Your character will never be able to die, since you are effectively playing yourself. However your agent will suffer similar fates to those within Uplink - dissavowed, struck off the agent list etc.

If you are convicted of a crime then you will lose your gateway and your rating will drop severely. The laws would be lighter than in Uplink - getting caught for hacking wouldn't be game over.

Framing other agents will be almost impossible for a lone hacker - it would require hacking a couple of Government systems, which means a group of Agents would have to work together. However, agents can collect evidence against other agents. Once there is enough this evidence can be submitted, and the guilty agent will be punished accordingly. So if Agent A attacks Agent B and Agent B is watching, he will be able to record the evidence of the attack and teh damage done then get Agent A dissavowed.

In short, guilty agents will be easy to catch and stop. This will make it much harder to pick on Agents - "Player Killing", which plagues other online games.

Of course, agents will be able to attack and destroy other agent's computers. This could potentially ruin the game if done wrongly. Clients will have an option on their Gateway for "Full Defense". The first gateway will have this option enabled by default. This makes it very easy for an Agent under attack to shut down his external connection and keep the evidence of the attack. Player-Killers will be caught very quickly from this. Unfortunately it also makes it near impossible to hack into the harder systems, because a number of key facilities are shut down. This is designed to ease new players into the game, and to discourage player killing. Advanced players will have to fend for themselves of course. Since this is a gateway option it will not be possible to enable/disable it at will. Two advanced agents could easily have a "duel" between their Servers providing this Full Defense is disabled.

Note that Servers will not have this Full Defense option - if you run a server you are responsible for defending it.