Sorry for When-RL-Invades post, but in my exploration of corporate infiltration in Eve I've given a lot of thought to security and trust models. Particularly, I'm interested in how the differences in identity and scarcity in Eve from identity and scarcity in the real world modify behavior. I've always liked Bruce Schneier's blog, but today he posted a teaser for his new book.

In a primitive society, informal systems are generally good enough. When you're living in a small community, and objects are both scarce and hard to make, it's pretty easy to deal with the problem of theft. If Alice loses a bowl, and at the same time, Bob shows up with an identical bowl, everyone knows Bob stole it from Alice, and the community can then punish Bob as it sees fit. But as communities get larger, as social ties weaken and anonymity increases, this informal system of theft prevention -- detection and punishment leading to deterrence -- fails. As communities get more technological and as the things people might want to steal get more interchangeable and harder to identify, it also fails. In short, as our ancestors made the move from small family groups to larger groups of unrelated families, and then to a modern form of society, the informal societal security systems started failing and more formal systems had to be invented to take their place. We needed to put license plates on cars and audit people's tax returns.
We had no choice. Anything larger than a very primitive society couldn't exist without societal security.

I'll be very interested in the release of this work, and if you're reading this blog and are entertained by thoughts of what makes the ethical landscape of Eve so compelling, you might be interested as well.