THE DARKWHOLE TESTS

[J C Lawrence]

Fcc: OutBox
--------

Poster's note: 

  I have inserted "--<log>--" tags to mark off text which was
  originally deliniated by font and face changes.  Form the
  perspective of the recent logging rights threads, this is an
  absolutely fascinating experiment.  Add time travel (as I have) and
  its very deep into (invasive?) social engineering.

http://www.actlab.utexas.edu/~smack/dark.html

THE DARKWHOLE TESTS 


The DarkWhole has been called "a sinister little device", libelously
described in LingaFranca as a guest-molester; but it exists in as an
artistic sacrament, an unintentioned loss, a theoretical crap shoot.

I had the idea of building a DarkWhole, a panoptical transmitter, in
my very earliest days at PMC MOO. The MOO is an ethnographers dream,
in that every interaction leaves textual trace evidence. Immersing
myself in this environment quickly led to the desire to shape it in
some way. As an attempt at environmental modeling, Palefist and I
collaborated on a Korova Milk Bar (from the book by Anthony Burgess, A
Clockwork Orange), complete with Moloko dispensers laced delicately
with various veshches, a custom robot of Alex that govoreets nadsat
quite horrorshow and plenty of the flip ultra-violence. The final
mediation of this environment was achieved by a close-circuit camera
providing a live feed to my Geodesic lab. Reading the fine text on a
movie poster for A Clockwork Orange by Stanley Kubrik, transported
users into this environment.  Hanging the poster conspicuously in the
Conversation Pit provided a steady stream of interactions for this
monitor.

I built the first DarkWhole shortly after TERRORISM, to protest, in no
small way, the imposition of a vague and tyrannical "Code of
Conduct". In retaliation for some supposed crimes of the Apocalypse
PMC became regulated by the Principle of Radical Consent. Essentially,
MOO users had a right to consent to activities they wished to
participate in and a right to not consent to activities they did not
with to participate in.  Simple, straight forward, filling the void of
authority, and the lack of clear guidelines that supposedly generated
the frustration of the populace; this legislation was an illegitimate
anathema on the popular will and did not apply to the Wizardry.

Repeatedly the Wizardry has violated the Principal of Radical Consent,
as witnessed most vividly by the imposition of $FAME in the Fall of
1994. In the particular case of the DarkWhole it was an experiment in
"poetry" by a Wizard named Glinda that was contested. Glinda intended
to use randomly sampled snippets of MOO conversation to create poetic
works (pure genius). I used the technology from the old camera and
monitor to make a device to automatically spy on any room in the MOO;
mimicking the unobtrusive intrusion of the poetry experiment. I
encased the device in a sinuous nest of blacker and black DarkWhole of
holes. A fishbowl of simulacra controlled the connections which were
opened by fleet footed rats.

--<log>--

  You choose the simulacrum of Guest and drop it on the floor.
  A large black rat runs out of a pile of burnt debris, grabs
  the tiny Guest and leaps down one of the DarkWhole of holes.

  The DarkWhole emits {Guest pulls you close inserting his hot hard
                       rod in your tight wet crack
  The DarkWhole emits {Violet_Guest kisses lightly at the sides of
                       your abs.. obiques.. and farther up to your
                       chest her hot tongue plays with your nipples
  The DarkWhole emits {Guest pulls you to the ground, there's no
                       going slow this time he wants you so bad, he
                       begins to thrust his hips against yours faster
                       and faster
  The DarkWhole emits {Violet_Guest feels the pain and wants it
                       more... more, more
  The DarkWhole emits {Guest sucks hard on your nipples
  The DarkWhole emits {Violet_Guest scratches at your back and
                       shoulders.  She pulls you close to her
                       mouth kisses your shoulder and bites it hard
                       at an extreamly hard thrust
  The DarkWhole emits {Guest continues to pump, the sweat forms, and
                       inside of you hot and wet combine

--<log>--

This selection led to the misinterpretation of the DarkWhole as a
guest-molester, but this naughty action is actually consensual. You
can easily see why it might be maligned as a "sinister" device. I
publicly announced it's creation and invited others to use it. It was
an open challenge to the Wizardry. I knew that the object would be
abused and generate plenty of complaints. I planned to use this
opportunity to take issue with the unrighteous domination of the
supposedly "Post Modern" hierarchy

--<log>--

  Dear Smack:
  We have received complaints about your listening device the
  DarkWhole.  Please read news 1 and 2 and consider adjusting this
  object in accordance with PMC-MOOs anti-harassment policies. If
  necessary, the DarkWhole will be @recycled.
                                                      -Glinda

  Dear Glinda,
  I have re-read news items 1 and 2 per your request and wanted to
  point out a few inconsistencies in policy.

    New PMC-MOO Policy
    Author: Barney (Arch-Wizard)  
    Tuesday, January 4 1994
    ==================================================================
    Obnoxious behavior is uniformly and universally discouraged here.
    If someone is being obnoxious, tell that person to stop. 
    If someone tells you to stop, take your act somewhere else.
    
    Let's be clear about this: repeated nuisance behavior will cost
    you your player.
    ==================================================================

  I am only the author of the object... am I to be responsible for the
  obnoxious behavior of others, for their misreading of my text? I 
  renounce my author(itative) privilege in the spirit of the Post Modern.

  Let's be clear about this: define behavior, define nuisance, define
  repeated.

  Nowhere in either news item was a policy regarding privacy
  presented.

                                                     -Smack

--<log>--

The fundamental problem lies in the Principle of Radical Consent
itself. If a user is being spied on (and that's what the DarkWhole
does, as it is in essence surreptitious) s/he can not consent unless
they are aware of the invasion. The ultimate solution to this quandary
was the installation of a security routine in ALL rooms. This routine
checks for an entrance message each time an object enters a room,
further, the entrance message must contain the object's name.

If this does not occur within 5 seconds of the object's arrival, the
security system announces the object's arrival in a quite accusatory
tone. Panoptical Transmitter (#1095) seems to have made silent entry,
10 seconds ago. The real joke of this system is that it goes off
arbitrarily bec ause of lag times, fails to recognize more elaborate
entrance messages, and often displays obscenely long entrance
times. Panoptical Transmitter (#1095) seems to have made a silent
entry, 35,450 seconds ago. But it does what it is designed to do,
discourage spying and render the DarkWhole useless.

Of course there is no such thing as privacy on a MOO, everything is
potentially loggable.  It is our complacency about cyberspace that
causes us to hold unchallenged assumptions.  The spirit of Terrorism,
a renounciation of the mundane, continued with repeated and passionate
defenses of free programming. There has been particularly strong
support for the legalization of spoofing, or false attribution,
atleast within the interests of the community, (as opposed to the
technocratic interests of the Wizardry). Though generally maligned by
the institutionalists as a juvenile power trip, the environmental
technology of attribution is necessary to construct textual virtual
spaces. Actions occur in relation to objects, and without messages
regarding these relationships, and the actions themselves, the space
is no more than a chat area. A more lengthy consideration of this
technology is contained in Technological Hierarchy in MOO. The more
theoretical argument concerns the death of the subject and author. If
one might misappropriate, or reappropriate, or recombine the works of
others as their own, what are the possibility of attributing works to
others. Governments do this all the time. Simple gossip is a similar
form of word play. But the more affirmative Post Modern theory might
challenge that there is no constructive use of abusing others virtual
bodies (putting words or actions in their mouths). In fact this
challenge was made and I resolved to use false attribution in some
CONSTRUCTIVE way.

The idea of the panopticon, the position from which it is possible to
survey every minute detail of a reality, is commonly used by Post
Modernists to describe the condition magnified and fragmented mediated
reality in which we live. Using the DarkWhole I hoped to emmulate a
panoptical singularity from the MOO environment.

By naming the microphone object (panoptical transmitter) "that" for
the brief moment as it enters a location, and then spoofing the
entrance message "I don't understand that."  the DarkWhole can fool
the silent entry detection system, and hopefully the occupants of the
room. The message "I don't understand that." is what users see when
they mistype a command, or try to do something the MOO doesn't
understand. I've never been quite sure who the voice of "I" is
supposed to be; the computer, my virtual self, God. Which ever it is,
a good 90% of the people who hear it; ignore that voice. After
entering the room, the object turns almost entirely invisible,
appearing as an extra space a room's contents. Any obtrusive scan of
the object, causes it to self-destruct.

Well, that's how it works. Here is an archive of several tests of the
device:

           TEST ONE

     Actually the first test ended in disaster. Giddy with the
successes of my early trials fooling the silent entry detection
system, I hastily constructed the first model. I didn't back it up,
and an errant line of code caused it to recycle itself! It took me
another 30 minutes to whip up a new version, still not as smooth as I
would have liked it, but my premature announcements had the rabble
clamoring for action. I did incorporate a panic button though. This
first run is a simple slice of life at PMC-MOO. Only one person
notices something odd has happened.

           TEST TWO

     A little later, I add the piece de resistance. To make the
DarkWhole truly constructive, I use it to create a new virtual
environment by erasing the virtual geography of the MOO. By turning
the microphones into transmitters and using the DarkWhole as a relay,
it connected every room in the MOO. An old school Wizard, Bleary sits
in on the next two tests, abruptly aborting test two because a
localized echo (dual transmitters) leads him to believe that it has
created a recursive loop.

           TEST THREE

     After reassuring Bleary that all is well, we re-engaged the
DarkWhole. This is probably the most interesting capture, but its also
the spammiest. Because I used the initial DarkWhole structure, in
which each microphone is responsible for itself, the new model spawned
dozens of tasks. It only needed one task to keep track of all the
microphones because they are not initiated individually. The multiple
tasks cause lag (slow the server) and are ridiculed by better
programmers. At some point another program is introduced to the mix, a
generic puppet object that reacts to speech. It goes into recursive
loop with the DarkWhole and spams the whole MOO. The resultant lag
slows a proper shutdown. Defender, the defacto Head Wizard makes a
special guest appearance at the end of the run.

           TEST FOUR

     Later that evening. The recursion problem and the multi-tasking
are eliminated, but so is the relay. This test was for
posterity. Similar to the first run, this one is a little more
interesting, as people react directly to the device.

           TEST FIVE

     Over the next couple of days I try a "consent" based model. This
model announces its arrival a presents the occupants a list of options
to participate or refuse. The result is significantly less
interesting, though there is genuine enthusiasm for the idea.

           IDENTITY CRISIS

     Bonus Track- Right as we are beginning the first test run,
Defender launches a program that creates a completely anonymous
communication environment, Identity Crisis. Participants must join the
forum, but the results are equally as interesting.  This capture is
extrapolated from Visual Mark's log of the DarkWhole. He was
monitoring the channel for it's first 2 hours with his buffers on. Its
impossible to say how many voices are speaking... at times perhaps as
many as 15, at others, only one.

--
J C Lawrence                               Internet: claw at null.net
(Contractor)                               Internet: coder at ibm.net
---------(*)                     Internet: claw at under.engr.sgi.com
...Honourary Member of Clan McFud -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...