‘Not A Villain’ Webcomic – Page 609

I'm at Salt Lake Comic Con this weekend in the Artist Alley: Blue 15 14.

Edit: 100 died a hundred deaths.

49 Comments

Aha, that’s how it all started. Fits very well. Everything she ever did was reason for awe and wonder and excitement, it was seen as good progress, and then – suddenly – this. No wonder she didn’t know how to handle the situation, especially since she always used to get what she wanted.

I’m pretty sure I myself would have failed equally spectacularly if given the same situation, thankfully, my parents had a better idea of how to raise a child. Not saying I could’ve brought armageddon to this world but to anything that was within my technical reach (so it would’ve been really bad for, say, the neighborhood or so).

There’s a hundred reasons why I disagree.

When being inexact or conversational “a hundred” is common. Saying “one hundred” is being technical and exact.

There are a hundred reasons why disagreements happen.

But there are not a 100 reasons. 😛

“100” is generally read as “one hundred,” as opposed to just “hundred.”

You didn’t need the “a” before it in the third panel – or maybe you did, but only if you meant to put the word “hundred” instead of the number, “100.”

Either way.

I actually didn’t want to lead with that, but I’ve played a MUD for over ten years. Makes me way too sensitive to this stuff!

Does that mean “She had no idea the possibilities…” is correct? Because I think an “of” is missing, but since you already scanned that panel it looks like you didn’t see it as a mistake.

I wasn’t aware of the 100 thing, so as a German I just read it the way it was intended.

of should be in there, but it’s someone talking, and dropping the of is something some people would do, whereas no one would say “…within a one hundred metres”

I see. Good to know! 🙂

I read those as two separate sentences.

“She has no idea! The possibilities she’d just opened up…” Then he abandoned that sentence in favour of the next.

“has” should be “had.” I have no idea how to correct this in my comment to which I’m replying.

It could also be “a 100 meter radius”. But yeah, it felt really awkward reading “a 100 meters”.

It’s what I would have said, though that might be a regional preferences thing- like the pronunciation of Data.

I’m pretty sure Star Trek: the Next Generation had a role in who pronounces the word “data” how.

Brent Spiner, the actor who played the role of Data, is Texan, and would have pronounced it the other way. However, Patrick Stewart said it the way you hear in the show, and… yeah.

Meanwhile, yes, dropping the “of” is a thing that happens. Other words are likewise effected. My most common verbal is dropping “I” or “I’m” at the start of a sentence. “Gonna go to bed. ‘Night.” (Yes, the word “good” in that “sentence” has been reduced to a glottal stop that usually goes unnoticed by whoever I’m saying “‘Night” to.)

Also, for the initial target audience of Americans using the British pronunciation makes it more of a name for a person than the common use of the term.

Like Data said in that one episode you might be thinking of, “One is my name, the other is not.”

Is this one of those dialect things, like how people from Tokyo and Osaka use different wording to say the same thing?

I get uncomfortable when a woman with an accent walks into my office supplies shop and asks to buy a rubber, but I’ll sell her the eraser all the same. And I may explain the local meaning of her request.

‘I’d like a hundread zinc plated nails’
‘I’d need a dozen eggs’
‘I’d owe a million yen’
These all look proper to me.

Hum.
*pokes google*
Ayup: https://ell.stackexchange.com/a/964

loooool.

Nah. Just give her the condoms. You can give her the eraser after you fake ignorance for a bit and have her say “No, I meant an eraser.”

And as an added detail, Torrenal’s nametag says Johnny.

“a hundred” and “one hundred” both work here, but “a 100” should be read as “a one hundred”, such as “a 100 dollar bill” being “a one hundred dollar bill” or “the 100 meter dash” being “the one hundred meter dash”. The problem is that here it’s “a 100 meters” which should be read as “a one hundred meters” which isn’t how anyone would say it.

Well I just read all 609 pages in the past 2 hours, I think I might be hooked.

Welcome to the club lol

Did you take notes? You’re going to wish you’d taken notes.

Nah. Who needs notes? Just read it all again from the very beginning if you forget any small detail.

Holy s*** is there 609 pages.
I’ve been here for years. might need to read up on it again since I seem to forget many of the references in coments.

And once again, “turning it off and on again” does not work. D***t guys, why do you make technology like that in the future! Never make technology like that in ever!

Wait, if they know the way I think they know, how did she manage to survive it?

I don’t think they wanted her to die back then.

“And then I saw her face
now I’m a believer.”

^That is great!!!
LMAO

Thank you! ^^

Dwagon steps in and says:

All the interesting things in this page we could be discussing… and comment after comment is focused on GRAMMAR? Serius?

How about her being physically hooked into a system that can KILL her if someone tries to turn it off. How about a game with such poor security that a hacker can actually destroy the real life world on a mega basis without even knowing they’re doing it. Or maybe Bandit BEING THERE when it happened and seeing the whole thing go down– and how is it in that situation anyone has lost track of her location and has no idea that she’s Kat?

I bet no one within a one hundred meters even thought of all of that there stuff cos them was focused on a word. I could sit on a chocolate cake and people would comment my toe claws need trimmed. 😀

Aight I accept most of your comment but the indignity you would perform upon cake has left me positively unhinged. Don’t you dare defile the greatness that is chocolate cake with your scaly posterior. EVER.

I agree on the grammar thing, but next time use anything but “chocolate” cake whenever your behind is involved. XD

I REALLY don’t think the theory of ‘she thought she was playing a game but actually it had real world consequences somehow’ makes any sense. That’s not how games work on such a fundamental level, I just… yeah. That’s stupid.
Sure, she perceived -real world- as a game, but that’s not because there was an actual game she thought she was playing, that’s because of how her father taught her )=

More like some genious hacking a game console with internet capability (like an X-Box) and using it beyond the game to hack anything else connected to the internet. The suit and system was an interface for the game, not the game itself and she ‘enhanced’ the interface beyond its orginal paameters so that she could then interface with any computer system, not just the game, and thats where it got dangerious and opened doors no one had forseen until it was too late.

Why would you need a game console for that??? What’s so special about a game console that you would need it / it would help you hack into literally anything else? A PC is like 100000% more useful for it… a cloud service, an e-mail server, literally anything other than a game console would be more useful 0.0
and I imagine the suit and the system were interfaces to anything, like a joystick: it just mapped onto conventional controls, on top of being ‘special’ controls for games made specifically with it in mind

That’s just it. The Hakido *WAS NOT* designed to be special in that way. Not until she got her hands (or rather, her spinal cord) on it.

Let’s try saying it this way: Before the surgery, she could quickly hack anything connected to the internet. And she used a PC.
After the surgery, she could slowly hack anything. Anything. Machines without networking abilities were now hers to hack. Anything within 100 meters. At least, that’s how many of us are reading the dialog.

Okay, so here’s my closest-to-realistic interpretation of what happened:

This system did not have any wires connecting you to the machine, so it used some kind of wireless interface. The interface that was installed on pretty much every machine in existence. Think Bluetooth keyboard.
Of course, there was at least SOME security to ensure that the equipment connecting was actually -meant- to connect and used by the owner of the machine in question.
And -that- is what Kat hacked.

Physical access is the ultimate security override, most of the time. If you’re at the keyboard (and the power button, and the USB slot), the machine is your oyster.
And Kat modified the Hakido so that it was treated by anything within range of its wireless interface (~100 meters, apparently) like its own keyboard (probably also +power button +USB slot).

Imagine that you can walk up to any computer you want to and do whatever you want with it, and no guards, locked doors or other physical security can stop you.

That’s basically what Kat got.

It was a ridiculous, inexcusable security flaw in the wireless interface… but honestly that strikes me as pretty realistic -_-

Holy crap! I don’t think she’s talking about hacking via wireless interfaces. I’m pretty sure she means that she can hack an isolated computer with no input devices.

I agree, that would explain the level of freak out that the dialog is expressing.

Another thing I get from this page:

“Bandit” is also a cyborg. With a Hakido.

The reason I say this is:

1)He has codeVision, like KleyaKat. Dude brags about this.

2)Proximity. Surely, once they realised what she could do, they wanted someone whose personality would prevent problems like the ones she caused. Bandit seems the natural choice to foil her.

Also, I begin to suspect that both KleyaKat’s parents are alive. One is a high-ranking TENka member, and the other is an Outsider.

1.) CodeVision doesn’t appear to be just a cyborg thing – it’s about being able to understand what the code is doing and how to read the values.

Almost certainly an abstraction of a Dev console or sorts.

2.) Given his closeness to Kleya, they probably didn’t want to put *another* cyborg so close to her.

We’ve seen Bandit – aka Jake – in the Reality. In fact, we saw him getting out of a Kido when his city crashed.

Besides, you’d think these cyborgphobic people wouldn’t be so okay with him if he was a cybord.

I think the code vision is more like having a debug window open watching for memory leaks and the like.

I don’t want to think about how realistic this technology is. Just, nope. Turning my brain off here.

Anyway, I’m glad Jake recognizes just how much of a disconnect there is between Kat’s scariness and her actual intentions…

How about if something reads just fine we all just chalk it up to dialog and natural speech? Spelling is one thing, and wrong words can be confising although they do occur in speech, but the difference between ‘a 100’, ‘a hundred’ and ‘a one hundred’ is like saying characters cannot misuse double negatives as is common but annoying in real life.

Aneeka, I’m sure you are sick to death of people telling you how to write, but replacing words with numbers is *terrible* practice. This is coming from someone who is otherwise willing to overlook many oddities of grammar and spelling as natural, in-character slips of the tongue.

I’m guessing that she didn’t intend for what happened, but she was in the middle of it for some reason. Maybe she unintentionally triggered somebodies Armageddon Protocol, or she cause a disruption in something that an opportunist with resources took advantage of to attack. Maybe she just unleashed the beast, as in an AI with viral capabilities, without knowing enough about it.

We still have a lot to learn, but until we know otherwise, I still think she’s a small actor in a big storm that she still feels guilty about. Kind of like survivors guilt.

As to her parents being alive, we seem to have a lot of info that one of them is definitely deceased. The other, it seems to have some wiggle room. After all, assumed dead without a corpse is kind of a red flag of somebody is coming back. Then they both played a lot of The Game, and it seems they were technically adept and into research, so it might be possible that one or both uploaded to digital form somehow. Though I doubt it would be an active personality at this point, but an active memoir seems possible, if only she can find it. Even with the most advanced research they seemed to have had, a functioning digital human mind seems to be beyond their capabilities. I wouldn’t be surprised if there is a parental cache, it can only be opened by her special powers of access.

Oh well, it’s all just speculation on our part, there’s so much that could still happen in the story. 🙂

what actual bodies have you seen for either of them

Okay, so I think I actually have a solid grasp of what the f*** happened with the hack-o-tron 9000.

When you are designing any security system, you have dual goals:
1) provide access to authorized persons (owners of the system);
2) deny access to unauthorized persons.
As important as step 2 is, if you fail step 1, the system is useless. Passwod recovery, password hints, all the things everywhere designed to make sure you can, in fact, access your accounts. Sure, in the internet step 2 is usually prioritized, so if you f*** up at EVERYTHING you end up genuinely locked out of your account with no means to access it.
But when it comes to your own PC, the physical machine that stands on the table, step 1 is GENERALLY prioritized.

And a thing to understand about this is that even if in theory step 2 is more important for some particular situation, people who actually work with the system tend to prioritize step 1. Writing down passwords, using the same password everywhere – most humans usually think that the reliable ability to actually do the work you need is more important than protection on the off chance someone else decides to f*** you up.

And so companies who make products for human people also might just prioritize useability over security.

And so, if you have access to your computer, its power button, USB slot and keyboard, even if you have forgotten all the passwords in existence and never written them down, chances are good that you’re going to be able to access it, and everything on it, including super-secure wired interfaces to super-secure not-connected-to-internet networks it’s supposed to manage.

(If there’s a server that doesn’t have input devices to it, there is most definitely also a PC somewhere that the administrator/tech support uses to access the server for maintenance and regulation. Human access to EVERYTHING is prioritized)

(Sure, there’s stuff like BIOS password that can stop physical access from being all-overriding, but most people won’t like the idea of actually -using- security measures that can irretrievably lock them out of their own machines…)

Enter technology that I’m going to call future-Bluetooth. No longer do you need to have wires going from your keyboard to your PC in order to manage it! For additional comfort of use, you can also have a USB slot and a power button on it, just so you don’t have to get off the sofa to do anything you want with your PC!

Sure, it -probably- needs some security on it, so you can’t accidentally connect to your neighbour’s PC instead of your own.
Y’know, some. It’s not like a super-hacker is going to walk down the street with a wireless keyboard and try to connect to strangers’ computers with it! That’s just ridiculous, keyboards aren’t made to be used like that! Their wireless connections aren’t even that strong, blocked by a single wall half the time!

Well, Hakido is, and has a strong connection, and presumably doesn’t need to be plugged to the wall to recharge (yay bioelectricity!). And all the human negligence components needed for Kat to have ‘physical access’ to all computers within its impressive range are:
– a wireless ‘peripheral device’ short-range interface with sh***y security Kat can break through;
– this interface being near-universally installed on all machines meant for human access (why make your own marginally-more-secure PCs for your bank’s employees when you can just buy standard issue Macs and call it a day?);
– nearly all machines meant for human access not having security systems against an intruder with physical access (because that’s called ‘guards’ and ‘locked doors’ and ‘motion detectors’ and all the other stuff meant to stop people from physically going into places they don’t belong).

For a cherry on top, let’s imagine the computers also have a remote-turn-on interface that runs on its own battery/accumulator, like a computer clock, and the Hakido can also access that, giving Kat access to even POWERED DOWN machines.

So, secure banking networks? Just access the manager’s / sysadmin’s PC and enjoy the password autocomplete feature! Military networks? Same! The most secure stuff that’s not connected to internet and doesn’t even have physical devices for internet access? Still has future-Bluetooth! F***ing arcade machines? Still need maintenance sometimes, and what’s better for maintenance than installing a future-Bluetooth interface so the techies can comfortably check it out!

Disaster dominoes are lined up, and all it takes is a push…

Now, this features a number of assumed security holes that just need to be patched up to stop Kat from Accessing Everything. Plugging them would mean stopping her… except those holes are distributed. How often do you install ‘necessary security upgrades to your drivers’… on your super secure machine not connected to the internet and so not receiving automatic upgrades? The answer is, as soon as the bureaucracy / the one person responsible for all the security gets to it, and that can be any time from ‘same day’ to infinity. And you’re not going to just f***in disable your PC’s peripheral device interface that probably connects the keyboard you are actually using, especially if you aren’t aware why you should do that.

People who realized the security hole was there deciding to keep mum about it is just… really a cherry on top, meaning the holes had NO CHANCE AT ALL to be plugged.

Of course, the limitation of this is still the fact that Kat needs to be in physical proximity of stuff she wants to hack this way. Too bad she just has to hack it once, and then all the backdoors she can put in are hers.

Oh, and fixing the hole -after- the fact might just only prevent someone else from doing it all over again, and won’t do anything about stuff Kat has already claimed as her own.

So… that’s what happened, I guess.

(this still doesn’t explain sh** about the apocalypse, obvs, nor about Kat’s thought process in turning military robots against the civilian population)

(but at least we can understand this particular page)

Not A Villain Webcomic

Webcomic of a semi- reformed hacker trying to redeem herself in a post- apocalyptic world she may have created.

‘Not A Villain’ Webcomic – Page 609