They were not the clueless idiots wrapped in FUD that the arrogant scripterati would have us think. Many of them in fact at that stage were technically proficient themselves. They were merely trying to be *helpful* and tried to reassure people. And frankly, the suspect members of libsecondlife who perpetrated the CopyBot disaster on SL were selling antidotes to their creation on Day One -- yet another piece of evidence proving their malicious intentions and reason for us all to continue to find *the entire group* suspect because *they refuse to disassociate from the immoral and illegitimate activities of their founder, leader, and key members*.
It's not about believe in the dangers of CopyBot -- hey, we're long past that. It's not about some McCarthyite desire to engage in "guilt-by-association". It's having a series of documented, explicitly malicious and immoral activities and finding that this group, in whole and in part, does not condemn and disassociate from them (except for a few of their members with greater intelligence and conscience, but then who have been timid and silent in doing this publicly). It's not about the threat to the community posed in the form of an actual copying device; it's about the threat to the community posed by rampantly cynical bad behaviour with impunity. That means deliberate deployment of CopyBot consciously to cause harm and fear while mocking people's reactions; that means responsibility for the side effects where people lost business by closing stores *because someone had deliberately tried to terrorize them, not because they are FUDites*; that means bribing a source to lie to a journalist; that means selling the CopyBot itself (!) and the antidote to it (!!!); that means apologizing and then retracting; that means the continued blatant, self-serving arrogant attitude of Eddy Striker, Baba Yamamoto and the other members of libsecondlife who *refuse to condemn, and disassociate themselves from immorality because they believe as reverse engineers, they are above the law*.
The problem, as usual in human life, is not about the artifacts humans make; it's about the ill intentions of humans themselves. It's not about the technology!
Since the scandal in November, many of us have worked assiduously to inform people that the anti-bot spammers are worthless; to pass out educational cards; to delete the spammers; to IM neighbours and reason with them -- all with nearly 99 percent success rates. I have dealt with literally hundreds of these situations as have other land managers. The spam was reduced by 80 percent surely, with only a few persistent situations left, involving no-show land owners or people who couldn't be persuaded (and I've never found one yet who didn't mitigate the situation after being asked politely and given information.)
Still, all of us were looking for some way to use something other than the confusing red lines within the user panel that finds ALL scripted objects; we were happy to see a way to find the owner of that specifically named chatter that spams for 96m2 continually.
After two years in SL, I know to read the scripters' forums and libraries extremely carefully. If you just copy something given there, much of the time it doesn't work, or doesn't work as it is supposed to. It is merely a kind of working draft sort of place, and usually in a day or two some other scripter comes along and *corrects* the work of the first poster, by pointing out their script was clunky or laggy. Such fixes and corrections can proceed through many iterations. But this is a public forum. Anyone can copy the script and use it. No Linden or poster has ever had a sticky on there saying USE AT YOUR OWN RISK! (iT SHOULD!!!) The people who make these scripts are merely interested in the sterile, abstract exercise of their scripting itself, not of the consumer using the scripts. In fact, most of them do these scripts as an abstract programming exercise and don't even want customers; they loathe them.
Ordinal Malaprop, who *does* have a store and *is* endlessly patient with consumers is not like this; I've found her prepared not only to discuss a problem for an hour, but spend another hour of her own time, for free, solving it for you -- though she has absolutely no call to do so. She's one of those genuine altruists of Second Life, not one of the bullies who goes around forcing help on newbies and styling themselves as newbie helpers merely because they "need to be needed" or need to look good in their stunning sandbox gear. She is the genuine article; a Renaissance woman, well-rounded in art, philosophy, and science, one of the citizens of Caledon who saves its stuffy, steampunk soul. I've known her to be a good merchant helping customers; a good neighbour; just an all-around good citizen -- contrasting sharply with all the tekkie-wikinistas out there who give the entire class of programmers a bad name -- precisely because there are so many of them and they are so aggressively nasty in SL.
That's why when I read through all the different versions of her script doing this or that thing, I still took her script to use -- since she had tested it. However, there was a problem -- for me -- in trying to understand where the name of the spammer went in the script. Having found that most scripts work by having you insert the name of the card to be acted upon, say, in a notecard giver, and reading that this script involved inserting names, I figured I had to put the name into the brackets -- so I did. It appeared to then function when I touched it.
I had two locations to check. The first location was in Keuka, and it turned up a store owner. Knowing that he was a long-time smart creator, I figured he couldn't possibly be using anti-copy bot at this juncture. But the device turned up his name. It gave you the option to send an IM automatically or not, but after I clicked yes, I wrote him manually trying to explain. I couldn't SEE he had it out but it was showing -- and possibly giving a false positive. I kept hearing the spam -- and then later fixed the script, found the person (up in the air apparently which is why it had been such a long search for weeks) and she promptly got on the problem hearing about the issue.
Next I went to Tuliptree where for weeks, neighbours and tenants and I had been driven absolutely mad by the spam. One neighbour said he had figured out how to mute the owner but in fact that wasn't working -- we couldn't *find* the owner to mute him. We kept looking and discussing it for days. It was most definitely heard there. But somehow in between the time I was working on other sites using the new script, and I returned to Tuliptree, it must have been removed. Anyone there can testify that it was indeed there. When I came to test it with the anti-anti device, it showed up the name of Weedy Herbst.
Now I'm definitely not stupid. Weedy, being a scripter herself, could hardly be accused of putting out an anti-copybot thing -- she would have long since figured out that those spammers just don't work. It wasn't visible at all in her store -- again, there must be something wrong with the way I was using it or the thing itself -- I immediately wrote all this to Ordinal asking for help.
The device sent Weedy one automatic message -- ONE -- when clicked "yes".
ONE IM.
ONE.
Not a spam, not a deluge. ONE.
Before I could follow up with a manual IM explaining that it didn't seem to be possible it was her object but explain what *was* going on -- Weedy herself came storming on the line. She becan falsely accusing me of "spamming her" (one IM does not make a spam) and refused to listen to reason. She went on a jihad, as usual, fueled with every ounce of her malevolent, vicious spirit, with which she poisoned the forums for years. Chief among her wild-assed complaints was an accusation that I made the script because I was shown as "creator" -- when in fact I had written on the description of the prim that Ordinal was creator, and everyone knows I couldn't possibly have written a script. Explaining all this was lost on the hysterical Weedy.
I got Ordinal on the job, explaining urgently that the issue was that it was somehow making false positives. She gently explained that it would do that if you didn't use the script command /123 [name of thing]. Of course, there being no directions to do that, and the channel itself seemingly not labeled 123 inside the script [again, I have gotten used to seeing "channel 1" or "100" inside the script itself on things like window tinters], I couldn't know that.
Ordinal quickly and competently fixed the script to make it dummy-proof against people like me so that it wouldn't start searching for ANY script-owner of ANY script (which it was doing, thus seeming to turn up false positives).
The thread itself, of course was despicable even before Weedy turned up with her shrill witch-hunt and fake P**** N***** comments.
I had in fact contacted 3 people in this thread and gave them quite a piece of my mind. Why? Because this is a public forum, and when they put out hate-filled, inciting statements on a public forum, I sure as hell do get the right to contact them and condemn what they are doing.
In this thread, a person named Winter Ventura gets on and vents with hysterical, hate-filled rage against the people who have deployed these spammers. Yeah, we all hate the spammers. But it's like those well-meaning posts to your email circle from people who tell you about the latest virus threat -- and it turns out to be just some hoax involving an actual needed piece of your Windows program -- they aren't ill-intentioned -- the people who gang up and scream on them are.
>There are over 10,000 residents in world that are NOT copybots, who are getting spammed mercilously by these things," she claims falsely. Huh? There is no such thing. That many people may be logged on, but not every one is hearing a spam; I'm not, nor are the hundreds of people in my groups who -- even when it WAS a big issue -- were not complaining. How can somebody who is supposed to be "technical" get away with an outrageous, illogical comment like that?
I've always found that the tekkies are a tribe unto themselves who believe that they can actually redefine what intelligence is and actually even redefine what logic or "correct thought processes" are. So much of what they do is actually infused not with intellect, but with emotion. This is actually a big insight for me and the key to understanding much of the idiocy of SL.
I used to think the problem with the tekkie-wikis is that they were intellects short of conscience and morality by being shorn of emotion. Now I see the problem is the opposite -- they suffer from too much emotion.
They substitute rage and ecstasy for rationality much of the time, in must of what they do, and that is why I find so much of what they do suspect. Only someone completely dominated by their emotional need for self-justification, power, recognition, glee over others' misfortune, and many other hysterias could do something like a) make CopyBot b) deploy it to scare others; c) take enjoyment in this; d) make a profit of it; e) make a profit of its antidote; f) lie about it and pay others to lie about it. These features are all profoundly emotionally-based on all the seven vices -- not on calm and rational intellect -- it is intellect not shorn of heart, but intellect overrun by the infantile and vindictive hearts of very immature, unformed beings.
I'll never forget my first experience of the World Wide Web years ago in a new job. I sat down at a brand spankin' new mail listserve that could now hold attachments -- thinks like pictures or WAV files. Someone sent around a notice saying that email attachments were infected by a certain virus and people should delete it. A condescending and arrogant tekkie got on and harangued everybody, telling them that viruses could NEVER be spread by attachments EVER it was NOT POSSIBLE (I'll bet he had to do some serious crow-eating some time later when it was finally found that they could). He kept haranguing the list for distributing this helpful news. People's internal trigger to be helpful is hard to stop -- and it means their helpful-impulse in fact becomes the real virus and legions of people dutifully go and erase some necessary thingie in Windows. Tekkies scream at people doing that as being paralyzed by FUD -- in fact they are paralyzed by the Good Samaritan Rule and a sense of wishing to help their neighbour (unlike the screaming tekkies).
Yet so outraged is Winter Ventura in this thread that she even winds up inciting an actual boycott of merchants who have this spammer out. Outrageously -- with the kind of FUD and hysterical mindlessly stupidity that is supposed to be the property of only the non-technical -- she describes this innocent Good Samaritan sort of anti-bot device as "a distributed DNS attack". Libsecondlife is guilty of something like a DNS attack by unleashing CopyBot in the first place and causing people to fight back in the only way they knew how: closing their stores in protest and anger.
These wild-assed accusations go unheeded by other smug tekkies in the thread, and by the mods, of course -- they want blood and will get it. They lurch around whipping up each others' sentiments against all those "stupid idiots" who are supposedly out their spamming people. In fact, there are far less spammers today than there were a month ago precisely because people like me are going around deleting them everywhere and warning others they don't work -- not because of rants in the scripting tips forums. But that's never good enough.
Along in this thread an interesting thing occurs -- while the OP is fuming about people using the defeater as being the dummies and spammers, she never once -- not once!!! -- (why-are-we-not-surprised) -- asks who had SCRIPTED the defeater and why THEY were not responsible! Interesting, eh? Defend your own; never question your own.
SO this person actually comes on, startling enough, given that being a scripter means never having to say you're sorry, and confesses to being the culprit who invented the defeater. Much like the Americans and Russians often say they planned to be involved in a war "for only a week," Domino Marama thought her defeater would only be used for a week. If anything, it is still being distributed because so many new people are reading about it in the press, joining SL, and arming themselves with it just in case.
"I am sorry that the systems, by necessity, are annoying to regular citizens, but I hope that as a whole, their use can be seen as a neccessary evil for this short time. Sorry if this makes me seem like a "joker" but it was with the best of intentions I took the actions I did," she said.
Now, Winter, even more irrational and seething with righteous indignation, lets loose another "fact" in her tirade against others for being stupid and not grasping the facts of the uselessness of the defeater, "And they'll never realize that spamming 1.4 million people to stop ONE original instance of copybot (which has legitimate uses).. isn't appropriate behaviour." Um...what, we went from 10,000 people to 1.4 million people over night, each and everyone one of whom gets a spam? Huh? What sort of Kool-Aid are YOU drinking??? And to think Winter actually had a plan to spam spammers back. For shame.
The thread natters on with one after another taking nasty pot-shots at all the supposed ignorant spammers out there (COMPLETELY overlooking that what these "ignoramuses" did was take a SCRIPTED ITEM made by a SCRIPTER who distributed it into the WILD without taking RESPONSIBILITY FOR IT (and who still hasn't, despite making at least a decent apology). Interesting, that bit, eh? A *scripter* has cased the anti-anti problem, eh? And yet the solution another scripter wants to implement is to spam the spammers and also nail the users -- not the maker -- to the wall for a DNS charge. Fascinating.
Another fellow has the "bright idea" to make merchants turn off "build" and "outside scripts" on their land as the REAL defeat of a potential copybot situation. Well, that's a dumb idea. What merchant will deprive his customers of being able to rez the package out while in the store and see what they bought, and also walk into the store on their scripted high-heel shoes? Hello? Are you hopelessly ignorant? Or do you just play that on TV?
Finally someone named Rebecca Proudhon gets on the thread and comments that she really doesn't like the spirit in which people are discussing this. Thank GOD for the bravery of this Ms. Proudhom, whom I don't know. She writes:
"This thread strikes me as very indicative of a major polarization among SL people. I think the comments above sound arrogant and non-helpful. Two posters objecting to Copybot use are criticized or slammed and store owners and creators are just "paranoids." And you want to boycott their stores. You are totally riding roughshod over the main point of all of the objections to the copybot use.
If you have a better tool to defeat copybots that doesn't spam then please produce it. People will pay for it--more then will want to violate creators rights."
Amen. Rebecca definitely does the right thing. She calls these arrogant scripterati to *conscience* to have them take responsibility for what they do in polarizing the community and also unleashing their unbaked shit on the community.
She gets an abrupt slap from Jesse Barnett, one of the FIC-types (they don't have to have a 2003 birthdate to behave this way) who tells her that while Winter Ventura, he, and a score of their precious little friends can use "Scripting Tips" to incite hatred of a class of people; publish wildly stupid concepts like "1.4 million people being spammed" (aren't scientists supposed to be precise with numbers); and vent long emotional tales of their brother nearly quitting SL; and many other stories, comments, and vents worth of As the World Turns for their soap opera quality, suddenly, when somebody like Rebecca points out that they are really out of line, Jesse says, "This is not the General Forums or Resident Answers. If you have a script to discuss then please discuss. If you only come to try to create division or rant, then go elsewhere". Huh?! Thus entitling his own tribe to rant against people forever and anon with nary a resmod intervention. Winter piles on with a hectoring, "This is not an ethics debate" -- although it damn well should be. And the ethics debate should start with Domino, and why she and others with similar scripts are doing nothing to compensate for their errors in spreading this in the world; and continue with a stiff controntation of Winter, for inciting hate against innocent merchants.
We saw how that works in the Cory Linden town hall thread. I challenge the hate and incitement going on from the smug assholes, and I'm the one banned, not them. These creeps feel they can incite boycotts and lambast an entire class of people -- merchants putting out something that they merely thought would work CREATED BY A SCRIPTER -- and never take responsibility for their own class of people inflicting scripts on the world in the first place.
(As an interesting side discussion, Rebecca also notes how World of Warcraft's makers fight their version of CopyBot with coding on their side and detectors and blocks server side, a path the Lindens refuse to take).
Winter continues on with another utterly false and utterly incredible statement: "Meanwhile, tens of thousands of users (who are not copybots) are each receiving hundreds of pieces of junk mail every hour.. many of us are getting them shunted to email, and even when we have them muted, they're using processor cycles like crazy." That's simply not true.
This concept that 'many of us are getting them shunted to email" sounds utterly preposterous to me. While it may be true in her case, I've never heard of a single other case. How can a chatting inanimate object inworld's chat come to you in an IM when it is unable to access your profile and IM you??? It merely chats inworld. This sounds completely bogus to me.
And then enters hysterical and screechy Weedy Herbst, who tells us she was "in bed" and got an "IM alarm". WTF? Every IM to her inworld is an "alarm" and "gets her out of bed"? One IM message makes an "alarm"??? My God, she must not get a minute of sleep, what with all those land deals and jobs she has an all the IMs they generate. What a ridiculously, hysterical emotional and emotionally-blackmailing statement from someone who, again, we are told is supposed to be a rational scientist and scripter.
Not to be trumped by the languishing Weedy woken from her bed by evil PN's IM, Winter announces dramatically, "I personally didn't need the athsma attack triggered by P****y N**a's verbal assault."
Wow -- you really have to hand it to the Internet Histrionics Gang. Next thing we'll hear that her kid was kidnapped and is being held at gunpoint by her ex-boy-friend and it's all my fault because she was in IMs with me lol.
What I did was contact Winter inworld and challenge her hysteria and hate-incitement. I explained that many of us work assiduously to remove these items from the world. We try to educate people, but frankly, not a single SCRIPTER who is RESPONSIBLE for this has taken the trouble also to distribute on SLEX and other public areas the NEWS that they do not work, much less antidotes.
And then together with Weedy, she launches on a witch-hunt against ME. All of a sudden, merely for sending ONE--REPEAT ONE--AUTOMATIC IM, and for trying to use a script in good faith to clean up these damn things, I'm to be expelled from Second Life through the use of their reports to LL. (This is how I can always determine people's real, authentic evil: that they wish to expel you from SL completely. I never wish that for them; they wish it ardently for me because they cannot stand any dissent.)
All of a sudden, for sending a few lines of comment, I'm guilty of "triggering an asthma attack" (!). You had to see this gal. She went on and on and ON -- emotion definitely rules this being, not rationality. She began psychoanalyzing me, started psychobabbling about how I must fear confrontation, and kept trying to force-port me. I kept saying "bye" and telling her she shouldn't incite hatred against people merely trying to do good. The irrationality and hysteria I dealt with for an hour for this person gave me an insight into what prompts these kinds of posts in the first place: not only youth and immaturity in RL could be at stake (one has no idea to whom you are talking in SL) -- if this person is a RL woman, she is someone in a man's domain -- programming -- trying to prove herself as a scripter and therefore likely insecure. But this may be a non-point, since quite a few of the IRC channelling types of scripters are in drag in SL and are m2f.
Weedy states falsely that I am an "owner of IMs" --a fake plural -- when this automatic device sends one IM and quits. It asks "yes/no" and I pressed it once only and then sent her the box. And the situation was clarified -- and should never have been one to get her out of bed in the first place (only the most hysterical crank could be setting up real-life alarms related to SL IMs).
Winter, never one to check her facts, having found a soul-mate to play vindictive tribal warfare with, starts spouting about me, claiming I "arrogantly fired off a series of invictives at you, demanding the object's removal." Bullshit. I did no such thing and the Lindens' server logs prove THAT. The object sent one IM. I have the chat log. I didn't demand shit. I explained that it was in fact likely a false positive of some sort. I merely explained it to Weedy, said I realized it wasn't likely her object, and she should talk to Ordinal. It was Weedy who then fired of a series of "invictives" (also known as "invectives") against ME, claiming falsely that I was creator of the script, etc.
Honestly, emotions will always disprove the bona fides of this class of scripterati who claim to be based on intellect alone. Their emotions have completely suppressed their reason. And as such, with their combination of a little bit of smarts to be able to script, and a whole bunch of wild emotion that is impermeable to even the most patient reason, they are a real bane to the world.
For the first time, the concept of a script clearing-house, something I'd always opposed before, seemed like a really good idea, given the hysterics we have at the scripting switches here, unable to find facts, see reason, or take the slightest bit of criticism of their actions. If it were only their intellect and creativity involved, we would never have to think about curbing them. Since they've allowed emotions, hysteria, and deep-seated vindictive hatred to prevail over their reason, they DO need to be curbed.
"Scripts like this, in the hands of scripting ignoramii and/or antagonists.....isn't good," says Weedy -- though the thought of a scripting clearing house would make her spit if it harmed her creativity.
Am I to blame for not having a script for instructions? No. I attempted to read the thread and follow the instructions in good faith. When I explained that my error was caused by reason-by-analogy (other scripts work by putting names in brackets; other scripts seem to "say something" when you type a channel or turn on and prompt you to say "XYZ"), Ordinal promptly dummy-proofed it. She didn't spend an hour calling me an "ignorami".
"I agree... and yet.. there's really no other way to learn to script, than to try things and make mistakes," says Winter, fondly remembering some spamming particle thing she made by mistake.
So...it's fine for the scripterati to make mistakes, but not people who innocently try to use them to do good? The people who took Domino's script to prevent theft because they didn't know anybody? Me -- taking Ordinal's script and trying to remove the annoying spammers? You can see where the good lies here...and see where the evil lies -- in the hypocrisy and blindness of scripterati who think the world is their sandbox and they have eminent domain to do whatever the fuck their little emotionally-immature hearts desire.
Weedy ends by stating falsely again that there were "IMs" when there was one; she also accuses me of "lying" because she was unable to find the anti copybot. Well, we've been all hearing it for weeks, and have spent DAYS trying to get rid of it. Somehow, in the course of the last day, with all the group IMs, etc. somebody found it and deleted it before I managed to arrive on the scene that day to look for it. End of story. No lies, no drama. Just a good-faith effort to get rid of something bothering people on 3 sims!
But there's always an eager, infantile, immature ear to pile on whenever there is an emotional-drama-fest like this one, especially under the shingle of INTELLECT which scripters falsely hang on their shack.
"It is also most pleasing to know that there are at least a FEW rational people around here with the ability to excercise common sense. You guys inspire me every day," gushes a little wannabe, Zaphod Kotobide, implying that people who used the scripts to fight the copybot, or used the anti-anti scripts in good faith to fight the spam, are the stupid morons, and the few emotionally-hysterical shrews who incited hatred of people, wildly cited fake facts and even faker accusations, and planned to harass them back are to be rewarded as "inspiring" others.
Continues Zaphode, with the usual short-sighted and narrow-minded moralizing we find on this issue, "It may have slowed down, thankfully, but it's still out there, along with the attendant misunderstanding of the core issues, and unfair characterization of libSL members or supporters. Interestly, there is a shop very near the libsl HQ in Hooper, with a big sign that in part reads: "Anyone found using, or suspected of using COPYBOT in this area will be banned IMMEDIATELY"."
So? With these kinds of irresponsible, juvenile, and condescending threads in "Scripting Tips," we can see why such bans need to be held firmly in place at least to send a message to people who are impervious to reason.
While some remain with "attendant misunderstanding of core issues" because they haven't figured out yet that CopyBot never worked well and is broken now anyway (messages that libsecondlife itself could have done 1,000 times better in spreading instead of being smug assholes), the attendant ignorance I see most glaring is within libsecondlife and its supporters to this day. They remain tonedeaf to the viciousness, tolerance of W-Hat griefers, and sheer assholery evident in their leaders and chief promoters. They remain tonedeaf to the fact that people who opposed CopyBot or used deaters were not seized by FUD, but by sheer common sense. Let me remark again: look at the group carefully, and see that people with the best reputations in SL are no longer in the group -- and with very good reason.
It's also true that people have the right to ban anyone from their land -- isn't this Philip Linden's solution for EVERYTHING? It's a good message to send to libsecondlife, which has been so emotionally immature and so irresponsible AS A GROUP for which I hold ALL GROUP MEMBERS INCLUDING LINDENS responsible. The leadership, the style, the message did not change.
So in contemplating this Christmas Eve the "polarization of the world," as Rebecca so aptly put it, I don't think it's a time to issue palliatives and silly, saccharine, "let's all get along" homilies.
Polarization can be minimized and managed, but first, there has to be a recognition from the scripterati that while they may follow a star, they are not the Magi and didn't find the Christ. They do indeed only find dirty straw much of the time. Their science isn't a science in the game of SL, it's just a kind of arty hobby with a very clunky set of tools. The arrogance they have about their "knowledge" is particularly pumped up because some of them do NOT have these credentials in first life at all, and hope to obtain them through SL and therefore are particularly juvenile, hysterical, and insecure about their "creations".
Furthermore, a script is not good in a vacuum; it is only good if it can be used successfully in the world and make it better. CopyBot has never been demonstrated to make the world Better; it has only been very reliably shown to make it Worse. Scripters must accept that they are not the only unilateral pole of Second Life that can dictate its nature; the other pole of users -- consumers -- are a very necessary and integral part of this world and their needs and concerns are legitimate.
Several people doing good really shined for me in this usual SL drama. One was Rebecca, who was willing to stand up to bullies. But the real star of the show was Ordinal, who kept re-doing the script quietly until the issues were fixed.
Today, thanks to Ordinal's quiet excellence, we have a script that anyone can press and use to find the owner of the anti-anti-copybot. That means that the hysterical nutters who got so angry about this SCRIPTER's work unleashed on the world so irresponsibly now have an antidote (not thanks to the original poster, and not thanks to the original maker of the defeater!) -- and we can get to work finishing the clean-up. Again, I can only call on Domino to hold public events, put out really visible public notices, and work much harder at educating the public to the inefficacy of the anti-anti script.
Says Zaphode, "So the issue is two-fold. Not only do people still apparently not understand that these countermeasure scripts are entirely ineffective, but categorically criminalize the entire libSL project, and all its members. It's really a shame, and I wish there was a way to reach out to these folks with the basic truths of the matter."
I can only say to this fellow, whom I don't know: open your mind wider, please. Nobody has "criminalized" anything. The Lindens made the "unauthorized use" (but not *any* use) of CopyBot a TOS offense. People have the right to ban folks from their land "for any reason or no reason" -- and that's something I myself fight because there is no recourse.
Bt in this case, they have more than a technical reason, and they are not guilty of a witch-hunt. The leaders and main supporters like Zaphode himself are continuing to remain blind to -- if not outright cover up -- the serious MORAL issues involved in CopyBot that are not about its technical dimension whatsoever -- and muddying those distinctions to enable scripterati to lord it over us once again is transparently wrong.
I don't expect any more peace to come to Second Life in 2007, any more than I expect it of the Middle East. I do think that unfortunately, there is a basic good fight to be had in Second Life that is vital in order to keep it free. Those who make the very mechanizers of the world -- the scripterati -- must be curbed, must be challenged as to their heedless and hedonistic infliction of devices on us in this world -- and must be compelled to cease their emotional handling of what should be accomplished by intellect. They must be compelled to stop harming our world.
Comments:
Posted by: Ordinal Malaprop | December 24, 2006 at 04:22 PM
I'm surprised this earned a whole blog entry. On the Prok-scale, my opinions are faily mild.
Regardless ... Merry Christmas, Prokofy. This should cheer you up:
http://www.secondlifeinsider.com//2006/12/23/a-second-life-christmas-epiphany/