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[Shintoko Akahoshi]

All the talk about soft clones, along with re-reading One Man Too Many, has got me wondering: How do we secure our assets? I mean, we set up clones for ourselves in the event that we are podded, and those clones have immediate access to all our hangars and our corporations and our wallets as soon as they step out of the cloning facility. How does this work? How would it safeguard against a criminal hijacking one of your clones? Would there be any defense against that? After all, in One Man Too Many we have exactly that situation, where an assassin hijacks a wealthy man's clone and uses it to kill someone at a dinner party.

Backstage Hive Mind, what do you think?

[Esna Pitoojee]

Capsule-clones actually have it fairly easy - the answer is something that has to travel with the consciousness, but not with the body. A password is the simplest and time-honed answer, but would leave capsuleers vulnerable to cyber-attacks and phishing (you think Jita scams are bad now? Whoo-wee...)

An answer I would propose is that the capsuleer is trained before graduation to select a given stimulus to which they have a reflexive response. Their brain activity during this reflex is then mapped using a non-intrusive brain scan system - a lot less accurate than the hard burner, but we're looking for a pattern here not mapping each neuron - and the result recorded. After each cloning or jump-clone, the newly-awoken capsuleer is presented with the test. Someone masquerading "in the meat" would be unlikely to be able to perfectly mimic their target's reflexive action, even if they knew what the stimulus was beforehand.

[Makkal]

Could someone upload their infomorph to your clone and have it be a perfect fit? I'd think there would be problems.

I mean, there is a mind/body connection.

[Shintoko Akahoshi]

It's happened before. The result was good enough to fool over 300 people at a very posh dinner party.

Esna, I like you're idea. It's simple and fairly foolproof. I'd imagine baseliners using mind-transfer would use the same techniques.

[Samira Kernher]

Could someone upload their infomorph to your clone and have it be a perfect fit? I'd think there would be problems.

I mean, there is a mind/body connection.

Possible, but not a guarantee. The brain is a gray mush before it gets the data, and is then molded to the proper shape. However, a basic examination of the individual's general skull size and brain size is made in order to insure there is enough matter to use.

So, if you are relatively close in brain size, you could theoretically have your neural map perfectly duplicated on someone else's clone. In practice, there might be tiny little errors due to slightly more or less brain matter than there should be.


*Edit* This is, of course, assuming you're transferring it to someone else's cloning facility and hijacking one of their prepared clones. If you prepare one yourself, in your own facilities, then you should be able to ensure that you have the proper quantity of material. You might need to slightly adjust the skull size of the clone along with the brain matter, but in all other ways it could be identical as long as you have an accurate "blueprint" of the person's physical form.

[Makkal]

Okay, I'll use a simple example.

My walking is the product of several decades where my brain got used to how my body handles and my body got used to the specific activities I ask of it. I'm a 5'3" woman. If my 'mind' were uploaded to that of a 5'6" man, I wouldn't know how to steer him properly. People who'd seen him walk previously would notice immediately something was wrong.

It's the same for lots of things. My speech involves a lifetime of habits. A person who 'mindjacked' my body wouldn't be able to speak enough like I do to bypass a sophisticated voice recognition device. Intonations, breathing, word/syllable emphasis, how my mouth forms phonemes -- all unique to the individual.

It's happened before. The result was good enough to fool over 300 people at a very posh dinner party.

Gaaaaahhh!

[Samira Kernher]

Okay, I'll use a simple example.

My walking is the product of several decades where my brain got used to how my body handles and my body got used to the specific activities I ask of it. I'm a 5'3" woman. If my 'mind' were uploaded to that of a 5'6" man, I wouldn't know how to steer him properly. People who'd seen him walk previously would notice immediately something was wrong.

It's the same for lots of things. My speech involves a lifetime of habits. A person who 'mindjacked' my body wouldn't be able to speak enough like I do to bypass a sophisticated voice recognition device. Intonations, breathing, word/syllable emphasis, how my mouth forms phonemes -- all unique to the individual.

Yes. As mentioned in the linked Chronicle, these things do indeed become tell-tale signs in the 'hijacker'. In the case of the guy in the chronicle, he was noted for having a different handedness, along with a few other small cues.

It's possible to make the neural map fit properly, but actually learning how to act with the body of an entirely different person will take some training.

[Mithfindel]

Actors can practice someone else's gait and mannerisms. Therefore, using a clone molded to look like someone else to the point of having their DNA would be the ultimate disguise. DUST implants make it even more scary, because they make it possible for the assassin to simply suicide to escape with full memory. (That said, EVE has enough fanatics that probably some folks would accept to jump into someone else's clone and accept final death.)

[lallara zhuul]

There is no mind/body separation.

Mind is the body, you cannot separate them.

Your body reacts immediately to what is going on in your mind and vice versa.

Reflexive response would not be completely unique to each person, mainly because of the part that most reflexes in a human body do not utilize the parts of the brain where learned data is stored.
Most reflexes only utilize the brain stem and the 'reptilian brain' never bothering with the actual cognitive parts of the brain, because the cognitive parts are slow in a situation where your body protects itself.
Yes, people are trained to react fast without thinking to certain stimuli but they are not 'real' reflexes.
They are just very highly trained reactions.

Mapping such reactions could be a good way to verify a personality, the problem is that if there is a need for an identifying Key... It means that the cloning company is not legitimate and untrustworthy in the first place.

Therefore any Key will be completely useless.

That is why the only real way to keep yourself intact as a capsuleer entity, financially and legally, is to only use the fluid router quantum entanglement hard burning system in a perfectly legitimate cloning company.

[Aelisha Montenagre]

I believe something along the lines of what lallara has suggested above - soft clones are a relatively insecure method of immortality, and so capsuleers in general consider themselves 'vulnerable' - they are still more permament/inviolate than poor baseliners, but they do not have the micro-quantum entanglement benefits of the NIS implant. 

That being said, the good old networking security acronym 'VIA' (verification, integrity and authenticity) is a can of worms with any modern expression of the facts.  Quantum entanglement is our 'tachyon pulse' so to speak, a deus ex machina that saves us from our mistakes with little satisfaction of the pseudo-scientific expression we attempt to bring to bear on it.  As the mind is constantly being adapted to new conditions, skills and cybernetic interference, the only live link is the capsule interface.  A soft clone is literally a hard back up, and the point of failure in hard back ups lies in the very memory locations they inhabit. 

There is a webcomic, I forget which, where the protagonist clones him/herself to become immortal, but an AI tests them against a biometric, psychological and personality auguring battery of challenges, which even a tiny failure of results in the destruction of the clone before it's release - thus ensuring the 'right' personality lives on.  Brutal, grim, and not within the remit of current PF.  But an interesting option for those paranoid capsuleers who have the means (nullsec outpost clone bays for example) to enforce their own code of practice to ensure that their copy wasn't pilfered or interfered with. 

If you want to be securely immortal out of pod, spend that immortality ensuring your own security - the technological equivalent of the crazy unshaven inventor sitting in a bath of dettol screening every door handle for germs on a compulsive basis. 

[Lyn Farel]

Capsule-clones actually have it fairly easy - the answer is something that has to travel with the consciousness, but not with the body. A password is the simplest and time-honed answer, but would leave capsuleers vulnerable to cyber-attacks and phishing (you think Jita scams are bad now? Whoo-wee...)

An answer I would propose is that the capsuleer is trained before graduation to select a given stimulus to which they have a reflexive response. Their brain activity during this reflex is then mapped using a non-intrusive brain scan system - a lot less accurate than the hard burner, but we're looking for a pattern here not mapping each neuron - and the result recorded. After each cloning or jump-clone, the newly-awoken capsuleer is presented with the test. Someone masquerading "in the meat" would be unlikely to be able to perfectly mimic their target's reflexive action, even if they knew what the stimulus was beforehand.

Personally I find that quite unreliable.

Could someone upload their infomorph to your clone and have it be a perfect fit? I'd think there would be problems.

I mean, there is a mind/body connection.

Possible, but not a guarantee. The brain is a gray mush before it gets the data, and is then molded to the proper shape. However, a basic examination of the individual's general skull size and brain size is made in order to insure there is enough matter to use.

So, if you are relatively close in brain size, you could theoretically have your neural map perfectly duplicated on someone else's clone. In practice, there might be tiny little errors due to slightly more or less brain matter than there should be.


*Edit* This is, of course, assuming you're transferring it to someone else's cloning facility and hijacking one of their prepared clones. If you prepare one yourself, in your own facilities, then you should be able to ensure that you have the proper quantity of material. You might need to slightly adjust the skull size of the clone along with the brain matter, but in all other ways it could be identical as long as you have an accurate "blueprint" of the person's physical form.

We barely use 10% of our brains. Maybe slightly more for capsuleers with all these skillbooks but well.

There is no mind/body separation.

Mind is the body, you cannot separate them.

Eve PF with cloning and infomorph seems to point at the contrary to me.

[Ché Biko]

We barely use 10% of our brains.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_percent_of_brain_myth

[Lyn Farel]

I stand corrected then.

But I can also read that "This theory could also be because of the human subconsciousness, which would mean that you only consciously use 10% of your brain, and the other 90% (such as heart functions, hearing, seeing, breathing etc) are left to your subconsciousness, and are autonomous. This would seem to be a probable meaning."

Which is more what I had in mind. It's quite modular.

[Samira Kernher]

http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Bioencryption

While devices of this type have been around for a very long time in all empires, the introduction of cloning technologies saw a rapid change in this field. While much of a persons biological data carries over to a clone, some methods of comparison have proven unreliable. Fingerprints and retina scans in particular proved difficult, and as such, there has been a marked increase in blood and DNA sampling devices, particularly on stations and facilities used primarily by capsuleers.