RPing Questions? Ask Here!

[Sunset]

Post by Atlantica » Fri Mar 13, 2015 5:11 am
On MT RP's, how should cyberattacks be RP-ed?

Just for funsies, I'm gonna go into a little more detail to give some examples and some counters...

Mainstream Media/Movie Cyberattack:

"We're hacking their systems to take them offline!" *Five Minutes Later...* "Looks like the hamsters are dead! Let's go!"

Real World Cyberattack:

Stuxnet (And a lot of this is supposition);

Four years ago, a worm was discovered inside Iranian industrial control systems that was designed to subtly destroy the uranium centrifuges they controlled but the origins of the worm were likely much earlier, possibly as much as a decade. However many years it was, Israeli or American Intelligence came across the idea of using cyberwarfare to delay or destroy the Iranian nuclear industry before it really got started. In order to go about this, they needed a lot of planning and we'll start with that.

First they needed to know what industrial control units the Iranians were using. They would have tracked this down through purchase records, looking through garbage bins for sales receipts, manuals, or look at what Iranian intelligence was trying to get their hands on. Then they would have gone out, bought said unit themselves, and torn it apart to figure out how it worked and what the vulnerabilities were. Then they can write the virus portion of the worm.

Next is a target/chump (AKA Spear Phishing). They need a way into the facility because the first rule of IT security is that if it's Important (Capital I) you do not connect it to the Internet. Again, you do not connect anything Important to the Internet. Period. Full stop. Don't listen to the managers, don't listen to the CEO, listen to the former Air Force penetration tester who taught my systems admin class; Do Not Connect Anything Important to the Internet. Otherwise it is considered to be hacked. Not if - It already has been. Interestingly, the Iranians knew this and thus didn't have these machines connected to the Internet. Thus the chump.

The target was likely a manager probably in the middle somewhere of the organizational chart. You know the type; Just smart enough to get the job, just dumb enough to be a pain in the ass every day. The kind of guy who will open the attachment on a carefully crafted email that purports to be pictures of his daughter at her birthday (and might just be, given American satellite imaging resolutions) but with a secondary payload of the worm.

Now the worm is going to sit there on his and perhaps others systems for who-knows-how-long because one target isn't really enough. You need a shotgun for things like this. The more targets you potentially hit, the more chance that one of those stupid, willful, stubborn middle managers who has been told better by IT but will do it anyway because it's convenient will take his thumb drive with those pictures of his daughters birthday party on it, load the spreadsheet or the movie or whatever onto it, and plug it into the supposedly isolated systems that are connected to those industrial controllers. Then, and only then, it will spread out and start the dirty deed.

For the next few months those centrifuges will spin and spin and spin too fast or wobble or too slow or mysteriously fail in the middle of the night. And then they break. Because you need 20,000 of the buggers to make the uranium you need. Every one destroyed puts you a little more behind.

That is a real cyberattack with real consequences. Forget what they show on TV; Real attacks don't take minutes, they take months, years. Because even with precision knowledge of the computers, the human side of the attack is often the most difficult. You need to find out who the chump is (Spear Phishing), and why they are the chump.

How to RP it?

Well, if you're serious about it, you could spend a whole year doing the run-up to the attack itself (and it could still fail). The intelligence agent on the street going through the manager's garbage at 2 in the morning looking for an owners manual, every day, for a year, until he finds it and the receipt for birthday supplies. The guys at the NRO (National Reconnaissance Office) who points a satellite at that guy's backyard and takes some pretty pictures. The Director who pieces the whole thing together. The stupid chump who falls for it. The maintenance guy who complains about a lack of parts (which is how Stuxnet 'worked').

[Oceans Haven]

Ok so, Ive been on NS before but Ive never really rped here. Ive done rps outside of NS but nothing quite this.......complex...feels like you need a PhD in politics, finance, psychology and memorize "Art of War" just to ask another nation to be your friend so Im not sure how to start. Literally. As a result I have a few questions...first, i read in a guide the average nations military should be around 3-5% its population. But what if youre a nation that has its citizens join the military as a government law? (example in my nation everyone must serve 1 year active duty in the navy/air corp then either continue their naval/air corp career or join the reserve where they lead civilian lives unless a national emergency occurs)

[Roski]

Ok so, Ive been on NS before but Ive never really rped here. Ive done rps outside of NS but nothing quite this.......complex...feels like you need a PhD in politics, finance, psychology and memorize "Art of War" just to ask another nation to be your friend so Im not sure how to start. Literally. As a result I have a few questions...first, i read in a guide the average nations military should be around 3-5% its population. But what if youre a nation that has its citizens join the military as a government law? (example in my nation everyone must serve 1 year active duty in the navy/air corp then either continue their naval/air corp career or join the reserve where they lead civilian lives unless a national emergency occurs)

Then you have a large, likely lowly equiped military.

Unless you're one of the lucky ones where a superpower literally funds your military.

[Oceans Haven]

Ok so, Ive been on NS before but Ive never really rped here. Ive done rps outside of NS but nothing quite this.......complex...feels like you need a PhD in politics, finance, psychology and memorize "Art of War" just to ask another nation to be your friend so Im not sure how to start. Literally. As a result I have a few questions...first, i read in a guide the average nations military should be around 3-5% its population. But what if youre a nation that has its citizens join the military as a government law? (example in my nation everyone must serve 1 year active duty in the navy/air corp then either continue their naval/air corp career or join the reserve where they lead civilian lives unless a national emergency occurs)

Then you have a large, likely lowly equiped military.

Unless you're one of the lucky ones where a superpower literally funds your military.

i pretty much tax the crap out of my citizens and almost solely focus on my navy and naval air force (i say air corp but my nations a seafaring nomadic one. so its literally nothing but boats, stupidly huge ships and aircraft carriers both civilian and military. ) but i basically dont have an army at all.

[Roski]

Then you have a large, likely lowly equiped military.

Unless you're one of the lucky ones where a superpower literally funds your military.

i pretty much tax the crap out if my citizens and almost solely focus on my navy and naval air force (i say air corp but my nations a seafaring nomadic one. so its literally nothing but boats, stupidly huge ships and aircraft carriers both civilian and military. ) but i basically dont have an army at all.

The higher the taxes, the lower the incentive to work (and if you pull the whole "I force them to work", there would be little stimulation of the economy, which isn't a good idea).

[Yalos]

Ok so, Ive been on NS before but Ive never really rped here. Ive done rps outside of NS but nothing quite this.......complex...feels like you need a PhD in politics, finance, psychology and memorize "Art of War" just to ask another nation to be your friend so Im not sure how to start. Literally. As a result I have a few questions...first, i read in a guide the average nations military should be around 3-5% its population. But what if youre a nation that has its citizens join the military as a government law? (example in my nation everyone must serve 1 year active duty in the navy/air corp then either continue their naval/air corp career or join the reserve where they lead civilian lives unless a national emergency occurs)

The 3-5% rule is an outdated, archaic one that is best ignored. Given that nations that practice conscription (i.e., forcing citizens to serve in the military) have military forces hovering around the 1-2% mark, as both active and reserve personnel, a 3-5% military is certainly unfeasible, and unrealistic

Then you have a large, likely lowly equiped military.

Unless you're one of the lucky ones where a superpower literally funds your military.

i pretty much tax the crap out of my citizens and almost solely focus on my navy and naval air force (i say air corp but my nations a seafaring nomadic one. so its literally nothing but boats, stupidly huge ships and aircraft carriers both civilian and military. ) but i basically dont have an army at all.

Roski already talked about it, but "I tax heavily" isn't an excuse to build a larger military. While there are some merits of high-taxing, high spending (Keynesian Economics :3 ) there also are considerations such as the crowding out effect (i.e. spending excessively forces the government to take out loans, which thus in turn raises interest rates and decreases incentive to invest and destimulates economic activity.) Of course, there also would be less incentive to work, less capital for private industry to work with, etc.

However, at the root of it all, it's your decision what to do with your nation. Just know that a 3-5% military is not going to be an elite, highly motivated volunteer force; it's going to be a horde of poorly armed conscripts.

[Oceans Haven]

Ok so, Ive been on NS before but Ive never really rped here. Ive done rps outside of NS but nothing quite this.......complex...feels like you need a PhD in politics, finance, psychology and memorize "Art of War" just to ask another nation to be your friend so Im not sure how to start. Literally. As a result I have a few questions...first, i read in a guide the average nations military should be around 3-5% its population. But what if youre a nation that has its citizens join the military as a government law? (example in my nation everyone must serve 1 year active duty in the navy/air corp then either continue their naval/air corp career or join the reserve where they lead civilian lives unless a national emergency occurs)

The 3-5% rule is an outdated, archaic one that is best ignored. Given that nations that practice conscription (i.e., forcing citizens to serve in the military) have military forces hovering around the 1-2% mark, as both active and reserve personnel, a 3-5% military is certainly unfeasible, and unrealistic

i pretty much tax the crap out of my citizens and almost solely focus on my navy and naval air force (i say air corp but my nations a seafaring nomadic one. so its literally nothing but boats, stupidly huge ships and aircraft carriers both civilian and military. ) but i basically dont have an army at all.

Roski already talked about it, but "I tax heavily" isn't an excuse to build a larger military. While there are some merits of high-taxing, high spending (Keynesian Economics :3 ) there also are considerations such as the crowding out effect (i.e. spending excessively forces the government to take out loans, which thus in turn raises interest rates and decreases incentive to invest and destimulates economic activity.) Of course, there also would be less incentive to work, less capital for private industry to work with, etc.

However, at the root of it all, it's your decision what to do with your nation. Just know that a 3-5% military is not going to be an elite, highly motivated volunteer force; it's going to be a horde of poorly armed conscripts.

Well its less "we want more guns" and more "we NEED larger ships". I was trying to do something different and make a nation that (when i started) had just recovered from a crippling, brutal borderline genocidal civil war and now only has what remains of its one huge fleet to live on. But i see your point. Im still working the details so when i started it my nation was essentially 40% naval force (a very broad term covering captains, shipwrights, engineers, chefs, medics, ect.) but ive kind of dropped that number a bit as of late.....

[Lubyak]

Then you have a large, likely lowly equiped military.

Unless you're one of the lucky ones where a superpower literally funds your military.

i pretty much tax the crap out of my citizens and almost solely focus on my navy and naval air force (i say air corp but my nations a seafaring nomadic one. so its literally nothing but boats, stupidly huge ships and aircraft carriers both civilian and military. ) but i basically dont have an army at all.

It seems at that point, you are in a continuous state of emergency, and might as well just say everything is centrally planned. Everyone gets a certain ration of food, power, housing, etc. Maybe more important people get more of a certain thing, but still.

As others have said, in general, every soldier and dollar spent on defence is a drag on the economy. The person being a soldier is not being a factory worker, student, clerk, or manager. The dollar spent on a tank that will sit in a storage yard or end up wrecked on a field somewhere is a dollar not spent on healthcare, infrastructure, or just left in the citizen's pockets. However, to a certain extent, this drag is worthwhile and necessary, as the costs of having no defence are much higher than the costs of having the military. And the 'worthwhile' point will shift around a lot depending on who, what, and where of your nation.

However, as a new player you don't really need to worry about all those things. Yes, there are certain players who are very knowledgeable--or even professionals--in certain fields. The overwhelming number of players are not. The most important thing to remember is OOC communication. If you can talk to your fellow players about what you want to do, and are responsive to their suggestions and what not, you should be fine. The cardinal rule of NS isn't 'calculate perfectly everything about your nation'. The cardinal rule is 'cooperate'. The point of RPing is to cooperatively tell a story together, and everything else is window dressing and background information. Some people have ludicrously detailed and pretty window dressing, but the core of NS RP is the story that gets told.

Hope this helps.
Cheers,
Lubyak

[Democratic Peoples republic of Kelvinsi]

Does anyone have a map generator I can use for a RP

[Oceans Haven]

i pretty much tax the crap out of my citizens and almost solely focus on my navy and naval air force (i say air corp but my nations a seafaring nomadic one. so its literally nothing but boats, stupidly huge ships and aircraft carriers both civilian and military. ) but i basically dont have an army at all.

It seems at that point, you are in a continuous state of emergency, and might as well just say everything is centrally planned. Everyone gets a certain ration of food, power, housing, etc. Maybe more important people get more of a certain thing, but still.

As others have said, in general, every soldier and dollar spent on defence is a drag on the economy. The person being a soldier is not being a factory worker, student, clerk, or manager. The dollar spent on a tank that will sit in a storage yard or end up wrecked on a field somewhere is a dollar not spent on healthcare, infrastructure, or just left in the citizen's pockets. However, to a certain extent, this drag is worthwhile and necessary, as the costs of having no defence are much higher than the costs of having the military. And the 'worthwhile' point will shift around a lot depending on who, what, and where of your nation.

However, as a new player you don't really need to worry about all those things. Yes, there are certain players who are very knowledgeable--or even professionals--in certain fields. The overwhelming number of players are not. The most important thing to remember is OOC communication. If you can talk to your fellow players about what you want to do, and are responsive to their suggestions and what not, you should be fine. The cardinal rule of NS isn't 'calculate perfectly everything about your nation'. The cardinal rule is 'cooperate'. The point of RPing is to cooperatively tell a story together, and everything else is window dressing and background information. Some people have ludicrously detailed and pretty window dressing, but the core of NS RP is the story that gets told.

Hope this helps.
Cheers,
Lubyak

more good advice xD thanks i appreciate it.

[Network Zero]

Hello,

I have been here for a while, despite a long hiatus. But the whole time I have really done nothing but answer issues, and I have decided that it is time for me to actually RP in this game. But I have a problem. The fact that Network Zero is in fact almost entirely virtual poses several problems, and so I have decided to ask here for some help regarding them.

Firstly, one I doubt can be easily resolved, is the fact that the Network cannot participate in many RPs as it is virtual, and thus cannot really fight wars, or have diplomacy, etc. As such, I believe that I should have some sort of method of physically doing something.

Secondly, I don't really fall into any tech level. I am an advanced, sentient server set in an MT environment, so PMT? I think I can resolve this issue just by having multiple versions of the Network, for different tech levels.

Finally, I am still trying to figure out what I can actually do if I get into an RP. So far, all I can do is launch malware from a proxy server to a target, and even then, I don't yet have much. Does anyone have any ideas about how exactly the Network could come into play in an RP?

[Sunset]

One of the defining attributes of Modern Tech is that if it doesn't currently exist, it's not MT. PMT has a somewhat low population but, without reading up that much, you sound strongly PMT. But making the jump to FT would be easy enough. As far as how to interact... Make some robots. My own example is that the Secretary-General is an evolved AI who owns a large robotics design and manufacturing corporation. She designs and builds her own body as well as everything from industrial robots to highly advanced and realistic house pets. You could takea similar tack or go for something more involved; a sentient network persecuted by the outside world and forced to take action.

What you might start with is an introduction RP. Play things by ear, see what you like to write. If that ends up being conflict, write that. If its diplomacy, go that way. Romance? The Secretary-General just married her girlfriend. Why not? Explore the ideas and concepts you like. There are players who are interested in whatever ideas you might come up with and it might take a couple tries to get a bite, but you can't catch a fish if you don't make a cast.

[Network Zero]

Ahh, okay. Thank you for the tech level clarification, that will help greatly. Your robot building idea seems good, but I had an idea that I would start by basically using my supporters to get low grade equipment and repurpose it into combat gear, and gradually become an advanced nation, at least in the PMT timeline. When I do get robots, many will, at least if fought, be experimental prototypes, and I will,gradually combat test them and improve upon them. Does that sound viable? Once I get access to factory equipment, either by hacking the system somehow or by physically overtaking it, I can start with the more powerful robots, although most would be utility at first.

For persecution, given that at the moment this network spreads by taking over websites and infecting computers, I would say that plenty of people would want the Network gone, so I could easily come up with a story about that. Diplomacy would be difficult, given that Network Zero has the goal to expand and that involves the infection of the world's computers, but it is possible if it was beneficial for the Network. Romance...would be hard, as I am terrible at writing stories without some kind of conflict, whether it be political, military, economic, or diplomatic. But possible, I suppose. I will think about this further as I come up with some RP ideas.

[Sunset]

You might try starting with that real-world expansion. Take over random_factory and look for someone who will RP as the factory owner. I'd volunteer but AI are everyday sentients in Sunset so that would be a pretty short RP... No conflict there, just a job offer and a 'Oh, wel, you gotta pay for that stuff.'

[Reffensburg]

How do you declare war?

[Reffensburg]

Have you ever killed a man?

...
...
...

It seems like a bit of a joke question, but it's an earnest one. The act of killing is actually a pretty accurate way to describe how one deals with the gamut of emotions that may come out of a murder. Whether it be fear, anger, vengeance, fanaticism, the act of such a heinous nature belies a rudimentary feeling - exhilaration. Not necessarily the whole 'I feel great' sort of feeling, but rather a 'wind' of emotion that swells up. That emotion underlies everything about the deviousness and deviance of that act, and as your heart race beats furiously, like a high, you're on a rush of both power and regret. But regardless of your feeling, it's a wind.

So what does this have to do with depth and feeling? Find the lowest common denominator of emotion. Find that 'wind', and base your writing on that. Emotions should be focused on coming from that - how one feels and how one perceives the circumstances around him should really be focused on a single, simple emotional process. And everything should span out like the branches of a tree. Maybe I'm using too many metaphors for this, but the fact of the matter is that depth and feeling into writing is the stuff that people can span hundreds of pages and entire books on - and have. If I can sum it up, the simplest process to put depth and feeling into your writing are things such as relating events to how you would perceive and feel them, find the base emotion upon which they're acting, and ultimately, note what they may be losing. Honestly, only with practice could you become more 'deep' and in your writing, and that takes practice; there's no short cut in this department, since many writers strive to establish their own sense and style of it, and not everyone is successful at it.

It's a bit vague, I know, but the subject is just so broad that I can't cover everything effectively.

[Lubyak]

How do you declare war?

On the Diplomacy boards, there is no 'declare war' button, or some other mechanic for waging war. Wars are fought via roleplays (RPs) with your fellow players. Here on NS, we do what we call 'open RP', so there are no mechanics like dice rolls or upgradeable skills that you might find in other RP boards. An NationStates RP is a bit like coming together with a bunch of fellow writers, to tell a cooperative story. Each of you effectively 'control' your nation in that story, whether from a wide perspective (e.g. the top levels of political and military power), or from a more individual one (e.g. a soldier on the ground, a citizen watching a revolution unfold, etc.), and interact with your fellow players to tell that story. Wars are just another form of story that you can tell.

So, how do you declare war? You chat with some other players, or maybe just advertise your idea for a RP, and start planning and writing your story.

Hope this helped.

[Xiscapia]

Post by Atlantica » Fri Mar 13, 2015 5:11 am
On MT RP's, how should cyberattacks be RP-ed?

Just for funsies, I'm gonna go into a little more detail to give some examples and some counters...

Mainstream Media/Movie Cyberattack:

"We're hacking their systems to take them offline!" *Five Minutes Later...* "Looks like the hamsters are dead! Let's go!"

Real World Cyberattack:

Stuxnet (And a lot of this is supposition);

Four years ago, a worm was discovered inside Iranian industrial control systems that was designed to subtly destroy the uranium centrifuges they controlled but the origins of the worm were likely much earlier, possibly as much as a decade. However many years it was, Israeli or American Intelligence came across the idea of using cyberwarfare to delay or destroy the Iranian nuclear industry before it really got started. In order to go about this, they needed a lot of planning and we'll start with that.

First they needed to know what industrial control units the Iranians were using. They would have tracked this down through purchase records, looking through garbage bins for sales receipts, manuals, or look at what Iranian intelligence was trying to get their hands on. Then they would have gone out, bought said unit themselves, and torn it apart to figure out how it worked and what the vulnerabilities were. Then they can write the virus portion of the worm.

Next is a target/chump (AKA Spear Phishing). They need a way into the facility because the first rule of IT security is that if it's Important (Capital I) you do not connect it to the Internet. Again, you do not connect anything Important to the Internet. Period. Full stop. Don't listen to the managers, don't listen to the CEO, listen to the former Air Force penetration tester who taught my systems admin class; Do Not Connect Anything Important to the Internet. Otherwise it is considered to be hacked. Not if - It already has been. Interestingly, the Iranians knew this and thus didn't have these machines connected to the Internet. Thus the chump.

The target was likely a manager probably in the middle somewhere of the organizational chart. You know the type; Just smart enough to get the job, just dumb enough to be a pain in the ass every day. The kind of guy who will open the attachment on a carefully crafted email that purports to be pictures of his daughter at her birthday (and might just be, given American satellite imaging resolutions) but with a secondary payload of the worm.

Now the worm is going to sit there on his and perhaps others systems for who-knows-how-long because one target isn't really enough. You need a shotgun for things like this. The more targets you potentially hit, the more chance that one of those stupid, willful, stubborn middle managers who has been told better by IT but will do it anyway because it's convenient will take his thumb drive with those pictures of his daughters birthday party on it, load the spreadsheet or the movie or whatever onto it, and plug it into the supposedly isolated systems that are connected to those industrial controllers. Then, and only then, it will spread out and start the dirty deed.

For the next few months those centrifuges will spin and spin and spin too fast or wobble or too slow or mysteriously fail in the middle of the night. And then they break. Because you need 20,000 of the buggers to make the uranium you need. Every one destroyed puts you a little more behind.

That is a real cyberattack with real consequences. Forget what they show on TV; Real attacks don't take minutes, they take months, years. Because even with precision knowledge of the computers, the human side of the attack is often the most difficult. You need to find out who the chump is (Spear Phishing), and why they are the chump.

How to RP it?

Well, if you're serious about it, you could spend a whole year doing the run-up to the attack itself (and it could still fail). The intelligence agent on the street going through the manager's garbage at 2 in the morning looking for an owners manual, every day, for a year, until he finds it and the receipt for birthday supplies. The guys at the NRO (National Reconnaissance Office) who points a satellite at that guy's backyard and takes some pretty pictures. The Director who pieces the whole thing together. The stupid chump who falls for it. The maintenance guy who complains about a lack of parts (which is how Stuxnet 'worked').

Quality post.

[Sunset]

Thinking about it at 4 in the morning...

Ways you could use a real cyber-attack on NationStates:

Assassination/Targeted Attack; A lot of modern traffic control systems - traffic signals - are managed remotely. Again, buy said unit, craft a take-over virus, get it onto the system either through spear phishing or a guy in a dirty workmans coverall right at the pole, then wait til the secretary of defense and a semi are coming up to the intersection at the same time and let the truck just keep going. Looks like he's not gonna be making that meeting...

Think of the Children!; In most societies, there are rules against various forms of pornography. Including on NS and I want to make it perfectly clear: Don't post it, even as part of a cyber-attack description. But hacking into a target system, planting it, and reporting it to law enforcement has been done in the real world. Probably one of the best short-term attacks since most individual systems are not well protected. Average TTO (time to owned) on a fresh windows box? 30 seconds.

Industrial Sabotage/Theft; The Chinese love this one and so should you! Most of this relies on the fact that many/most managers are kinda dumb and do things like post blueprints on internet networks that are connected to the internet for both convenience and oversight.

How can you defend your systems?

There are several methods and most of them make things less convenient to use. That's pretty much a law of computer security; The more convenient it is, the less secure.

First, if it's Important, don't connect it to the internet. Monitoring system at a nuclear plant? Yes. Control system at a nuclear power plant? No. But how do you get the information from the second to the first?

Lasers.

A laser link is inherently one-way. It comes from the control system to transmit information about temperatures, maintenance cycles, and output. It can be manipulated on the monitoring system side, yes, but in the control center you have two monitors; the first shows the control system readouts, the second shows the monitoring system readouts. Believe the first, check the second. If the monitoring system seems to be hacked, dump the system down to bare metal and reload via the laser link. This does mean that any additional data you want to move from the control system to the monitoring system must be done by hand but this is a Good Thing. Questions can be asked; why is it asking for the exact maintenance schedule and where the guards are?

[Holy Chuder]

Are there many Medieval Tech Civilizations on Nation States that rp. Sorry I'm new here

[Vancon]

Are there many Medieval Tech Civilizations on Nation States that rp. Sorry I'm new here

Yes there is, but they are a lot less common. I've ran into no more then 10 so far.

I haven't seen any the RP medievally, but in a more fantasy light there are a lot of people in P2TM.

[Lubyak]

Are there many Medieval Tech Civilizations on Nation States that rp. Sorry I'm new here

No doubt there are some past tech (PT) RP groups about, but I can't think of any off the top of my head. Always welcome to start up an RP and see who comes out of the woodwork!

[Holy Chuder]

Thanks for the help guys!

[Lluariden]

My question is simple; may I hold a general meeting of RP? I'm rather new and wanted to know if my character could hold a conference. Is that allowed?

[Sunset]

Sure. You'd need a really good hook though; Something that will perk the interest of a good number of players. If it gives them something to bluster and brag about then that's your best bet.