Meta XRepublic

 
Cheating, Tyranny and other Nastyness
January 2004

This document outlines some of the ways that I can guess people might try to cheat the system by inventing ways to gain undue influence on the polity. From this understanding, countermeasures may be built into the system.

Cloning
The first place where it seems likely to cheat would be for individuals to clone themselves into a Partisan Group. If someone were able to spoof the system and control multiple Citizens, they could Wonk and Polish their own Arguments, have them Attached to Issues and Weight them into Significance. As well they could inflate their own Credibility.

Re-Entry Spoofing
Citizens who have outworn their welcome in any of the Houses might not be recognized as they create for themselves a new identification. Some singular method of assuring that an individual is registered only once should occur, lest they begin spoofing the system. We should identify this as Re-entry Spoofing, that is, a condition in which a previously expelled member re-registers as a new individual and seeks to continue the same behavior that got him/her expelled. To control Re-entry Spoofing, all materials of expelled members lose their attribution. That is to say that if JoeBlow is PNG'd from the Eruditorium, all Posts that he created as JoeBlow will now appear to be created by Anonymous.

It then seems as though there must be some limit to franchise. An individual could certainly be more opinionated and more capable of reading and evaluating the materials in the XR, but should that privilege the individual?