LAST EDITED ON Mar-11-14 AT 03:28 PM (EDT)
 
>It always bugged me, on a fundamental level, that the entire CONCEPT
>of "black ice" falls apart in seconds if you simply install a fuse in
>the circuit.

It's even worse than that, actually. There is no reason for a control interface to involve dangerous voltages in any way, and no reason for software to be able to introduce them where the cabling standards should prevent them from being in the first place. It's not a question of bandwidth - at the wire-coming-out-of-the-wall level, the biggest, baddest data trunk in the world isn't going to give you a lethal, or even perceptible, electric shock if you unplug it and touch the conductors. Digital telecommunications simply don't involve dangerous quantities of electricity. (Particularly since the biggest transmisssion lines aren't even electrical. The only way a person could be injured by fiber optics would be to suffer an eye injury from direct laser exposure, and that would take some doing.)

So the only way black ice could work is if the interface hardware were deliberately designed so that there was a mechanism inside it that had no other function but to kill users - and frankly, even most cyberpunk settings don't reach those levels of tinfoil hattery. And that's just for hardwired connectivity! Over a wireless network the concept is even more ludicrous.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
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