential solution would be to Install kill switches. If anyone connects to a shield with any kind of connector that could change the meaning brick the whole thing and alert the authorities (though a built in audio alarm). After all there is no reason why the shield would have to be linked to anything external, shield damage could be displayed on a built in system with no connections to the outside world.
I've been around DRM and seen the scenes for cracking it from afar for a long time, so my intuition is that while these would mitigate the issue, they wouldn't stop it altogether.
But you've given me an idea: if we want the gold standard in tamper resistance? That'd be machine spirits. Ergo, MSCR->MSCPS should mostly see this problem licked. We needed those to make an export version anyways, so that's good civ.
That thing you're attributing to Bongo didn't actually happen, though the relevant passage does suggest something along those lines might have happened if the vault shields weren't built with subunit self-destruct charges which scuttled each corrupted section before it could:
Oh, pfft. Yeah, you're right. I just remembered the "tendrils of scrap code" from the paragraph after and mistook those for coming from the corrupted shield panels while missing the explosives entirely.
Though of course this event suggests that mono-function psy shields can already be used to chaotic ends when corrupted. (Though they might need to be physically compromised before being spiritually compromised in order to avoid the incendiaries.)
It does, yeah. There's two factors that make this less bad, though:
1. Corruption in progress is visible, or soon will be visible to every
other shield. Rapid response could be on the scene before anything bad happens. A software change using alternate meanings... maybe not so much.
2. We probably don't want bombs in as wide circulation as shields - I think that was a measure specific to bongo's shield, 'cause otherwise he could probably have triggered them on our main shield after breaking out or something like that, since he was on the inside.
These are somewhat valid concerns; yet, as I stated before, that would be trivially detectable with Empathy... and that's before we get into Taste of Chaos and Empathy at Range.
After the fact, yes. The big, important problem isn't "our sensors can detect evil shields during evil shield operation", but that our sensors cannot detect the
development and implementation of Evil Shields, and that it's harder for conventional counterintelligence to discover the prep for evil shields than the prep for a ritual that requires human sacrifice.
If somebody wants to pull a bongo and try to corrupt the shields that way, our sensors would immediately detect that and the culprit gets nabbed before their plan gets off the ground, just like with a regular ritual.
If somebody turns their shield into a corruption generator with a software update, we may only find out after it's turned on and is already doing bad things - and notably, flipping the switch could be done remotely, so a whole bunch of corruption generators could be done all at the same time, dealing widespread harm and overwhelming responders. It's not for nothing that I characterized this as a "city threatening" disaster.
All the above concerns also count for demon phones, except there it's also an open question how quickly we could notice it happening once it's started, though there are probably options to mitigate that.
That was never going to happen. I warned repeatedly that it was never going to happen. It's plainly obvious that Denva doesn't have a research body to its name.
Neablis has already said otherwise - they
had no research body to their name.
Also I have to say I am profoundly unimpressed by Denva's research. What was that 1 AP worth of research for that boon? We could have gotten a lot more work out of diplomats for Vitcan or another psyker.
They spent a good chunk of time just setting up R&D, and were more focused on designs than tech.
Now they do. We could have bootstrapped their research before - there were construction actions for this - but we chose not to. You get what you pay for.
That said, most techs that would improve their throughput also improves
our research throughput. I've had plans kicking around for some time about how we can avoid getting tied up uplifting individual planets, and we'll see if that goes anywhere.
