Which was always pretty stupid. At best it means the Cylons can't hack the whole ship, just whichever part they exploited to gain access remotely in the first place. But really the Cylons would've needed exploits for each individual system anyway, since simply connecting them with wires shouldn't just do that. And unless those other systems are completely air gapped with no wireless or other access, it would be trivial for them to still gain remote access, or have one of their infiltrators provide a local connection of some kind. AFAIR that was never a plot point, which was odd.
I think it's genius to use this element of computer security in narrative fiction. But I think they still had comms across the ship. The cylons could still clone the captain's voice and have random crew members perform arbitrary tasks by directing people to do so over the ship's radio.
Most of the in-ship comms were 'old school' (in our terms) analogue devices. They actually had to pick up speakers. Internal speakers were wired, not radio.
I didn’t follow the whole thread. Just want to point out that over the last 10 years hacking air-gapped systems has been a primary objective. Hard drive clicks, keyboard clicks, CPU squeaks, speaker-to-speaker. Exactly what advanced adversarial AI would be specifically good at.
“Close” in relative terms. It’s been a while and don’t remember, but I think one study concluded it could be done from across the street or through an office window, etc.
It may not sound very exciting, but if you’re the NSA or CIA and you want access to a HVT, then all of these options are on the table if the routine approaches haven’t been successful.
