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

[JC Lawrence]

On Mon, 22 Dec 1997 08:19:56 PST8PDT 
Stephen Zepp<zoran at enid.com> wrote:

> I had to jump in here a sec: 1) I imagine that he's talking about
> having trusted admins with access to this information _only_.

Seeing as you give no attributions for the relevant quotes its
difficult to determine if you are referring to my implemenation or
Woolcock's.  In mine I intend to make all logs freely available to all
players.

Why?

Controlling access to logs essentially creates a problem of secrecy,
privacy, violations of privacy, determining veracity of logs, etc.
I'm just not interested in solving those problems.  Give the logs to
everyone, and the impetus for other forms of logging collapses, and
all the rest just vanish in a puff of virtual hot air.

> 2) Japan is huge on "monitoring" their workers, and for the most
> part it leads to a) incredible management of workers b) very
> stressed out workers

I suggest that the problem here is not the fact of the supervision,
but the fact that there is doubt, FUD, and fear as to what was seen,
and what was not.  Consider the case of your father when you were a
child.  When you did something you knew wasn't Okay, the big fear
was whether your father would find out, whether he knew, whether the
axe was hanging over your head, not so much what he would do once you
knew that he had found out.

Now at least they all know that everything was seen.  The only doubt
left is whether anything in particular will be acted upon.  I do
expect there to be conspiracies in ensuring that certain activities
are rolled off the back end of the logs (more than one week old)
before they are discovered and reviewed.

> 3) Your comment about the FBI is a two-edged sword.  The FBI ( along
> with a few other agencies ) is responsible for counter-industrial
> espionage, in addition to counter-intelligence within the borders of
> the US.  The "clipper" chip, and other concepts are very
> misunderstood by the public: Primarily, the _concept_ ( there are a
> lot of ideas for implementation ) is not to be able to monitor
> _anything_.  Just like legal wiretapping, reasonable cause will be
> required, and a warrant issued to obtain the encryption keys ( in
> most proposals held by the Department of Standards, or some such, in
> any case a completely non-justice oriented gov't. department ).
> They're not gonna ever get free reign, at least not legally.

This is not the place to comment at length on this.  I'll content with
the statement that I find this view incredibly suspect, and very
likely unsupportable.  Then again I come from the opposite side of the
fence as a proponent of freely available stroing encryption etc, along
with all the other implicit bits of digital signatures, anonymity etc.

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