Subject: Nomic: improved parser

From: Joel Uckelman <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 23 Jul 2000 20:16:48 -0500

Today I fixed numerous things wrong with the parser, viz.:

1. It rejects proposals with text portions exceeding 5k.
2. It rejects proposals with titles exceeding 500 characters.
3. It replies with confirmation of what it did.
4. It skips broken tags, but still attempts to process the remainder of 
the message.
5. It rejects new proposals from players who already have 10 live 
proposals.
6. The error messages are somewhat more informative than before.

Things still unlimited:

You can make as many revisions as you want to, as quickly as you can 
send mail. If you really wanted to fill the game user's quota, you 
could do it this way. (Please don't.) Checking for this is somewhat 
more complicated than the other error checking I've implemented. I 
still may try to do this. Anyway, I'm not sure this will be a problem 
when we're actually playing, since the parser will be subscribed to the 
business list, just like everyone else. Thus, setting up a script to 
spam the parser would likewise spam all the other players--I hope no 
one would do this.

So, once again, please try some stuff.

-- 
J. Uckelman
[email-masked]
http://www.public.iastate.edu/~uckelman/

---

From: Roger Carbol <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 23 Jul 2000 19:32:22 -0600

Just a general note.

There's a branch of cryptography called side-channel attacks.  It
deals with things like directly monitoring the hardware implementation
of a cypher, flooding a cypher recipient, etc.

This whole business with the Nomic Bot reminds me of it a bit.  In
that it's a physical attack, on some level, than an algorithmic
attack.

There are "real life" analogies.  Filibusters, fer instance.

Anyways.

.. Roger Carbol .. [email-masked]