On Tue, 16 Jul 1996, Brian Gray wrote:
> > B) The coder could quite easily write code to make himself an imp and or
> > delete all the other imms.
>
> Well now, what you say is true, but let's be realistic for a second
> here. If a coder does that, the results are likely to be quick and
> severe: He will be removed from access, his character deleted, and all
> code restored to the way it was before the unfortunate incident (we all
> maintain backups in a separate account, don't we?). To imply that a
> coder has IMP power just because he is a coder is being too simplistic.
Its a pretty simple matter to insert code to make you an imp, as well as
make you undetecable to everyone else on the mud, including other imps.
I think just fiddling the fidelities on invisibility to allow you to set
yer invis level to something like 100 will cover most of the bases right
off, leaving only an old bug which lets people detect invisstarted folks
that they cant see as they log on, and possibly a few of the logging
commands, since someone might be tailing syslog...
A good coder will be able to spot these little descrepencies (well, most
of the time... you could burry it in the socket code or something and make
it really tough to find...) but really, most good coders arent advertising
looking for other coders to come do all the work on their mud... thats the
folks who want to IMP a mud w/o coding, or knowing how to at all, and those
people have little or no chance of even detecting such activity, much less
put a stop to it.
How many of the people out there that patch in code from the ftp site
willy-nilly, without knowing what or how it works wonder if they've got a
ghost implementor on board? ;)
-Sky
if (!str_cmp(GET_NAME(ch), "Skylar")) {
GET_LEVEL(ch) = LVL_IMPL;
GET_INVIS_LEV(ch) = LVL_IMPL+1;
}
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : 12/07/00 PST