June 2010 Edition
Computer Science Department, University of Cape Town
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Table of Contents
LamdaMoo is a MUD (multi-user dungeon, dimension, or sometimes domain) game, that allows player to create spaces and character and to use them to interact with other players’ characters and spaces. Bungle wrote a piece of software that took control of other players’ characters and make them do sadistic actions including rape. The actual owner of the character has no control over these actions. As a result, LambdaMooers are outraged and wanted bungle removed. Various opinions have been voiced ranging from expulsion to support because ‘he has done nothing wrong’. In the end, the community decided to banish Bungle and to prevent similar incidents in the future, the rules were changed such that any player’s characters and spaces can be modified or removed, if the majority of players agrees.
Think about the following questions.
Did Bungle do anything wrong?
Consider that he was responsible for the event and that he violated an implied, but not formalised rule. What did he do wrong?
Do you agree with what the community did? How should he be treated?
What about the community’s new rules concerning what amount to censoring? Do you think more safeguard is needed? If so, what?
Kim works for an investment company. Her job is to pick investments for a pension fund. To help her make decision, she uses an expert system. Each upgrade of the system gives more complex analysis.
Kim is very nervous about the market this week. Her personal indicators point to the market going down, while the expert system points to it going up. The system recommends that she puts substantial investments into the market but she does not understand the system’s analysis. She also can not judge if the system is defective.
What do you think Kim should do? Should she go with her own analysis and feeling or go with the market. If she makes the wrong choice, she will lose a lot of money for her company. Also consider the following questions:
Can Kim be held responsible if she uses the information of the program and that turns out to be the wrong decision? Perhaps company should have a policy dealing with situation such as this?
Can the system’s designer or owner be sued or held responsible if the system is working properly? What about if the system is found to be faulty?
Milo is a freelance journalist and specialises in South American politics. He uses the Internet to keep up to date and uses his computer to write articles, news, as well as taking part in online chat rooms and forums.
He has been away and on his return, eh is outraged to find postings on a forum attacking him. In these postings, it was claimed that he is a drug dealer and that his stories are filled with lies. In response, he posts a denial and also contacts the forum administrator for names and address of the defamer (All posters are required to register with their real names and address for billing purposes). However, the forum administrator refuses to give him this information. Milo is now suing them because he can not sue the perpetrator.
Do you think the forum administrator should be responsible for what is said in the forum? If no, then who should be? What about giving the information away? Recall the relevant privacy issues concerning information collected.
Recall the infamous Y2K problem, where by to save precious memory space year information is truncated to two digits (e.g. 1975 is stored as 75). As the year 2000 approached, calendar dependent activities were at risk. The public reacted to this with disbelief and outrage. Were the professionals asleep? Was it a ploy for companies to employ more professionals and charge their customers to fix this issue? Should the manufacturers and designers have had more foresight? Why was more not done earlier to address the issue? Who should pay for the costs?
However, the year 2000 arrived with no major catastrophe. There were only a few isolated problems. Various opinions have been expressed on this issue – some saying that the problems were fixed on time; while others saying that the problem was over stated. Whatever is the case, who was responsible, and why did this problem actually ever occur?