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PE-07-Announce [Moderator]: Scandal in D'Ni spreads to HQ!
Date: Wed, 30 May 2007 14:07:23 +0000

Announcement from the Moderator to All Leaders:

A high-placed whistleblower in the nation of D'Ni has paralyzed the
government with allegations of high-level misconduct!  Ministry
officials, ignorant of the Power's Edge Code of Conduct (
http://www.powersedge.org/?Page=code ), have been violating critical
diplomatic protocols. 

Further investigation reveals that the Power's Edge Headquarters (HQ)
is mainly to blame: for some time, new leaders have not been required
to view the Code of Conduct while signing up, and the Leader's Guide's
link to the Code has been broken for some time!

The Code of Conduct contains several critical rules essential for the
proper functioning of a Universe.  These are time-tested,
battle-worthy principles and all Leaders are supposedly required to
follow them.  

One of the principles is that messages should not be sent using code. 
The idea is that leaked messages must be meaningful to all, or there's
no point in having leaks in the game.  Leaks are implemented in
Power's Edge to simulate the real-world situation of spies and
self-interested bureaucrats -- with access to the *unencoded, real*
messages -- deliberately leaking the content of a particular message. 
Even a perfectly secure coded communications system is subject to
leaks by key personnel (spies) on either end -- "Two people can keep a
secret, but only if one of them is dead"!  If Leaders actually encode
their messages, the spirit of this rule is broken.  Now, evidently the
agents of D'Ni came up with an elaborate scheme to write messages that
looked normal, but were in fact secretly coded with hidden meanings. 
This would be against the Code of Conduct, had they known about it. 
(Power's Edge Headquarters is also disappointed with the co-schemers
in this system, who didn't realize this was against the rules either,
but again, we are to blame for not publicizing the Code of Conduct
correctly.)

To make matters worse, a second principle in the Code has also been
violated.  Leaders are not to impersonate other leaders in sending
(leaky) messages.  When a real leak occurs, the leaker (spy) would
know the true origin of the message.  Fooling the Power's Edge
computer system is not too hard - just write in someone else's style
and sign it with their name.  But that would generally not fool a
real-world spy, so it's prohibited.  It appears that agents of D'Ni
have been sending messages pretending to be other leaders, in hopes
that the messages would leak and cause diplomatic trouble for the
other leaders.  This, too, is a disappointment to Headquarters.

The government of D'Ni has been roiled by this scandal, and may yet
collapse, but as the whistleblower was in fact the mighty Aitrus
himself, we expect it will reorganize swiftly without a major change
in management.  However, the nation of D'Ni is losing all of its moves
this turn in penalty for the rules violations.  (The penalty would
ordinarily be much worse, except that Headquarters is in even greater
scandal and we cannot really hold anyone responsible for not following
rules that we didn't inform everyone about!)

Meanwhile, the Webmaster at Power's Edge Headquarters has been
beheaded (er, metaphorically speaking).  He will be replaced with
someone (hopefully, at least marginally more competent) -- as soon as
we can get the Webmaster's head screwed on straight again! :)

Please take a few minutes to review the Code yourself: 

http://www.powersedge.org/?Page=code

Finally, we're not on a witch hunt - we just want everyone to play
fairly within the spirit of the rules!  If you feel you've been out of
line on any of these issues (especially if your name looks like
"apeloverage"), please get in touch with us to discuss.

-- Power's Edge, http://www.powersedge.org/ 

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