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

[Stephen Zepp <zoran#enid,com>]

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_.

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

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.




Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
> 
> Mike Sellers <mike#online-alchemy,com> wrote:
> >At 12:56 PM 12/19/97 PST8PDT, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
> >>>Finally, the job of administration will be greatly eased by knowing
> >>>exactly what happened in any given incident.  No more claims of 'But _I'm_
> >>>the one who finished the quest first.  Boffo just spam-killed my link,
> >>>took the prize while I was reconnecting, and claimed to have won...'  A
> >>>simple, 'Well, lemme chack the logs...' will make even the most daring
> >>>trickster come clean if they know that you _do_ have the logs to back it
> >>>up.
> >>
> >>This is awful...  To me this is a movement towards virtual fascism.
> >
> >I don't see the problem here Ola -- and I certainly don't see any fascist
> >tendencies (admittedly, I haven't been following the discussion closely).
> >If you tell people up front that you will be logging everything that is
> >said, but that these logs will be kept confidential, what's the problem?
> 
> The first problem is that he won't tell them directly. The second
> problem is that it isn't treated fully confidential (need to know is
> an important principle). The third problem is that he is logging more
> than can be defended from an administration POV. The fourth problem is
> that this is a supervision system where those with total power gain
> total control, which in turn has a bad impact on any society.  The
> fifth problem is that most users don't expect exessive logging, and
> that they think that this isn't common.
> 
> >I'm not interested in going over logs of others' private conversations or
> >cybersex, but I cannot tell you how valuable a complete log of any
> >contentious or harassing conversation would be.
> 
> I think the proper way to handle this problem is to allow the
> _offended_ person to turn on logging of incoming harrasment.  A slip
> is ok, persistant repeated harrasment isn't.
> 
> Anyway, I don't see why more than 1 and only 1 person should have
> access to logs.  All systems have wizard "assholes" (from a user POV).
> 
> >accounts of the same incident.  If you cannot tell what really happened, it
> >becomes much more difficult to deal with potentially explosive situations
> >(and IME, there is no one quite so ready to be a vocal martyr than someone
> >who had in fact done something dishonest like edit a copied log).
> 
> Eh, I believe in the right of each individual person to protect
> themselves, but I don't believe in exessive supervision by the
> "ultimate" government.  Especially as any abuse (by admins) is
> difficult to trace.  Users should be able to feel the freedom of
> thought, the exchange of thoughts (inclusive ways to exploit the
> system!!) without having some fascist police checking up on their past
> in this way.  Besides, logs may lie, you can't log the communication
> that happens in parallell in other media.
> 
> >Also, I think that just the knowledge that a conversation is being logged
> >will tend to keep harassment from happening without constraining any other
> >forms of speech.
> 
> Actually, I don't believe in either assertion.  Logging constrain some
> forms of speech, especially critical comments towards admins... :-(
> It's funny though, that logging and checking up on employees is rather
> common in the US, just as logging and chekcing up on individuals was
> common in old East Germany and Romania! :^) Do I have to mention FBI's
> concerns about not being able to monitor encrypted communication??
> 
> Ola.