Activity Server: You can run but you can't hide.
Sanjay Manandhar · USENIX Summer · 1991
The activity server is a software utility that provides high-level information on what a user or a number of users are doing by combining data inputs from various sources. These sources are: 1) thejinger server, 2) the phone server, and 3) the location server. The finger server provides information on users' activities or lack thereof on hosts within a local network; the phone server abstracts information from call progress of users' digital phones whereas the location server abstracts information from active badge sightings. Responses from all these unobtrusive data gathering sources are put together to form a composite model of the activities of users. Information may be collected only from or on behalf of participating users; each user within the user community can determine how much of his own information the activity server may receive. The main attributes of the activity server are: 1) it maintains history of all the participating users, 2) it synchronizes among the many, possibly conflicting, pieces of information from three sources, 3) it distinguishes interdependence of activities among users, and 4) it provides a high-level abstraction about users' activities.