On Tue, 2021-06-08 at 09:22 -0700, Kerim Aydin via agora-discussion wrote:
> I had a feeling you'd bring this one up when I saw you register and saw
> that your computer delivery was faster than mine :) !
My CFJ earlier was actually primarily intended as a test of my delivery
times to -bus. I decided to disguise it as something other than an
email timing test, because I think that if I'd made it obvious that I
were planning a timing scam, someone would have figured it out and
might have pulled off the counterscam.
> Someone actually noticed my slow delivery times last week in discord and
> mentioned it - obviously this is a self-interested statement, but I think
> current precedent, or game custom at least, is that the date-stamp of
> hitting the send button is the prima facie time of sending. But I'm not
> sure there's been a focused CFJ on that since you were a player.
>
> Not just for fairness, which is of course one big issue, but also because
> it's a big burden for officers to hunt for other buried timestamps.
>
> If there's evidence of purposeful delay, that might be punishable by No
> Faking ("the datestamp is a lie") and a one-off judgement that evidence
> suggests a different timestamp is closer to the actual true sending time.
> But also, it's in the socially unacceptable category along with
> sockpuppets? (No Faking idea isn't truly tested because no one's ever
> been accused of it - it's in the sockpuppet category because we can't
> really combat it because it's hard to detect, so let's make sure it's
> understood to be a big social taboo).
The Date: stamp on an email is forgeable, and I've actually forged it
in the past (but to something so obviously incorrect that it probably
wouldn't count as Faking). Actually, in the olden days when I used to
"hand-deliver" my emails, I had to write it out by hand every time, and
it's sometimes hard to know what to put there.
I think the best choice (which might require a rule change) would
probably be along the line of "an email is sent at the point in time at
which the person sending the email completed the process of telling
computers to send it, except if they introduced an artificial delay
into the process". Instead of forcing timing-scamsters into having to
find a tradeoff between ensuring the email arrives on time and ensuring
people can't react to it if it arrives too early, it makes sense to
just say "as long as you aren't trying to rig things, just make sure
you send it before the deadline and don't worry about when it arrives".
One additional complication is that we think of sending an email as
something that happens at a point of time, whereas in practice, the
start of the email is received before the end of the email is. There's
the theoretical possibility to artificially slow down the rate at which
the email is received, allowing the end of an email to be written
substantially later than the start of the email arrived. (I think many
servers will date-stamp with the point in time at which the email
started to arrive, meaning that an email can contain text that reacts
to things that happened considerably before it arrived.)
The other additional complication is what happens when there's a very
long delay, on the order of days (especially when it isn't the fault of
the email sender); this has been known to happen at Agora in the past.
You wouldn't want someone to be able to make and resolve an RWO intent
before anyone else saw that the intent existed. (CFJ 2058 covers this
case, but it's unclear from the judgement what the precedent actually
is; it appears that we're using some sort of equity test and the
message's arrival time may be different for different purposes.)
--
ais523
