From: jfurr@vtssi.vt.EDU (Joel Furr)
Subject: re: tinyspying
Organization: The Ohio State University Department of Computer and Information Science
Date: Mon, 12 Oct 1992 07:33:01 GMT

To continue the discussion of tinysnooping and tinyspying, which despite its
relatively insipid origins might eventually make for an interesting thread
here in rec.games.mud.tiny (which sure hasn't done much to justify its
existence so far)...

NewDay is MUCKER_ALL.  What this means is that every character created there
STARTS OUT with a MUCKER bit, enabling them to program in MUF.  What this ALSO
means is that if you have a rude, inconsiderate, or totally stupid player who
either learns enough to write malevolent programs or gets someone with more
smarts to write the code for him or her, you are in a position where some real
annoying stuff can get done.  Let me digress off the subject of tinysnooping
here for a moment to give an example of this kind of player at his worst:

      We had a character who showed up on NewDay named "BriSter."  I
      would have thought him too totally clueless to learn how to tie
      his shoes, but somehow he got a few really nasty programs put
      together.  One was called "get.muf" and what it did was teleport
      other people against their will to BriSter's location... whenever
      he felt like it.  When people started complaining of being yanked
      without warning to BriSter's location, we scolded him and found
      him totally remorseless.  He said "The mucker policy doesn't say I
      can't do it, so leave me alone!"  Ditto on a few other programs
      BriSter popped up with that had people screaming.   When we found
      him going around asking the more clueful programmers for tips on
      writing a MUF version of @force, never mind its impossibility or
      whatever, we said "Hmm, it appears we have a virtual reality
      sociopath here."  Somewhere along the way we wound up locking his
      site(s) out and we haven't seen too much of him in a while.  
      Presumably he's coping with ninth grade somewhere and won't be a
      real danger until he gets to college and has more access to the
      Internet.

Now to get back to the subject of tinysnooping and tinyspying, stop and
consider how difficult it is to write a program that spies on someone or on
people in a room  (it's about one line, more if you decide to make it fancy) 
-- and envision what your BriSter type of player would do with a spycam.  

We were getting spycams hidden in rooms all over the MUCK  -- except the
public areas, which all were set STICKY and had droptos of HOME so junk left
there would go home if no one was in the room -- and, cleverly, the spyers had
set their items with the spycam actions attached DARK.  We were finding them
in people's apartments, bedrooms, you name it.  Short of a draconic "no one
except people we absolutely trust can have a MUCKER bit" policy, all we can do
is bitch out the owners of the spycams and caution the spy-ees to watch out a
little more carefully.  If we don't know a spycam is operating, we can't do
much about it... especially since the wizards can't be on the lookout for
spycams 24 hours a day. 

So before you assume that a wizard has been spying on you on any given MUCK,
remember that you don't need to be a WIZARD to SPY... and that while _wizards_
presumably don't want to do things to drive players away, sociopathic program-
mers and program-users don't HAVE that compunction.

Here's a tip for those of you who play on MUCKER_ALL or mucker-bit-available
MUCKs:  examine your room before engaging in tinysex or anything you _really_
don't want shared with other people.  If you _examine_ your room, you will see
anything DARK contained therein.  Another tip: if YOU spy on people, don't
suddenly get righteously indignant when someone else spies on you.
Newsgroups: rec.games.mud.tiny