Andrew
06-20-2007, 03:29 PM
Ubiquity of Communication (http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/06/ubiquity_of_com.html) -- Schneier on Security
Read this essay by Randy Farmer, a pioneer of virtual online worlds, explaining something called Disney's ToonTown. Designers of online worlds for children wanted to severely restrict the communication that users could have with each other, lest somebody say something that's inappropriate for children to hear.
Randy discusses various approaches to this problem that were tried over the years. The ToonTown solution was to restrict users to something called "Speedchat," a menu of pre-constructed sentences, all innocuous. They also gave users the ability to conduct unrestricted conversations with each other, provided they both knew a secret code string. The designers presumed the code strings would be passed only to people a user knew in real life, perhaps on a school playground or among neighbors.
Read this essay by Randy Farmer, a pioneer of virtual online worlds, explaining something called Disney's ToonTown. Designers of online worlds for children wanted to severely restrict the communication that users could have with each other, lest somebody say something that's inappropriate for children to hear.
Randy discusses various approaches to this problem that were tried over the years. The ToonTown solution was to restrict users to something called "Speedchat," a menu of pre-constructed sentences, all innocuous. They also gave users the ability to conduct unrestricted conversations with each other, provided they both knew a secret code string. The designers presumed the code strings would be passed only to people a user knew in real life, perhaps on a school playground or among neighbors.