[MUD-Dev] Wild west (was Guilds & Politics)

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad <olag@ifi.uio.no>]

Mike Sellers <mike at online-alchemy.com> wrote:
>At 12:56 PM 12/19/97 PST8PDT, Ola Fosheim Gr=F8stad wrote:
>>>Finally, the job of administration will be greatly eased by knowing
>>>exactly what happened in any given incident.  No more claims of 'But _I'=
m_
>>>the one who finished the quest first.  Boffo just spam-killed my link,
>>>took the prize while I was reconnecting, and claimed to have won...'  A
>>>simple, 'Well, lemme chack the logs...' will make even the most daring
>>>trickster come clean if they know that you _do_ have the logs to back it
>>>up.
>>
>>This is awful...  To me this is a movement towards virtual fascism.
>
>I don't see the problem here Ola -- and I certainly don't see any fascist
>tendencies (admittedly, I haven't been following the discussion closely).
>If you tell people up front that you will be logging everything that is
>said, but that these logs will be kept confidential, what's the problem?

The first problem is that he won't tell them directly. The second
problem is that it isn't treated fully confidential (need to know is
an important principle). The third problem is that he is logging more
than can be defended from an administration POV. The fourth problem is
that this is a supervision system where those with total power gain
total control, which in turn has a bad impact on any society.  The
fifth problem is that most users don't expect exessive logging, and
that they think that this isn't common.

>I'm not interested in going over logs of others' private conversations or
>cybersex, but I cannot tell you how valuable a complete log of any
>contentious or harassing conversation would be.

I think the proper way to handle this problem is to allow the
_offended_ person to turn on logging of incoming harrasment.  A slip
is ok, persistant repeated harrasment isn't.

Anyway, I don't see why more than 1 and only 1 person should have
access to logs.  All systems have wizard "assholes" (from a user POV).

>accounts of the same incident.  If you cannot tell what really happened, it
>becomes much more difficult to deal with potentially explosive situations
>(and IME, there is no one quite so ready to be a vocal martyr than someone
>who had in fact done something dishonest like edit a copied log). =20

Eh, I believe in the right of each individual person to protect
themselves, but I don't believe in exessive supervision by the
"ultimate" government.  Especially as any abuse (by admins) is
difficult to trace.  Users should be able to feel the freedom of
thought, the exchange of thoughts (inclusive ways to exploit the
system!!) without having some fascist police checking up on their past
in this way.  Besides, logs may lie, you can't log the communication
that happens in parallell in other media.

>Also, I think that just the knowledge that a conversation is being logged
>will tend to keep harassment from happening without constraining any other
>forms of speech.

Actually, I don't believe in either assertion.  Logging constrain some
forms of speech, especially critical comments towards admins... :-(
It's funny though, that logging and checking up on employees is rather
common in the US, just as logging and chekcing up on individuals was
common in old East Germany and Romania! :^) Do I have to mention FBI's
concerns about not being able to monitor encrypted communication??

Ola.