The Mush Hackathon

Ashen-Shugar

A fun idea I wanted to toss out there.

How would people feel about having a 'hackathon' with mushing?

Essentially, we set up a TinyMUSH3, a MUX2, a PennMUSH and a RhostMUSH.

We get set teams.

We have a team that defends the mush.
We have a team that attacks the mush.

We have pre-determined methods (that can be accomplished on each codebase) to mark when a system was 'comprimised' to establish a winning scenario.

I figure this will be a good learning experience for everyone to give people a bit more hands-on experience administrating mushes, stop real-time problem players and trolling, and so forth.

The only caveats with this would be:

Keep personal insults at the door. This is a friendly competition, not a way to air someone's dirty laundry.
Go after the mush only. Not the people on the mush. Not the server hosting the mush. Going after the people will instantly disqualify your team. Going after the hosting server will likely get the ISP involved and could go so far as going after you as a person. Criminal hacking is criminal hacking.
This is meant entirely as a learning initiative. Both sides are to come out of this learning more about protecting a mush.
Both teams are intended to comprise people who really don't know much about either defending a mush nor attacking a mush. This is not expected for people like Talvo, Brazil, myself, Thenomain, or others who already have ideas in our devious little minds on how to hack things. People like us, however, will likely set up the situations for what people do to 'win' or 'lose'.

Keep in mind, this is just something rolling in the back of my head. No plans, just tossing it out there.

What do people think?

surreality

@ashen-shugar It sounds interesting enough that I'd want to read the findings (and ideally implement whatever security things it uncovers that would be within my power to implement), but I definitely do not have the brains to even guess at where or how to break things or defend them, really.

While that sounds like it'd make me an ideal candidate for a team, I don't... know if that's the most effective team composition to have to learn from it, which I am guessing is the ostensible goal?

Derp

@surreality said in The Mush Hackathon:

I definitely do not have the brains to even guess at where or how to break things or defend them, really.

Same. This sounds like rad fun. For coders. Not so much for people who can barely get the code to move. I think your teams would be maaaybe 3 on 3, which might be your ideal.

Post the things and let us know how it goes!

skew

So you just want me to start a new code project and see how badly I can break everything?

WildBaboons

This is interesting and something I have considered looking in to, specifically with Ares and Evennia with their web integration.. but I'm not familiar with the actual MUSH codebases at all and you've banned the usual methods of compromise I do know.

Good luck!

Thenomain

@skew said in The Mush Hackathon:

So you just want me to start a new code project and see how badly I can break everything?

I would buy you a week's worth of coffee (er, one coffee a day for a week) to watch this beautiful trainwreck unfold.