Grrl Power #1377 – Lett hackers
I’m going to make the double res version of this page on Patreon available to everyone, since there’s so many small panels. My intent was just to show a series of hacking steps involving nano-goo holding down a switch to prevent the counter intrusion alarm from going off and things sliding and future circuits being manipulated, but I have a bad habit of zooming in to like 500% while I’m working and it’s all kind of hard to see at the regular webcomic resolution.
A physical switch like a refrigerator door light switch in an alien satellite to detect a panel opening does seem really basic and low tech, but like Sylv suggests, just because you can use super crazy alien high tech doesn’t mean it’s more economical or even better.
The Xevoarchy isn’t an evil empire or anything. They’re basically a space U.N., and members of that body figure out the galactic rules more or less democratically. Now that isn’t to say that every planet is some perfect, pure democracy. Just like our U.N., there are representatives there from dictatorships, monarchies, republics, the whole spectrum really. Their main function is to maintain a multispecies space police force that’s also capable of spinning up into an armada in case some race of previously unknown hive-mind all-consuming swarm type aliens or “conquer everyone” warlike race shows up and attempts to plunder/kill/assimilate the galaxy.
The Xevoarchy also defines the laws outside of sovereign territories, i.e. open space, and also any “publicly owned” bases or installations, like Fracture Station, and in a few cases, collectively settled planets. They also set the rules for interacting with non-FTL races, and even lay out what constitutes FTL for their purposes. If you have Stargates but no spaceships, you get to be in the cool kids’ club. If you’re barely FTL and venturing to the next nearest star is still a journey of 20 years… it depends.
Cora and crew are “adventurers,” bounty hunters and explorers, and are on good terms with the Xevoarchy… generally speaking. That doesn’t mean they want some supergovernmental entity tracking their every move, and sometimes the representatives of this dictatorship or that monarchy don’t want free agents rescuing political prisoners or whatever, so this is hardly their first time hacking into a Xeev satellite or database to massage the data.
The vote incentive is finally done!
The update to the TWC image is pretty minor, but the Patreon version has the bonus comic as well as nude versions. I will strive to make the next one more timely.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
That stinger text: Fair, but ouch.
Reminds me of a girl asking about how to remove her nudes that she sent to someone and have now spread through the internet from the wider internet only to be told it’s a lost cause and one day her nudes will be mined from a fossilized server and added to a growing body of evidence that mankind was never truly intelligent.
One of these people has the power to down a battleship.
Weaker ones took down an invasion force from said battleship while being vastly outnumbered.
I’d keep an eye on us as well.
Pre 8:30 gang sound-off
Yo!
Shame the page where the satellite is getting pwned isn’t #1337.
lmao yeah it’s 1377 which makes it lett
Typo in second panel – should be “outclasseD.”
I have to admit this page was rather confusing; it was only near the end that I realised the goo was Max’s doing, rather than the satellite’s defences kicking in – and even then, I had to read the commentary below to be absolutely sure.
Typo’s fixed.
I think this is my first “sequence of infiltrating” and it honestly should have been like 3 whole pages if this was a regular manga, to make it visually more coherent.
“Outclasses” should be “outclassed” in panel 2, ja?
How would Max look in those old style spacesuits from the 1960s?!?
A simple media tap in satelite form.
That’s a ridiculous flex on earth.
The sky is basically the most monitored thing on earth and they seem to have access to all airgapped systems from a sattelite.
Between top of the line intelligence gathering equipment and straight up military hardware in the public view and still megameters and the entire earths crust they’re without getting detected observing things that requires physical tampering for us mere earthlings.
It’s wild how I never noticed sylv has screws for eyes before
He’s got + shaped pupils, like the Boron from thr X universe games. In theory, they should allow him to detect the polarisation of light, like a cuttlefish.
As a student in cybersecurity, the idea that alien tech can break all encryption seems pretty unrealistic; even if their computers where incredibly more powerful than ours, it would still not be enough to just brute-force modern encryption. Maybe they could beat RSA, if they have beefy quantum computers, but the really sensitive stuff already uses post-quantum encryption.
The aliens aren’t really after launch codes. They’re far more interested in information about supers, and even being able to track who is talking to who and with what frequency could give them a wealth of information. As Kilravok says below this comment, watching social media for information could give them a baseline of solid information, as long as they’re not stupid enough to fall for totally unfounded conspiracy stuff like antivaccers.
It is nice that we are on post quantum encryption. But you foolishly assume that nobody ever will be able to crack post-quantum encyption effectively. Or what about the 2-4 encryption itterrations that have to happen after that?
Plus that also assumes they can’t just read the decrypted files from RAM, the second someone tries to load them. Even we can read monitor signals through walls. We probably need new hardware to have a hope.
Regardless of the encryption method used, you always have access to green-paper cryptography (bribe people to give you access) and rubber-hose cryptography (beat the crap out of them until they give you access), even if other methods fail.
We have acceptable protections against both of those already. Because they do apply to humans as well.
I would be more worried about alien nanotech hijacking the optical nerves or whole brain.
You might look up concepts “information-theoretic security” and “one-time pad”. There are ways to do it, but they’re clunky and uncommon.
To be fair, you wouldn’t need to hack the satelite to feed it misinformation. It is getting everything from Earth’s Internet. That should be enough misinformation as is, if the analysts ever make it past the cat videos.
They will just assume that the cats are the real leaders as most others do.
Wait, you mean they aren’t?
Paper storage resists hacking attempts.
But a micro-wormhole spycamera or a atom level scan is still going to get them the picture. But you might have to get a little closer then Geosynchronous Orbit.
As the guy said, they have the men’s. But it’s not worth it just for a ‘monitor the situation’ type intel gathering mission, especially if they are using what is hinted to be, for them, an off-the-shelf low-cost monitoring satellite.
If an FTL journey to the nearest star is still 20+ years, that star’s a lot more remote than Sol.
After all, Proxima Centauri is “only” 4.25 light years away, so FTL would mean a maximum of 4.25 years’ journey.
“Scifi Writers Have No Sense of Scale” strikes again!
Godzilla-shaped holes in scientific studies
If speaking specifically about earth, yes. If speaking generally about any random planet that just developed FTL, it could be any distance.
I’m surprised the solution wasn’t “Maxima smash”
Superheroes tend to punch first ask questions later.
Max’s intellect isn’t something that has been directly explored in the comic as far as I know. It seems likely that she is of at least average, if not slightly above average intelligence. She also has experience which also counts for a lot. We haven’t seem that much of Max’s “just got my powers and making dumb mistakes phase”. I wonder if she had a mentor who was a super. It hasn’t been said, but she may have gotten an intelligence boost from that geode or she may just be intelligent enough that she got past the “Maxima smash” phase. But yeah, there are supers written where every problem looks like a nail.
The idea from the beginning was to position themselves to monitor and possibly alter the data flow, not shut it down. Smashing would be kind of counterproductive and would only convince the Xevoarchy that they need to keep a closer eye on earth.
You don’t get to major in the special forces if you don’t make a habit of thinking with your big head. They are NOT going to make an exception for someone who personally packs more than a brigade’s punch.
If it takes you 20 years to get to the nearest star at greater than light speed, I suspect you’re far enough from the galactic disk that the Xevoarchy isn’t paying attention to you anyway.
The details are all perfectly clear, zoomed in 200% on my 43-inch 4k screen… XD
This is why I equip my spy satellites with two smaller ones that just use boring cameras to take pictures of the main sat. The thing about spy work, you don’t necessarily need the information to be accurate, you just need to know who is feeding you what bullshit.
And have like 3 people on the ground working for you. And you tell them you have 5 people working for you. So they’ll never be comfortable betraying you.