dex drako wrote:we're unlikely to see any black box data from the bell.
True enough. But there will have been a *lot* of computers on the Bell. Given reasonable advances a lot of them probably survived. When the Loroi were over there on salvage they probably grabbed enough to cobble a working system together. Given how badly the whole mind probe business went, they'll probably at least try, just to varify what Alex is telling them - and to find out what he isn't. I can easily see Stillstorm persuing this course of action out of spite - and Beryl persuing it out of boundless enthusiasm.
Getting data out of our computers would be a huge undertaking. We're talking about different system with different interfaces and coding.
They'd have more touble with that than humans would reverse-engineering a plasma cannon.
I think I've settled on my preferred hate on the Historian conspiracy theory. The historians are playing the Umiak to fight the Loroi (and playing both sides to keep the war going). Their goal is to attain a piece of technology to counter Loroi psionic advantages, thereby leaving the historians the sole superpower. Given how secretive they are the historians could secretly be hiding a fleet that would just wipe out the Umiak (or at least hold them at bay and prevent encroachment indefinitely taking into account supply lines and such for the Umiak), however perhaps they cannot openly move against the Loroi or risk being outmaneuvered by the Loroi. It could be a small technologically advanced fleet, or it could just be irrational fear of the Loroi reading historian minds (or maybe they are super susceptible like the golim). Suffice to say, I'm putting my chips on historians manipulate umiak into being a testing bed for anti farseer technology as well as a valuable substitute for Loroi anger that conveniently also gets the Historians closer to the Loroi (remember how badly the construct wanted to get more sophisticated systems and it appears to me to be just itching to get its tentacles into the Loroi computer systems.
Also getting data out of the computers wouldn't be *that* hard, especially if there is some trade (language) in there, just keep trying things until some chunks of data spit out trade. You look for recognizable patterns and start figuring out the data inbetween, I mean if it was encoded in "DNA" you'd quickly figure out what start/stop codon look like and determine that the stuff in the middle is the data. Obviously it would be a complicated system, but maybe you take apart the power supply, or take a look at the hard disk itself, the physics of the hardware will tell you a lot, for instance it should be obvious what "base" number system we're working in (at the lowest level) based on how the data is stored (are there more than 2 states capable of being stored on the hard drive, more than 2 voltages in the chip etc). There's going to be a lot of brute force and some requirements for some elegance to the solution path you take, but I think it's not that hard, it might not be quick but I don't think it would be that hard...
TrashMan wrote:Getting data out of our computers would be a huge undertaking. We're talking about different system with different interfaces and coding.
They'd have more touble with that than humans would reverse-engineering a plasma cannon.
Ehem. I refer you to the case of Jeff Goldblum vs Aliens.
TrashMan wrote:Getting data out of our computers would be a huge undertaking. We're talking about different system with different interfaces and coding.
They'd have more touble with that than humans would reverse-engineering a plasma cannon.
Ehem. I refer you to the case of Jeff Goldblum vs Aliens.
TrashMan wrote:Getting data out of our computers would be a huge undertaking.
Oh for pity's sake... So they don't have ipads? Or mp3 players? Or gameboys? Or anything like them? Nothing like pocket calculators? Nothing like the computers that we've had for the past twenty years that are designed to be so easy to use a child can get something out of them?
If you want to argue the humans will have carefully deleted anything of interest, fine. If you want to argue it's all password protected, fine, but there's no such thing as a protected system once a hacker has physical access to it. But it's silly to claim they'll have to reverse engineer the technology when in many cases the hardest part will be identifying the 'on' switch.
anticarrot wrote:If you want to argue the humans will have carefully deleted anything of interest, fine. If you want to argue it's all password protected, fine, but there's no such thing as a protected system once a hacker has physical access to it. But it's silly to claim they'll have to reverse engineer the technology when in many cases the hardest part will be identifying the 'on' switch.
There won't be anything hard about accessing our data except the major part of figuring out what all the 1s and 0s mean. I figure an advanced computer could probably make sense of it in a decent amount of time though. But that's just conjecture.
osmium wrote:I think I've settled on my preferred hate on the Historian conspiracy theory. The historians are playing the Umiak to fight the Loroi (and playing both sides to keep the war going). Their goal is to attain a piece of technology to counter Loroi psionic advantages, thereby leaving the historians the sole superpower. Given how secretive they are the historians could secretly be hiding a fleet that would just wipe out the Umiak (or at least hold them at bay and prevent encroachment indefinitely taking into account supply lines and such for the Umiak), however perhaps they cannot openly move against the Loroi or risk being outmaneuvered by the Loroi. It could be a small technologically advanced fleet, or it could just be irrational fear of the Loroi reading historian minds (or maybe they are super susceptible like the golim). Suffice to say, I'm putting my chips on historians manipulate umiak into being a testing bed for anti farseer technology as well as a valuable substitute for Loroi anger that conveniently also gets the Historians closer to the Loroi (remember how badly the construct wanted to get more sophisticated systems and it appears to me to be just itching to get its tentacles into the Loroi computer systems.
except the historians dont need a anti farseeing device as there ships have no personnel on-board for farseers to detect so they are already invisible to the farseers
dfacto wrote:There won't be anything hard about accessing our data except the major part of figuring out what all the 1s and 0s mean. I figure an advanced computer could probably make sense of it in a decent amount of time though. But that's just conjecture.
Physical access will not make accessing the data trivial. It's not impossible, but would require a wide variety of specialized equipment and expertise, and a lot of custom equipment will have to be designed and built to even begin deciphering the low level protocols that the data is accessed with.
And that is the easy part. Deciphering the meaning of the data isn't a matter of using an "advanced computer", you'd need a powerful AI if not a team of AIs and researchers. Even uncompressed, unencrypted data formats can be highly abstract and extremely complicated, and in many cases you'll need to decipher them without any indication of what the relationship to the real world is. Compression can completely obscure that structure until you figure out that the data is compressed, work out what the compression algorithm used was, and develop a decompression algorithm that actually works. And then there's encryption, which makes the data no more useful than noise unless you have the decompression key. This would almost certainly be a showstopper unless you can find the decryption key (which itself will look like random data) among other data...the Terrans are probably using encryption strong enough that a computer powerful enough to decrypt it in a reasonable time couldn't exist.
Their best approach is to do what Anticarrot suggested and try to salvage/assemble working pieces of equipment, accessing Terran data with Terran equipment. If they can make enough headway with learning the languages (human and programming ones) and software development environments, they can translate the data on the Terran hardware and shove it out through a software-defined radio signal or even optically out the display, or just get what they need directly.
uthilian wrote:
except the historians dont need a anti farseeing device as there ships have no personnel on-board for farseers to detect so they are already invisible to the farseers
Historians, to my knowledge, have normally manned combat vessels and employ the personality constructs solely as diplomats. Not saying they couldn't have fully automated warships, just that I don't think they do. To be clear the only thing we know for certain is that the personality constructs are used as diplomats, anything further is an assumption from which I am reading through the lines and vaguely remembering that Arioch had choice words for automated attack fleets (as in if it were easy / reliable the Umiak would already do it).
dfacto: ever heard of the rosetta stone? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_stone
it was the key to learning ancient Egyptian, figuring out a alien language is a non trivial task even before you add a couple of layers of digital infrastructure and paranoia, not to mention xeno engineering(building the Terran computer to use for the task).
Sprawl63 wrote:I wonder what the Azimol Citadel is? A space fortress/defensive position?
That's correct. Azimol is one of the Loroi operational bases along the Steppes border.
For more information on Citadels, I have rewritten the outdated System Defense article, with an emphasis on system installations. I also finally got around to posting the first of the Weights and Measures articles, which has reference information on Ship Scale and System Scale.
Arioch wrote:I also finally got around to posting the first of the Weights and Measures articles, which has reference information on Ship Scale and System Scale.
Very nice. I very much like the info-pictures.
Minor Glitch in the picture: A GEO is 35.786 km, not 42.164km.
Edit: Ah, Orbital Radius is meant. A little bit confusing though.
Edit 2: Ship size chart lists Bellarmine as typical for Scouts, but according to the terran ship classes site her acceleration is only 6G?
dfacto wrote:I would hope that a species generations ahead of us in tech would have the necessary AI to crack unknown code.
It's a matter of missing information and needing to solve mathematical problems designed to make doing so require more processing power than can physically be implemented. No matter how many generations ahead they are, if the encryption requires a computer larger than the universe to break...they're not breaking it. And an unencrypted file format, without information on the structure of the data, is just a string of binary numbers. Encoded data often has very little direct relation to the information being encoded, and can have a great deal of interdependencies and structure that just isn't evident from the binary data itself.
dfacto wrote:Then again the Terrans could be using quantum computing by that point which would make it a useless endeavor.
That doesn't change it either way. Quantum computing just allows certain problems to be solved with a lower order of computational complexity, it does nothing that'll make data harder to interpret. Data still has to be communicated to and from the outside world, and any quantum computer system will consist mainly of classical computing hardware to avoid the performance penalty of pushing classical computations through the quantum computer and to handle the task of setting up the computations and reading out the results.
Trantor wrote:Edit 2: Ship size chart lists Bellarmine as typical for Scouts, but according to the terran ship classes site her acceleration is only 6G?
I believe the "typical thrust" is for non-human ships. Human ships are far slower than the main combatants ships.
There is a possibility that there is a program with a Trade-to-(Presumably English) linguistics trainer meant for the crew to keep their language skills sharp.
I'd think that would be there, thus the Loroi and anyone who knew Trade would get context from what an English word means, otherwise they'd at best, be able to string a sentence with proper grammar, but not know the context of any of the words.
Until they find that program however, the unbeatable encryption would have to be decoded if there is one, or someone left a personal computer open to users (and survived the attack), with said linguistics program.
dex drako wrote:Arioch has gone out of his way to leave us guessing about that ship which means it's reveal will likely turn change the direction of the plot.
kind of like finding out the villain hidden in the shadows or so long was really the hero's best friend.
WILD THEORY (besides the obvious Historians):
Perhaps time traveling humans who for reasons unknown, would rather have the Bell's mission fail.
