Drek that's so Illegal you can't even get a FAKE license isn't necessarily that way for certain NPCs. Remember: what's good for the goose is not always good for the gander. It's how it is chummer, suck it up.
Sure. I mean, I said as much myself, two posts above you.
(I suspect the answer is "they're 'forbidden' in game terms but they can legally exist under some form of licencing that is beyond the usual terms for 'licenced' items.")
Another equally valid explanation would be that the corps make decks that are perfectly functional and legal, but locked down in some way that makes them useless to deckers (eg broadcast to GOD constantly); before deckers get them they are illicitly modded to remove this restriction and this renders them illegal.
This is all a very tiny point, but for me it's a small example of a broader issue I have struggled with with the Matrix rules in modern Shadowrun. I don't understand how it works, in-world, well enough to reason about it; and when I have to make a rules call on the fly, I don't feel like I have a grasp on it well enough to invent something without worrying it's inconsistent with something else. For, say, shooting someone, or driving a car, I have real-world experience I can fall back on. But SR's Matrix isn't like anything in the real world, so I can't do that.
I don't know how many citizens walk around in AR, and I don't know how that number changes across different parts of the city. I don't know if someone with AR on is seeing 100%, 50% or 10% of active AROs. I don't know how they choose which AROs they see. I don't know why Shadowrunners can't seem to carry a second dummy commlink with just a fake SIN to hide the real one that's running silent, as that appears to be the safest infosec against casual inspection. I don't know if a commlink is "online" when it's not actively running someone's persona. Can it still receive calls?
I don't know what a Host is. Kill Code says most hosts are Foundation hosts, which are "grown" and that that is a perilous and expensive process; and Foundation hosts can be accessed from anywhere on the Matrix, via an unexplained mechanism. But the CRB says that your local Stuffer Shack has a Host, and that Host is down at "ground level", located at the same place in the Matrix as it is in the real world. Is that a Foundation Host? Why does Stuffer Shack use an expensive Foundation Host for every outlet? If it's not a Foundation host, how are non-Foundation hosts as rare as Kill Code says they are?
I don't know the granularity of Hosts. I don't know if a small corporate facility would have its own, or have multiple hosts, or share one big Host with nearby premises.
I don't know what it's like to use P2.1 in Shadowrun. In AR, is it just a window you overlay over your vision? Do most people use AR or VR? In VR, do I fly up to and enter a P2.1 Host, or is it a Horizon mega-host with a P2.1 section inside it? Do wageslaves have an AR window on P2.1 open while working, or is their comms monitored to prohibit that? If I'm jacked into my corp network in VR, can I overlay an AR window with my P2.1 feed in onto my sensorium? Can I use P2.1 on my commlink's screen, not in AR or VR? Why would anyone do that?
I don't know if normal corp workers typically work in AR or VR, and therefore what an office looks like. Does it have desks and water coolers? Or do people spend 90% of the day jacked in, in which case it just needs couches? How do I describe it to my runners when they break in? What do they see in the middle of the workday -- can they just sneak through a load of jacked-in quiescent bodies?
I don't understand what a Google search is in the Matrix. There are Hosts and the Hosts contain files that contain data, some of which are public. How do I look something up? Do I go to a public library Host? Do I go to a sort of meta-indexer Host that searches information on other Hosts? Do I write a bot that goes off to loads of Hosts for me and searches each in turn? How do I describe what happens when my players say "look this guy up online and see what we can find"?
I could go on but you get the idea. Any one of these is fairly easily resolved one way or another; probably some of them aren't really ambiguous and I've missed something. But taken in aggregate, I find they make understanding how the Matrix actually works, for its users, in SR5e very slippery and nebulous. And that means I have no mental framework to slot the rules into, which in turn makes the mechanics side of things feel awkward and arbitrary.
Maybe it's just me. I doubt it, though.