From: wcs@anchor.ho.att.com (bill.stewart@pleasantonca.ncr.com +1-510-484-6204)
Date: Tue, 15 Feb 94 16:01:44 PST
To: strick@osc.versant.com
Subject: Re: cypherpunks meeting in Mt. View last weekend.
Message-ID: <9402152352.AA07218@anchor.ho.att.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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Hi, Strick,
It was a pretty good meeting; large crowd.  If you don't mind, I'll
turn this into an informal meeting report for the list.
I missed the first hour or so.

Someone said Phil Zimmerman is working on Voice communication systems
and wants volunteers.  He's trying to do a portable,
no-special-sound-cards, widely deployable system, presumably either 
trading sound quality for flexibility or depending on Internet or V.FAST?

Pavel Curtis talked about LambdaMOO and the emerging democracy there -
lots of the users are young, and about half are statists and half are
Libs or Anarchists of various sorts.  About 5000 people have accounts,
it runs on a 256-meg Sun Scorpion and really needs even more horsepower.
Interesting stuff on the social evolution there, and the lessons
the Wizards learned about letting things develop on their own
and staying out of the way while the players create stuff.
It's largely a discussion world, I gather.  About 2/3 of the participants
just use telnet (lambda.parc.xerox.com 8888) instead of clients,
which limits the ability of people to do fancy stuff with
PGP or machine-assisted characters.  Most are young (mean age <24,
mode 19, mostly .edu, about 25% female.)   parcftp.xerox.com for software.

Chip Rosenthal talked about
Habitat, an early Commodore-64-client+central-world-server system
that he helped put out with QLink, which later became America OnLine.
In Habitat, you have a graphical user interface, avatars who start out 
normal-looking but you can customize appearances (e.g. there's a Head Shop.)
To fit in a C64/300baud world, they had to think a lot about what objects
they needed and what kind of communication really needed to happen;
they also found that when you get LOTS of users out there they can think
up stuff lots faster than the sysadmins can, a lesson LambdaMOO also learned.
(They spent two intensive weeks planning a quest for Something in
a Dungeon for the users; the users found it in half an hour.)
(Cooperation works *far* better than central planning!)
Since it was originally a gaming world, you could get killed or kill
other players, and much dissent and discussion about this gradually occurred.
Eventually, enough players asked the Wizards to change this that they
had a vote.  It came out 50-50, of course, so the Wizards decided you
couldn't get killed inside the town boundary but could get killed outside,
and folks voted with their feet.  The town elected a Sheriff (whose gun didn't
work in town either.)  Various discussions about how people felt
about the Wizards having to obey the rules, etc.  C64s eventually got old...
Habitat ran partly in America and partly, longer, in Japan; Fujitsu
bought out the remains and it's gradually coming back as a new
Global Cyberspace Project or something like that.  New Fujitsu
custom hardware supports the current stuff, and there's a 7-layer
protocol stack :-(, etc.

Arthur Chandler, disguised in a suit :-), talked about BayMOO,
where last week's cpunks virtual meeting was.  mud.crl.com 8888.
Arthur teaches social science of some sort at SFSU; I forget if it's
polisci or anthropology or literature, but he's studying the kinds
of social interactions that go on in MOOs.
BayMOO has a much different balance of statism that LambdaMOO;
some Lambdafolk came over to BayMOO and started talking about
how neat it was to have Government and how BayMOO should get some,
and people politely informed them they were crazy and ignored them.
(Hypnocracy was working quite well, for you old folks in the audience :-)
In BayMOO, the folks who run it are janitors, not wizards.
BayMOO is basically running on borrowed time on crl.com;
since they don't charge by the hour for connections,
they're not making any money from all the load it's placing on the Sparc2,
so it may eventually have to break up, charge money, or find a new home.
Anybody have a machine to donate?  The Little Garden may be
able to lend some bandwidth, if I'm not misremembering John's comment.

The fourth speaker was also very interesting, but memory fade
is setting in, so I can't tell you who he was or what he said :-)
but he was doing some formal modelling of some of the interactions,
and I remember it being neat stuff.  Oh, well.


Somewhere along the line there was a lot of discussion about
security, and how much of it needs to be done by the server,
who would then need to be trusted (can you *really* trust a Wizard? :-)
vs. peer-to-peer by clients.  For people who use clients for their
MUDs, it may be a lot more effective.  

Eric Hughes brought up a topic of how to name people across MUDs,
which related to this topic and to several others and led to 
Notable DIsagreements among participants.  The basic suggestion
was that people should be able to bring names from other environments,
e.g. Haakon of Lambda or Blast of BayMOO.  While the primary context
was simply MUD/MOOs, it touches on issues like global vs. local name spaces,
centralized naming authorities and is-a-person (Tim May opposes it for
this reason), server vs. client control, reputation servers,
guilt-by-association, etc.  Someone sensibly pointed out that
you could create a Lapel Pin object in a MOO which could by used
to provide any identifying information you want for people who
want to look at it, and decide whether or not to trust it
based on contents, signatures in it, etc. 
Tim's opposition is largely to the concept of central naming,
which leads to government-controlled id trees instead of web-of-trust,
and therefore lack of anonymity.  (COmments by various on
Clinton National Health ID card and Republican Not-An-Immigrant ID card.)
Someone commented that you shouldn't really have A public key,
you should have a ring of public keys for different things,
so people remember that identity is contextual rather than True Name.
Another problem is the unsettled question about how reputation
servers should work, and whether by bringing an identity from
a given group (e.g. LambdaMoo or CypherWonks) you drag along its
reputation, as opposed to providing pointers for people
to go look at your reputations in various places you hang out.

Dinner was at the sushi-on-little-boats place in Mountain View.
The group was separated due to lack of contiguous seating,
and it became obvious after a ping or two that this was a Token Ring :-)
NTP yielded about 65 seconds RTT; a packet containing
begin 644 /vmunix was dropped into the bit bucket by one of the servers...
Later icecream split into two discussions, one serious and one
centered around Don's powerbook with the Rube Goldberg object-oriented
mousetrap-making games.  Can't tell you about the serious part,
but the mousetraps were fun.

		Bill
# Bill Stewart  AT&T Global Information Solutions, aka NCR Corp
# 6870 Koll Center Parkway, Pleasanton CA, 94566 Phone 1-510-484-6204 fax-6399
# email bill.stewart@pleasantonca.ncr.com billstewart@attmail.com
# ViaCrypt PGP Key IDs 384/C2AFCD 1024/9D6465