[Crime, Technology] ‘Gethnapping’ Case Baffles Authorities, Worries Consensus

‘Gethnapping’ Case Baffles Authorities, Worries Consensus

Report by Rachel Zhao, The Drescher Times. Holographs by Bella Rosales, The Drescher Times.

The bizarre case of Harmonious Accord, the ‘kidnapped’ geth program, has both the Shanxi Colonial Police Force and the Alliance Investigative Services “completely baffled”, according to an anonymous inside source, amid rumours the Geth Consensus is preparing to undertake its own investigation.

The program identifying itself as Harmonious Accord, like many other geth, left Rannoch in order to assist the galaxy’s restoration and reconstruction work after the Reaper Invasion. Little did it know that it would be caught up in what local detective Isidore Beautrelet is calling “the most baffling case [he has] ever worked on.”

“All we know is that the program’s platform was attacked by unknown assailants during a routine inspection of the city’s power lines,” Detective Beautrelet continued. “Evidence suggests that the program known as Harmonious Accord was illegally downloaded - don’t ask me how - from its platform and removed from the scene of the crime.”

In a Drescher Times exclusive, we can reveal an anonymous inside source’s perspective.

“It’s completely [blocked],” alleges our anonymous insider. “The only evidence is a dead flashlight with some scratches around an optic fibre cable. It’s just geth doing geth [blocked], there’s no need to call in those Intelligence guys. If this guy had been human, nobody would care.”

Rumours persist that the Geth Consensus is preparing their own independent investigation, although the Consensus has repeatedly denied such claims.

Firstly, I'd like to join everyone in my concern that shadowy badguys have found yet another way to screw people over, by literally tearing someone's mind (program, whatever, if it were organic I'd call it a mind, or even a soul) out of their body. I'm unaware if geth can feel fear, but getting your mind torn out by unknowns can't be fun.

Secondly:

Screw this pathetic excuse of a human being. Presumably, its his job to care if something like this happens to someone. I'm not sure how exactly it would quantify into a human perspective, but some variation of kidnapping/murder/enslavement, etc.

Honestly, this offends me more than a crime itself, that an apathetic thug like this has any sort of position in an investigation. Gods and Spirits preserve Shanxi if this is the kind of person expected to look out for its people.

The statement follows an established trendline of dismissal towards synthetic life. It is within well within a standard deviation of response.

And now my day is made.

Observe: The above response.

Irrelevant. Just because something is accepted or propagated, doesn't make it any less right or wrong. Harmonious Accord's purpose on Shanxi was to help. And not only did this happen to his program,but this bilge scum dismisses the matter. Its repugnant.

I know that's not something I can support with facts or figures, but its what I believe. What he, or Pariah say or do, even with any implication societal acceptance, doesn't make it right.

If I'm going to get some flak from certain members for saying so, so be it. I wouldn't stand for it, either way.

While this statement is accurate, but made on an incorrect assumption: that I have made an inherent judgment call, justifying the statement in my observation.

The inverse is accurate.

Good.

You can get off the cross now man, don't think anyone's going to try and martyr you.

And the human is right.

None of you would have given a shit if it was any other species that suddenly got taken. In fact, it would have probably not even been worthy of a news article (and before any of you say it. Yes I am well aware how special this is) for you pieces of filth to try and show how morally superior you are to everyone so you can feel good about yourselves.

I don't have this problem.

I hope the machine suffers.

I think the how is important here-this was thought impossible, so of course it's newsworthy.

As for my opinion, I for one just wish the way to do this was in better hands. Good that it's possible, though-maybe they can make geth prisons now?

Or something.

Fuck if I know how flashlights work.

I still think it'd be weird if someone stole a human's brain. But maybe that's just me.

Just trying to convey sincerity.


Take a basic ethics course when you have a chance.

Hahahaha, you realize that the only thing you are trying to do here is assume a position of 'moral superiority' here so you feel better about yourself.

Like, this is literally what this post is. An abject lesson in why people in shitty bunkers shouldn't shoot shit.

@Ms Pariah : Actually the members of this board have been consistently disgusted by all the attacks on alien volunteers. I'll refer you to the salarians attacked on Earth and the volunteers (like our own member Epsilon, hope she's alright) attacked on Tuchanka.
I also strongly believe that if someone a non-synthetic body is found and that it's revealed that its mind was stolen, it'll make the news and elicit a strong reaction.

Now about the slaver theory allow me to offer my professional point of view. As slaves geth may sound ideal, but they are not. Even with their platform they need constant monitoring so they won't upload to the concensus and call the wrath of the geth collective on us, which is not worth their lack of sleep.
As pure AI (as is the case here) they could theoretically be put to work solving problems, but who would trust them? How long before they manage to breach the computer's isolation and contact the collective?
In both case anyways I imagine that they would do the logic thing and flatly refuse to collaborate in any way, even under threat of deletion, to discourage further attacks on their fellows. Can one of our geth residents confirm or infirm that assumption?
So honestly the most logical reason for this gethnaping is, for me, study. A lot of people want to know more about the reaper modifications geth undertook.

About how it was done a lady I know in Slaves4Us IT offered an interesting theory. She said that in theory it could be done by first creating a "fake concensus" by mimicking the signal of the real one, then attacking the geth platform and attempt a hack on it (that's what the optic fibers are for). The geth will of course upload to the concensus when it's being overwhelmed by the hack, and get trapped in the decoy concensus.

Welcome to a galaxy full of slavery.

Well, as sad as this is, it had to happen eventually, sobody trying to steal a geth. If nothing else for the sake of an experiment and to get better results next time, if it didn't work as intended.

Actually, maybe one of the geth present can answer me this:
Organic beings often submit into slavery if their sense for self preservation is tricked. Meaning, they will rather serve and hope (for whatever) than removing themselves by suicide. At least for a period of time and when the working conditions are controlled, the slavers can manage this pretty well, sadly enough.

But what about a geth invidual? If successfully cut off from the consensus, how would it react? Would it self terminate without a second thought and render itself useless or would it submit itself and hope, out of a sense of self prservation?

Anyway, this incident should be investigested, as the technical achievement indicates, there is more behind this than just a simple individual.

This would require some pretty sophisticated tech, I would think. If geth platforms have hardwired ports, that would probably be the easiest way to perform a transfer. If they don't, close-range high-gain antenna. The storage medium that the runtimes were downloaded to would simply need a selective one-way firewall to prevent them from escaping.

Either way, though, considering the filesize and complexity of all those geth runtimes, especially post-Reaper upgrade, you'd need one hell of a complex system to store that data.

I'd guess whoever's the gethnapper's probably got a blue box if not a full-fledged AI on their side. I doubt this is an individual. Large organized crime syndicate, maybe. STG. Hierarchy Ministry of Intelligence. Some entity of that nature.

Alarming.

This is similar to an idea I had about how it could be done, but not with a fake Concensus. I doubt one could make one ell enough to fool an A.I. for long enough, especially considering their sheer raw processing speed. Instead, after initiating a hacking attack or a physical attack on the platform, you use a short range intercept downloader to forcebly download the program into the device instead of the Colective. If the device was only capable of receiving and not transmitting data it would make for an idealized Geth prison as they could not then transmit themselves out of it.

You need better IT support, they're delusional if they think this was possible even *before* the geth were overclocked by the Reapers.

The consensus isn't a signal you can mimic - it's the collected signals of millions upon millions of advanced AI's, all communicating in a highly secure and constantly-updating network. Geth were notoriously hard to hack before the Reaper War; it took us - the quarians, their creators - three hundred years to figure out how to do it for even short periods, and that wasn't anything approaching the scale your IT tech is fantasizing about. You're literally suggesting hacking a civilization. A civilization that can read and react faster than you can hope to match and on a scale you can't really comprehend. Imagine every batarian in the galaxy shouting at you at once.

Throw in that the geth are now each, independently and on their own, equivalent of a high-end ship AI, capable of thousands of calculations per second? Throw in that there are still millions of them, maybe even billions, and they can reproduce almost infinitely if they see a need, so long as drive space permits?

No. However they did this, it was clever, not something stolen from a bad gethsploitation sim.

From the IT :

Like every system the consensus have input and outputs. And that's what you want to control. If I want to fool your omnitool into connecting itself to my server instead of your closest extranet node I don't create a pocket extranet, I just intercept your signal and have my server "looks like" the extranet, mimicking handshakes and all.
So what I they may have done is that they carefully monitored the frames exchanged between the platform and the consensus, mostly the encryption and fluctuating pattern, and when they striked they mimicked the "idle" exchange between a platform and the consensus for a few microseconds before forcing the upload.
It is actually much easier than hacking the AI itself.
Also may I point out that it's been done? From what I read it was the purpose of the horrible Horizon experiments, Cerberus managed to hack in reaper communications to order husks around. It's not like they hacked the reapers themselves of course.