I didn't get a chance to get to the virtual meeting proper last night, but I did stop by afterwards for a while. This morning I got a chance to see some what was on the videotape which was left in the camera in the meeting hall. My praise to Arthur Chandler for setting this up. Definitely a worthwhile experience, expecially given the topic of the Bay Area meeting this weekend. I've a few comments for now, though. -- Client software. A must-use. telnet is really annoying. I point this out because unimportant technical considerations make huge differences in usability. -- Speech. A lot more people talk in the MOO than on the mailing list. And you thought the mailing list was loud. People get up to speed much more quickly on overall structure, but it's still not very good for quickly explaining detail. -- Time Zones. One never forgets that real people are behind the pseudonyms because the entering and exiting is based upon clock of bodily origin. A surprising intrusion into the abstract environment. Might I suggest that some future v-meetings happen at morning hours Pacific time, in order to allow those to the east of the Atlantic to participate? I heard from a dear old friend who's living in Cambridge that he was thinking about showing up, but it was 4am local time. A noon Pacific time meeting is 8 p.m. London time, for example. -- Names. A number of people were logged on, as guests, with their real names, including me. The authentication of guest names here, though, was even lower than email addresses. I was logged on as Eric_Hughes, but anybody else could have done so as well. A small proposal. It would be convenient for meetings in the future, which might be held at different locations, to have persistent identity across MOO's. A cryptographic identification scheme seems appropriate. We can't use a global naming space, since that doesn't scale. We can, however, nicely use a hierarchical naming space since MOO names are assigned on a per-MOO basis. So, for example, we could have Haakon of Lambda or Blast of Bay. We can also resolve conflicting common names by the old custom of place-naming as differentiation. Each MOO would have an identity-signing key, which would be use to attest that a particular key was the possession of a name on that MOO. The MOO's could distribute keys amongst themselves or use a central signature source to sign MOO keys. This technique would allow characters to visit other MOO's, even as guests, and retain their identity. These pseudonyms need not even be issued only by MOO's. IRC seems another source of pseudonyms, as does the cypherpunks list. Xenon of Cypherpunks, for example. This same segmentation could be used to determine the origin of objects, as in, "This vcr is of bay-arean make." Finally, this hierarchy could be distributed with DNS, e.g. bay.moo MOO <MOO public key> bay.moo ADDRESS mud.crl.com 8888 blast.bay.moo PERSON <public key, signed> DESCRIPTION "He's bald. Very bald." (Acknowledgements to Carl Ellison. Here the identity is the key, and enforced by software.) Eric