Grrl Power #1377 - Lett hackers
Added 2025-07-28 10:00:11 +0000 UTCThank you for the support! You guys and grrls are awesome!
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.
Comments
Posting this here because I'm getting 'Forbidden' messages on the website again. This was a response to a post saying that we can do truly secure messages, such as with a one-time pad. This is true. A one time pad is secure. You break down the message into bits, and combine it (using a simple operation called XOR) with a truly random bit stream. The combination is also truly random. Someone who has the same random bit stream can decode the message by using the same operation (XOR) again. Very simple, and completely unbreakable unless you possess that random bit stream. However. It requires a source of truly random bits that is the same length as the message you are sending. We have a number of sources that we think are truly random, but are we correct? The aliens have stuff, e.g. FTL travel and magic. The people working on whether bit sources are random have no idea how those work. What if things like cosmic rays aren't actually random, they just look like it? Oh, and after you get the one time pad, you have to keep it secure at your source and also transport it securely to the destination of the message you're going to encrypt. No, you can't send it via radio; that uses up as many bits as you would be sending. Since the bit stream is truly random, it cannot be compressed (if you could, then it's not truly random). So the storage requirements get pretty big. So yes, it's quite cumbersome. I'm not too sure of the security of using paper actually, depending on just how sensitive alien sensors are. Could they read the location of the ink deposits on the paper right through the ceiling?
Mark Magagna
2025-07-29 23:55:01 +0000 UTCAny government needs to be watched carefully by outsiders. None are perfect. And sometimes end runs need to be made.
eddi_TBH
2025-07-29 03:29:23 +0000 UTC
