At 05:14 PM 04/15/2001 -0700, Kevin Elliott wrote:
At 15:14 -0700 on 4/15/01, Tim May wrote:
* Orson Scott Card, "Ender's Game." Kids using untraceable pseudonyms.
Huh? Excellent book but I don't recall it having the slightest mention of anything remotely applicable to the current thread... Care to refresh my memory?
The book wasn't just about Ender being raised to be the Last Bugkiller. Much of the activity was Ender's brother and sister carrying on conversations on The Net, with multi-layered reputation systems affecting who got invited to speak on particular mailing lists, who got listened to, etc. Some of the cypherpunks implications were that we all saw reputation systems as a goal that Really Made Sense, but also that turn out to be much harder to implement, even on non-fictional paper, than to describe in fiction. What kinds of algorithms do you use? How do people outfox them? How do you deal with not only the real Detweilers, but with people using the kinds of pseudonym hacks that Detweiler was constantly ranting against, such as creating a bunch of pseudonyms that all give each other positive ratings and positive reviews of each others' articles, to create a bunch of reputation capital that's undeserved and can later be burned if needed. And what are the chances that Tim's email filters still toss out discussions about Detweiler? :-)