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

[coder at ibm.net]

On 17/12/97 at 10:13 PM, Derrick Jones <gunther at online1.magnus1.com> said=
:
>On Sun, 14 Dec 1997, Ola Fosheim Gr=B0stad wrote:
>> Richard Woolcock <KaVir at dial.pipex.com> wrote:
>> >Ola Fosheim Gr=B0stad wrote:

>> >> I find logging everything without warning to be rather immoral.  In=
 my
>> >> country it would most likely be a crime.  Respecting players privac=
y
>> >> is for me an unbreakable rule.  In a commercial system this should =
be
>> >> paramount.
>> >>=20
>> >> (A nasty sideeffect is that rumours about admins snooping on player=
s
>> >> is likely to wreck player loyalty)
>> >
>> >Sometimes logging is essential, particularly if you believe someone i=
s, or
>> >might be, cheating (but don't want to jump to conclusions) or are try=
ing to
>> >work out what exactly is causing a crash.  I have the following messa=
ge come=20
>> >up the first time a player connects:
>>=20
>> AFAIK, according to our laws, logs should only contain information
>> that is highly relevant for keeping the system running, access to logs
>> should be limited and controlled, those who have access to logs are
>> not allowed to spread the information, etc.  But I think Scandinavia
>> is doing more to protect individuals than many other countries.  In my
>> opinion this is a good thing. Computers can quickly become tools for
>> fascist-like behaviour/reasoning/monitoring.

As usual I'm going to take an utterly different tack here, and go straigh=
t
for the social engineering jugular:

  As mentioned earlier I log everything.  Be careful of that word "log".=20
This does not mean that I create text files which record past doings, but
that I log DB activity amd the event sequences such that any prior point
in time for that BD can be created __exactly__ as it was then, with the
addition that that point in time can be rolled forward thru time such tha=
t
__exactly__ the same things as ahppened back then, now happen again.

  Translation:  This is time travel.  You get to see the past in perfect
duplication.

  As I said, *everything* is logged this way, from NPC actions on up.  Th=
e
criteria for logging is that it was an event which transpired across the
DB.  Outside of the DB, and I don't care.  Inside, and it gets logged, an=
d
can later be recreated.

  Want to see exactly what happened on Main St yesterday at 16:03?  Just
go to that location on Main St, walk back thru time to 16:05, and then
resume normal time flow.  You'll see everything that happened there,
exactly as it happened, exactly as if you had been standing there at the
time (except that you won't be affected by anything).

  Its time travel with the MUD world.

  The key part of this is that I'm not going to reserve the ability to
time travel to special players or individuals.  Anyone and everyone can
and will be able to do it.  Full auditability, full accountability, full
history preservation, etc.  Lotsa disk space required -- which is why I
"kill" the history past a week old.  You want to know what someone really
said, if they were really there, what they really did?  Just time walk
back to then/there and see.

  Imagine a world where your every move and twitch is recorded and
available for others to view.  Its not 1984 as the sheer information
overload becomes unmanageable.  There is too much data.  There is no
parsing ability as the history is not collected or scriptable.  IIts
impossible to meaningfully phrase historical questions.  ts is just, well=
,
reality minus N.

This is relevant to one of social engineering experiments currently being
promoted for RL: placing extremely cheap internet addressable video
cameras in all public places, =20

>> I think one should consider the sensitivity of the information one
>> logs.  Attack and walk commands are less sensitive and more relevant
>> to the system than emotes, tells and says (which are highly
>> sensitive).  Furthermore you don't neccessarily need the personal ID
>> to work out the cause for a crash.

Information becomes sensitive when it is neither disclosed or fully
hidden.  Its state must be partial.  I'm attempting to forcefully force
the equation to one extreme.

>I'm still debating on what sort of warning I'm going to give players
>about the logs. =20

I'll just publicise the history ability and let them twig to the rest.

>I also remember that at least one person is using the logs for a sort of
>history playback of certain events, which is another boon of such logs.=20

Sounds sorta like me.

--=20
J C Lawrence                               Internet: claw at null.net
----------(*)                              Internet: coder at ibm.net
...Honourary Member of Clan McFud -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...