basilisk hack

Trope-a-Day: Tome of Eldritch Lore

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Tome of Eldritch Lore: One of the small number of amendments to the Imperial Charter amends the otherwise protected rights of “access to information, freedom of research and inquiry, freedom of speech and of the press” to include an exception “when such information or speech constitutes, in whole or in part, infectious or self-executing code”.

The existence of this sort of thing, in an infectious-meme, basilisk-hack (see: Brown Note) sort of way, is why.

(The Silent Library exists to contain this sort of thing. Can’t go around destroying them, obviously. They’re books.)

Trope-a-Day: Holodeck Malfunction

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Holodeck Malfunction: Utterly averted, with the possible minor exception of someone using a virtual reality version of a basilisk hack on you, but that’s not a malfunction, that’s deliberately exposing you to something that would be equally bad for you if you perceived it through any other sensory channel.  But, in essence, what sort of idiot engineering gives a VR simulator privileged-channel access to your brain?

You’ve Got To Read This

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basilisk hack: (from the mythical petrifying serpent); a class of cognoweapon capable of being introduced through normal sensory channels which attack metalogical defects in sensory input processing or cognition, causing various cognitive dysfunctions, neural storms, seizures, and in advanced cases, coma.  Most publicly known families of basilisk hack are automatically filtered by modern security metacortex extensions.

YGBM hack: (“you’ve got to believe me”); a more advanced class of cognoweapon based on basilisk hack (q.v.) principles, in which the basic hack serves as a channel to introduce a memetic payload without it passing through normal cognitive/memetic processing, thus causing instant belief and/or conversion.  This is largely a theoretical class due to the difficulty of passing a memetic payload through limited sensory bandwidth and the nature of available cognitive exploits, but certain simple examples are known to exist, including the Andreth-Calcië emotropic symphonies, the Citizen Nondescript bioshell series, the Out-Of-Mind visual textures, and the Must-Have-It Box.

YGHM hack: (“you’ve got to have me”); a specific YGBM hack (q.v.) variant focused on inducing desire, or simple lust.  While no target-specific forms are known to exist live, one subset of the Andreth-Calcië emotropic symphonies is known to induce these mental states in a generalized sense.  (Legal warning: effective-fidelity recordings of these qualify as a Class I Coercive Substance and, as such, non-consensual exposure to such is a serious crime under Imperial law.)

yaghem: (slang); a person whose sexuality presentation and/or seduction techniques possess all the subtlety of a YGHM hack (q.v.), albeit without the effectiveness.  Considered derogatory.

– excerpted from Cognitive Threats Monthly: Special Introductory Issue