Subject: A new twist on an old MUD social issue

From: [email-masked] (Eric Schwartz)
Date: Mon, 19 Apr 1993 11:48:22 -0700

MOO folk,

On the TechMOOseum (a MOO "soon" to become part of a real-life  
exhibit at The Tech Museum of Innovation), I'm concerned that at one  
time or another there may be a character who insists upon using foul  
language or unacceptable behavior.  This is hardly a new or unique  
concern, but a portion of the population of this particular MOO will  
be visitors at the real-life museum, many of them young children.

Although the museum is very interested in exposing new technologies  
to the general public - and this very issue would be of interest to  
the visitors - we creative exhibit designers must also cover our  
bums.  In general, I do not advocate MOO censorship, but we need to  
find a way to keep the MOO "clean" at least for families visiting the  
real museum.

I'm interested in collecting ideas for handling this situation, so if  
you have a story to tell or a technical implementation to suggest,  
let's hear it!  One idea is declare a "clean" zone for people  
connecting from the museum.  There would have to be some sort of  
mechanism (i.e. server hack) to at least attempt to filter out  
obscenities or MOOsex activity, etc.  Connecting from outside of the  
museum would be just like any other MOO - the MOO community would  
have to come up with solutions for anything that isn't socially  
accepted.

By the way, this is but one of the exciting things happening on The  
TechMOOseum - 156.151.253.1 8888 - so feel free to stop by if these  
things interest you.

Thanks!

	Eric / Ahtraddis

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From: [email-masked] (Clay Webster)
Date: Mon, 19 Apr 1993 12:22:06 -0700

> obscenities or MOOsex activity, etc.  Connecting from outside of the  

Auto-toad'em. Three strikes (in a 'clean' area) 'n' yer-out.
______________________________________________________________________________

Clay Webster, [email-masked] "Now I know why they call television a medium.
DB Appl Progmr/Tech Mrkt Coord   It's never rare, or well done."
908-287-2100 ext. 920                                          -- Mighty Mouse
______________________________________________________________________________

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From: Judy Anderson <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 19 Apr 1993 19:50:31 -0700

One problem with machine-censored text is that people are quite
clever.  The mud wrestling pit on LambdaMOO has some machine
censorship, but users are frequently quite clever in coming up with
ways to be obscene without using any of the proscribed words.  But
it's a good first cut, especially if you do something drastic to first
time offenders so they don't get the opportunity to start scheming.

Judy Anderson yclept yduJ   [email-masked]  'yduJ' rhymes with 'fudge'
    [ LambdaMOO is lambda.parc.xerox.com 8888 / 13.2.116.36 8888 ]
       Join the League for Programming Freedom, [email-masked]

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From: [email-masked] (bilding at ncm)
Date: Tue, 20 Apr 1993 11:34:07 -0700

Like many things on the MOO and MUD in general, censorship
seems not to have been perfected as a simple mechanism
of code yet ... alas, it may be that someone will have to
get their hands dirty and monitor for obscenity.
Orwell suggests the easiest and most fun way to do this,
simply having each MOO room in the 'cleansed' area contain
a 'vidscreen' object that feeds what it hears to an
agent of censorship.  That agent can be a person, at first, 
but on the regular part of the MOO (i.e. pseudo-free) you 
could sponsor a coding competition to see who can come
up with the best 'nasty-text' catching NPC to listen in
and learn to spot unclean ideas expressed on your MOO.
You could liquidate those characters (the ones not actually
logged in from the Museum, that is) who use NastySpeak
and perhaps offer their quota to those whose code successfully 
terminated them...

After a while, you might need no human intervention to 
enact the repression of expression you propose, the ultimate
Virtual Big Brother :) 

[email-masked]  

ps.  Jokingly, I might suggest using port 1984 ...

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From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 21 Apr 1993 06:18:51 -0700

I recall the Dartmouth 'animal' program that would play twenty
questions to try to guess an animal.  People were very imaginative in
the ways they got obscene answers and questions into the database.
And your animal couldn't be a peacock ..

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From: Berry Kercheval <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 21 Apr 1993 08:35:51 -0700

>>>>> On Wed, 21 Apr 1993 06:18:51 -0700, [email-masked] said:
bhayes> I recall the Dartmouth 'animal' program that would play twenty
bhayes> questions to try to guess an animal.  People were very imaginative in
bhayes> the ways they got obscene answers and questions into the database.
bhayes> And your animal couldn't be a peacock ..

I seem to recall that "Fanny Hill" was Cleland's response to a wager
that he could not write a sexually explicit story without recourse to
obscenity and foul language.  If you've ever read it you'll find it
full of "ivory pillars of manhood" and the like.  Not a dirty word in
it, yet as explicit as Hustler.

I think the moral here is that mere vocabulary-based filtering will
not eliminate folks determined to be offensive, though it may help
with most of the juvenile jerks.

  --berry

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From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 21 Apr 1993 17:10:00 -0700

I think vocabulary screening could be made to work, but addresses
the problem at the wrong level.  Some people -want- to have sexual
conversations with others, and that should be permitted as long as
people are all consenting.  The question in my mind is how to 
implement consent.

What strikes me as the way to win would be to keep a small ring buffer
of messages typed to players (and the sources of that info, such as what
@paranoid keeps), and to permit someone at any time to freeze the
information in a `sealed envelope' (perhaps even encrypted so that it
could be kept in the database for a long time without having the
database prodded by an external program in order to reveal its contents
prematurely).  

 >"Hi there.
 You say, "Hi there."
 JoeLoser says "**** ***"
 >@save_incident
 A log of the recent conversation fragment is being created.
 Enter a one-time encryption password:
 x892ksj
 Your conversation fragment has id #234257.
 Please remember this id and the password you have given.
 The password will be needed later to unlock the saved information.
 If you believe that a MOO Law has been violated, 
 you can report the incident with @report_incident.
 >"You'd better go away and leave me alone, JoeLoser.  I've warned
   you about this before I have recorded evidence of your abusive
   language and I am prepared to report these incidents if they continue.
 You say, "You'd better [...]"
 JoeLoser apologizes profusely and promises never to do it again.
 JoeLoser has left.

That person could then make their accusations and if it came to trial,
the envelope could be unsealed to be used as additional evidence.  I
would hope that the mere knowledge of that information waiting would be
enough to keep it from being opened in a lot of cases.  If the envelope
were not opened, the information in it would remain private and
eventually be disposed of.

I believe that what I am proposing is the moo equivalent of what I
consider to be a reasonable service now starting to be offered by the
phone company where someone who receives a harrassing phone call can,
after the fact, ask that the phone company notify the police.  The
callee can't actually get the caller's phone number, but can still do
the necessary operation of turning the information over to the police.
Would it be socially and legally proper, and would it be computationally
feasible, to keep the stack traces for the last ten things typed to each
active player, just in case of this situation?

My main concern is about whether the information could be appropriately
safeguarded while in the ring buffer waiting to find if it is to be
kept.  Perhaps even then it should be encrypted in a way that only the
MOO owner has access to.

It would probably bother me if the same kind of information were being
kept on phones, so maybe there's some other privacy concern that I'm not
thinking of.  Or maybe I just don't trust the Phone Company not to
knuckle under to the FBI if they randomly want to peruse people's
conversations for no good reason.  I want the online information
instantly expunged as soon as its ring buffer size is exceeded, and I
want the information available to no one.  Similarly, I want the saved
envelopes available to no one unless needed specifically by one of the
participants in the conversation for use in a `trial'--no casual uses 
permitted.

As a special case, too, people should have a list of trusted friends
(controlled by verbs named @trust and @distrust), and recording should
reliably not take place whenever a room was filled with people all of
whom trusted each other.

Just the knowledge that this after-the-fact reporting could be done even
by those who had not been prepared in advance might deter a lot of
would-be offenders because there would not be the sense of potential
victims being quite so `alone' and `undefended'.