Thursday 14 January 2016

star trek - How did Data so easily access and control the Borg ship?

Several points:



  • A wise command structure does not apply commands globally by default, but locally. (And this, alone, is likely the answer.)


  • Sometimes commands can have default settings. For instance, in Unix, the command "rm *" applies to the current directory, not to every directory on the drive. It also doesn't descend into subdirectories unless you tell it to.


  • There would be propagation delays. There was one cube in the Alpha Quadrant (or one that we know of -- maybe there were a couple back-up ones that got blown up without our knowledge). The others were far away, so the command would have taken time to reach them.


  • With any networking system, it's prudent to not always trust something just because it came from another node without verifying it. Think of it in today's terms: Something might come into your LAN from another LAN that you trust, but it's still possible it was from malware, so it's still wise to scan it for issues. Other cubes, or the collective as a whole, probably scans incoming communications from members to be sure they're valid and free of malware.


Think of how vulnerable the Borg would be if a command like "sleep" were to work on the entire collective at once. Such a command, like many others, would work only on a local level by default. (Or, as a safety, it could be that such commands would never work globally and would have to be activated on each individual ship separately.)



The question is, more likely, why it didn't effect Locutus' subgroup (or unimatrix, or whatever the proper term is) only. But since Data was gaining access to the command structure, it is very likely that along with finding the commands, he was also able to find out how to pass parameters with it, such as, "sleep --range=cube."

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