Editing Mesh (section)

=== Sidebar: Aether Jabber ===
''# Start Æther Jabber ## Active Members: 2 #>>I have to tell you, after losing Kiri and Sal to that Exsurgent infection, my team is a lot more worried about contracting the virus from digital sources. Actually, I’d label them as paranoid. I don’t think they’ll ever touch any salvaged electronics again unless they’re behind a zillion ﬁrewalls and the device is completely isolated and tested by a delta fork loaded with every antiviral ware we can ﬁnd ﬁrst. Even then, they’d rather shoot it than access directly or hook it up to an important network. After seeing what the virus did to Sal, I don’t blame them.<<In our line of work, paranoia can be healthy.>>Sure, but it’s also a pain in the ass. Security is always a trade-off. Firewall’s gotta have something up its sleeve that I can pass along to the rest to put their guards at ease.<<Yes ... and no. It’s complicated.>>I don’t see why. Do we have a way of detecting and killing this thing or not?<<Sort of.>>You’re killing me.<<Look. Ever since the Fall, we've had measures in place to detect and counteract Exsurgent infections and all of the other worms and malware the TITANs concocted. Firewall went to great lengths to make sure that everyone had access to the detection signatures and countermeasures—and we mean everyone. They’ve been incorporated in almost every commercial and open source security software released in the past decade. Every habitat in the system—well, every one with a lick of sense anyway—employs such measures in their chokepoints and mesh infrastructure.>>I sense a “but.”<<Yes. The problem is that the Exsurgent virus and similar TITAN infowar worms are adaptive. They’re intelligent. Even though we mostly eradicated them from our networks, new versions periodically pop up, using some new trick to get past the Firewall scans and wreak havoc. Our warning and outbreak response system has it down to a science, and such instances are usually contained.>>Usually.<<Well, there’s always the chance that variants are still skipping around out there, under our radar. What’s worse to contemplate, though, is that we may get another major outbreak that spreads to multiple habitats before we can contain it. That might get very, very bad, very, very quickly.''