I think you are missing an important part. The Holonet is like the Internet in china at this point in time. It is very very tightly controlled by the empire.

It was never the internet, more like Teletext, with only certain news services able to post.

If you want an info hub, it can always be a private network accessed only via specific data kiosk or encrypted relay (for example, bounty hunter guild records).

Take note that the HoloNet has been blown out of proportion after the internet age begone, and the trademark was used to facilitate Star Wars website stuff.

http://vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net/starwars/images/2/2e/HNN.png/revision/latest?cb=20080822155755

The Rebels show a great example of the HoloNet via its news broadcasts... simple image projection of a news story. No search option, no sites...

http://www.rotoscopers.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/star-wars-rebels-holonet-news.jpg

-Goofed up the formatting, ended up with a double post. My bad, guys n gals.

I'm so very, very sorry...

I’ve been a professional Unix/network/system administrator longer than many people on this forum have been alive.

EDIT: Man, did I goof up the formatting on this to start with.

Really good stuff guys, lots of great insight. Let me throw this out for fun and perhaps to pin down one reason to have the matter settled in your game.

A PC is waiting for a ride at, lets say a Chandrila spaceport. He is having a drink when he wonders how the pod races turned out on Tatooine two days before. (Purposefully this inquiry is not security sensitive so Im addressing only the technology end, not legalities)

A. He moves to a table with a computer terminal, pays an access fee and logs on to the Holonet Sports and Entertainment database. Flips through a few pages and comes to the results he is looking for, posted by the Hutt's techies after the races.

B. He moves to a table with a computer terminal, pays an access fee and logs on to the system/planetary database. He sees that the most recent Imperial update is 3 days old so it wont have the results he is looking for yet. A banner informs him the next update is scheduled for that evening so he can check back later.

C. As there is no way to access such information directly, he makes a call or stops by the local news service and pays for the query. The clerk behind the desk tells him he can request the results via Holonet transfer for 10 credits and get a response in under a minute, or use a subspace carrier message for half that price but it will take a few hours for the response to arrive.

Thoughts?

Remember the bar scene on Coruscant from AOTC? Remember the sports broadcasts from what are clearly 3 different planets? (And if the middle one is on Coruscant, there's no way the other two are.) There's no reason to suspect that these aren't "live". So how are they getting them? Guessing some version of your Option A.

Regarding the Death Star Plans and email. We know that the data wasn't so big that it couldn't be transmitted as that's how Leia got it in the first place. But, from that point on she never really had a chance. While traveling to Tatooine, she didn't realize she'd been made and thus wouldn't want to broadcast that info from the Tantive IV as that would have linked her to the Rebellion. Once over Tatooine, the Devastator was so close that it would be jamming their transmissions anyway. So she sticks the droids in the escape pod. Once Luke finds it, he doesn't have any information about where the rebel base is so he and Obi-Wan have no idea where to send them.

Once they rescue Leia, they are already on their way to the base so there's no reason to transmit them since that would reveal the Falcon's location (of course, she already knew she was being tracked but she went to the rebel base anyway which, IMO, makes no sense).

I imagine that the scene in ESB where they are looking for a place to go was Han searching the internet for info. First he googles "Anoat System" and get's a few hits (Leia responds "there's not much there"). Then Han sees a hit that mentions Lando which he clicks on to bring up the info on the Bespin gas mine.

Remember the bar scene on Coruscant from AOTC? Remember the sports broadcasts from what are clearly 3 different planets? (And if the middle one is on Coruscant, there's no way the other two are.) There's no reason to suspect that these aren't "live". So how are they getting them? Guessing some version of your Option A.

Sadly, I think they're getting them through the "George Lucas thought this would look cool, how it works be damned" network.

Good point on the Leia/Han Googling scene. It would seem they did have access to a database of some kind. Of course it could have been only the Falcon's own personal database set up and recorded by Han but he had to have downloaded the data from somewhere.

Im leaning more and more towards a publicly accessible, albeit Imperial controlled, galaxy wide holonet that effectively provides much of the same services as our own internet. If for no other reason its so **** convenient in any number of storyline uses. Access would depend on satellite relays and such and therefore some remote areas might not have service and have to depend on scheduled subspace data-bursts and the like to get their news but as a rule the net is the information highway.

Communications (unsecure and without fear of eavesdropping authorities that is) could utilize the same net through whatever format requested (written, video, hologram etc.) essentially piggy-backing on the continuous flow of FTL transmissions that keep the net up and working. I suppose it could be hacked to provide a medium for unauthorized communication as well but it would be risky, using the Empire's own system for criminal/rebel activity. And lastly I suppose there could be private alternatives. Hard to imagine the Empire tolerating that though.

Sadly, I think they're getting them through the "George Lucas thought this would look cool, how it works be damned" network.

Well, that's the same network that provided us with Laser Sword Magic Ninjas, so...I'm rather inclined to favour it.

Communications (unsecure and without fear of eavesdropping authorities that is) could utilize the same net through whatever format requested (written, video, hologram etc.) essentially piggy-backing on the continuous flow of FTL transmissions that keep the net up and working. I suppose it could be hacked to provide a medium for unauthorized communication as well but it would be risky, using the Empire's own system for criminal/rebel activity. And lastly I suppose there could be private alternatives. Hard to imagine the Empire tolerating that though.

It's VERY hard to control the flow of data, who copies, shares, stores, distributes what. Real-world underground groups from the nefarious to the sickening to the well-intentioned are able to evade government control of the internet -- and the difficulty is exponentiation as more people and more "nodes" are added.

It's not like the Empire can monitor everything that gets carried and copied "on sneakernet" via the millions of ships out there, the files on billions of datapads, etc.

Communications (unsecure and without fear of eavesdropping authorities that is) could utilize the same net through whatever format requested (written, video, hologram etc.) essentially piggy-backing on the continuous flow of FTL transmissions that keep the net up and working. I suppose it could be hacked to provide a medium for unauthorized communication as well but it would be risky, using the Empire's own system for criminal/rebel activity. And lastly I suppose there could be private alternatives. Hard to imagine the Empire tolerating that though.

It's VERY hard to control the flow of data, who copies, shares, stores, distributes what. Real-world underground groups from the nefarious to the sickening to the well-intentioned are able to evade government control of the internet -- and the difficulty is exponentiation as more people

It's not like the Empire can monitor everything that gets carried and copied "on sneakernet" via the millions of ships out there, the files on billions of datapads, etc.

"You can't stop the signal, Mal."

Communications (unsecure and without fear of eavesdropping authorities that is) could utilize the same net through whatever format requested (written, video, hologram etc.) essentially piggy-backing on the continuous flow of FTL transmissions that keep the net up and working. I suppose it could be hacked to provide a medium for unauthorized communication as well but it would be risky, using the Empire's own system for criminal/rebel activity. And lastly I suppose there could be private alternatives. Hard to imagine the Empire tolerating that though.

It's VERY hard to control the flow of data, who copies, shares, stores, distributes what. Real-world underground groups from the nefarious to the sickening to the well-intentioned are able to evade government control of the internet -- and the difficulty is exponentiation as more people

It's not like the Empire can monitor everything that gets carried and copied "on sneakernet" via the millions of ships out there, the files on billions of datapads, etc.

"You can't stop the signal, Mal."

I bet when someone steals the Death Star Plans Vader just tells one dude somewhere to press one button and turn the Holonet off.

It's hard to monitor stuff when you're dealing with a conglomeration of private companies in a country that extends civil liberties like we have. Easier in a place where the gubmint runs the infrastructure, has no civil liberties, and has blanket policies that say if you allow your system to be used by the Rebels we'll come kill you, your whole company, your family and your whole town. Lotsa people ratting each other out in that kinda environment, way less need to monitor anything.

You're probably stuck with having some smart ass 18 year old member of royalty carrying your stuff at that point.

Really good stuff guys, lots of great insight. Let me throw this out for fun and perhaps to pin down one reason to have the matter settled in your game.

A PC is waiting for a ride at, lets say a Chandrila spaceport. He is having a drink when he wonders how the pod races turned out on Tatooine two days before. (Purposefully this inquiry is not security sensitive so Im addressing only the technology end, not legalities)

A. He moves to a table with a computer terminal, pays an access fee and logs on to the Holonet Sports and Entertainment database. Flips through a few pages and comes to the results he is looking for, posted by the Hutt's techies after the races.

B. He moves to a table with a computer terminal, pays an access fee and logs on to the system/planetary database. He sees that the most recent Imperial update is 3 days old so it wont have the results he is looking for yet. A banner informs him the next update is scheduled for that evening so he can check back later.

C. As there is no way to access such information directly, he makes a call or stops by the local news service and pays for the query. The clerk behind the desk tells him he can request the results via Holonet transfer for 10 credits and get a response in under a minute, or use a subspace carrier message for half that price but it will take a few hours for the response to arrive.

Thoughts?

Remember the bar scene on Coruscant from AOTC? Remember the sports broadcasts from what are clearly 3 different planets? (And if the middle one is on Coruscant, there's no way the other two are.) There's no reason to suspect that these aren't "live". So how are they getting them? Guessing some version of your Option A.

It doesn't have to be truly live. It could be three days old and playing "live" for the first time locally. I recall being deployed in the military and watching the super bowl several hours late on a military station. There were strict unofficial rules for not revealing the final score before it was televised locally in case someone got a call from home (internet not what it is today). In Star Wars, you wouldn't have to worry about a phone call or text from light years away spoiling it for you. Thus the local first possible broadcast of special events would still have the feeling of being live even if days old.

B was my favorite from the list above.

Really good stuff guys, lots of great insight. Let me throw this out for fun and perhaps to pin down one reason to have the matter settled in your game.

A PC is waiting for a ride at, lets say a Chandrila spaceport. He is having a drink when he wonders how the pod races turned out on Tatooine two days before. (Purposefully this inquiry is not security sensitive so Im addressing only the technology end, not legalities)

A. He moves to a table with a computer terminal, pays an access fee and logs on to the Holonet Sports and Entertainment database. Flips through a few pages and comes to the results he is looking for, posted by the Hutt's techies after the races.

B. He moves to a table with a computer terminal, pays an access fee and logs on to the system/planetary database. He sees that the most recent Imperial update is 3 days old so it wont have the results he is looking for yet. A banner informs him the next update is scheduled for that evening so he can check back later.

C. As there is no way to access such information directly, he makes a call or stops by the local news service and pays for the query. The clerk behind the desk tells him he can request the results via Holonet transfer for 10 credits and get a response in under a minute, or use a subspace carrier message for half that price but it will take a few hours for the response to arrive.

Thoughts?

Remember the bar scene on Coruscant from AOTC? Remember the sports broadcasts from what are clearly 3 different planets? (And if the middle one is on Coruscant, there's no way the other two are.) There's no reason to suspect that these aren't "live". So how are they getting them? Guessing some version of your Option A.

It doesn't have to be truly live. It could be three days old and playing "live" for the first time locally. I recall being deployed in the military and watching the super bowl several hours late on a military station. There were strict unofficial rules for not revealing the final score before it was televised locally in case someone got a call from home (internet not what it is today). In Star Wars, you wouldn't have to worry about a phone call or text from light years away spoiling it for you. Thus the local first possible broadcast of special events would still have the feeling of being live even if days old.

B was my favorite from the list above.

I think you are all trying to solve this with your 21st century brains. As a child of the 70's, I think it is a more simple solution.

He goes to sports bar (similar to the movie) and they are streaming vision via a comms channel, no different to a TV set, only its an intergalactic signal being beamed to the bar. Don't think of it as a computer terminal, a webpage, or the holonet, think of it more like how TV made it to bars in the late 20th century.

I second Andreievitch solution, it's the simplest and most logical given the timeframe the OT films were made. I also think that solution B is also very good for outside of a cantina. Solution c would work for the outer rim worlds: we never see tv screens on Tatooine's cantina, i bet they used radios to relay informations to thos who were interested, or the patrons simply went to the "sport building/betting shop" where they could watch the matches.

Really good stuff guys, lots of great insight. Let me throw this out for fun and perhaps to pin down one reason to have the matter settled in your game.

A PC is waiting for a ride at, lets say a Chandrila spaceport. He is having a drink when he wonders how the pod races turned out on Tatooine two days before. (Purposefully this inquiry is not security sensitive so Im addressing only the technology end, not legalities)

A. He moves to a table with a computer terminal, pays an access fee and logs on to the Holonet Sports and Entertainment database. Flips through a few pages and comes to the results he is looking for, posted by the Hutt's techies after the races.

B. He moves to a table with a computer terminal, pays an access fee and logs on to the system/planetary database. He sees that the most recent Imperial update is 3 days old so it wont have the results he is looking for yet. A banner informs him the next update is scheduled for that evening so he can check back later.

C. As there is no way to access such information directly, he makes a call or stops by the local news service and pays for the query. The clerk behind the desk tells him he can request the results via Holonet transfer for 10 credits and get a response in under a minute, or use a subspace carrier message for half that price but it will take a few hours for the response to arrive.

Thoughts?

Remember the bar scene on Coruscant from AOTC? Remember the sports broadcasts from what are clearly 3 different planets? (And if the middle one is on Coruscant, there's no way the other two are.) There's no reason to suspect that these aren't "live". So how are they getting them? Guessing some version of your Option A.

It doesn't have to be truly live. It could be three days old and playing "live" for the first time locally. I recall being deployed in the military and watching the super bowl several hours late on a military station. There were strict unofficial rules for not revealing the final score before it was televised locally in case someone got a call from home (internet not what it is today). In Star Wars, you wouldn't have to worry about a phone call or text from light years away spoiling it for you. Thus the local first possible broadcast of special events would still have the feeling of being live even if days old.

B was my favorite from the list above.

I think you are all trying to solve this with your 21st century brains. As a child of the 70's, I think it is a more simple solution.

He goes to sports bar (similar to the movie) and they are streaming vision via a comms channel, no different to a TV set, only its an intergalactic signal being beamed to the bar. Don't think of it as a computer terminal, a webpage, or the holonet, think of it more like how TV made it to bars in the late 20th century.

So how is that live signal being sent live from a planet orbiting a star the light from which won't reach the sports bar for 1000 years?

And why can't that same "how" be used for other purposes?

it's being sent through and hyperpsace transceivers, or a dedicated channel on the holonet, cuase it's not a sensitive information.

It probably can be used for other purposes but the point is that PC don't have ways to routinely exploit that possibility, with the exclusion of holo-comlnks maybe. I wouldn't be surprised if there are "holonet kiosks" similar to the old phone booths to deal with long distance private messages.

it's being sent through and hyperpsace transceivers, or a dedicated channel on the holonet, cuase it's not a sensitive information.

It probably can be used for other purposes but the point is that PC don't have ways to routinely exploit that possibility, with the exclusion of holo-comlnks maybe. I wouldn't be surprised if there are "holonet kiosks" similar to the old phone booths to deal with long distance private messages.

As long as you can set up the explanation such that it gives you the capabilities and feel you want, and it stands up to some scrutiny, that's fine.

I think it might be best to focus on what we know can actually happen.

1. We know it's possible to send huge amounts of data wirelessly (source: Leia getting the death star plans via a "transmission").

2. We know that it's possible to have a real time conversation anywhere in the galaxy, even from remote areas (source: Obi-wan talking to the Jedi Temple while on Kamino)

3. We know it's possible to send photographic data from remote location nearly instantly (source: probe droid in ESB)

The sports broadcast from AotC posted earlier is convincing to me. Even a tiny delay on a sporting event that's being gambled upon can give the house a huge advantage and wouldn't be allowed in any legitimate establishment. Since we know that people can talk via holograms without any noticeable delay, the broadcast have to be live feeds.

The Empire Strikes Back probe droid is, to me, the most significant demonstration of SW data communication. These relatively small droids are sending video and data from a remote planet with their own built-in transmitters. The transmission capabilities of this little droid are so well known, that General Rieekan starts the evacuation procedure the instant he learns that the droid is present.

To me it's looks like the SW has the technology to create a galaxy-wide internet. So, the question becomes why don't we see any evidence of such a thing. The most likely culprit I can see is cost: The internet of our world exists because companies create the infrastructure and then sell access to that infrastructure to customers. Each company's servers agree to handle all the data from their competitors in exchange for their data also going through. In the SW galaxy, the cost of this infrastructure might be much higher than what regular customers are willing to pay. IOW, people aren't willing to pay 1,000 credits a month to download cat videos. No views equals no demand. If providing the data isn't profitable, it would fall upon governments to build and maintain the system. Imagine if there was one T1 data line connecting Earth to the rest of the galaxy. With a fixed data throughput, you'd see companies and local governments bidding on bandwidth pricing the regular guy out of the market. It might end up in a similar situation to broadcast TV and radio. Even though the technology exists for me to create my own private TV station, I can't really do it.

Plus, the SW-internet would be hundreds if not thousands of years old. People simply wouldn't be impressed by some guy's home-made movies about video games.

EDIT: Man, did I goof up the formatting on this to start with.

I remember when that came out, and I already had experience with the SGI computers that were used to create that sequence. Sigh….

Real Unix admins use only the command-line interface as God and Dennis Ritchie intended, not these silly clicky-GUI things.

It's VERY hard to control the flow of data, who copies, shares, stores, distributes what. Real-world underground groups from the nefarious to the sickening to the well-intentioned are able to evade government control of the internet -- and the difficulty is exponentiation as more people and more "nodes" are added.

It's not like the Empire can monitor everything that gets carried and copied "on sneakernet" via the millions of ships out there, the files on billions of datapads, etc.

If the original computer chips that were first made had a backdoor built into them, and that was a smart backdoor that could hide the existence of that backdoor being propagated to the next generation of chips, then there would be no way to ever tell that your computer systems are compromised.

Ken Thompson (one of the original creators of the Unix operating system) had a nice little paper printed entitled “Trusting Trust” in 1984 which addressed this concept. See https://www.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/712.fall02/papers/p761-thompson.pdf

When that paper was published, virtually the entire computer world completely and totally freaked out, because they thought that he might have actually compromised the assembler and C compiler in the way he described. He had to do some work to convince people that this was all just a thought experiment.

These days, virtually all computer systems are manufactured in China, unless they are military or important enough to the government that they are required to be manufactured here in the US, and required to use government certified parts. Even then, it would be easy enough for the Chinese (or Russians, or someone else) to get people into the “trusted system” so as to compromise those parts — certainly no harder than it is to steal classified military secrets.

There’s a lot of stuff that the Chinese just let happen, because they want to keep tabs on people, and they don’t want to risk exposing the unique methods they have available to them. When they can construct adequate means to get those people in some other way and not risk their prime advantage, then they can move forward.

In the US, we do the same thing with the spying systems that were exposed by Ed Snowden, and the FBI and BATF do the same with cell site simulators (a.k.a., Stingrays).

If you really want to go down this rathole, keep in mind that I was read onto the Top Secret/SCI compartments for these areas, and I’ve been tracking this subject for decades. I know the material I can talk about, and the material I can’t.

I’m more than happy to have this discussion with you (and anyone else who is interested), but at that point we’re talking more about Ronald Reagan’s version of Star Wars than we are the George Lucas version.

I wouldn't be surprised if there are "holonet kiosks" similar to the old phone booths to deal with long distance private messages.

Didn’t we see those in an episode of TCW?

Really good stuff guys, lots of great insight. Let me throw this out for fun and perhaps to pin down one reason to have the matter settled in your game.

A PC is waiting for a ride at, lets say a Chandrila spaceport. He is having a drink when he wonders how the pod races turned out on Tatooine two days before. (Purposefully this inquiry is not security sensitive so Im addressing only the technology end, not legalities)

A. He moves to a table with a computer terminal, pays an access fee and logs on to the Holonet Sports and Entertainment database. Flips through a few pages and comes to the results he is looking for, posted by the Hutt's techies after the races.

B. He moves to a table with a computer terminal, pays an access fee and logs on to the system/planetary database. He sees that the most recent Imperial update is 3 days old so it wont have the results he is looking for yet. A banner informs him the next update is scheduled for that evening so he can check back later.

C. As there is no way to access such information directly, he makes a call or stops by the local news service and pays for the query. The clerk behind the desk tells him he can request the results via Holonet transfer for 10 credits and get a response in under a minute, or use a subspace carrier message for half that price but it will take a few hours for the response to arrive.

Thoughts?

Remember the bar scene on Coruscant from AOTC? Remember the sports broadcasts from what are clearly 3 different planets? (And if the middle one is on Coruscant, there's no way the other two are.) There's no reason to suspect that these aren't "live". So how are they getting them? Guessing some version of your Option A.

This is pre imperial control of the holonet

This is pre imperial control of the holonet

And...? If the Imperial government shut off sports feeds, every citizen and soldier would revote.

This is pre imperial control of the holonet

And...? If the Imperial government shut off sports feeds, every citizen and soldier would revote.

The empire chooses what it allows on the holonet. They may allow some through and other not...