The other day I left a message for a Linden: please don't think you'd be doing me a favour by putting rental tools into the land menu, you will dispossess me. So I'm not surprised that Khamon Fate has come up with the idea of putting rental tools in the land as the way to more elegantly fix the messiness of the group-tools reform.
I'll bet some Lindens will faun all over this idea and say, ooooh, shiny, what a great idea to Empower the People to Effect Change and Make a Better World!
Except...it's a bad idea for the following reasons, not the least of which it is being cooked up by people who don't actually try to rent, either as landlords or tenants.
1. Rentals are currently run in the game of Second Life either through very elaborated scripted thingies, such as what Adam Zaius and Nexus Nash have scripted for Azure Islands, or less elaborate scripted thingies, or merely a "handshake" or in some cases a notarized notecard at Note Bena I imagine (or they could be). That means they have a huge variety of options that suit local needs that no Linden-created template can ever be expected to duplicate -- yet because it is Linden-made, will have the imprimatur of the game company itself and the federal government, and therefor can be expected to kill off resident-made rental scripts and systems (just like they did GOM).
These various rental scripts have their pluses and minuses, let's review them:
a) The Azure rentals are tied up to the whole GIGAS secondserver.net, requiring registering on this third-party site, so that it requires the usual futzing around inworld with a terminal, creating an account and accessing a site (thereby outing your alts BTW), getting an object into the inventory, etc. -- and it collects your avatar key (and therefore everything about your purchasing patterns and movements around SL, even if not your RL identity). Yes, we all know that everybody with third-party sites from GINKO to anshechung.com collects avatar keys and tracks avatars to see where they go and what they do in terms of sales, traffic, etc.
In exchange for that free windfall of economic information, the Azure script gives you access to rental property in which you yourself can decide to pay by the week or the day, to pay a purchase price for a "deed" and then "maintenance" (tier) fee, or pay a higher-priced "rent," and then even add prims if you like. It's a very neat system from the owners' end, except when it breaks down, but from the tenant's end, it's awfully clunky struggling to work that repeating, stupid blue drop-down menu that moves slowly and is not intuitive. Still, in theory, it's pretty self-service and enables the GIGAS people to run their vast empire more efficiently without actually interrupting their college math classes to actually come inworld and serve customers : ).
Best of all, this master rentals system enables Adam or Nexus or their minions to have mass executions at dawn -- anyone who has not paid their rent, who is tagged as a griefer, or who is just some kind of glitch is immediately ejected from the group, and in some cases banned from the properties, too. If you've ever sat in the morning and seen these groups massively execute in this way, it's unsettling. Knowing how unsettling it is, I never eject people myself until they haven't logged on for two weeks, have resisted all automatic and manual IMs telling them to pay or reduce their prims, or whatever.
b) Probably most other rentals are run by the script created by Moonshine Herbst for his Rentomatic. Aside from being an ugly yellow-white-red texture that injures the eye across the grid, and is not changeable, this rentomatic is what I would call the Oligarch's Special. It is configured to force a four-week payment up front and most people use that option -- do they have a choice? It has no refunds. Unless you are an oligarch who can buy in bulk for the non-comm version, it provides a healthy commission (five percent of every transaction) to Moonshine, who was routinely on the top of the Leader list and popular places list as a result. It's a textbook case of Usury gone mad. Of course, you could buy the non-comm copy version which is thousands of dollars, but few people other than huge mall owners can afford those.
c) Another rental script by former microbaron Hank Ramos used to pay out commissions to Hank constantly but for the lesser, more tolerable amount of 1 percent -- I wish I had a dollar for every time I used to see Hank getting paid out of my rentomatics using his script...but...*he* got that dollar ROFL.
d) When I finally saved up enough money to break free of Moonshine's and Hank's usury -- their tax on me as a newbie trying to start a business which they as oldbies felt they had to apply -- I commissioned an independent scripter to make me a rentomatic with different features. The first thing I did was get rid of that forced four-weeks in advance stuff. At the scripter's suggestion, I even gave a 10 percent discount rather than a forced march. I built in a refund -- against the scripter's suggestion lol. I think people should have the freedom to refund at any time when they either find a better offer, run out of money, or are unhappy with their rentals. I find when people *can* refund they usually don't -- and to prevent abuse of the system, i.e. by people just wandering around and living one day in each house or something, I make the refund fee $150 and up depending on the price.
After I and others began to use my newly-commissioned script that didn't pay commissions to the scripter, but was available for a flat cost and had refund capacity, Hank then suddenly released his script into the open for free. His script has one good feature -- because, like secondserver.net it takes avatar keys, it can tell you the name and location of the person renting. This is extremely helpful to be able to contact customers wth the most important thing you need to tell many of them, even those not so new: join the group and activate it on yourself to build or decorate to hold the prims on the group land or they autoreturn.
But unlike secondserver.net, because it is not hooked up to a third-party server, Hank's script doesn't require registration first, which is a nuisance and an obstacle to renters who often find the interface clunky. Thus it doesn't capture and collects their keys and save them somewhere to track them -- something I don't believe I or any business owner should be doing so casually in Second Life frankly. Instead, it sends a message to you, which fades out after the chat is closed. If you are offline, it delivers a message in your email. (Now, you could sit there and endlessly cut and paste those keys individually but who will bother?) The main thing is to be able to tell newbies especially, since they never read even the biggest and brightest instructions, that if they want the land to stop eating their furniture, they need to join the group, activate it, and set their prims to the group automatically by keeping the tag on as they decorate. I must say that a hundred times a week.
The script I use doesn't enable the adding of prims -- but then, I'm not on a private island able to endlessly add them, sometimes just by buying and placing yet another island next to the one I have, in the same group.
e) I should add another nuisance of sorts the private island dealer has to address is first becoming a member of a tenant's group as an officer, so that he can transfer the private island parcel to the new deeded group, and then leaving it. The tenant has the nuisance -- and an essential $100 tax on private island renters for being forced to create and maintain the group -- if it disbands because somebody leaves, or he doesn't pay for that alt account or something, he loses his deeded land, and this can then be resold on him before he has the chance to get it all together again to reach Anshe or Adam.
I should add that unfortunately, Anshe, her staff, Adam and Nexus are almost never online when you need them. I find all their customer service hugely to be desired. Notice that while they may be paid shills, whenever posters praise rentals agents, it tends to be Hiro Queso, who doesn't require purchase prices up front for deeds, only charges tier, and seems to be more online to help customers. To be sure, Anshe has added more staff and your chances of finding an "angel" to help in "Dreamland" are greatly improved, but there are still questions that never get answered and problems, often of the unsightly build variety where they can't manage to police their own rules.
Anshe does not appear to have a scripted system for rentals, and I think she and her staff run themselves ragged as a result -- as I do.
But why would I want to run myself ragged, manually refunding and re-configuring a box each time someone would like to buy extra prims, which I offer to them for a low price? Because I want to be able to use human intelligence on the system, as much as I can muster at what is often 1:00 a.m. for me. I'd like to eyeball what is happening in the sim, and not have some automatic system doling out prims when, say, the sandbox on my sim might have been overloaded by some asswipe burying 200 weapons each with 200 prims in them (this "fun" teen grid griefing habit seems to be showing up more and more on the adult grid -- or maybe it infected the teens from the adults, not sure).
I also like to be able to *talk to* the tenants. How are they doing? Do they need land edit on? Is their music working? Maybe they are not happy with their prefab house? etc. *Talking to* these tenants, I find, helps to serve the whole area better because they can often tell me what is happening. For example, if I'm running an automated system, and I see 3 refunds on one sim at once, I could merely let the system run, they refund, they take their money, new ones come etc. Or, I could go out there and see what *made* them refund, which is often some asswipe putting out 500 prims on a 512 with an agreement only for 150, each of which rotates, glows, and spews particles radiating the entire sim.
I went into this amount of detail because I'm trying to give all the reasons why customized resident scripts are better, and all the additional reasons for not creating automatic rental tools, which are:
1. Pro-rated refund capacity or discounting may not be easily added without additional UI features and configuring, and the same for adding prims. All that will likely be done is being able to set a weekly price, and click off for or on.
2. By making it possible to switch on and off entire sims and parcels (someone will just write a script for switching on and off all the parcels on a sim), mass rentals can thrive run by oligarchs who will be most positioned to take advantage of this windfall tool, and it will drive all others out of business. They can hired labour to terraform a sim, plunk out trees by an automatic script, even deliver houses and buildings by automatic script (I've seen how blaze made an insta-city like that), click on "rent me" and then go play World of Warcraft which is more fun than deeding videos and stuff. Heck, why even come inworld *at all*? Just run the whole thing from a third-party website.
3. Already enjoying a privileged position with LL and already possessing a complex and powerful existing rentals scripted thingie, Adam Zaius and company could well lobby to have their script GOMed or sold or deployed to LL to use on the whole land interface. Then who will answer the question about the trap door that enables them also to collect all the information on their third-party website, which is not bound by the TOS because it is a third-party? (Not me, I'm permabanned from the forums). Indeed, I'm well aware that these are two hypotheticals: 1) whether or not their scripted thingie could be purloined by the Lindens or sold to them to integrate in the client or 2) once that happens, there is then necessarily any further connection whatsoever to secondserver.net -- the Lindens could buy or take their script but close off the trapdoor to its data-collection capacity, I suppose. But it's fine to ask these questions now rather than after it's already done.
4. Therefore: Land that is run off the Linden tools for rent, just like land that you can sell with the Linden tools (rather than the much more vague "deeded private island land" that you can "sell" also through IMs and ads on your own) is going to be viewed as "safer" and "the better deal". That means that in partnership with oligarchs, LL will be able to deliver "safer communities where You are Governor Linden". Indeed, if they put renting into the client, they may just be inclined to skip fixing the group tools -- who needs them except a few clubs. Therefore, the Linden-created mass template, even with less customization, will put the customized out of business by appearing "safer" as part of the integrated set of tools.
5. Land owners renting off their own scripted thingies will be come to be seen as "suspect" -- why can't they use the Linden land tools? What, are they ripping people off? A culture of trust has developed where people are willingly paying into the rentos created by Moonshine, Hank, and others, because they have come to see that when they pay their money, they get a rental, it shows up on their transaction history, and unless they violate the rules and don't pay, they can keep the rental. But this culture of trust will be disrupted when once again, the Lindens compete with their own customers and put something into the client to crush local business. And crush local business it does...as we saw with their telehub/p2p debacle.
6. One advantage to the Lindens putting rentals into the client is that it will "empower the people" (and they'll love that concept) by enabling thousands of people across the grid to stop hunting and struggling for rental scripts, and just parcel off parts of their estates with beach cabanas or Tikis or cabins. Already, many larger properties with mansions, or clubs, or stores, provide little rentals for cheap prices to try to help pay their tier. Some owners provide this for free, as a kind of loss leader to build traffic to their club or other attraction. (They could do this BTW due to the developer incentive US dollars they might expect in return -- that's now ending in March.)
Of course, the greatest mistake that newbie/singleton landlords make is putting out identical prefabs in rows, thinking that other people will be only too happy to move into such cluttered boxes and live, merely to enable someone else to pay their tier. Originally when I began doing and studying rentals all over the grid, this was my greatest observation, and still is: people do not like to move into cookie cutters. Yet, with the right kind of cookie, the right price, the right location, it sometimes works, so we'll likely see, with some basic set of integrated rental tools, a proliferation of baking trays and cookies all over SL. I suppose that's a good thing. There will be some like Jauani Wu who will scream about Levittown, however.
In general, giving rental tools for individuals to use will be a good thing -- in theory. There will be many more people who will buy land, make dwellings or stores or clubs, if they can put in vendors or tenants easily and help pay their establishment's tiers. Increasing the sale of land and the stabilization of sims by people who are settlers rather than sandboxers is very good for civilization -- after all, you need civilization to sustain the sandboxers, because if left to their own devices, sandboxes only destroy as they create.
But most things good in theory don't work in practice. The biggest competitor to that hopeful singleton or mom-and-pop or medium-sized business will be the mass oligarch who will have his Chinese gold farmers plunking out houses and trees across the vaste wastelands of BULKAUCTONLAND, who will simply flip the switch "rent" and go away. And without the flexibility of refunds, prim-adding, and other kinds of features that an agent using his own customized script or notecard system can provide, they will have troubles. Of course, when the covenants come in, the Lindens plan some kind of tool that will pop up a text with rules in it (apparently that's all the covenant is envisioned as, at this point, we're not really hearing anything more elaborate).
If thousands of people can be empowered to have their own mom-and-pop rentals (and actually the interesting thing that few people realize is that hundreds now practice this form of tier assistance even with crappy tools and no support -- which shows you the potential) -- can that be an important hedge against the oligarchs? Because it's very important to bolster the middle class as a buffer in society between the poor blinging masses, the radical sandboxing tekkie wikinista, and the oligarchic BulkAuctionBidders and private island queens and kings. Often, when the Lindens code in YouRule it turns out to be TheyRule because it turns out only a fraction of people have time and resources to do the YouRule stuff.
This remains to be seen, so I could only look at their coding "rent" into the tools with the greatest apprehension, like I have been forced to now view any Linden change with a mixture of narrow-eyed suspicion and then shock and awe.
If the Lindens added a feature to put your own parcel on a public auction, that could increase freedom, liquidity, and the better development of the middle class too -- and thus give those using these putative in-client rental tools an even break and an equal opportunity.
People like me who continue to offer larger lists of rentals, not just a handful in one establishment, or have themed communities in some sims, like Asian or Future or Tiki or Beach or whatever, will not necessarily be put out of business if they have only the mom-and-pops to compete with, because they will be able to offer more choice, more features, things like free prefabs, or whatever. But they already face fierce competition from private island and bulkmainland rentals and giving those oligarchs the "rent me" tool will kill them off for good. I'll bet you're not thinking of that, Khamon. Or maybe you are...
Rental tools and even only the mildly reformed group tools might not put someone like me out of business. But because they are likely to, I'm going to be fighting this concept tooth and nail. It's fine to fight for one's class interests, just like the other classes on the left (sandboxing tekkies) and right (oligarchs and land barons) do. Like they do, I'm going to cloak my struggle as being Good for the Community, too, because I believe it really is. I think small and medium businesses are good to promote, and customization is better provided by residents than Lindens.
What I hate about the way these discussions go on the forums is that nobody ever asks "Is it really a good idea to have rentals be a function on the client?" or "Can the Lindens really code all the good features you would need in a function like that, and avoid the bad?" or "Is having land able to rent everywhere something that individuals and small businesses can be making use of profitably and equitably, or will it just be gamed out by the oligarchs and the griefers?" etc.
Instead, they just cut to the narrow-minded and narrow-focused discussion of the technical aspects of doing it. There is no context or wider picture. So now people are asking whether it can or should refund. We already have perfectly could resident-created scripts that refund rent to people on a basic pro-rated basis, with a customizable refund fee of $0 or more.
But I'm sure not a single one of the people having this discussion, including the original poster, have ever worked within a rentals group and a system of rentals, with these scripts, and studied their pluses and minuses, and thought about what it would be like to just leave this realm to the residents, instead of once again, grabbing a sector and stuffing it into the client -- to benefit the few, especially those who are programmers, and already close to the creators of the client.
Great comments Prokofy. I'm not all that familiar with the rental business, so this was a very insightful look at some of the pro's and con's to current and proposed systems.
The thing I liked about having it included in the land tools was that on our map, it would show up - so a prospective renter could easily see where land was available to rent.
I'm also not intimately familiar with Adam's system, but one of the things I do like about it (as I rent in Deneb) and possibly one of the reasons for registration/key grab is that the system sends reminders to you, IIRC, both in-world and also to your specified email address. I don't think, though this would need to be verified by a scripting guru, that simply having one's key would allow you to track any/all purchases they make in-world. It would allow you to track purchases made on that particular system.
I wonder though, could both of these systems work together? Could we retain the highly moddable, customizable script approach and at the same time integrate a rental tool into the land management tool? Would it even serve a purpose?
Posted by: juro kothari | 01/27/2006 at 02:18 PM
Very good points. I somewhat fear for the rental community as a whole if a generalized system is pushed with no scalability.
The only way to make such a system scalable would be to allow scripts such as Hanks/Adams/et al be able to interface with the Linden provided rental system -- that is, allow it to be built on top of, via scripts.
For example, instead of the part where the script joins them to the group upon being paid, it activates the the land as temporarily owned by the paying tenant. Presumably, that would be the only part of the script that would need be changed.
That's the only way I can envision the generalized system and existing scripts to work together harmoniously. Of course, I haven't seen many Land control options available in LSL, so the possibility of that seems slim.
Posted by: Aspen Normandy | 01/27/2006 at 03:25 PM
Thank you both for seeing the wisdom of adding a generalized tool while retaining the ability for owners and renters to work with it in a customized fashion. I do hate these discussions always breaking down into cold insistance that we must have one or the other.
All that'll be required is a set of LSL commands to interface with the rental tools. We have those now for setting URLs and such. Evil wikitypes call that "API" if you're interested. It's not LL's forte so the term kills an idea in it's tracks if you mention it too early.
Again, thank you repliers for adding it to the conversation and thank you poster for providing the opportunity to bring it up.
Posted by: Khamon | 01/27/2006 at 04:00 PM
I'm afraid I have to be cold and insistent, Khamon, because nobody but me will take into account my interests, meanwhile plenty of people will do this in the abstract, and plenty will step on my interests merely because they don't like me personally, without realizing what is good for the whole community of small and medium businessmen and customers.
You can praise an architect and...whatever Aspen is in the game...for their grand insights into the rentals business but..um...I'm not persuaded.
Of course, I don't at all insist that one has to be an expert in a field to comment on it. Why, that is my theme song -- not an expert, yet I "arrogate" myself to comment on this techsol world all the time. So comment away...but I'll be adding the correctives based on experience of actually using these things.
Re: "the system sends reminders to you, IIRC, both in-world and also to your specified email address. I don't think, though this would need to be verified by a scripting guru, that simply having one's key would allow you to track any/all purchases they make in-world."
Hank's script and the other scripts also send you reminders. I should have mentioned that -- it's an obvious given. The whole point of having a script, instead of merely a notecard give and an object that takes money is to send reminders. And they all do that, on a schedule. They do it without keeping the keys on a third-party site, they just keep it within the internal dbase, but as I noted: Hank's doesn't keep them in some accessible, archived, location, they are taken at the moment of transaction, the reminders are sent to that avatar, then it disappears with the next customer's input, and disappeares out of a closed chat history or closed IM. You'd only save it by arduously somehow cutting and pasting all the individual messages. The one I commissioned doesn't provide messaging with keys and names and locations, which would have been more work and expense, but it does provide reminders to the customers. I did a hack around that by merely naming each individual rentomatic when I install it with its location so that when it sends a reminder, I can see the location expiring.
Indeed, having the key, and keeping it enables you to track them. Read Anshe's slam on GINKO doing this (of course she does it herself -- they all do).
I guess you've missed the voluminous discussions on the website about key-harvesting and use. Go and do a search on them.
Re: maps. Showing up on the map is something that appeals to big oligarchs, and to abstractionists, not people who really do this at a small or medium level.
Have you looked at the map lately? It is hugely cluttered with dollar-signs and numerous event and classified symbols -- Lauk even did a spoof posting showing the whole dollar-chocked map of SL just in that mode. You can't see the forest for the trees. Worst of all, if you press one of those dollar signs, you can't even p2p to that spot, it won't let you -- it gives you merely a pull-up of the land-for-sale list, and not even that particular entry. You have to know to p2p next to it.
People don't read maps. They type into the sim list. I know this runs counter to tekkie beliefs. But do a scientific poll of people, and watch them land on 128/128 all over the place, or ask their friends to tp them, or tp on to their friends' cards, and realize what a bill of goods we've been sold with all this religious belief in "p2p free to be you and me" crap.
Add to this huge clutter even a differently coloured rental lot. People use the map...but not as much as all the tekkies imagine.
What they *do* do is use FIND. We all pay $30 to have all our rental listings in FIND. FIND is the single greatest seller of rentals there is, it beats word of mouth, repeat customers, classifieds, telehub ads, and fly-bys by a mile. In fact, I've been waiting, heart in mouth, for the Lindens either to completely take away FIND, and its liveable $30 fee, payable out of the group as an expense against traffic, and either increase the price of FIND, or insist that we all use classifieds, which are more cluttered and go not to the search word and the user's selection of a search word, but to the highest paying customer.
Maps are not a solution, and so to sell me the rent-in-the-client for the rentals business, run off coloured parcels on a map, is not persuasive. It provides no immediate assistance to the manager, who has the group itself, and the aqua colour that the land turns when it is group land in "view property owners," to keep track at the hover level over a sim of which plots are mine. And it doesn't provide any real help to customers, except those handful of really zealous tekkie customers that are really map happy and really believe in maps and will brook no dissent about the reality, which is people don't use maps.
Oh, sure, for BULKAUCTIONLAND, yeah, a bright green or orange spanning 40 sims or whatever will stick out very nicely. But see my arguments above, why I don't feel the game should constantly be nerfed to fit their needs to sell more giant tracts more quickly when they already have a huge advantage, buying sims for only $1000 in bulk, whereas other people have to bid on the pretty terraformed ones and pay $1200-1500 or buy an island for $1250, and then uniquely customize parcels by hand in ways they do not -- often providing better customer service, often more individualized.
As for land control options in LSL, there is already a claque of tekkies pushing for this on the forums and in these group land meetings, wanting to get memberships of groups, mass ban through tools, have scripted reports on who owns what or is associating what where, etc. etc. And they'll probably get that, because the direction the whole techsol movement is going in is always one favouring the utmost totalitarian control for the programmers.
Finally, Khamon, I can only wonder if you have sat in too many meetings with Lindens lately. How on earth can you make a statement like this: "Thank you both for seeing the wisdom of adding a generalized tool while retaining the ability for owners and renters to work with it in a customized fashion."
If a generalized tool is forcibly laid over the grid, prompted by...what? People like you who just have ideas for how the rentals business should be run? -- I don't see any place for that "customized fashion" to enter in. What, I press "rent me" with a payment option on the UI and expect people also to read notecards and do other stuff? Then pester me with IMs for all the other features? They don't read cards and pester me ALREADY, and won't read cards and pester me even more later if these customized features like refunds aren't offered. I'm expected to manually process refunds? How is your concept going to give refunds, or add prims, or give discounts, or have specialized promotions, or subtract discounts for tier donations? These are all things I do manually, using colour coding or texture coding in boxes in folders, in conjunction with the scripted functions -- by creating anything more generalized (and more stupid), it will then be billed as "the official way to rent" and the land barons will all scoop it up (especially if THEIR script is the one used!) and it will be hard for anybody else to compete.
But I guess that's the idea.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | 01/27/2006 at 04:57 PM
I'll do some reading up on the key issue, I wasn't aware that they could track your every purchase in-world just by having your key.
As far as the maps, I use them all the time - when I purchased my last 3 plots for model home displays, I used the map. I specifically used a map to make sure that wherever I was buying appeared to be a low-build sim (more residential than club/shop) and, more importantly, to quickly redline any sims too close to the hubs/info centers.
I do, as you mentioned, use 'Find' all the time. I guess really, when I'm shopping I flip back/forth between the two tools.
Maps may not offer the rental manager/owner any assistance, but it could be helpful to prospective renters.
Posted by: juro kothari | 01/27/2006 at 05:10 PM
Juro, they can track your MOVEMENTS and your purchases on their site. There's no claim they can "track your every purchase" -- except on their system. But they can see where you go, and surmise where you are buying. For example, land barons sell money or have third-party website sales, they get the key, then they see where people shop, what sims they go to. Many things in world that you touch or pass or interact with can tell what your key is. It's not some invasion of your RL privacy, but it is a way of getting a lot of economic info that is valuable for figuring out business strategies, pricing, etc.
I don't want to hear about how YOUR use the map, Juro, because you're an architect and a tekkie and a FIC -- that doesn't count. Thousands of people DO NOT use the map. Stand at 128/128 on any sim and just watch how many people materialize out of this spot because they are typing in the list. I'll be writing about this soon after doing some questionnaires. Anybody with shops (or unfortunate to have homes) knows all about the 128/128 issue.
Maps are useful for purchasing land, and for looking for interesting builds, and exploring. You cannot extrapolate from your own experience to understand what everyone else does in the game.
It always amazes me that people can be so emphatic about their own subjective experience. Of course, they're "entitled" to do that. But they could also just WATCH what people really do, and ASK them. I've been asking people all over, and finding they use the list, and if anything, are annoyed that the Lindens took the sim names out of the list to pull down "as is" without having to remember how they were spelled.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | 01/27/2006 at 10:24 PM
a positive move for the community is one that push PN closer to the moment she will decide to leave SL
Posted by: Kyrah Abattoir | 01/27/2006 at 10:35 PM
Hahahahah jamais, mon petit chou
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | 01/28/2006 at 01:37 AM
dont you just love kyrah and her predictable comments. they speak of wisdoms not unlike the gems you find in fortune cookies at a chinese restaurant.
really kyrah, i think you're on to something here.
dont you have anything better to do, or whoah, try this, actually respond to the freaking subject matter of the blog entry?
do you even read it? or do you just scroll down and pick your next prok/reply/of/the/day and add it to the comments?
well whatever. you are annoying. and have a fugly personality.
I <3 U KYRAH, SO MUCH LOL
Posted by: Nobody | 01/28/2006 at 04:08 AM
I think you're contradicting yourself, Prokofy. In your last post to me, you say:
"There's no claim they can "track your every purchase""
Yet, in your original post, you say:
"and it collects your avatar key (and therefore everything about your purchasing patterns and movements around SL, even if not your RL identity)"
Do you think there is much difference between someone, such as Anshe or Adam, using that key data for business purposes and Visa - which has tons of data on purchasing habits and can also extrapolate, to some degree, the physical location of individuals?
As for the maps.. I don't spend my time interviewing others or spend time sitting around 128/128, so I'll take your word for it. It's a shame more people don't make more use of the map - it's a fairly handy tool.
Feel free to add my comments on *my own* usage of the map to your research - or, better yet - drop me a questionnaire. It will be very interesting to see how people use the map and why. That is, if you decide to share it with the public.
Posted by: juro kothari | 01/28/2006 at 05:01 AM
"Hahahahah jamais, mon petit chou"
your french is pretty bad actually, grammar isnt good (see same shit you say me for my english)
and well you can still be perma banned my love ^_^
Posted by: Kyrah Abattoir | 01/28/2006 at 06:27 AM
"well whatever. you are annoying. and have a fugly personality."
at least i sign my posts ^_^
and i am of a delicious personality, as long as you arent on the wrong side of the jigsaw ^^ be carefull, these things chop your fingers fast ^_^
Posted by: Kyrah Abattoir | 01/28/2006 at 06:30 AM
With nothing but your avatar key - no other network of scripted prims - or atms - or scanners you pass by.. just your avatar key and nothing else, and I am NOT in the same sim as you:
If you are online
Your avatar name
Your creation date
And your ratings info (given / received)
If I am in the same sim but not within 90m and only have your avatar key - I can get your name a little bit faster and tell if you're walking or sitting etc. (your animation status).
With your key alone - I cannot track where you are.
This is F.U.D.
Posted by: Siggy | 01/28/2006 at 06:37 AM
"Indeed, having the key, and keeping it enables you to track them. Read Anshe's slam on GINKO doing this (of course she does it herself -- they all do)."
Having the key of an av is, however, essential to giving you an item if you aren't in the same sim as the object giving it to you - this is, I would say, requisite to running a website that enables you to get goods in Secondlife.
Again - having a key alone CANNOT track you.. walking past an atm that has a scanner, it CAN get your position and post THAT data to a website. There is a world of difference between these two things.
If you beleive that having an avs key (poorly named as it implies some kind of 'secrecy and security' it is actually just a unique identifier such as every single asset in SL has) gives such information you should wear white gloves because its given every time your avatar touches something - walks past anything that scans, sits on something, animates, gives or receives money, or even talks.. collides with an object or passes through an object that is phantom.
Basically, just about everything you do in SL in some way passes your key.
Posted by: siggy | 01/28/2006 at 06:50 AM
Juro,
See, you and other tekkie-wikinistas always distract in these arguments by removing the focus from Second Life, and its specialized set of circumstances, with no internal free press, no judiciary, and the inmates in charge of the asylum on the forums, and compare it to Visa.
When I sign up for the services of a Visa or a Mastercard and give them my information, I know I'm dealing with a vast, impersonal public company, but that's a good thing -- I don't have to be anybody's friend or a beta-tester to get in good with them. I'm dealing with a company that is subject to law, press coverage, and the norms of the free marketplace which include taking care of customers properly or losing business.
When I sign up for Second Life, I sign up for a very unfree system in which the government has all the information -- more than Visa could ever gather -- yet has no checks or balances on it; where there is no free press, especially if you criticize the company and its ties to this big business in SL that also gathers information; where if you so much as question the poor customer service of any big company you will find youself expelled and banned from their realms and smeared and slandered on forums and inworld to boot; and where there is no appeal to the behaviour of these big businesses -- indeed, after they get done outing your RL and slandering you with a false RL, after they get done slamming and libeling you everywhere they can possibly do so, you have to recourse, no appeal, no justice, and if you try to push it further, you'd only slam up against the banning from SL itself due to the "any reason and no reason" clauses.
When I sign up for Visa, I know that the employees are hired on an open labour market with open job descriptions and labour practices -- never perfect, but at least I can see that they hire people more or less for the job to be done, not because they are related to the king, or have dwelled in the kings realms and become wizards and lords (over one third of them) in fealty to the king.
The people at Visa don't give a bear to me, or ask me to be nice to them and never criticize Visa or its practices in exchange for the credit card services. I don't have to friend up the king and his wizards and regeants and lords to ensure that I keep getting Visa services.
There's no Visa mascot on their website who controls the free press and can't be criticized without going into attack and ban mode.
Ok, you get the idea. We are not in a free country. And therefore comparing the information-gathering and business practices of this non-free country to the practices in a free country (America) is silly. The context and the practices are completely different.
There is no contradiction in this statement: ""There's no claim they can "track your every purchase"" Yet, in your original post, you say:
"and it collects your avatar key (and therefore everything about your purchasing patterns and movements around SL, even if not your RL identity)"
PURCHASING PATTERNS means WHERE YOU GO, they include documenting the purchases within one's one business system, the ability to compare this information with other big companies doing the same thing, and the ability to see where avatars go -- if not track every purchase in some *other* company's system. For example, you use the Ginko Terminal or the terminal of any other third-party site. They have your key. Then they can see *where you go to shop*. Which sims and areas. Whether you go to telehub sims, and which telehub sims (back when we had them). I know this for a fact, so I don't know why you are trying to play "techno-gotcha" here. It is indeed done, and not only can you see what purchasing patterns occur within your own system and website, by seeing what other sims there are you can see the purchasing patterns -- WHERE PEOPLE SHOP.
If you take the phrase "purchasing patterns" to mean literally "every purchase they make," then I can only explain I'm not using the phrase to mean that, I'm using it to describe what indeed these avatar key harvesters do: 1) track purchases within their own system 2) track movements of avatars to see where they might play, shop, etc. 3) *have the ability to* share with with other big companies.
Tekkies love to scream FUD at you. To which I can only scream: Literalist Narrow-minded Distractive Bullshit. You can too harvest loads of information from the keys. That's why Ulrika and others went apeshit on the forums and had all these pages with the keys listed, and people argued insanely for days, with no mod intervention, about what they can and can't do.
Re: "walking past an atm that has a scanner, it CAN get your position and post THAT data to a website. Having the key of an av is, however, essential to giving you an item if you aren't in the same sim as the object giving it to you - this is, I would say, requisite to running a website that enables you to get goods in Secondlife. Again - having a key alone CANNOT track you.. walking past an atm that has a scanner, it CAN get your position and post THAT data to a website. There is a world of difference between these two things."
Well, no, not really, it's already a lot to scan and track people who merely walk past your terminal, even if they don't use it. Among the many things you could track with this information is who is associating with whom. But this is EXACTLY what I am talking about -- using the atms or other scripted objects you pass to get the info. That's EXACTLY what I'm saying, so no need to try to twist it around.
This is what you tekkie assholes with your constant "techno-gotcha" and FUD crap don't understand: the larger issue of what it means to track WHAT YOU DO INDEED TRACK AS YOU JUST DIDN'T DISPUTE YOURSELF DUH.
You seem to think that's "OK" just because it enables an item or a rental to be delivered.
I *question* whether it's "fine" not only because it's excessive information to be gathering, you can and do indeed track purchasing patterns, and then when people say, hey, what's up with that, you react with fierce, virulent, aggressive, stubborn assholery attempting to smear, ridicule and get banned anyone asking the question.
That is EXACLTY what happens.
So we can only say, hmm, you are not to be trusted with that information, you are not acting out of good will, you are merely trying to obtain power and advantage over other people, for whom you have no regard.
Um, that's not FUD, that's democracy.
Re: the concept of avatar key as "something secret" versus "a unique identifier".
And "gives such information you should wear white gloves because its given every time your avatar touches something - walks past anything that scans, sits on something, animates, gives or receives money, or even talks.. collides with an object or passes through an object that is phantom."
Well, duh, we realize that. It's not secret. In fact, anybody can get a free script from a Linden or other sources that enables you to find out your own key, and get others to click it and get their keys etc etc. I just pointed that out in my article, about rentomatics that are required to collect rent and make notices to the customer.
So your efforts to lay FUD and tinfoil hat charges at my door are utterly unfounded and stupid, as I just got done explaining how rentomatics, which I use myself, are not "evil" for taking the avatar keys, but are necessary for the manager to be HELPFUL by finding the customer and warning them to join the group to prevent their prims returning, giving them expiration messages etc. etc.
What I talked about was STORAGE AND USE and the problem of ILL INTENT AND LACK OF TRUST with that information. The information appears necessary to gather for good purposes. There are numerous big holes in these systems enabling persons of ill will -- of which there are NO SHORTAGE in Second Life -- to make evil use of this information.
To an absolutely unprecedented degre, the Lindens have created a society -- a country! -- in which the masters and their chosen overlords can harvest an incredible wealth of information about you, everything from your chosen inventory to your sexual preferences to your most intimate chat. All of this is gathered not only on their servers, but on the servers of those who provide other plugged-in-services -- I've never had a good explanation, for example, of whether all the conversations on the Nexcom cellphones "go" and like the emails being sent out of SL to Snapzille -- and being sent they are indeed -- and why it's OK with LL to allow private information of customers that it promises privacy to, to be filtered out to third-party sites who are not bound by the same TOS as LL offers its customers.
This is such a basic, normal, democratic principle that for the life of me, I cannot see why there is such a storm of assholes attacking it -- unless of course they have something to hide, and unless of course they wish to have undue power over other people.
No one has EVER given me a satisfactory answer to these very basic questions, and I will indeed keep asking them. I'm told with withering hatred that these conversations, or telephone numbers are "deleted" and "not used". But frankly, when such scorn and hatred and prickliness comes with the expanations, you'll never get me (or a less educated public) to believe you.
Really, Siggy, if you call me the most unbelievably foul things on the forums, and on Hamlet's blog (saying that I ought to take a corpse's cock and have it sewn on myself, etc.) and if you are unbelievably foul-mouthed to Cocoanut and other people who are making comments in good faith with an aim to have open discussion, then you can't double back later and say, "Oh, believe my explanations about my good intent and the good intent of all my third-party server friends, they mean no harm."
HELL, no.
I suppose some day when LL has either hired all these people that provide third-party services for their own staff (like Nota Bene) or killed them off (like GOM) or co-opted them (like Snapzilla) or in the process of either coopting them or mutually benefiting from them (like secondlifeboutique.com, slexchange.com and secondserver.com) or having to accommodate them due to their huge business (anshechung.com) -- the picture will become more clear. That is, either there will be a huge company with sub-divisions, or there will be a kind of huge conglomerate, Metaverse, Inc., with its various subsidiaries, etc.
I see absolutely no reason why we can't question the formation of this beast. After all, this kind of questioning has to be done in First Life, about monopolies and large corporations. The very people who get all seized with leftist paranoia on the forums about big corporations like Nike or Coke taking over SL are happy to sit back and let the tiny pixelated equivalent take over in their own little world, just because it's hate-any-business-but-my-business.
I will continue to raise the very alarming moral and political issues surrounding the ability of any entity to compel me to "wear white gloves" (an impossibility) before I "play".
Someone like Siggy, completely embedded in the FIC mentality and the tekkie-wiki mystique, is absolutely unprepared to have any reaction of questioning, or even nausea, about the concept of the "unique identifier" being used for absolute invasion of privacy, and therefore control. He's like to cockily dismiss any concern about how this is used in our context with no free press and no independent judiciary because I suspect these things would only get in the way of him and his pals and their continued undue influence in SL, especially on the forums.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | 01/28/2006 at 12:05 PM
What are you worried about with someone being able to gather data? You yourself mention that you have sat and watched people, which is in itsself gathering data.
What are your concerns with someone knowing your purchasing habits?
Posted by: juro kothari | 01/28/2006 at 01:52 PM
If you have to ask these questions, Juro, you are looking at the problems of this society in a narrow-minded, self-interested way for yourself and your FIC class. You don't get the larger issues.
If I sit and watch people rez out of telehubs or rez out of 128/128, I don't have the technical means to track their keys or ability even to track their names. I merely observe the world, and go against the forums received wisdom, when I discover that GASP people really pour into telehub malls to shop and GASP people really pour into 128/128. Every time I go to Alice, I type in the name in the list -- it has water and builds and woods and is hard to pinpoint p2p from the map. I land on Desmond Shang's shop, which is a pleasant experience. I invariably land on someone else's head, and have someone else land on my head of other people who were going to Alice...either to visit a friend in Alice and they can't remember their exactly coordinates, or even remembering vaguely that Desmond's shop is in Alice but not remembering its name or his name, which often happens. If people take my card and see I have a rental in Alice, they might just type the name in and visit it that way rather than struggling to pick the landmark out of their inventory and press on it.
All of us clumping together on each other in Alice are just like the telehubs used to be, that's my point.
My concern isn't about something that someone "individually has on me". I'm an open book. My concern is about the SYSTEM. Where a few have the power over the many, which is what we have. Large corporations can figure out the purchasing patterns and movements of people and shift around their goods and services. At one level, this is normal. But in a world with no freedom or checks and balances, it can become arbitrary. I don't like the arrogant, dismissive attitudes I see in the people commanding this information, their secretiveness, and their bland tekkie dismissals. It's not reassuring. They have no privacy policies in many cases, although they grab and deploy the exact same info that Linden Lab grabs and is careful to create a TOS about, and create an elaborate privacy policy about, a webpage about, and even an email you can write to about.
These are very basic issues. I'm sure when more enlightened folks come along who don't belong to this stodgy and evasive tekkie set in LL, who are just more broad-minded, from other policy-fields, even just grown-ups and adults with more RL experience than some of these kids have who reach for the old Lord-of-the-Fly techniques, we'll see changes.
What can anybody do in any large sytem where you can endlessly gather information, Juro? Take control over people in all kinds of subtle and unsubtle ways.
On the Internet, I know that if amazon.com grabs my number and purchasing patterns and greets me with a "Hello Avatar, maybe you'd like to try this book now based on books X and Y that you purchased last week" then it's done to help, not control, and merely to sell books, not mind-control me (although someone might write an entire senior thesis about how the things they push to me based on my supposed preferences they've gleaned are altnerately hilarious or sinister).
But in Second Life, I could well get this message: "Hello, Avatar, I don't like what you wrote on the forums and your criticism of my business so fuck you, I am blocking you from renting in this gated community and buying my high-end products on my exclusive website."
Tekkies definitely have this in mind. You have only to look to
Traxx Hathor's call, alternatively for a whitelist with him and his friends on it, or a blacklist, with me on it, to understand how this will work. And fortunately a Linden helped question this publicly.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | 01/28/2006 at 02:11 PM
There are, as demonstrated, cons to gathering key data. There are also pluses to it.
I do think that if a business has an issue with a customer, they should be able to reserve the right to not do business with that customer. In the case of rental businesses, this can be achieved through the land tools. For other businesses, where they may rent land from a mall owner, this is not possible. Yes, this is one way in which it could 'control' you - but I can't think of any others.
Keys give you very limited information - much, much less so than Visa could cull or your phone company.
I also think it would be good to see some sort of clarification over *how* that information is used on larger commercial entities.
Posted by: juro kothari | 01/28/2006 at 04:17 PM
See, this is what why we can't let people like you rule our world, Juro.
It would never occur to me to deny a rental to someone based on what they did on the forums, based on anything they had against me, or on anything I personally didn't like about them. They right-click, they pay, the keep to the prim limits, they follow the rules like "no spinning signs" and we ignore each other. They press refund, or they press "pay" again, they ask me to deed their video -- that's the extent of our relationship in a modern, open, democratic, market society that does not rely on a privileging or ranking system or abusive controlling system of any type to dole out goods and services.
As I look at my rentals, I can only see three names that I regularly ban: rascally Varmint, Jumpy Grasshopper (for continually placing, and leaving, prims on my land, for their own land-scanner needs, whatever the hell they are, upsetting the prim count and not paying for the use of my land for their projects, and Lazarus Divine, who griefs and extorts with signs -- I don't mass ban him on all properties because I don't have the time, but I put him on those properties where he is abusive nearby or tenants fleeing him complain, etc.)
Of the tenants that come and go, I can think of perhaps one or two who griefed the group IMs with swearing and insane behaviour probably while drunk or on drugs, and a handful of people I've had to ban off tenants' lots who repeatedly harass them with shooting or verbal or sexual harassment. It's actually interesting to note that by and large, in this "zoned community" of Ravenglass Rentals with parcels on 50 sims, there are actually very few bans.
There's an old saying, money doesn't stink. It's often invoked as a reason to take somebody's money when doing business, even if they stink. Money talks, bullshit walks, etc. It's the basis for the modern economies. I can't imagine having a political, social, or moral "issue" with someone that I'd have time to parse out such as to try to ban them in any way and not take their money. Anyone at all is welcome to right-click and pay the box.
The rule of law is contained in the few rules of what I owe them if they pay, and what they owe me if they pay. It's a limited relationship and a useful one to model in SL, where so much depends on guilds, privileges, and MMORPEG culture of tekkie wikinistas and, of course, the Pendari Principle.
In our world, unlike real life, keys give you plenty of information to completely harass and block an individual -- making it impossible for him to use a rentomatic, tied to a third-party site, or even come on to a territory. This is being actively discussed, and if anything, some people want even more powers to use these things and more scripting commands to deploy them from the Lindens to make it more thorough -- Goreans and Traxxians to cite but just a few who were amply visible in the discussions about covenants.
I don't know from whom you are seeking "clarification of how this information is used". I'm the one seeking this clarification, and cannot give it. I don't see policies about privacy and the use of keys from some of these big sites -- not that we could even expect them to abide by it, as I've discovered.
In their eagerness to do more with less, and spin off the soft stuff that they're not good at managing, the Lindens seem way too eager to give the masters of realms all kinds of powers to control the lives of those on them, and we're hearing very, very squirrely answers from them when confronted, in 2 of these group meetings, about whether TOS and CS will prevail on these parcels.
They seem to be getting very soft on the concept of CS being open to "reinterpreting" or "additions and subtractions" at the "local level".
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | 01/28/2006 at 05:09 PM
So a business should not have the option to ban a known griefer from doing business with them? You just mentioned that you used the tool set available to you to do just that. You, with the nature of your business, have tools available to you to keep known problem makers off of your land - your business.
People who sell clothing, hair, sex balls, buildings, etc. don't always have the luxury afforded to you - they do not always own the land that they have a shop on, so they cannot ban trouble makers.
Because of that, I think it is not unreasonable to use keys, if necessary, in this fashion. You should'nt have to rent to people who continually defy the rules you've put in place for your rentals, rules that you created so that your customers could enjoy the product. Others should have the same option.
Is there room for abuse? Certainly, just as there is room for abusing the land tools, but I feel that they should still be afforded the opportunity to opt-out of doing business with those with whom they have problems.
Posted by: juro kothari | 01/28/2006 at 05:19 PM
"Tekkies love to scream FUD at you. To which I can only scream: Literalist Narrow-minded Distractive Bullshit. You can too harvest loads of information from the keys. That's why Ulrika and others went apeshit on the forums and had all these pages with the keys listed, and people argued insanely for days, with no mod intervention, about what they can and can't do."
See this is what I call the standard 'prokofy litany of ingnorance' argument style - I actually had a bet that this would be the reply.
You make a broad sweeping statement based on willfull ignorance (in that you don't WANT to know how things work - else it destroy your carefully planned rant) - and when someone says 'hey - thats not how things work' they are 'teki wiki' literalists - and if they don't comment on how patently false your statement is, the you are off saving the world.. the grand hero..
Its very transparent.. and if you look back you can see a 'mad libs' style of post.. its very humorous..
You can't even follow your own 'blog guidelines' which I find even more humourous.
I used to liken you Don Quixote, tilting to windmills - but truthfully you are more like Fox Mulder - so desperately wanting to beleive 'the truth is out there' you fail to see the facts at your feet.
Very funny indeed :)
Please carry on.
Posted by: siggy | 01/28/2006 at 08:43 PM
Yes my 'distractive bullshit' comes from the actual documentation of the Linden Scripting Language...
...where as your absolute truth comes from the left side of your brain...
Uh huh.. okay... never let the facts get in the way of a good story eh? Thats 'reporting' for you :)
Posted by: siggy | 01/28/2006 at 08:53 PM
Um, if there is a relevant fact here that proves some point, I'm more than happy to "let it get in the way of reporting". Bring it on.
Siggy, you're not grasping the bigger picture here, about malicious intent, and how what seems to be innocent in one setting becomes criminal in another.
I'm not at all afraid of some "fact" to be brought forward. But when I ask these larger questions about intent, and morality, and the actual behaviour of these big corporations, and what means could be used to provide more accountability from them, all you can do is recite tekkie-wiki literalist bullshit about how keys aren't really your RL information -- well, duh, we know that -- or keys don't really tell you everything about an avatar -- well duh, we know that. What I want to know is what we can do about big companies already grabbing all our keys, and not knowing what they do with them, especially when some of them use this charge of malfeasance in their wars among themselves.
See, you agree that key information is taken...you have no problem admitting that, as it's a fact, but then you can't zoom out to see the larger picture of how this might be misused. Instead, all you do is keep repeating what we already know -- that yeah, keys are just identifers and don't contain everything -- but you don't face the music on really legitimate questions about what to do about all this tracking. Instead, you resort to the usual cheap asshole forum techniques like "I had a bet going in the IRC channel you'd say that, and sure enough you did" and other belittling comments.
You ought to know by now that no about of belittling and attempts to humiliate me, impugn my sanity, talk to me stupidly about left-brain activity and other such nonsense is going to intimidate me from further seeking the truth (um, if the left brain is responsible for math and science, and the right brain for art and creativity, then perhaps you need to fix up your metaphor).
Anybody raising questions about this key-tracking is immediately kicked in the ass and told they are suffering from FUD. Well, that sounds like patent bullshit to me. The first time I saw this issue raised on the forums, I took a look, but I didn't get obsessed. How can you , in a world where your every movement is recorded? But I ask the larger questions of what advantage in SL these sites are gaining WHEN THEY DO NOT SIGN THE TOS.
None of these big third-party sites *at all* have my trust, and I don't doubt the trust of a certain portion of the general public because 1) they are shown time and again to be beneficiaries of Linden favouritism and cronyism yet they have not signed the TOS; 2) they are shown on their websites to commit libel and harassment of some residents they don't like 3) they gather information and don't inform customers what they do with it 4) they use strong-armed tactics to silence people on the forums.
And much more. It's all pretty obvious.
All you can do is recite like a parrot things like I am "willfully ignorant" when you reveal yourself to be utterly inconsiderate and utterly tone deaf to these larger issues.
I don't even know where to start with someone like you because you are evidently not smart enough to have this conversation.
It's not about saving the world, it's about getting accountability and some adherence to policies and some normal explanations from these companies.
Juro, you're not making sense. What, somebody renting in a store or a mall is somehow going to ban purchases from people off their vendors using the key? Huh? You actually advocate that? Barring purchases inworld because you don't like what someone writes on the forums?
Your repeated whimpering and stabs at me as a land owner, over those who "can't afford land and have to rent" are silly. I "can't afford land either" which is why I rent it out to pay the bills -- I don't live in a palatial mansion on a private island by myself.
All those tenants with vendors out in a mall, that you imagine to be harassed somehow, can ask for bans on that mall if they experience actual harassment at that site. But who is going to define "problems"? And what reason would a seller have to ban a buyer at a vendor? I cannot in good faith advocate a system that enables people with all kinds of personal axes to grind, especially those who are privileged insiders in the system itself, to be able to ban people in this fashion.
I can forsee this problem developing in spades with this new concept of covenants. The Lindens are thinking of it in terms of how to get rid of the Bush guy, that is, how to make groups of people themselves get some adherence from their own ranks on a sim to prevent the unwanted signs. They aren't seeing how some people merely want these functions to shut out others.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | 01/29/2006 at 02:31 AM
Two cents...
First, a bit of technical crap.
In order for a scripted object to have any ability of interacting with an avatar at all (buying/ touching/ passing near/ etc), it absolutely needs a way to identify the avatar. Keys are used simply due to speed reasons. There is no alternative that could be implemented. The only thing LL could implement to stop any sort of key tracking at all would be to allow avatars to turn off script interaction at will. Of course, that would be extremely limiting -- can't open doors, etc.
Summary: From the technical side of things, it is impossible to prevent scripts from being able to lift avatar identifiers, without removing interactivity.
Next point, business practice. Yes, it is rather obnoxious that people might go so far as to ban and prevent dealings with someone based on forum behavior. That said -- there are no business laws in place in SL at all. I think the best thing to do there would be to try to establish sort of a commerce conglomerate -- a more esteemable group of businesses that are bound by a clearly defined set of fair business practice.
I personally think it would be highly detrimental to SL if LL attempted to write out an in-game business code and demanded everyone adhere to it. Not only would it create an administrative nightmare for them -- it also would probably not be suitable for many businesses.
Posted by: Aspen Normandy | 01/29/2006 at 03:27 AM
Duh, Aspen, I grasped that thousands of years ago. Indeed, you would have to be nearly braindead not to figure out that the game of SL grabs your key -- even if you are completely stupid about technical matters, you'd notice your offline emails have a long complicated letter-and-number code attached to them -- you see them when someone answers you and it comes back that way. So duh, no need to hector and lecture about the very obvious facts of our world.
And duh, I realize that it is required for interactivity, and if you could put aside your arrogant asshole approach for just one second, you can see that I ALREADY WROTE THAT in my post. I wrote that it is necessary and indeed beneficial for a script to grab a key.
The know-it-all asshole tone that a tekkie adopts in telling us about the fucking OBVIOUS things in our world are more than annoying -- they border on the criminal. They border on the criminal because it's their rooted belief that this bit of rote knowledge they've learned by rote (which most intelligent people could learn if they applied the time and money and effort) entitles them to rule people, and tell them what to do. Nothing of the kind.
So please, stow it. You don't need to provide helpful little "lessons" or "bits of information" when not only did we all grasp it in spades, I wrote about it in my opening post.
Now, as to business laws, well, there are business laws of two sorts: what is in the TOS and COS relevant to business and what people establish as a norm -- notecarded handshake sort of agreements. I realize since you deal in utter abstractions that you are not aware most likely that people already bank, earn interest, take out mortgages against land, have loan businesses -- and they are of varying degrees of good reputation, but the longer they persist, the more good experiences people have with some of them, the stronger the sector and the norms become. And it's very important that the Lindens not kill that off -- as they did GOM.
As for this really awful idea "I think the best thing to do there would be to try to establish sort of a commerce conglomerate -- a more esteemable group of businesses that are bound by a clearly defined set of fair business practice" -- I can't think of anything WORSE. Various big businesse keen on shielding their reputations from any scrutiny come along from time to time and try to form these "better business bureaus". They'd like to create "white lists" and "Goodhouskeeping Seals of Approval" about themselves first and foremost.
We hardly need this bunch to be setting any kind of code. Nor would we ask the Lindens, who are always prone to fete their pets anyway, to take on this chore.
Laws can only be written when there is first a victorious struggle for power over an oppressive government; then a separation of powers; some sort of people's assembly; the division of powers into legislative, executive, judicial -- the drafting and passage and signing of laws. This is the normal and effective way it has been done for centuries.
Of course, utopian tekkies think they will skip all those steps and just literally put in a programming code to run things, or automatic "direct voters" or other trinkets and gadgets. They don't work well. And they aren't a solution. I don't need government-on-a-prim.
The first step before a business code can be written is to end the anti-business climate and culture on the forums and in the games. The Lindens have done a little bit of that, but nowhere near enough. If they fix the group tools enough so that the rudiments of companies and safer businesses could start, then we could see whether it's possible to make a world out of a lot of "groups" instead of governments made up of mandated individuals, representatives of individuals, and individuals themselves. I'm very skeptical of the groups stuff. But it's all we have given that the very heavy executive power is unlikely any time soon to allow the appearance of a constitutional assembly that will place curbs on its powers.
Meanwhile, I suspect all kinds of Singapore or Chinese or Russian sorts of models will take root, where the state will have a few cronies among the top businesses, like the chaibols in Korea, or like Haliburton in the US or Gasprom in Russia or whatever, and they will run the place, crushing dissent and competition where they need to. It's not going to be pretty.
To pretend that there's some nice, well-meaning, earnest, honest business people running the top businesses is not to see how they behaviour already on the forums and in the world.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | 01/29/2006 at 04:24 AM