Couldn’t find it anywhere, but is being hackable by certain programs while Holomasked in ZoC open info?
I was unable to find mention of it as well, but in page 15, Open and Private information, the list of private information does not include being hackable, so I'd say that yeah, it is... as long as it's not part of the content of a Marker. So the question would be if the "content of a marker" includes being, or not, hackable. Personally, I'd say that yes, hackable is a characteristic of the troop, and if the troop is in a marker state, the hackable characteristic is Private Information. Also, since there is no provision nor limitation, if it were decided by CB that hackable is Public Information... it would be so regardless of the presence of an enemy hacker in the ZoC, so the opponent might ask, marker by marker, if those are hackable, thus ruining quite heavily the shell game.
No. Holomask says that the trooper that is hidden is private information. There are no rules in the n4 rule set that lets you know if something is hackable mechanically, this is entirely a unit characteristic and if it is hidden its hidden
That is what I was thinking since I couldn’t find anything saying it would have to be announced! This does give a holomasked Tian Gou some weird chance of making a person do the wrong ARO.
There was a long discussion about that scenario in a couple of previous threads. The tentative conclusion was that KHDs need to constantly try to Trinity everyone, just in case they're secretly hackers. But, it's part of the broader set of questions around the declaration of AROs before they're valid, which ijw has said requires clarification from CB. So I think we're going to have to wait on this one.