Re: cheating

["Carl Edman" <cedman@cedman.remote.Princeton.EDU>]

lemke@ncd.com writes:
> i'm one of those who think cheating is unimportant -- people who
> really want to do it will probably find away around any safeguards,
> if only for the challenge (as most crackers will tell you).

I'd sure hate to use a rlogind written by you.  "Why bother requiring  
or verifying a password to get root access ?  True hackers will figure  
out a way around that anyway."

> if you're really worried about it, then perhaps some form of server
> access control is the simplest solution.  just disallow connections
> from users/sites/playernames that are caught cheating, and as as many
> of the security checks out of things like rshd that you need.

But that is just part of the perniciousness of client omniscience  
cheating.  It is completely and 100% undetectable from the server side.   
Unless you look over the shoulder of every player all the time, you are  
never going to find out whom to lock out.  And as that is so, every  
cheating player gets a free advantage.  Honest players have no way of  
knowing if they are the only ones who labour under that disadvantage  
and so can rationally only decide to become cheaters as well.  You'll  
end up with a system without LOS.  As I've said before, if that is what  
you want, lets debate it before we go to all the trouble of  
implementing LOS algorithms which nobody will use in the end anyway.

	Carl Edman