A deck's Evasion code is concerned with making it difficult to find the decker's programs in order to do anything to them. Its techniques include spawning extra processes with similar characteristics to the important ones the decker is running, shifting executing code to different spots in the machine's address space, and leaving false trails in all the locations that monitor system resources. The Masking code attempts to cloak the decker from discovery. In addition to shifting the appearance of the user's icon to an appearance appropriate to the local host, it also camouflages the characteristics of the decker's utilities to make them appear to be legitimate programs running on the system. This includes activities such as talking to license servers, accessing the appropriate support files for a given utility, and inserting the user's code into a running utility program to steal its resources.
Sensors make sense out of the chaos of the computer world.
The deck's Sensors provide annotations to other icons in the area, and supply vital statistics about the system as the decker operates it. A very large part of the Sensors suite is the heuristics for knowing which information to feed the decker at the right time. This is the major place where an encephalon helps out with decking, as the sensors can simply feed the information directly to the decker's short-term memory without requiring additional time for conscious processing. FASA's treatment of IC is occasionally lacking in an understanding of computer technology. Killer IC is a straightforward, half-tamed descendent of Core Wars , designed for the modern computing environment.