Grrl Power #1088 – Password is “drowssap”
Back to the regular coloring for now. I’m probably going to experiment with it over the next few pages. I think the flat cell colors were nice, but would have benefitted from at least one highlights pass. I’ll find the right balance. Honestly I’d like a little more time to work on novels and other things, and I basically haven’t written anything since I released Tamer: Enhancer 2. I’ve dabbled with the opening scene for TE3 and I like how it’s started to come together, but by dabbled, I mean less than 1000 words so far.
So this was their ultimate goal. The List. As stated way early in the comic, the government doesn’t require supers to join the military or anything, but it does keep a list of them. Ostensibly, this is in case they need someone who can put out forest fires with their mind, or grant waterbreathing to everyone in a 333 yard range, or can fix all the cracks in the Hoover Dam by running his hands over them. There are probably a few people in the government who like having that list “just in case,” but this isn’t an X-Men comic. Yes, realistically there would be a lot of fear and suspicion around the existence of supers, but that’s just because people suck in general, and I’ll hint at that stuff on occasion, but the comic is mostly told from Sydney’s point of view (obviously not always, as this page demonstrates) but she’s mostly shielded from that sort of stuff due to efforts from Arianna and others. Also racism is a pretty boring reason to be a shitty person, and I like my villains to be a little bit deeper than that. I don’t feel like I can ignore it entirely as a motivation, because then it feels like I’m just denying an essential aspect of humanity? I don’t know. We’ll see.
Anyway. Yeah, so this list isn’t made public. Of course there are plenty of private citizens who have super powers who aren’t shy about letting the world know about it on social media, but there are a lot who want to keep it to themselves for various reasons. Some just want to live life as a normal person, and some realize they have some sort of power that could be exploited by bad people.
This list exists in more than just Archon HQ, but only in places like a basement somewhere in the Pentagon, Quantico, Langley, etc. But the actual FBI headquarters probably doesn’t have air vents you can drive a golf cart through, so a blitzkrieg on Archon HQ when the big guns are out was determined to have the best chance of success.
I’m not sure what ecokinesis is. Like, general environmental powers? Or maybe a superpower relating to the economy? Either way it sound OP.
Rammstein was awesome. We were in the third row, but that was off to the side, not in the “splash zone” pit right in front of the stage. I’d guess we were… 150 feet from the stage? I wore earplugs the whole time because my family has a history of hearing loss, and I want to be able to hear things when I’m 90. Honestly I forgot they were in most of the time. It was still sternum rattlingly loud. I kept thinking, “This man needs CPR, quick, get him to a Rammstein concert!” Watching people in the audience and guessing what they were on was at least as fun as the show. There was a woman in the front row who hung on to the railing and headbanged the whole time. I was like, “Hey, good for her for not getting a migraine from that.” I’m no expert on drugs, but at a minimum, I’d guess some amphetamines were involved. Four seats over was a guy with his head tilted back and his arms up in the air slowly dancing in a circle most of the concert. For him, I’d guess weed, a little ecstasy, and half a Xanax. Or, hell, I don’t know. Peyote and redbull? I am not a drug knower person.
Most everyone there was wearing black, because German Metal, but down in the stage pit, there was one woman with a very Barbie/Bimbo body – probably fake boobs, tiny waist, mid-back blonde hair, and she was wearing a latex pink mini dress and thigh high latex stiletto heels, and she spent a lot of time dancing around very sexily while her short-haired friend filmed her. I couldn’t help but think, “She definitely has an OnlyFans page, and her attractive if slightly more butch friend does all the technical stuff for her.” I pointed her out to my wife and she had the exact same thoughts, so I’m fairly confident my scenario is accurate.
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I’m guessing they caught the Fire guy and Brute with claws who battled Hiro. Goon Squad can apparently dismiss any of his captured clones. But if they’re expendables like Concretia, I imagine they won’t know much.
If only Dabbler was there to put a locating spell on someone.
You could argue that the Clan of the Crimson mask won this one.
So… the whole encryption strength deal is kind of silly because currently we have systems in common civilian use that are known to be quantum-resistant and would take longer than the sun going red giant to get a 50% chance of brute forcing it even with literally all the computers the Earth has ever had.
An increase in computational strength would drastically decrease the time taken to crack it almost certain there are quantum computers (and beyond) in this universe, and those would be included in the “10% of earth’s computational power”
There’s a theoretical upper limit on the amount of computation you can do for a given amount of energy. It’s a very high limit, but modern encryption is so hard to brute force that even at that maximum computing efficiency, and using the entire power output of the Sun, it would still take longer than the current age of the universe. So yes, it’s very silly.
And quantum computing isn’t encryption cracking magic. Only some encryption algorithms are vulnerable to quantum computers, which doesn’t include most symmetric algorithms, which is what you;d use to encrypt data at rest.
Let me try and visualize the problem for you. Let’s pretend that instead of an encryption key, we have a deck of cards. And your job is to take your deck of cards and arrange it to match the random order of my deck of cards. You may not see my deck, you can only make guesses and ask if they match.
You might think offhand that this is a cakewalk. And I’m going to give you every single advantage I can possibly give you. Your computational power is so great, each attempt takes the shortest unit of time possible, one zeptosecond. Then I’m going to give you a time machine and allow you to travel back in time to the start of the universe to make your attempts. You have been doing so since the start of time.
You are, at present day, about 2% of the way done. Because I have given you a lock with 80658175170943878571660636856403766975289505440883277824000000000000 different combinations.
Now, if that is just a simple deck of cards as the lock, imagine what we can do when we are actually *trying* to keep people out. Frankly, an encryption on par with a deck of cards is extreme overkill because after a certain point which we crossed long long ago, you do not crack encryption with brute force anyway, that’s stupid. You crack encryption by finding out how the encryption works and reverse engineering the way it was made. This is why you can actually find online what a lot of passwords look like after they have been encrypted and saved by most websites using common password encryption. People have long since figured out how that encryption works and have found out how to decrypt it. Yeah, so, uhh, your passwords basically everywhere might as well be stored in plain text at this point, which is why Google is always emailing everyone about how some of their passwords in their password manager may be compromised.
Real-world cracking usually depends on the information not being random. It’s easier to find something if you have an idea what you’re looking for, because it narrows the search space down.
Yep.
Even with the best computers, the best people running said computers and infinite computing power there will always be some things that it is simply not worth the time to do. There is a reason human intelligence gathering exists and always will.
Example? Why would Batman bother to decrypt a message (which he MIGHT be able to do, btw, since he is Batman!) when he can ‘borrow’ the encryption key with no one the wiser? Or even better, get someone like Zatana make him a ‘special’ key that violates many laws of reality. Which as a magic user not always constrained by silly things like laws of physics or math, she can do!
Batman doesn’t need to decrypt a message because all the villain characters use the latest and greatest Wayne Tech computer software. Even Luthor’s tech is second rate to it.
*Sort* of true. That’s not really the case with modern encryption algorithms; they’re not generally susceptible to known-plaintext attacks. But again there’s the little footnote of “what if we screwed up the security proof” or there’s some other flaw.
Beyond that, even. This would be encrypted with a symmetric key, and we only know of quantum attacks that halve the bit-strength of symmetric encryption. Check out Bremermann’s limit — according to Wikipedia, if the entire Earth were converted to perfect computronium, it would still be *physically impossible* for it to take less than 2 minutes to check all 256-bit keys. That’s assuming only a single operation is required to check a key, while in fact it is much more expensive. If someone did have a magical supercomputer-planet, why not use 512-bit keys? Now it would take 10^72 years — a billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion years. This would requite something like an 86 character password. Unpleasant, but doable.
Pretty solid 512-bit symmetric algorithms are already freely available today, and I’m sure Archon wouldn’t go for something weaksauce that depends on how many computers Earth happens to have this year.
I think what Dave should do here is to highlight that algorithms can have *flaws*, and that security proofs can be incomplete; what an adversary might be able to do is locate a vulnerability in the algorithm that reduces the security, e.g. from 512 bits to 64 bits. That’s much more possible to brute-force. This is how real cryptography gets attacked (when it’s not being bypassed entirely, of course).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rERApU26PcA
Yeah, I agree.
Even FIPS 140-2 compliant drives that are available in the real world that I’ve actually used for my work can’t be “brute forced” per se. I guess if you disassembled the hardware with sufficient precision or used some esoteric alien scanning thing you could copy the data off, but then you’re just left with some AES-256 encrypted data, which even a sufficiently strong quantum computer would take a trillion times longer than the lifespan of the universe to break.
I guess the only thing we can assume is that alien advances in technology also include alien advances in methodology, and it’s possible that extremely “hard” encryption schemes which exist in the real world might have hitherto unknown weaknesses that are commonly known to aliens who are into encryption. It’s possible that Alari tech can just blow straight through any level of AES because they understand mathematical properties of prime numbers that we just aren’t aware of. That’s without even getting into esoteric shit that probably exists somewhere in this setting like infinitely-powerful time-traveling computers which can just feed information about their own results back to themselves as soon as they start.
Though, if they have that level of computing power laying around, I can’t imagine how dumb their motivation has to be for them not to just sell a tiny fraction of it as cloud computing resources and retire to a beach while commanding half the market on the planet for such things.
Nobody’s talking about the energy requirements of a brute-force attack.
Assuming that you could make a single attempt to crack a 512bit key using a trivial amount of energy – the energy content of a photon, for example – a brute force attempt would consume more energy than the mass-energy content of the universe.
Better computer technology can’t really solve this.
Attacking the method is what’s really important here, and Alari tech isn’t likely to be able to help there.
Quantum encryption isn’t built to deal with psychic or magical divinatory help. There’s only one ‘right way’ to unlock the code, and it’s based on how many characters at a time? The correct way will stand out among the eighty or hundred ‘first characters’ or whatever that starts the process. As long as you have a cryptological equivalent of ‘Find the Path’, you can break the code without a great deal of effort. The correct way stands out from the false ones, one step at a time.
Cypher from the X-Men could probably break it in under an hour. A cryptolock is just another language to him.
…They said the drive self destructs in a brute force attack already. I don’t think they are necessarily referring to a brute force attack? I’m not very familiar with decryption myself but surely there are other ways to employ computational power than on a brute force attack, no?
There’s things you can do, but every workaround has defenses that can be taken against it. A couple of options (but by no means an exhaustive list):
* Bit-dump of the drive to a non-self-destructing medium. Attack the copy instead of the original.
* De-solder the storage chips and transplant to another device.
At any rate, once you’ve removed the self-destructiveness from the equation, you might try Rainbow Table scans. Or looking for a flaw in the encryption scheme itself. Or looking for predictability where randomness was supposed to exist for the algorithms to work correctly.
Again, that’s not comprehensive, but the number of lateral attack methods on encryption aren’t huge in number. Failing any of those and falling back to brute-force, there is simply not much to do in the real world against any reasonable encryption. AES-128 is quite mature at this point and is still estimated to require on the order of billions of years (at minimum). Alien-tech-having fictional governments will probably have something … significantly stronger to protect their Ultra-secrets.
… Wouldn’t one need to know about the self-destruct before you attempted to smash into it?
Yep. And that gets you into the countermeasures: encasing all of the chips in epoxy to prevent visual inspection, additional self-destruct triggers sensitive to X-Rays to prevent radiologic inspection, deadman timers, geofencing; the sky is the proverbial limit if you assume effectively unlimited resources.
And that’s only for mundane technology! Add in the possibilities that magic offers in a fictional setting and we’re clearly into MacGuffin territory. Time to relax, sit back and enjoy the ride. :)
And wait for the “BOOM!”?
Not an ‘Earth-shattering ka-boom!’, because most of us still have our stuff here
Let’s just hope it isn’t Sydney’s list.
I suspect it’s the same group that tried to make a grab for Sydney already and had Concretia’s body. There’s a huge super battle coming no matter what else is up.
1. i am sure they wanted to grab the holy grail, but their description was not accurate so they went for THE list as an alternative.
2. i hope we find out were to find the barbie/bimbo-page is.
They wanted the holy Grail, but ran out of inventory slots. They had to drop either that, or the lamp that grants wishes.
The Augur: for some reason in my head it looks like Shrek with a funky huge drill bit-type spear.
It’s a gatling gun with spinning bayonets https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-1071-goon-life-and-death/
Have to think that thing was more of a danger to Archon staff than the Goon Squad was. Those bullet would go through walls, no problem.
Going to have to start refering to him as Canada Goose. Looks menacing while calm and then OH MY GOD MERCY!!!
We raised Brown Chinese geese and often had the canadian’s come visit them, I learned real quick how to deal with them. You just have to act like them when they are going to attack: hiss loudly, raise your arms like wings, and run at them. if that doesn’t work I did something I call the shake, grab their head and give them a quick “hand shake” and they’d stagger off confused. And no it didn’t hurt or kill them just made them dizzy.
Up here we just shoot them then have Thanksgiving dinner ;)
When you’re breeding them for money it’s not a good option. At one point nearly half of our stock was part Canadian, weird looking things I’ll tell ya! We had to confine the pure Brown Chinese to stop the cross breeding.
And at $25 a chick it was pretty profitable.
You got a problem with Canada Gooses, you got a problem with me!
https://youtu.be/_oK4Q5G1asI
Bumper maannn, when I clicked the count showed one comment ahead of me but nothing visible when I loaded the page. And my superpower is not very useful without way more training than I’m willing to do unless I get paid large sums (7 figures annually AFTER taxes) because I’m old and using my IRL superpower is pretty painful. Highly resistant to blunt force trauma such that 2 out of 3 times I walked away from getting hit by/with a truck that impact was enough to total the vehicle all 3 times, but that 3rd one was rough, that’s the 60 MPH wreck on my bicycle. The first 2 were both in the same crosswalk, and almost the same scenario, short cycle on the WALK light or driver in a hurry runs the red light in the left turn lane (I know I started crossing with the WALK light on) and pushing the speed limit a bit (30 limit on that road back then 2nd time I was hit I would have had to be hit at ~35 MPH to get thrown from one crosswalk to the other) but the trucks in both cases were not capable of driving away with the front end pushed that far around the engine.
It is kind of funny, in a sad way.
A list is a tool, no more, no less. In and of itself, a list is no more evil than a screwdriver is.
That said? The publicized WAYS that people use lists have been evil far more than good, especially in recent years. Making a list? It has to be for something nefarious these days. Funny. I make lists to remember what I need to do, not to decide to who hurt next. I guess I am not ‘modern’ enough?
Another funny thing- The Germans and Russians get the worst press for lists and much of that is deserved, but the worst list I EVER heard of was from an American Senator named McCarthy. HE would have gladly set up death camps in the US for any of the people on his list. I know several US politicians and former politicians ‘today’ who would likely do the same if they thought they could get away with it. Will they? Who knows. So many seem to WANT such.
Maybe they should read some history…
‘First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.’
—Martin Niemöller
We definitely know that Sydney’s “The List” will be used for evil.
Especially since apparently all you needed to do to get on McCarthy’s list was be a decent person. I mean, there were many other ways of getting on that list, but wanting to take care of your fellow human beings when they needed it was sufficient.
McCarthyism was simply the (at the time) culmination of a hysteria drummed up and perpetuated by the privileged upper class in order to kill any resurgence of Rooseveltian politics – New Deal policies – from resurfacing after WWII.
Efforts to demonize and even racialize class unity ultimately peaked with the election of Ronald “those African people look uncomfortable wearing shoes” Reagan.
That campaign was so effective, it scared the Democrats into abandoning the Roosevelt legacy altogether, instead adopting the Clintonian “Third Way” garbage, which is just the same Right Wing Capitalism, but with a smile and donuts in the breakroom once a week.
We today are living in the the world that Wall Street hired Reagan and Clinton – and others – to arrange for them.
And yes, this was – and is – very much the product of “lists” too.
For example, lists “socialist leaning” people were once used to bar certain ideas from both public office, and public schools. Today, social media helps to curate the millions of blithe self-registering people, and the sorting algorithms tell employers who is and isn’t likely to organize, or “get ideas” above their station.
One could make an argument about superpowers, yes, and in much the same way that we argue for registering weapons, cars, planes, hazardous materials, etc.
But none of these material things are inherent to a person’s state of being.
The X-Men comics was always a bit ham-handed about illustrating minority struggles, but I think it infinitely more important that we specifically recall the stories revolving around the “Mutant Registration Act,” and Herr Eisenhardt’s very specific, and very, very correct point about it being not significantly different from his experience in early/mid 20th Century Germany.
So very true, Bharda.
I grew up under Reagan and learned a LOT about government during his tenure in office. Reagan was a good actor and mostly good at saying what his handlers told him to say. People got what they wanted, short term and ignored any potential long term consequences. Money was made, power was garnered, it was all good. Now? We are paying for it, but many of those responsible are dead now, so they don’t care.
Good point about Herr Eisenhardt. Marvel had to dumb the stories down and clean it up to pass the censors and cater to their their chosen audience. Personally, I think they went a bit too far that way. They made it almost slapstick at times. History is often funny, but ‘never’ clean. That was the first lesson I learned in a ‘real’ history class in college. All I learned before that was propaganda dressed up as history. Funny, that is still what is taught today, no?
Lists are a very useful tool, especially for someone with AD/HD like me. They help with efficiency and that is often a good thing. That said? The myriad ways that lists have been used for evil boggles the mind.
I’m amazed they got away with as much as their lives, considering what Archon was able to throw at them. Also worried for the future of Archon, as so far they have been involved in two very public super-brawls and effectively forced Earth into grappling with the existence of extraterrestrials within their first year. Now their supposedly secure headquarters was compromised and sensitive data was stolen. At the least there’s going to be a House subcommittee wanting Maxima and General Fulk in front of them until the next recess.
Let the guy have some fun he doesn’t always get to use his favorite guns
Someone’s gonna find out about that geokinetic with all the gold
I suspect that geokinetic is probably not going to cooperate with them.
Anyone smart enough to understand that they are a danger to global economic stability, is probably _also_ smart enough to understand how to protect themselves from This Sort of Thing.
In fact, I’d bet a paycheck that said individual is probably on a first name basis with Deus, who likely keeps a watch on them. And you have to admit, with Deus on one side, and Archon on the other, and probably also more than one member of the Twilight Council keeping an eye on them too, our geokinetic friend is probably one of the most securely protected people on Earth.
And that’s before we get to the discussion about the theoretical scope of their own power. Given that they apparently work beneath the mantle, we should at least consider the likelihood that their aren’t “just” an “earth-bender,” but also a “lava-bender,” and possibly on a “big enough lever” scale that pissing them off could result in several sudden volcanic events, anywhere, anytime.
Good chapter, you saw Rammstein from basically the same position I did, back in latw August. A true bucket list moment for me, glad you enjoyed their show, and yeah there was a group of about 12 of those pseudo-barbiegoths there.
[Barbiegoth]
And everyone sing with Fabio Lione:
Wonderful lady of charming might
Of mystic accessories and vintage revolving light
A sorceress trapped in a luxury spa
Unleash the bucolic adventures that my camper yields
Hair in the wind
Mould the horizons
Shining blue eyes
Forest and lakes
Yes, I am a Barbie!
For me the people watching is part of the fun at a concert, or any large public gathering really.
Looks like Archon security has been compromised….!
While knowing the big guns were out is easy enough to tell potentially, knowing they were gone for long and where the list was kept in the building speaks of a lot of inside information. the fact that the list is even in form that is portable so easily says even more for carelessness unless that list was a plant and real one is hidden somewhere else that only Maxima and the top leader or two know (know the one gotten was a fake).
A certain teleporter in 5 bodies with divided loyalties and her evil master most likely. He tried for date on Maxima while likely his thugs were raiding the HQ.
Yes, but if they have good operational security, only Maxima and General Faulk will know it’s a fake list until the people who have it start finding out that many of the people on the list don’t actually exist and some of the ones who do aren’t actually supers or don’t have the powers the list said they do.
But mostly it’d be people who don’t actually exist, and it’s really hard to prove a negative so that’d take some time to figure out.
Given that, it’s completely reasonable that the people here think it’s the actual list even if it was a fake list.
Rock Ridge
Ah yes the dreaded “Onlyfans” I’ve met a pair like that and no thanks, weird at best. I remember the head-banging days well at a Ted Nugent concert, couldn’t walk straight for a couple of days after that! I swear I must of hit the railing at least once (yes I was wasted) ah yes, regrets of youth….
Clearly Dave is setting up a huge super-power battle in the future for us that’ll make the first one seem like a square dance! Like the old X-men Saturday morning cartoon intro showing the X-men squaring off against Magneto’s group. Or G.I. Joe and Cobra’s show.
Ah, ‘the list’. Because as Kalenath pointed out, they tend to be used more for evil than good. And here in ‘murica, people like to think they have a right to privacy, so revealing that yes the government ‘is’ monitoring your life doesn’t go over well.
They like to claim privacy, then they put their entire life [even what they are having for dinner] out in public using their dumb, er, smartphones. Then they have the nerve to look surprised and outraged when that information is used against them . . . . . . . . . . . . most people are soooooooooooo stupid! *sigh*
Yeah, I’m reminded of a conversation I had with my brother some time ago. He was complaining about specific instances of “government surveillance” that he’d been subjected to, and my response was basically, “So, was that cop Officer Bob from your Facebook friends list? Didn’t you post that bit on Facebook publicly? Didn’t you post that next bit on Facebook publicly?” on down the list all the way through.
Also, just to be clear, my brother’s a cis het white dude and wasn’t actually in any trouble. He was just weirded out that a cop he knew was aware of stuff that he’d effectively specifically shared with said cop. Also to be clear, I don’t think the cop’s name was actually Bob, but it was a long time ago and I don’t really remember for certain.
Privacy is one of those things that people demand, but no one else really deserves it. Why? BECAUSE!!!!
It is the old ‘Do as I say, not as I do!’ argument which is REALLY popular in many places in the US right now.
Lists are not evil. They can be USED for evil, but then again, just about anything can.
If Sydney’s List ever gets nabbed by some supervillian? I PITY the poor slob they have who has to enter its data into a database. Even AIs can go nuts. Just saying…
Assuming that said list isn’t a Rock Ridge initiative – and probably with various tracking Widgets attached – there is still a _lot_ of daylight between “monitoring your life” and “has documented your existence.”
And I say that as a person with fairly strong Anarchist leanings.
You were closer to the stage then I was but I selected mine based off have an unobstructed view while being far enough to not need hearing protection.
Some months back I went to see Bon Jovi. I was pretty far back from the stage and it was still deafening. I wish I had thought of taking ear plugs. While it was going on I downloaded a DB meter on my phone to see what the volume was but it only showed like 80-something DB which I’m pretty sure was probably the limit the app could process. I’m sure it was way over that; DB charts often show rock concerts to be in the 120 DB range, which is enough to cause permanent hearing damage.
Whoever runs maintenance for that section, their blood pressure is probably through the roof.
WALLBOT IS READY TO DEPLOY!!!
*crashing noises*
I have to say, the list being stored in such an easily portable form, in such a small safe, seems very, very contrived.
Very contrived considering how big the building is with so many secure vaults super reinforced rooms for training that it was kept in a simple, normal, easily opened by a super wall safe. The fact that there are likely a lot of other such safes in building and they knew which one it was supposedly in makes this even more suspicious.
It is also weird that they didn’t take the other four items in the safe considering they are small and takes only 2 second to swipe and pocket them. What sort of person doesn’t take everything (if only to conceal what item they wanted specifically).
“They aren’t Criminals because they’re smart.”
– Some TV Detective, Probably on L&O
I mean, this entire break-in arc is contrived. The cast is as powerful as they need to be to make the plot interesting, but never consistently. They have power dampening cells and the ability to quantumly cloak people, but they kept an extremely important list in an easily breakable safe. I guess since Dabbler isn’t here to explain super in depth about every minutia of the safe, then it just is a normal safe.
Sir?
You’re prescription is ready.
100mg Chill, Tablet daily
IF of course, that is the ‘real’ list and not a fake conveniently left in a barely secured safe.
Bets?
You would think it would have been easier to attack FBI headquarters to get The List than Archon HQ simply because no supers to fight or no defenses designed with supers in mind.
What’s Really Bad: The List also details the secret weakness of each super. Just in case they go rogue and need to be taken down.
I’m surprised they were able to put that much security on The List, because a list is no good if people can’t consult it. I imagine it has to be looked at (and searched) multiple times a day during the course of ordinary business. You can’t lock something like that up in a safe. Well, not during business hours anyway. I suppose it can all go back in the safe after-hours.
Fairly sure it was after-hours
But putting that much security on a fake list is relatively easy, because you *don’t* need to consult it.
That said, I think the idea was this was a list they’d only consult in an emergency. Having that much security on it would be operationally difficult just because it would probably need frequent updates, though it could be that they only had it secured in that fashion while one of Maxima, Zephan, or third person we probably don’t even know were going to be more than distance away from the office.
The password is ‘incorrect’ ;)
‘Invalid’ then it won’t work ever.
drywall budget is code for, ‘fix everything under the sun, cause you know this group!’ ..
TE3 ? .. Yay..
encryption.. whatever was built by man, can be broken by man,. easily.! so, put a tracking chip in it,. or,,, make the case a tracking device,, IE: vakaya.
color.. love it in any format… just give a warning if you decide to use ‘ psychotropic ‘ , so we can prepare.. :)
For the 1990s Animated X-Men TV series, I imagined that everytime Rogue, Jean Grey or ‘This Week’s Guest’ put a hole in the roof of the X Mansion they used that opportunity to install a skylight.
I think a good way to acknowledge that said fear/racism exists in your world is in a ‘between arcs’ segment, have Sydney encounter someone who is anti-superpowered, have her go off on them Sydney style, and in the end basically say something like ‘yeah, people like them suck donkey balls, but I’m not going to let them get to me’. Could add the cliche’ ‘most of my best friends are superpowered and I’ve got an alien boyfriend!’ if you want a bit of a touching moment between Sydney and whomever she’s with at the time. But over all, it would show those sorts of people exist in your world but also show that it’s not going to be a major element in your stories.
Sounds like a new ‘Agnes’ adventure.
Maybe durin a road trip vaca with a certain Space Woof wearing a holo-disguise, or w/e.
Some diner somewhere, where they can trade knowing looks while some Karen goes on a rant.
Note that the moment the theft of the list is reported, the remaining copies will be re-encrypted and the encryption keys will be erased wherever they’re stored and replaced with the new ones. This was probably initiated by Leon already, so the bad guys can’t just go to another secure location and steal the keys.
My only question is, “What in the Cornbread Hell” is a piece of”Top Secret” or better information doing at ARC? That level of data should have been stored at a “Black Data’ bank pr some other Ultra Secure Black site.
That’s one way of looking at it. But who has need to know for this particular top secret information? Everybody on that list of Need To Know works at Archon, by design. So putting it somewhere besides Archon means storing the list somewhere that doesn’t Need To Know, and will be a PITA for the people who keep the list up to date to update it.
Where better than the sanctum hq of the US Superteam?
I mean it could be a false Flag operation and they could also had a list and need a cover on were they got the information to recruit new supers, it´s an incredible obnoxious operation for a so secretive group(s)
It also means you have a severe security leak for them to be able to perform a targeted strike.
it could also be that some one out there has remote viewing.
why would they even keep all the names in one list in one location? a multi-part key divided several ways too. I would expect some of the names would never be on the list and only be known by certain people.
One: No information can ever be 100% secure, even moreso in a world with super-science, magic, and super powered villains & heroes. Thus, WNI.
Two: The proposed list is very probably a Rock Ridge initiative. Look up the reference & watch the movie if you’ve never seen it, it’s great.
Three: Double agents are absolutely a thing, and nothing is better than intentionally informing Charlie of where the McGuffin is, so that he’ll invite himself over to snatch it on your terms.
Four: McGuffins can be tagged for location & retrieval.
I like the detail that the safe is open, but still contains some stuff which the people who took the list didn’t think was useful to grab. That speaks to a certain mindset.
Of course, in a case like this, that’s probably a good mindset to have. A thief could have just cleaned out the safe, which could muddy the waters on exactly what they were after. But it’s probable that there’s at least one thing in the safe that’s really just a dummy that emits a homing signal. Possibly even several things.
Ecokinesis would be the ability to alter/move the environment, moving one type of ecosystem into areas it should not be, like turning Sahara into a field of flowers, making jungle sprout in the antarctic, rise islands out of the sea, SINK mountains, ETC. Honestly speaking, it would be a VERY potent and VERY wanted power for any sort of environmental protection/terrorism. Not to mention the damage such an ability could cause would be massive if misused.
‘drowssap’ is already in use. Please select another password.
How do you know which passwords are already in use? Do you store used passwords somewhere? You shouldn’t do that. And use a salt with the stored hashes.
Cheaper to just get a new building
Ecokinesis is the ability to manipulate ecological patterns and phenomena, including the weather, natural disasters, climate, etc.
https://list-of-superpowers.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_Superpowers_Wiki
someone actually named it that. Figured that’s what it would be. Seen some use “Omnielemental” but that tends to be less natural phenomena and more control over the four elements in different combinations.
I think I saw someone call it Envirokinetic, with also having zoopathy and florakinesis in the mix.
I’ve never seen “omnielemental,” but now I’m suddenly inspired to try a “Paramental” character.
One that can control Ice, Smoke, Ooze, and Magma.
you’d think they’d call that Polymental or Poly-elemental, controlling more than one but not necessarily related elements or aspects of natural forces.
So, I am not 100% certain, but I believe that the basic concept, when TSR invented the “para-elemental” concept w/ the attendant “para-elemental planes, et al,” was that the para-elements were the result of interaction between each of the Classic Four’s other, non-directly-oppositional elements.
So, Smoke occurs between Fire and Air, and Magma between Fire and Earth, Steam is isn’t para-elemental between Fire and Water, which are oppositional.
It’s been a _long_ damn time since I even thought about looking into D&D monster/cosmology lore, so I have no idea if they’ve got an independent category for such. “Quasi-elemental,” perhaps?
Quasi-elementals are a thing (or were… not sure if they survived 4th and 5th ed)
They’re the interaction between the Main Four Elemental Planes and the Positive/Negative Planes.
So in total 8 (should be 16 when you consider they should be interacting with the paraelemental planes too).
Positive Quasi are: Lightning (Air), Radiance (Fire), Mineral (Earth), and Steam (Water).
Negative Quasi are: Vacuum (Air), Ash (Fire), Dust (Earth), and Salt (Water).
… Isn’t Salt a type of mineral? o_O
I remember now, yes…
“Salt” in this case is designated for its dehydration reaction. It draws moisture out of things.
I recall WotC delving into this more deeply, with the publication of Liberia’s Morris & Sandstorm.
“Undead water elements,” were called….hmm, “thirsters,” if I recall, and were an example of the interaction between the water & negative energy planes.
Then you had Cinders, for fire & NE…and so on.
Later, the dehydration attack of the thirsters evolved into dehydration damage, in Sandstorm, and was common to several critters, including a few types of undead.
Well elemental as in spirit not superpower, then Omnielemental would be redundant as at that point a spiritual being is either a fairy, celestial, or god.
Adding to my reply, this also applies to Ecokinesis and envirokinesis, the terms apply when it’s a superpower , but make it a spirit being and it’s like fairy, god, celestial being, nature demon, etc…
Failure is not an option; it is inevitable. Always make the fake encrypted data a little bit easier to get to than the real encrypted data.
The Real McGuffin should be kept in a safe deposit box under an assumed name in a poor, boring, out-of-the-but-not-specifically-difficult-to-reach small down populated mostly by depressed, stubborn old timers too afraid to move elsewhere, and depressed, underachieving youth too afraid to move elsewhere.
What I’m wondering about is not only that the baddies knew of the list, but they knew very presicely where to find it and where to look for one of the keys.
I’m thinking that geokinetic guy with all the gold just became a little more vulnerable. I wonder if Max already knows about him? Unlimited funding in one sweet magic would make a good ‘recruit’.
She was standing right there when Zephan was talking about him, so I would sure hope so.
Drow sap? Is that what you get when you milk an Alari?
_rereads_ oh, never mind.
I’m guessing you’ve never explored Castle Roodpart?
called their motive, they went after Concretia likely through the parkinglot fight and tracked her down.
I am guessing still they have high connections in office as well, how they got so close, knew there was a physical list, and where to find it.
Or it was intentionally leaked via a believable asset.
Remember, Bad Guys are generally always ready to believe the worst about people. Things like greed & personal grudges, petty revenge, or even exploitable class angst or political grievances are all things they cheerfully abuse to get what they want, because even while being disingenuous, they _understand_ these kinds of motives. They are familiar.
Comfortable.
And when someone has convinced themselves that have been very clever, and gotten away with it, they are generally too busy trying to capitalize on their gains to take the time to seriously analyze themselves, and question their own competence. _Especially_ if they feel like the getting wasn’t “too easy.”
I strongly suspect that “The Ascenders” are going crack that file just in time for it to play Rick Astley, while Archon roll in and collectively curbstomp them.
…should be a _wicked_ good fight ta watch, ya? ^_^
The only people who knew about the physical list (and its location), are probably the ones in that room, plus one other…
It sounds like only one guy in that room knew the list was there and questionable if Maxima knew there was a list beyond military and combatants. So chances are others involved in taking this census , thinking Arc Dark job to try and track down supers and watch if they as re discovered to be above a certain grade, or maybe even scout them as potential recruits.
There is one good news about the list, based on how the Parkinglot fight went and how very few of them were known supers; the chances are the majority on the list can be tracked down to warn, protect, or are already combatants anyway.
so the majority of supers would likely still be unknown unless they get the modern MCU bug and because of a change in culture with supers being “out” decide to publicly announce themselves; in which case a secret list is pointless as this person wasn’t on it, and now everyone knows about them anyways.
Data Protection Inc. : We are sorry to inform you that ARCHON files containing your confidential information have been compromised. You may find yourself being recruited/kidnapped by various evil organizations in the near future. Please take appropriate precautions to secure your powers and abilities.
Best Regards,
Bob Johnson,
Data Protection Inc.