On Tue, 27 Aug 1996, Jon Leonard wrote:
I've been planning to run a MUD like that, at mud.umop-ap.com port 2121. I just don't have enough coded to be worth announcing yet.
Cool. What's it running under? I was planning to base it around the latest version of the Nightmare library for MudOS, which I just downloaded. If I can get a copy somehow I could start hacking on it.
Pseudonyms Anonymous digital cash (issued by any pseudonym, not just "banks") Public and private keys Secret sharing Anonymous broadcast & message pools Anonymous markets
All sounds like good stuff to me... DC Nets as well, of course. I guess we should also simulate the Net somehow, with Web servers, email, etc. Though the Nightmare library apparently lets you create Mud objects which can access the Web so perhaps we can use the real one somehow (with the obvious security implications). What else? Protection Agencies Escrow Agencies Private Law Courts (probably controlled by players rather than the computer) Reputation Agencies
What am I missing? Should there be direct support for Jim Bell's assasination markets? It'd provide a means of demonstrating its ineffectiveness as a means of social control.
I think it should be incorporated, but I think that people can set them up easily themselves. Perhaps we should have an NPC-run 'Assasins Inc' which would run the lottery, and then players could do the actual 'wet work'. But yes, I'd really like to see how this would work in the game. As I said I'm thinking of this more as a semi-scientific experiment than a pure game. We have some idea of how this stuff should work in theory, but little of how it works in practice. I do think though that we'd have to enforce some kind of rule against 'disposable characters', otherwise people could simply create a new character every time they were killed trying to assasinate someone. There would need to be some disadvantage to just going in guns-blazing and being killed ten times in a row.
I think that for purposes of simulation, it's reasonable to model cryptographic primitives in a "Trust the server" mode, because you need to trust the MUD server anyway (unlike a government), and it puts a much lower load on the CPU.
Yep, I agree. I would like to include the real protocols but it's going to be far too slow. So we could create, say, remailer objects, anonymous digital cash objects, etc. As long as they have the same properties in 'SimAnarchy' as they would in real life then the actual behind the scene mechanics don't matter. We could, perhaps, allow characters to break protocols if they could accumulate enough processing power. I don't know how low a level we'd want to go to. I think that having an explicit group of remailers (and 'IP rerouters') would be a good idea as it would allow people to try to crack messages and perform traffic analysis. Some remailers could be run by NPCs (some of whom would be trustworthy and some wouldn't), others by the players themselves (with or without logging enabled). I'd like to also include some way by which players could write 'software' even if they weren't able to create new objects for the game. So they could perhaps write front-ends for remailers and give them away or sell them to other players.
There's also the question of log policy. Having run a MUD for a few years, I want to keep logs for bug detection. A declared policy that they aren't released for n years would work though. Opinions, anyone?
Part of me thinks that we should explicitly state that anything may be logged and used in sociological research. Perhaps we could create some kind of secure protocol to allow users to connect without revealing their real identities, so that it wouldn't matter if they were logged? Anyone want to set up a mailing list for this discussion? Mark |-----------------------------------------------------------------------| |Reverend Mark Grant M.A., U.L.C. EMAIL: mark@unicorn.com | |WWW: http://www.c2.org/~mark MAILBOT: bot@unicorn.com | |Approximate Current Location: Auckland, New Zealand | |-----------------------------------------------------------------------|