[MUD-Dev] Re: Private Re: [Mud-Dev] Re: Affordances and social method

[Mike Sellers]

At 11:05 PM 8/16/98 +0100, Marian Griffith wrote:
>On Sun 16 Aug, Mike Sellers wrote:
>> At 07:52 PM 8/15/98 +0200, Ola Fosheim Gr=F8stad wrote:
>
>[everything snipped]
>
>I tried to think of something to say to this but is just too gross.
>It is like you know it happens but do not want to know. Ick. Please
>make sure this particular person gets caught!
>
>Marian

Sorry folks.  There wasn't anything really inappropriate there, but I had
meant to send that only to Ola.  I think I forgot to clear the cc field. :-/=
 =20

Anyway, as truly repugnant as this topic is, it's probably worth discussing
at some point: How do you deal with those who use your world to violate the
law and/or violate others?  I'm not just talking about quasi-IC "virtual
rape" events either.  Child pornography comes to the top of the list pretty
quickly, though I've seen (and had to deal with) a regrettably long list of
other kinds of harassment via an online game.  Predators who cruise your
game looking for those who will feed their destructive desires can cause
real, serious, legal and ethical problems. =20

Hmm.  I'm not really sure I want to talk about this, but it's probably
relevant to any of you who happen to have a high profile on your world:
there was a guy on M59 who called himself Dark Reaper.  On an external
public bboard, said he had hacked into our computers and gotten all of our
source code.  He also said he had hacked into my computer and had found all
sorts of child pornography there.  I got a call at home about this and
rushed into the office -- I had a nice long time while driving in to think
about what this guy might have *put* on my disk if in fact he had hacked
his way in.  It was sickening just to think about.  It sickens me now. =20

I got in, had my computer checked out; there was nothing unusual there, and
no files missing.  It turned out that this guy had not in fact hacked into
our computers.  He *had* hacked into one of our programmer's computers at
home due to an oversight on the programmer's part, and had managed to
download a few source files (that shouldn't have been at home, but...),
which gave him enough ammunition to say he'd hacked into our corporate site.=
 =20

The company took all this *very* seriously, and ended up sending one of our
lawyers and a very large federal marshall to serve this guy with papers
about theft and slander.  It turned out that he was a 19-year old kid
living in a small room in someone else's house.  His room was strewn with
pornography of all sorts (child and adult), old food, dirty clothes, etc.
Not a nice place.  He turned out to be basically a very angry, scared,
warped kid: his parents had abandoned him abruptly when he was about 13,
and he had spent his time since then learning everything he could about
computers.  He had landed a job at a small ISP, and had used this as a way
to continue his learning.  His whole focus was on breaking into the
computers at the place where his dad worked so he could ruin his father's
life: your basic revenge.  Unfortunately, he somehow latched onto me as a
father figure within M59, and turned all of that hatred onto me. =20

All of that was bad enough.  Here's the worst part for me personally: the
hesitation in people's voices when they found out about it -- the thought
for just a second: could it be true?  Even now, I'm willing to bet that
just from my recounting all this, someone reading this is more than
half-willing to believe that all the gross, distorted lies this guy told
about me (the child porn was just the tip of the iceberg) might somehow be
true. =20

This is the sort of problem that ultimately you're going to have to deal
with if you're online.  Someone says something about another person, and
that person, rightly or wrongly, is marked for a good long time by those
who choose to believe the accusations.  The slandered person might be one
of your players, or it might be you.  I know this is a far cry from dealing
with issues like why the socket pool is never quite as large as it should
be, but this is it folks, this is real life.  This is the kind of situation
you'll eventually have to deal with if you're dealing with thousand of
customers/players. =20

Anyway, food for thought.  And now, back to Marian's Tailor Problem...



--

Mike Sellers       Chief Creative Officer       The Big Network
mike at bignetwork.com                   www.bignetwork.com

                       Fun  Is  Good=20