Posts made by Ashen-Shugar

Teri Garr.

You shall be missed.

After several years, Pyewacket the Norwegian has decided the new couch is his…

We respond ‘yes sir’.

RhostMUSH is proud to announce the new development discord.

Anyone who runs a RhostMUSH, wants to talk about mushes in general, even who wants to ask help on code, even if that code is not related to RhostMUSH, all are welcome.

https://discord.gg/7uAZj5et

@Polk said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

@DarthSmegma I don’t think it lets him off the hook for anything.

He’s a fully grown adult (We can tell since he’s been at this long enough that, even if he were a teenager at the start, he’s an adult now).

He’s responsible for his own actions.

I find it useful to understand a person’s pattern of behavior, because then you know where the threat lies.

In the case of Cujo and his game, the threat is that he’s dehumanizing every player on his game, for the sake of the game itself.

He believes keeping the game running smoothly, and growing, is more important than the well being of any player on it.

That’s immature. That’s dangerous. And it’s important to realize that.

At this point I would call his behavior as ‘All in’.

It won’t matter if the decision is right or wrong, on his or other’s viewpoints. The line has been long crossed, and the point of no return has been wiped in nuclear fire.

It’s a train wreck, but short of a restart from scratch, I think it’s a done deal.

@Pavel said in On the utility of Logs, Receipts, and Proof:

If you’ve got it written in a public, easily accessible and understood form, that you’re logging everything all the time always? That’s fine, go for gold.

If you do it surreptitiously, that’s where the violation is. It’s not the action itself, it’s the lack of transparency that loses the trust. And without trust it doesn’t matter how much data you have logged, nobody’s going to believe you.

This I will grant you, 100%.

If you log, you need to be upfront that you are doing it. Doing it on the sly helps no one.

If privacy is not guarenteed on the game and that you may log when situations warrent it, you need to be visible about it.

We were on Labyrinth from the start, and to be frank it’s the only thing that stopped my wife and I being considered as accessories from what amounted to statuary rape charges that the abuser was doing on our mush.

It’s an extreme case, but here’s the thing I learned

I would rather invade privacy one million times I would rather annoy and piss off every single person on here. If it would save the innocence of one. single. child.

I hope none of you are ever put into a situation like that. It scars you. For life.

It twists your perceptions of what is truly important. It twists your morals on what you think you knew and what s reality.

It corrupts your beliefs on what is truly evil in the world.

I wish and hope and pray none of you ever go through that.

But it’s partly why I stand so hard nosed on why logs are necessary.

It’s not always about privacy. Sometimes it’s necessary to protect people who don’t even know they need protecting.

Where the line is? That’s up to you to discover.

@sao said in On the utility of Logs, Receipts, and Proof:

@Ashen-Shugar this really just is a weird derail of the point. The fact that we live in a weird corporatist oligarchy is a fact that we all live with but that doesn’t mean that in our hobbies as between each other we can’t have totally reasonable expectations of privacy and data sharing separate from the compromises we have had to make with technology in order to exist.

Google may be up in my business but that doesn’t mean my friends expect me to hand them my password just because we chat. Like, what even is this point you’re trying to make?

The point I’m tryng to make is that whle privacy should be enjoyed and even apprecated, it really shouldn’t be expected, especally when situatons arise that may demand that privacy concerns are not as important as the situation that may require that data.

That’s my point.

@Pax said in On the utility of Logs, Receipts, and Proof:

@Ashen-Shugar My dude, my guy, my french fry:

That data collection exists at an obligatory and, let’s be fair, extremely technical level doesn’t mean that overt monitoring is the ideal resolution in every scenario.

What a nuclear take.

@Pax my bud, my chum, my beaten drum:

Obligatory in a ‘need for beer’ kind of way sure, in that ‘if you want to use our services, you agree to be collected’. Where ‘opt-out’ means you don’t use the service, which, for a lot of places means ‘the internet’.

Even ‘opting out’ just means it dosn’t personalize the data, they still collect it.

It’s not a nuclear option when most places are glowing green around us.

@sao said in On the utility of Logs, Receipts, and Proof:

I don’t think staff needs to be bad actors for me to not want them to be in my private shit?

So you er, may not want to be on the internet?

TCPDUMP(1)                                                       General Commands Manual                                                      TCPDUMP(1)

NAME
       tcpdump - dump traffic on a network

SYNOPSIS
       tcpdump [ -AbdDefhHIJKlLnNOpqStuUvxX# ] [ -B buffer_size ]
               [ -c count ]
               [ -C file_size ] [ -G rotate_seconds ] [ -F file ]
               [ -i interface ] [ -j tstamp_type ] [ -m module ] [ -M secret ]
               [ --number ] [ -Q in|out|inout ]
               [ -r file ] [ -V file ] [ -s snaplen ] [ -T type ] [ -w file ]
               [ -W filecount ]
               [ -E spi@ipaddr algo:secret,...  ]
               [ -y datalinktype ] [ -z postrotate-command ] [ -Z user ]
               [ --time-stamp-precision=tstamp_precision ]
               [ --immediate-mode ] [ --version ]
               [ expression ]

The reason I bring this up is that everyone tied to the internet can and will log everything for ‘reasons’. It boils down that you have to trust the people who control the mechanisms where you send and receive data to not be douchebags.

Data collection is big business anymore. Privacy is important, but to be perfectly clear, connecting to the internet waves your ability to guarentee that. It just does.

@dvoraen said in On the utility of Logs, Receipts, and Proof:

[snip]
At the end of the day, someone went over the line or you wouldn’t have a report in the first place. Don’t be a part of the group that went over the line.

Once upon a time, my wife started up a mush based on the movie Labyrinth. It had base ‘please have permission if you’re not 18+’ which as everyone knows people tend to ignore anyway.

So, lets fast forward a year.

Labyrinth, yes, it attracts under aged people, we don’t ask, they don’t tell.

Except one day we had a potentail creeper come on. very very good on hiding what they do. page only, in so much as gathering times to send real life information back and forth.

real life information like nude pictures of children on the mush.

Which I would not have known if i was not ‘logging everything going on’.

Which would have promptly gotten me in trouble with a federal agency, which was involved in this situation.

Which was ugly all around.

So yes, I’m all for privacy, and all for ‘not being part of the group that goes over the line’.

But sometimes in rare situations, you have to ask yourself. Who suffers the most when you refuse to go over ‘that line’?

Food for thought.

@Jennkryst said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

@Ashen-Shugar said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

D20 Saga system

Too crunchy, TOO CRUNCHY.

I fully agree. I loathe the code. The feature set and end-user stuff is fun. But the code… the code…

Trying to modfy that code is like forcefully removing your eyeballs, surgically replacing your sexual organs with them, then willfully having sex with a rabid honey badger…
…
…
…
in slow motion…

@Jennkryst said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

@IoleRae said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

@shit-piss-love said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

@Wizz Whoever was looking to build their own Star Wars game may want to get in touch with Zephyr and the other booted admins. Sounds like Cujo just vetted some potential staff for you.

This is a great idea. @Jennkryst, you should consider reaching out. If nothing else, they have experience admining in the genre, and could provide valuable input for setting things up.

sets up the Staff-summoning signal

Please feed me all your coding knowledge. Or just write the code for me. OR BOTH!

(Everyone is going ‘read this and that, and they will tell you what these different strings of code mean’ while I am way earlier in the process than everyone assumes. Just ‘wait… Linux? I haven’t tried to figure out linux since (in the biggest twist of irony) AoA died the first time, over a decade ago’.)

I have a generic database with a D20 Saga system for RhostMUSH I can pass to you. Not sure what codebase you’d want, but it’s available.

@GF said in Pets!:

@Pyrephox With laser eyes!

There’s a reason he gets treats when he asks for treats.

He’s like the 500 pound gorilla in the room. You shrink down and say ‘yes sir’.

Here’s a portrait view of Pye.

@GoodInnit said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

@Ashen-Shugar said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

To be blunt, I wish more codebases had @snoop.

I know Penn has a command to do something to that effect. The catch is that on Age of Alliances it requires Cujo to do something about problems, and that is anathema to him. His preferred method is to avoid problems at all costs and his inaction enables the abusers. You don’t need to dole out consequences if you refuse to look at the problem.

Reminds me a lot of places ran by Elsa/Zero.

Pity that.

@Pavel said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

@Ashen-Shugar said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

To be blunt, I wish more codebases had @snoop.

Penn and TinyMUX have similar capacity, at least, with the SUSPECT flag. Assuming logs are configured suitably in the latter’s case.

Correct.

However, the SUSPECT flag tends to send all suspects to a singular log, @snoop is unique in that it lets you do logs by dbref# so it allows separation which makes it easier to review.

Well, ‘unique’ in feature. To be honest LPMud and DikuMUD’s had it before we did.

Pyewacket. Our fluffy 30 pound Norwegian Forestcat.

@Warma-Sheen said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

@mangosplitz said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

The sorts of people who need to get Red Flagged are also generally the sort of people who are VERY good at manipulating, and so they will have counter receipts anyway and sometimes those are more damaging than the initial offense. So receipts are a very tricky subject.

As Jethro Gibbs would say, “trust but verify”. It doesn’t have to be public to all, but if games don’t substantiate claims, it will allow accusations to be weaponized for any type of grievance. It only takes one false accusation to be acted on to break down the trust of an entire community in all directions and destroy the environment.

Trust but verify.

This.

This is the reason why RhostMUSH has @snoop.

Yes, it can be abused.
Yes, it can be an invasion of privacy.
But system logs are the end all be all of truth.

No more ‘he said, she said.’
No more ‘it was misinterpreted.’
No more ‘s(he) is just emotional and taking it out of proporton.’
No more ‘they’re just emo and are jealous.’
No more.

Player logs can be modfied, and again goes to a he says, she says.
System logs can’t. Sure, the system admins can be douchebags and modify them themselves, but if that’s the case it’s a mud waving a red flag on ‘don’t play here’.

To be blunt, I wish more codebases had @snoop.

@oknow said in Dead MU*s you remember fondly:

Riffing off @imstillhere’s thread, a place to reminisce about dead MU*s you remember. Smaller and more obscure the better.

I’ll start:

• Armageddon (not the MUD)

Armageddon MUSH’s db is up if you’re interested.

No players, but for nostalgia.

galaxy.silvren.com 6666