In case some of you don't know this, besides ensuring that players are running verified cheat-free clients, Wormbo's AntiTCC mutator also offers a couple of features to clients that touch upon equally relevant trust and right to information matters and which have been around in other online congregation media/protocols for decades (e.g. IRC), such as the Whois and Whowas commands. These allow players to ask the server for all known aliases of anyone playing at that time or before they logged off. The catch here is, this feature - which I personally consider to be a very important right, at about the same level as being shown the other players' nicknames in an online game in fact - is hung upon each server admin's discretion regarding whether to have it enabled or not. Which brings us to TechCom where, you guessed it, we have it disabled and, from what I can tell, we've always had. So I guess what I'm wondering here is two things:

a) why does Foibos believe that people who may engage in trolling, harassing, griefing, or any other constant counterproductive/disruptive practice (I could name dozens in ONS alone) while being cunning enough to barely avoid mass vocal resentment through aliasing have a greater right to their anonymity than ours to know who they really are so we can weed them out as they join time and again under different nicks and take appropriate action against them (be that collectively shunning them or anything more effective)?

b) What are everyone else's thoughts on this here? Would you rather "give up" your secret aliases in exchange for greater transparency and all it offers us as a community or would you prefer to keep yours hidden knowing that some out there are likely to be abusing this privilege against us?

I don't believe I need to tell you where I stand on this...

I believe in total transparency with respect to nicknames.
We have a great thing going on TC and it is imperative that we continue to maintain a level of respect, and may I say decency that is utterly missing on most/all other servers. It is rude and I think underhand to turn up for war without your identity being clearly broadcast. No more covert aliases, come and fight, bring your A game!

Let us Play!

As a programmer I have by nature a reasonable restrictive opinion about personal data and consider each law/principle of the data privacy act a well-wrought and necessary one.

One of these principles is that data can only be accessed by authorized persons and those should only be as many as are required for the work that is done. In other words only the admin and co-admins.

You can argue in how far the other principles (data transparency, appropriate security of the transmitted data, correctness of saved data, necessity of data, data reduction and others) can actually apply to the data that is related to playing on a public server without being bound to a password-secured ingame account, but the main principle of data privacy is the "prohibition principle with permission clause" would be yet another important one that would speak against such a system: you may not gather data without the allowance of the person concerned. The data may be transmitted automatically upon connection but he didn't give you the permission to make the data available to everyone else.

In the end I don't really care as I only have this one nick in any game I play, but from an IT guy's point of view would I not consider the gain of this step enough to be worth sacrificing people's personal data as long as the same result can be achieved by watchful admins without having everyone's privacy too much compromised.

I really don't understand what's the point of your (quite nasty and suggestive) question. Surprisingly I don't think that the trolls and such idiots should have more rights than standard players, I just haven't enabled this option because of bunch of the "shared IDs" on our server that makes useless in many cases (be sure that the trolls are mostly using them) and because there was no interest in it, players haven't asked for it. Regarding the "shared IDs", I respect the privacy of the players with the - ehm, doubtful copy of the game.

As an introductory disclaimer, let me just assure you that I'm quite a privacy-minded person myself; I've always been even before I was a CS student. After 14 years of online presence, I'm confident I have as small a digital footprint as humanly possible; you won't find any images of me anywhere nor any instances of unsecured http where my full name or any other personal information is displayed for others to see. I do not network socially and I've never considered the minutia of my daily life suitable for public consumption. I may not frequently browse through proxies, but for the past few years I have been using an untraceable and disposable secondary email account to register with any online service of quetionable legal (not ethical, mind you) nature, and my primary, should it ever get hacked into, has an almost empty inbox.
Having been aware of the privacy and electronic security war waged against western world civilians and common users over the past decade but also of the evolving realities of hacking, identity theft, online stalking and other threats - not to mention having put on a grey hat myself on a few occasions - I can most vehemently state I'd never consider giving up anyone's personal or sensitive information unless there'd be a clear and demonstrable greater benefit to that. As you can imagine, such occasions hardly ever come about. This one, however, I believe to be worth taking the time and making the effort to support, hence the discussion.

Now then, to address the various concerns. Below are Crusha's arguments in distilled form:
Crusha wrote:
- I'm an IT, personal data should be restricted; all laws that regulate their dissemination are good
- private data should be visible/handled by admins only
- many private data restrictions don't apply to acct-less public online gaming, but opt-in data gathering should
- "private data" automatically recorded in online games, but shouldn't be publicized without permission
- by offering alias lists, you're "sacrificing" personal data, compromosing privacy
- alias lists offer little gain
- better policing can be achieved through admins
Crusha, do not have any illusions that by offering the server-side feature of whois alias lists anyone's privacy suddenly sustains a big, new blow. Three reasons for this:

Firstly, TechCom (and most other popular ONS servers) require online stat tracking, therefore everyone playing already has all their stats tracked through their Epic-assigned unique PlayerID (a hash of arbitrarily given Stats-Username and Stats-Password). Anyone who wants to know such a tracked person's aliases can already do so by looking up a match where they played with any nick at ut2004stats and following that back to their stats page where the matches for all their other aliases will also be listed, so those nicks will be evident. No new holes in the wall then.

Secondly, you seem to be under the impression that, either explicitly stated by the game's own EULA or legally implied, private UT servers are (or should be) bound by any kind of privacy laws of any country. Obvious culpability and jurisdiction matters aside (how would you prosecute a chinese UT server breaching your privacy?), you need to realize that when you join someone else's service, everything happens under their own terms; hell there's no implied democratic process to begin with (we just assume that will be the case because it is conducive to attracting a bigger playerbase), let alone a concept of privacy protection. Your entrance alone is enough to imply your own agreement to that (no separate opt-in choices or permissions concerning the collection or handling of "private" data) and this fact alone strips you of any later right to protest any (mis)handling of data you exchange with that service. To put this in practical terms, if Foibos plastered an IP list of everyone who's ever played on TechCom tomorrow morning, there'd be nothing you could do and nowhere you could appeal about it. The sooner we stop pretending we're in a lawful state environment and understand that our discussion pertains to a fuzzier, no-guarantees, as-is situation, the more suited we will be to evaluate the facts and make better arguments about them. For better or for worse, the power is in our hands (well, Foibos' mostly) to decide, dismiss and regulate everything based on our own morals, not on written law.

Finally, the only knowledge - the only data - that 3rd parties might end up getting is that of more nicknames. Nicknames are NOT (and certainly should not) be considered private data within the virtual world they're meant for. Private data is anything that identifies or describes the real person behind an avatar or any of their personal state or attributes; such would be an IP address, a real name/surname, residence address and/or other contact information (phone no., email acct, other online accounts), family/marital/financial status documents, visual and/or other biometric identification data (picture, fingerprint, etc.), health and medical records, records of IRL or online activity like video recordings of your presence and/or habits in public (hello, UK), audio recordings of interpersonal communications on any medium (hello, Echelon, Carnivore et al.), or trackings of your visits and searches at various websites (hello, Google cookies, Microsoft et al.) and many other practices that we're perfectly aware of and despise the implementation thereof in the name of counter-terrorism, saving the children or whatever other lofty cause polititians and lawmakers profess when they're looking to subvert your freedoms for a buck from capitalism. Umm, yeah, sorry for the sudden rant there, back on topic now...
Point is, nicknames are an integral part of your public online identity, just as your character skin and voice pack for audio taunts are too. Nothing about those is secret since they are "meant" to be your proxies for being identified and recognized as an individual player different from other individual players. No matter how much you may want (or believe) it to be otherwise, whois/whowas (unlike its IRC counterpart) won't tell 3rd parties your IP and if that claim is your whole argument for why our privacy's gonna be shred to tatters as soon as it gets enabled, I'm sorry but I'm gonna have to label you a delusional hysteric here (fearmonger also fits, but that implies more sinister motives). I have already argued how and why the knowledge boost from a tool like whois would benefit the community as a whole and since the only "drawback" involves having all your own aliases out in the open (and we know what sort of ppl typically alias and for what reasons), I really don't see how you can claim the cost/benefit analysis is not in our favour, however small you might want to make the boon out to be.

As for the current alternative to proactively policing the server for troublemakers, the server's own history has demonstrated it doesn't cut it for every case. If it did, we wouldn't be here.

Running out of space, will address Foibos in another post.