51 lines
1.9 KiB
Plaintext
51 lines
1.9 KiB
Plaintext
chapter 6 "Privacy"
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One of the most powerful and most easily abused tools
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in your administrative arsenal is the snoop command. When
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you "snoop <person>", you get to see everything they
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say and do.
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Players usually find this intrusive and objectionable,
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and it is ethically shaky to do this without their
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knowledge and consent. The only circumstances under which
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snooping is unambiguously ethical are:
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* Snooping one of your own test characters.
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* Snooping a player (with their consent) for the purposes of
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troubleshooting a bug.
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* Snooping a user (without their consent) to investigate
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a legitimate suspicion of malfeasance.
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Secretly snooping people for your personal amusement is
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just flat wrong.
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By default, only admins can snoop. Admins are players who
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are members of one or both of the groups SECURE and ASSIST.
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An assistant admin *cannot* snoop a full admin. However,
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assistant admins have read access to the snoop log directory,
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so if global monitoring is enabled, they can read the
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contents of a full admin's monitor log.
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The new SNOOP_D system allows for the simultaneous
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snooping of multiple people, and allows multiple people to
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snoop the same person. It also permits you to enable
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monitoring of users without having to snoop, by using the
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monitor command to log i/o to /secure/log/adm.
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The GLOBAL_MONITOR parameter in config.h will take one of three
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arguments. 0 = monitor nobody. 1 = monitor everyone. 2 = monitor
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everyone except admins. After changing it, reboot the mud
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to make sure the change takes effect.
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This functionality isn't here for your entertainment. In
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fact, I had to think long and hard before sharing my snoop
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code with you and putting it in the general lib distribution.
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In the end, though, I believe that the benefits outweigh
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the risk of abuse. As an admin, you have the right to know
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what's going on in your mud, and as a lib coder, it isn't
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my business to interfere with that.
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