Thread by @rdonoghue

Strikes me that a great political issue in a cyberpunk setting is the "Right to patch". If you have cyberware installed in your body, are you entitled to security updates? If no, then you're signing up for extortion, which seems like it would make the obvious answer "no", but!

That's evil you could explain to a 5 year old, and megacorps are at least a little sophisticated. They get your money by making you WANT to spend it, and conceding on this gives the government (such as it is) a "win", which is great optics.

And, critically, the details are in the fine print. Yes, security and stability patches are mandatory for a "reasonable period" after release. Which means that rather than nickel and diming you with service fees on your heart, they mandate a replacement when it goes EOL.

And, of course, because the patches are free and required, they're also *mandatory*. Blocking your cyberware from taking the latest upgrade is not only illegal, it's a health code violation, and that's serious business.

So, of course, some people strenuously object to patching. Put on tinfoil hats and such. They're seen as cranks because the alternative is leaving your kidney with a zero day exploit. So they *are* cranks, but they also aren't.

By cementing the "right to patch", the megacorps have a legally sanctioned back door into your body, and most people will fight to keep it that way. Just another day in Cyberpunk.

There's almost certainly an open source patching movement, but it doesn't have much funding, and it's viewed as "too fiddly" for most people, but they quietly save thousands of lives each ear by re-enabling EOL'd organs.

Of course, it's also got a bad rap because any back alley doc who doesn't have an in with a corp has to install the open source stuff on their wares. They're not IT professionals, so it's often outdated, infected or both. Many hyperenthusiastic stories equate it to crime

Ironically, some docs (or their employers) use this situation to blackmail their employees in exactly the way that right ro path was designed to prevent. Because their folks are reliant on off-market patching, their whole stack is compromised.

Why install a cranium bomb when instead you can just turn off their lungs if they disobey?

This is, of course, why it's always cheaper to go to a ripperdoc. The real cost of cyberware is not in the chrome, it's in the extended maintenance.

But it's also why you better damn well trust your doc.

Tangential to all this, some day when there are panels and conventions again, I fully intend to hijack @multiplexer To talk about cyberpunk and banking.