It would be gosh darn spiffy if you could record conversations on your mobile phone. Then you could use it as evidence to incriminate someone, or to blackmail someone. To spy on your low down cheating partner. All the good stuff. Heck, you could even try and bring down the Chief of the WJF by talking on the phone with his floozy about her dry cleaning and taking it to the press later.
Sounds cool to me - but you couldn't bring down the chief of the WJF with that, check it out:
Corporates are the council. The council is responsible for the WJF and owns it. The media is corporation-controlled and in extensis council-controlled. So this could only work if the corps WANTED it to. And besides, Johnny said in another post that marriage was non-existent (at least in legal form) in Withmore, so the WJF chief, as well as anyone else, can go out and have sex with whoever they want. Nobody's ever lost their job because of cheating on their girlfriend (non-legally binding relationships are pretty damn subjective, when you think about it) - and it's even less likely to happen in the somewhat less moral environment of 2087.
But recording devices of a non-avian nature would be spiff-o-riffic.
Anyhow, I've gotta rush out the door into the snow and bitter cold, I'll post more on this later.
The actual reason for this post, phone bugging.
Eventually there will be ways to intercept cellular transmissions (cell phones), radio transmissions (Pac-west Freqman/etc...), SIC transmissions (Matrix hacking) all that good stuff. Heh, it may even be possible someday to listen into the next room with high freq listening devices. I'm sure along with all these there will be a way to hard-copy the info, or store it in some way.
What else *thinks*...
Yes you could use it to blackmail someone...
Yes you could write up a story and post it on the NLM QuickTerms...
Yes you could take it to a Judge and rat on someone...
Yes you could talk to people's floozies about laundry (but really now...do you wanna know what's been in their drawers??)
thanks for paying attention!! *WAVES*
Especially since bugs and tracer dots don't work.
Think of all the fun you'd have making up code words and sign systems to get around the monitoring! Make everyone more paranoid. Maybe even make you use encrypted SIC channels *gasp*!!!!
Anyway, this kind of makes me wonder why the most advanced type of a mobile phone is... one that comes equipped with text messaging. Seems kinda odd when in the present day every phone comes equipped a camera and internet access.
And was Murph being serious about the parrot thing? I am now curious as to whether the Polly Parrot things actually have a purpose IC...
Are there Polly Parrots still kicking around in game? They were just a fun toy, there's a way to turn them on and off (possibly "shake" or "squeeze", honestly can't remember). When they're on they record everything that's said around them (should record your location while you're carrying it) and at random intervals they repeat a random phrase they've recorded.
They have a limited memory, when that's reached each new phrase bumps off the oldest one. Anything they record is anonymous.
Much fun to be had hiding them in locations or planting them on people. I think most of them got trashed or turned off after the initial "fun". Really not much use as a bugging device to be honest, but they have code (possibly not great, it was a quickly hashed together trinket) that handles recording while hidden or carried, etc, so they could be adapted for bugging.
