Taking a page from Yik Sheng Lee's playbook, and reposting a recent comment of mine to a Niantic Project thread, so...
Taking a page from Yik Sheng Lee's playbook, and reposting a recent comment of mine to a Niantic Project thread, so that those here can comment directly:
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Lets talk about the portal discovery process and the implications of being a seer for a bit. You come across a piece of artwork and say to yourself "That has to be a portal" but when you check your scanner, nothing is shown.
So you submit it, and after some time, you get an email back from NIA SuperOps or Ingress Operations or whatever they're calling themselves this month, and it says "Success" and now sure enough that piece of artwork now shows a portal the next time you go by that spot with your scanner.
This is the part that I think some agents get confused on. Even though the label on the long-press gesture menu on the scanner says "New Portal" NIA SuperOps/Ingress Operations doesn't send out a portal construction team to come out and weaken the fabric between dimensions to make a portal at that spot. We don't have that technology.
The portal was already there and has always been there. (Or may have recently moved there, if Lightman's observations on moving portals are accurate.)
The reason it didn't show on your scanner is that each portal (and the XM spilliage it emits) has its own unique signature frequency, and the scanner didn't know to look for that signature until it got added to the Intel Package that gets downloaded to your scanner each time you start it up.
So if portals are there whether or not they're listed in the Intel Package, and all that's needed for the Shapers to pattern an XM Entity copy of someone is for that person to "bask in the presence of XM" and "spend time at the portals", why would Jarvis say here that "The Scanner is the key"? What difference does the Scanner make?
The difference is Control Fields, which project the influence and XM of a portal over a much wider area, extending it to places that aren't near any portal.
So what of the "false portals" that are mentioned, what does Roland refer to there? I believe that this stems from the fact that our methods for detecting unique XM signature frequencies aren't entirely accurate yet, especially with the remote sensing techniques that Ingress Operations must employ.
These satellite surveys have already picked up a trace background noise of XM that does not seem to be associated with any particular portal; these may be residuals from Lightman's moving portals, sensor echos of portal-associated XM that is located in another location, or they may be leaks in the dimensional fabric too small to be classified as full portals. And again, we only see XM that matches a frequency in the Intel Package, there is likely a lot more Background XM that is undetected.
Some Agents try to game the system, using these traces of Background XM to try to trick Ingress Operations into marking a location as a portal when there's no proper portal there. Links and fields created off of these false portals still spread the touch of XM, but without any intelligent force behind it to guide and moderate the effect. The effects of this are unknown and unpredictable.
No matter what your feelings are of Roland Jarvis and his Shaper friends, this warning against false portals should be heeded by both factions. If you think a city has too many cars on the road, causing smog, noise pollution, and putting pedestrians at risk of being run over, sticking more cars on the road, driverless, with bricks on the accelerator pedals is not a solution. Sure, it makes it harder on the other drivers, but you're going to aggravate all of the problems you're trying to curb before you frustrate those drivers into staying home.
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Lets talk about the portal discovery process and the implications of being a seer for a bit. You come across a piece of artwork and say to yourself "That has to be a portal" but when you check your scanner, nothing is shown.
So you submit it, and after some time, you get an email back from NIA SuperOps or Ingress Operations or whatever they're calling themselves this month, and it says "Success" and now sure enough that piece of artwork now shows a portal the next time you go by that spot with your scanner.
This is the part that I think some agents get confused on. Even though the label on the long-press gesture menu on the scanner says "New Portal" NIA SuperOps/Ingress Operations doesn't send out a portal construction team to come out and weaken the fabric between dimensions to make a portal at that spot. We don't have that technology.
The portal was already there and has always been there. (Or may have recently moved there, if Lightman's observations on moving portals are accurate.)
The reason it didn't show on your scanner is that each portal (and the XM spilliage it emits) has its own unique signature frequency, and the scanner didn't know to look for that signature until it got added to the Intel Package that gets downloaded to your scanner each time you start it up.
So if portals are there whether or not they're listed in the Intel Package, and all that's needed for the Shapers to pattern an XM Entity copy of someone is for that person to "bask in the presence of XM" and "spend time at the portals", why would Jarvis say here that "The Scanner is the key"? What difference does the Scanner make?
The difference is Control Fields, which project the influence and XM of a portal over a much wider area, extending it to places that aren't near any portal.
So what of the "false portals" that are mentioned, what does Roland refer to there? I believe that this stems from the fact that our methods for detecting unique XM signature frequencies aren't entirely accurate yet, especially with the remote sensing techniques that Ingress Operations must employ.
These satellite surveys have already picked up a trace background noise of XM that does not seem to be associated with any particular portal; these may be residuals from Lightman's moving portals, sensor echos of portal-associated XM that is located in another location, or they may be leaks in the dimensional fabric too small to be classified as full portals. And again, we only see XM that matches a frequency in the Intel Package, there is likely a lot more Background XM that is undetected.
Some Agents try to game the system, using these traces of Background XM to try to trick Ingress Operations into marking a location as a portal when there's no proper portal there. Links and fields created off of these false portals still spread the touch of XM, but without any intelligent force behind it to guide and moderate the effect. The effects of this are unknown and unpredictable.
No matter what your feelings are of Roland Jarvis and his Shaper friends, this warning against false portals should be heeded by both factions. If you think a city has too many cars on the road, causing smog, noise pollution, and putting pedestrians at risk of being run over, sticking more cars on the road, driverless, with bricks on the accelerator pedals is not a solution. Sure, it makes it harder on the other drivers, but you're going to aggravate all of the problems you're trying to curb before you frustrate those drivers into staying home.
What worries me is agents haven't yet had to worry about common portals generating chaotic matter, rather than (relatively) safe XM. We don't know what these false portals could do to change that. The data from these portals, carried across links, could destabilize existing portals and fields. The proliferation of these portals could lead to trace amounts of dark XM leakage, endangering and mutilating agents before the NIA have time to lock down the portal. The consequences could be terrifying.
ReplyDeleteAn alternative point of view:
ReplyDeletehttp://ingressresist.tumblr.com/post/68714125755/on-deception-and-false-portals
I forget where I heard this, but it was said to "submit portals that you yourself would want to visit - more specifically, those you would want to be led to if you had only an hour to experience an unfamiliar region"
ReplyDeleteConnection to the history of a place is a factor. There are many grave markers in the world and to consider all of them portals ("but they are sculptures!") dilutes their presence. It is a different matter to find a radiant headstone with a name that you recognized from a park across town, and hey, this old building has that name on it too but it isn't in the scanner... what else did this person accomplish in their recent life? Did they leave any other traces?
There is also a subtle difference between "fake" portals and multiple interaction points of what Devra I think called a "super portal" in her presentation to the CDC. Think of a plaque in memory of a local person; to find it by itself, one might be upset for making the drive. To find it with 10 others in a woodland along a path also with a piece of statuary or what have you - this is much nicer and now you've taken a walk around that path on a warm spring day and you're glad you went out of your way.
Of course the scanner is key! Not everyone is naturally aware of these things; one might drive the same route to work every day, and they pass that park and at best they think "oh, there is the park, I am almost to the office" - put a scanner in their hands and now they know who their grammar school was named for and what that weird rock in the distance is, and maybe now they want to see what else in life they have glossed over.
That sounds like it may have been a John Hanke quote from an interview.
ReplyDeleteAh yes, that's where I saw it, the decodeingress interview
ReplyDelete