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

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

coder at ibm.net wrote:
>>Ola wrote:
>>> 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 mentioned earlier I log everything.  Be careful of that word "log". 
>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 that
>__exactly__ the same things as ahppened back then, now happen again.

(From a norwegian legal POV "access" and "neccessity" are the
keywords, the nature of the storage doesn't matter.)

>From a CS POV logging is a fascinating principle, because, as you
mention, it preserves the timeline.  I made a prototype environment
for case handling a while back that used this for determining whether
a case had followed the rules or not.  The system also provided a set
of legal actions which were determined by parsing the history (log) of
the case.  (Used extended RE.)

Are you doing this in your system?

>  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).

Ok, but on what level is this observation done?

I split concepts into at least 3 levels:

- World level 
- Room level ("field of view" if the system doesn't involve rooms)
- Avatar level

For instance, is it possible to observe actions that take place on the
avatar level? ("you feel hungry" etc)

>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,  

(Which are illegal in norway :-).  All video cameras should be placed
there for a (legal justifiable) reason and there should be a clearly
visible warning sign)

>>> 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.

Yeah, but as I mentioned before, from what I can tell your world will
not make the user feel "at home".  That is, it doesn't allow you to
transfer too much of your RL knowledge to the world.  Most worlds
tries to create a "real" world, therefore users have no reason to
expect exessive logging.

Ola.