I don't like year-enders, as I don't think it's very easy to sum up such fast-changing momentous history while we're living in it, but as there is already a lot of rewriting of history by the victors, it's important to keep sounding the note of dissent and keep setting the record out for posterity.
The three main stories for the last year are: a) the departure of Cory Ondreijka from Linden Lab; b) the decline of the Second Life Herald into what I call a mukkake-raking rag; c) Copybot (yes, still). All three topics are related and really all about Copybot, who you might have thought was last year's story, but is actually really just as much this year's story in many ways, because it's all about, what Dean Moriarity once famous called, "The Big Grab from Washington to Moscow" -- property, its valuation, who gets to own it or take it, and who manages it.
Someone else might say the really big story of 2007 was the entrance -- and exit -- of a lot of big companies to Second Life. They can write that history. This phenomenon was responsible, in inworld terms, mainly for the rapid aggrandizement of a lot of content-makers and programmers who perhaps didn't keep their modesty as intact as their NDAs. It's historically important but I will leave someone like Forseti to fawn over it.
I've already written about Cory Linden since the story was broken by our familiar FIC at massively.com -- but it will long haunt as a topic, as if a close family member had left home or died. His departure was one of those laser burns that the virtual world unleashes now and then making you somehow feel it "in real" too. While everyone seems to acknowledge that he made a graceful and even noble exit, the public really does have a right to know what the "creative difference" or "engineering dispute" was all about. A very old Second Lifer told me frankly they thought it was a business dispute, not an engineering difference. And as engineering *is* business in SL as in a lot of Internet and platform technologies, that is very astute.
Suddenly, I recalled a moment in SLCC 1 outside the Korean bar where a group of us had gone to hang out, and wound up hearing Philip Rosedale do a karaoke of Jeremy's Spoken, a song I felt he obviously identified with. As we left the bar, Cory Ondrejka wandered off and returned from a Korean deli, impishly holding up one of those ubiquitous gourds (does anybody ever buy them?!), which he cradled like a ventriloquist, and mimicked the words in a high, squeaky voice, "I am the CEO of the Metaverse!". We were convulsed -- it was a fitting coda to days of back-to-back SOP and SLCC. I glanced over at Philip -- he wasn't seeming to find it as funny as everybody else. There you have it. Cory's irreverence and geeky sense of humour. Philip's ardent belief.
It was appropriate that when AP got this story of Cory's leaving, they immediately fastened on the Spaghetti Monster angle. (By the time the Inquirer got it, it was "Pastifarian CTO Resigns Second Life"). Of course, Cory adopted this avatar and was part of an old group in Second Life, founded by Cory's alt, Exposition Linden (he used for shows), called Flying Spaghetti Monster, who "Pastafarians" "worshipped" the Monster as a spoof -- the entire thing is a wicked satire of religion, meant to ban on the "intelligent design" people in particular.
Of course, Cory didn't push this anti-religion bit as much as you might imagine from the AP story (which was picked up by the New York Times and LOTS of other outlets), but still, when a powerful and influential new technology is launched and operated by people who not only don't believe in God, but feel they must satirize and even grief those who do believe in God, it's an issue. I asked Philip Rosedale if he believed in God in The New York Times article -- he failed to answer, so I made a follow up comment.
The most interesting speculation about Cory Linden's departure I've found on a little-know geeky site basically tells the story as follows: they point to clues from a May meeting transcript "Work should start on the ability to back up your full-perms content in Q3 2007" (the dream of geeks; nobody else has quite the burning need to save their Second Life pixel junk like a Word document on their desktop).
What's operative about this "back-up", however, is that evidently if *you* can back up your work somewhere off world, then *anybody* can -- erm, they can COPY it is how ordinary people would explain this magic capability that is the Holy Grail of Geeks.
Here's how the Crystal guy puts it on this blog:
All I know is that I would quit if my boss told me to code DRM and copy-protection methods into my system. Any good programmer knows that copy-protection schemes just slow a game down and hinder the creative process when you get caught up worrying about violating people somehow.
Uh, actually *no*. Any good hacker extremist opensourcenik thinks this, but real professional programmers with jobs in the real world don't think this. Programmers at World of Warcraft, that works assiduously to stop hacking of its game by exploits, and to stop gold farming, and which does NOT suffer from copying of content or mechanisms out of the game, know that.
In fact, if we go back to the last Cory Linden town hall ever held (as far as I recall), over which I was first banned from the blog, then ejected from the meeting itself, we will find that Cory was barely -- one senses through clenched teeth -- convinced to put the use of copybot in the TOS. No doubt Robin Linden, who had personally travelled out to the field and been surrounded by angry merchants ready to kill nimrod Yaffle's alt selling Copybot from a store, knew that this copy-left stuff wasn't going to fly. Copybot was a tremendously painful issue, as I'll recall in a minute -- and Cory likely didn't think it should be stopped, and likely held to the copy-left concept of Lawrence Lessig and others that it was inevitable that in the course of creating software for worlds, as Crystal Studio explains to us, you are "slowed down" by having to worry about copying functions.
It's funny to see the hagiography in the making -- Cory is already being remembered as the Saint of Second Life who Granted Intellectual Property Rights to the People. But as we all know, that was Lawrence Lessig talking, who was happy to have IP when it was against a corporation and a game company inclined not to give it, but of course less happy to have it preserved for the corporation itself. It was merely one step in his Marxian plan for undermining property in general as a kind of old white guy's meme, and free it up everywhere for use -- and, oh, have foundations and universities like the kind that copy-leftists live off of pay for everything, I guess.
What's most fascinating about this blog is what was ferreted out from another article in IP Watch.
, in which we see in full bloom the copy-leftism of Cory Ondreijka:
"Cory Ondrejka, chief technology officer at online society SecondLife, told publishers that opportunities exist for copyrighted products there but that digital rights management (DRM) could be a hindrance.
On SecondLife, users retain the intellectual property rights over things they create, and all users have the tools to create such as in games, art and music, he said. But Ondrejka tied innovation to the cost of learning, and this cost is driven up as access to knowledge goes down, which is a by-product of technological restrictions on information flows in order to protect copyrights.
“As people get used to working across different environments, there’s one thing that’s going to slow us down,” he said, referring to DRM. “DRM by its design increases the cost of learning. It impedes people’s ability to learn.”
Crystal Studio, which has evidently already reverse-engineered an OpenSim sort of simulation of Second Life, is rooting for the extremist Cory vision, where "DRM gets in the way of learning".
Um, learning what? How to steal other people's creations? Are we building a nation of hub-cab stealers here?
Of course, talking to a few of these extremist coders myself, they remind me that "the Internet is already like this". You can right-click on anything. You can swipe any texture, blah blah. of course, people put in various foils to stop that; they increasingly use flash which is harder to copy except with individual screenshots, it seems to me. Bottom line, people make money off images and textures and scripts from the Internet, and yet they suffer from copyright theft. Of course, they manage it through takedown notices and lawsuits. Perhaps Cory felt that if Stroker could get a lawsuit and put a chill over would-be thieves even with just a settlement, it was important to push for the open sourcing of Second Life *right now* even though the pesky "detail" of how both intellectual property (content design) and virtual property (land) will be protected in their value and in their integrity remains painfully open.
Go further, and look at today's Wired take on Cory's departure:
"His team was responsible for adding streaming video and web-integration to Second Life -- technologies which have been hailed as huge advancements, but also decried as methods through which hackers can deface the virtual property of others."
Accident, comrade, that the Apple exploit got bruted about so close to the moment Cory departed?
My guess is that two conflicting things could have been doing on in the strenuous debates between these two geeky founders of Second Life. Philip wants to open-source Second Life -- but he is probably less mindful of how bad the code is; Cory, being a Navy man used to ship-shape and tight corners on the bunk might have been aghast at open-sourcing the mess to the public before it could be made presentable. But maybe he was for open-sourcing some of it, or licensing it to trusted parties.
Philip would be in one sense for pushing harder to open source despite the mess but he would be more cautious than Cory about ripping up the guts of Second Life without protection for at least the content makers, which he does care about, and even the land owners, which he marginally cares for out of necessity.
Cory doesn't care about dress-makers; Philip doesn't care that much, but he cares enough to know that if he savages them at this juncture on the way to open source, it will be very hard to recover. People who make content and own land make up the Lindens' bottom line still; their dream of dumping us in favour of big grid-level customers like CBS or NBC or whatever has died, or at least not as grown as quickly as everyone hoped after the flop of CSI:NY (120,000 registrations only, not a million); corporations are leaving Second Life, and though there are still many staying and new ones coming in, the Lindens are far, far from the place where they can live off giant orders of 444 islands from huge enterprises operating at a grid level, and afford to dump the 100,000 or so hard-core land owners and creators.
It's hard to understand what Cory Linden was working on in the last 6 months. Astute eyes have pointed out that he ceased to be a VP, and became a CTO, and that Joe Miller, more of a grown-up, or so it is said, became VP of Platform and Technology at least 6 months ago if not more. The question is what that means. I have to figure there is an essential clash between someone with the title VP for Technology and CTO, but CTO is itself not a title I see in companies I'm familiar with so I don't get it -- I'm told its common to see it in tech companies. But then are *both* titles common? I'm told that the VP of tech is more of an engineer's engineer, making sure the engineers code to the vision; the CTO could still have the vision.
I'm also told by those clearly in the know that I'm all wrong about my speculation that Philip and Cory's "creative differences" or "engineering differences" were really about copybot, so to speak, or open source -- yet, in the black box we live in, I do insist on the right to be wrong, and to speculate, and to put up hypotheses, and to float variants. Let them be shot down. The point is, even if these two particular Lindens in charge aren't arguing about this; OTHER Lindens in charge will be arguing about this some other day, unless of course they've already perfectly decided their open-source date, plan, pacing, and type -- which I doubt. And unless they have a really keen business model in place -- which I doubt.
Whatever the argument between Philip Rosedale and Cory Ondreija, it wasn't about HTML on a prim or Ruby on Rails it was something more substantive to do with the pace of the growth -- and open-sourcing -- of SL and its grid versus world.
COPYBOT
So let's come to Copybot. I just landed in a store literally just now, and a year-old resident store owner still had that awful anti-copybot spammer on, can you imagine?! That never did any good in the first place.
It's been more than a year since the Copybot scandal, and the ensuing scandal claiming that I am a "tabloid journalist" who was "libelous" against the Sheep. This is false, of course, and the very misleading treatment this story got on the very self-promoting and ingratiating Metanomics is indicative. It's helpful to remember the bare facts -- and to remember my first piece, which broke the story in the SL blogosphere:
o On November 7, 2006, someone made a whole bunch of alts with the name "Mannequin".
o Christian Prior (Christian Westbrook), an SL scripter and coder, was an active member of libsecondlife, and indeed was told by his former employer the Sheep (he left them some months ago) to keep involved with libsl because they were reverse-engineering SL and coming up with all kinds of neat stuff
o Eddy Stryker (John Hurliman), a defiant reverse engineer and founder of libsl, evidently had an order from a client to make the mannequins. There was speculation this was some clothing company, but it was actually apparently some inworld company with some other product.
o nimrod Yaffle got the story about Copybot, and someone -- he wasn't sure exactly who -- working on this for the sake of a client; he also pointed to the presence of a Sheep member in libsl, whose chat on internal channels was pasted.
o I reported this speculation, but it turned out to be incorrect in one point -- the Sheep had no client in any form, garment or otherwise, they were merely interested in tracking libsl; some of them found out about and played with Cobybot, but they deny any implications over this.
o Jerry Paffendorf and other members of the Sheep (Jerry also quite some months ago) got ahold of Copybot very soon after its inception, and filmed themselves with it on Destroy TV -- they thought it was a hoot, and didn't really seem to realize the destructiveness inherent to the economy
o Baba Yamamota was also one of those who deployed Copybot earlier, and after some protest, put in a notecard that asked people's consent before they were copied, which many found unsettling; Hamlet Linden didn't and revels to this day using the picture of his Copybotted twin
o FlipperPA Peregrine, an original member of the Sheep, who sold his SL Boutique to the Sheep (it was later renamed OnRez) knew about Copybot; as a merchant and scripter of a huge shopping site for SL, he grasped the implications, and tried to argue with the makers of it, tried to persuade them not to let it loose -- and he failed -- this is by his own admission.
o John Hurliman, maker and seller and exploiter of Copybot, was temporarily apparently banned from SL on the account Eddy Striker, or put under review, but he was let back in, and in fact honoured and feted by coding Lindens who never saw anything wrong with Copybot. He was invited all expense-paid to the Lab as one of the very select few that got to be part of the Architectural Working Group, an elite body that is discussing with the Lindens how to open-source Second Life and make a larger grid; as a footnote, one can point out that Eddy's girlfriend became a Linden, who then later left the Lab. Hurliman later apologized; I didn't accept it as sincere.
o Reluctantly, Cory Linden announced that Copybot's use to steal IP was against the TOS; the fact is, we all understand perfectly well that Copybot couldn't effectively copy stuff, and that fears about it were exaggerated, but it represents more the philosophical threat of in fact other means that in fact are used to copy content -- and even scripts -- in SL.
o the Sheep, especially Giff, understandably threw a fit about my article. Although a correction was quickly published, and the mistaken point about this supposed client was removed and corrected, they continued to fume -- because in fact they were vulnerable to scrutiny by having Prior in libsl, and libsl's very founder being implicated -- something that they continue to this day to deny as an issue. The issues I raised at the time stand: the attitude toward libsecondlife that the ESC espoused then -- and now -- was supportive, and its proximity close -- and enthusiastic. They remained tone deaf to my and other concerns about the rampant griefers inside libsl, including the W-hat Plastic Duck types, and refused to heed even my point that some respectable scripters left libsecondlife when they saw how badly Eddy had conducted himself. In fact, when I brought evidence of ugly griefing of me and my tenants to Jesse Malthus, he was genuinely concerned and sympathetic, and he went to libsecondlife's leaders and asked them to remove and reprimand those members of the v-5 harming me. He then returned to me sobered and chagrined that in fact he was unsuccessful in persuading the libsl leadership to remove those griefers.
Walker Spaight/Mark Wallace (remember, his blog 3pointd.com was paid for by the Sheep, so he was on their payroll and reluctant to cross them in any significant way), who printed the retraction of my story, while stating correctly that the Sheep did not have a client ordering Copybot, and weren't involved in its creation or distribution, leaves open the question of what they *did* know about its creation, when they knew it, and what they did about it -- issues that could be argued endlessly and about which we'll likely never agree -- or learn the truth.
Try to hear it, a year later: I see Jerry and Christian of the Sheep frolicking with Copybot and not caring a whit what it means for content not because they're mean, but because it just doesn't factor for them as cutting edge pushers of platforms; I have 2 sources telling me the Sheep are somehow involved, one of whom turns out later to have been paid to lie; I have Flipper saying he heard about it and tried to stop it. I also see thousands of angry content makers and merchants running boycotts and demonstrations and having the largest revolt in Second Life since the prim-tax revolt -- something neither the craven Hamlet or the Lindens could recognize (except Robin). And sure, while these Sheep are now ex-Sheep, and while the Sheep was not implicated in any way, I have to continue to raise the hypothesis, and ask the question in all sincerity: do they think the virtual world is viable without inworld permissions-based IP because their IP is paid for by corporations outside of Second Life, able to be backed by corporate lawyers, for items they don't need to sell in Second Life for micropayments? All the questions I raised then are unanswered.
o The Sheep went on to use a host of other bots -- the Grid Shepherd, the MultipleInstancesBot, etc. to do various projects, for clients or for their own R&D. These were not related to Copybot except as a genre.
(Copybot is an external program that needs to log on avatars, not something functioning only inworld).
o Cory Edo and other Sheep continued to insist that they had no relationship to Copybot's havoc in SL -- and that is of course true -- that they merely reviewed/researched it and that it posed no threat. But the essential problem remains: the Sheep don't have any objective need to worry about their own copyright of content solely within SL like a common dress-maker because they all use their skills now for clients who pay them to create things that don't need to have copyright as such to succeed and get paid for. They are at a completely higher level of functioning as content and experience creators. While they all might go on having inworld
content, they don't have the same relationship to the world-shattering and gut-wrenching consequences of a Xerox machine inworld the way the common dress-maker and prim-hair peddlar does. Ultimately, I do hope Giff Constable will be able to see that this dispute isn't about tabloidism, about libelous comments, or anything of the sort, but about the different narratives that people in different places of power in a society will tell about the events of their world and the absolutely vital role of the independent press in covering it without fear or favour.
o Later, various IRC transcripts and a third-party website transcript of chatlogs, whose authenticity was not denied by the participants, revealed the cynicism with which Eddy and other libslers had treated the Copybot debacle. It was revealed also that Eddy offered to bribe nimod to lie to journalists (like me) about his relationship to the issue
So, as anyone who is unbiased and maintains an open mind outside the hothouse of Second Life can see, these issues are not about me being "a tabloid journalist". They are about unscrupulous, cynical programmers in libsl just doing what they do naturally, heedless of the consequences -- but the Sheep having indeed very plausible deniability that they had any ill intent for their proximity to these characters. There's more I could say about this, but hopefully a magazine article or book could tell the full story some day!
But imagine, the sleazy Hurliman selling Copybot to make a buck off it; making people fearful and miserable; ridiculing them; bribing someone to mislead journalists; and then becoming a Linden favourite, all expense paid, at the center of the exercise to open-source Second Life. And we're supposed to believe we will be "migrated"? That our stuff will not be lost? Ugh.
The issue didn't go away; Stroker Serpentine, very friendly with the Sheep himself, got a very good lawsuit out of another exploit that involved sim restarts and exploits of permissions and got not very much financial compensation, but enormous publicity and a freeze on the attempts of yardsalers and knock-off artists to try to copy -- or even resell -- his bed. Moral of the story: in the era of Copybot, don't rely on coders, software, permissions, Lindens to keep your business -- have a good lawyer and go to RL courts.
MUKKAKE-RAKERS
This is the term I've coined for the Herald, which has made history of sorts by covering the exotic Japanese sport of bukkake -- which involves humiliating women -- I'll leave you to find the link yourself, ugh. So combine that with the old concept of "muck-raking" and you have the Herald these days, bottom-feeding there with the worst of them, even doing a special on pony girls, one of the more disturbed BDSM forms of deathstyle in Second Life.
The Herald has degenerated into something worse than a tabloid; it's now more like a kind of sleazy porn paper. The efforts to try to sniff out what the Lindens were up to are gone; the critical coverage of mafias and goons has ceased as they've now let the barbarians into the gates. The other day I put a message of a meeting in the Herald editorial group, where I am still nominally a member, and got a W-hat/goon type harassing as one of the "reporters" for the Herald now, IMing me and griefing me with a score of asswipes TP'd into the event I held. Pixeleen griefing me too -- ugh.
To me, the problem of Pixeleen and the Herald is more starkly clear now, ever since I suddenly realized that Pixeleen was likely male in real life. Suddenly, I saw that the take on the stories wasn't the take of, say, a lesbian, or a soul sister, or involving womenly solidarity, but was more about prurience and abusiveness and a sense of power over other people. I had always felt uncomfortable at the weird way that Pixeleen used to flatter me and give me little peptalks, but was never truly friendly and always abrupt -- and then as she/he was challenged, began to allow others to abuse me on the comments, and to be passive/aggressive about doing anything in my defense. When I saw how he was setting up this Penance Satereau to be bullied and harassed, that clinched it for me -- it's a special cunning art of Mr. Pix to get the victim to feel they are in a special little club, and not being victimized -- and then to incite them further to join the hate choir of me.
Speaking on the Metanomics panel this week, Uri explained his theory of the tabloid press -- he believes a consciously tabloid press that doesn't try to get the facts right is vital -- I agree, and I don't think Robert Bloomfield buys this, as he came to me aghast at the idea of "not trying to get the facts" but trying to find the truth of narrative beyond the facts.
People think my writing on a story like the Sheep and Copybot is "tabloid" -- and yet it wasn't that at all. I was first told about Copybot by someone who is now dead (as in real-life passed away) -- Jesse Malthus. I had no idea at the time he was only 17; I thought he was 32, and a cynical coder like the rest, but I should have realized, in hindsight, that his wish to tell and be quoted was actually youthful enthusiasm. When he first told me, I thought it was even a set-up, that he knew of my criticism of the Sheep, and was feeding me a story I would "bite" on. I waited in fact several weeks -- the story I broke on the Herald came 2 weeks after November 7, when Copybot first surfaced.
It wasn't my first story that was wrong, but one I did before going overseas, and wanted to make sure I posted something before it was scooped by another newspaper. To the best of my ability it WAS checked -- I didn't just "make it up". And as I've indicated, getting two sources, one of whom deliberately misleads you, and the other of whom isn't sure but thinks there is a connection, isn't exactly going with scandalous tabloidy stuff. It's as good as it gets in Second Life. There isn't better because business silences the press every way they can -- and the Lindens, first and foremost.
Of course, when challenged fatuously by Robert Bloomfield, who thinks wrongfully that this story of the Sheep is a "tabloid" story, Uri says first "that was a year ago," and then makes it seem that it was that story that led to the "junior author" policy. But it wasn't. I continued to post directly to the web page and there was no such policy then for another 7 months, until *another* story, which again, I did NOT cover in any tabloid fashion, as can readily be seen, but was rather a case of a "reluctant protagonist" who first seemed to want to tell her story, then when confronted with all the ambiguities and consequences of her story, began to back away from it. Instead of calling this one for exactly the manipulative cunning it was by a disturbed young person (claiming to be 18; we have no way of knowing), Mr. Pix found it attractive rather than manipulative and while she/he was the one to have vetted and cleared the story, later let me hang out to dry on it.
The fact is, whatever the prudence of organizing submissions through one person, it can't work when that person is abusive, and not acting in good faith, and themselves jealousy grabbing the stories away and trying to report on them differently him/herself. It's not collegiality. Methods like this work when there is likemindedness. Uri is blind to these things.
Basically, I agree with his theory of epistemology, which is pure Karl Popper as I've written any number of times (the need to go through a series of hypotheses, right or wrong, seeing if they are falsifiable, which implicitly includes the right to float the false hypothesis and pick at it to see if it is true -- "You may be right, and I may be wrong," was the famous Popper quote -- which means I could be right, too -- it is all about tolerance for free discussion). Asked if the SL press is discredited and bottom-feeding, Uri, that quintessential bottom-feeder, says no, this is all part of what he calls a "media ecology" where there have to be different degrees of separation, as it were, from the truth:
"Most [SL media] aren't reputable; my outlet [the Herald] isn't reputable and should be taken with grain of salt; I'm making the case for an epistemology and theory of knowledge; what does it take for a community to have knowledge..it needs some who are anal-retentive about getting everything right; but it's also important for people to dig stuff up and put it into the infosphere right away; not just blogs and chat logs and chat rooms."
So it's very important that there are people willing to run hypotheses, based on what they know or can speculate, so that they can get the story out and others can then refine and correct it.
The work of Daniel Terdiman and Hamlet nee Linden Au is contrasted with the Herald, but they don't really cover Second Life per se; Daniel covers selectively what advances his personal and corporate tech publication agenda at C-Net; he is now flogging his book as well; Hamlet puts out little set pieces or cameos that he thinks help make compelling human interest features to keep people coming back and clicking on his blog, but neither of them will attempt to do a story like I've attempted to do, getting to the bottom of Copybot or the Sheep -- that would fly in the face of their corporate interests which necessitates caution.
On the Metaverse show, Terdiman makes a comment that completely took my breath away in shock. I don't know how he squares this circle -- to me it feels as if he is telling an amazing whopper, even though no doubt he feels himself to be sincere -- and that's the story of Anshe Chung.
In my last very lengthy e-mail round with Daniel, he was trying to get me to flog his book, knowing I'd be a big critic, as I already have been on his blog, where he failed to thank me for helping him do the book. He promised to send me the book to review -- but then didn't, likely because he decided to shun me, after I made a real challenge to his cover story about why Anshe Chung isn't in the book.
On the Metanomics panel, Uri asked him the exact same thing, completely uncoordinated and scripted with me, as any journalist would, and paranoid Daniel blurts out that he must have been "set up by Prok" (rolls eyes). Uri denies this, and says we all want to know! My God, it's the most obvious thing about a book purporting to be a guide to entrepreneurship in SL -- where the hell is Anshe Chung?
I followed up with Guni, who told me that they didn't get any request to their knowledge to do a special interview for the book. Upon repeated query, he did go back in his queue and find one email which he said had been accidently neglected. In this video for Metanomics, Daniel claims there were multiple requests, and we had to "do the math". But in my extensive discussion with Guni, I found that Guni felt he had cooperated with Daniel, in terms of sending a staff person to be on a panel once for example, and that he seemed to be unaware that he was being asked to turn out Anshe for the book. Do the math as we may, there was a larger issue that brought about the rift between Anshe and Daniel Terdiman, which Daniel is evading.
Of course there was first the issue of Daniel's woeful handling of the security on the land, not being able to turn off scripts or return prims -- partly because he isn't the owner, it's MOU's land, but he seemed ignorant about what to do technically, by his own admission.
But there was a much bigger issue over which they fought. Guni and Anshe wanted CNET to remove Anshe's real-life name from the story. They said it was upsetting to keep seeing all the coverage tying the avatar and the real-life name; their daughter had to see it. They felt Daniel should not have used it.
Daniel seemed utterly insensitive to this request, and belligerent. He thought that if the real-life name was already "out there" on a Reuters story or in a Fortune magazine article and so on, that it was fair game to put out now. Technically, of course, he is correct. But yet, there was a request, and it was a legitimate one. It is common journalistic practice, for example, for a reporter not to publicize the name of a rape victim. Anshe's avatar name had to be mentioned because it was the essence of the news story, but why drag her real-life name in, and show her real-life name on television and in machinima clips all over the Internet with her real-life name? The clumsy -- and unjustified -- effort of ACS first to try to use creative content copyright concepts to stop the reprinting of this ugly video shouldn't distract from this other point -- which Daniel was simply tone deaf to when I dealt with him on it -- and he refused to speak to me again.
So imagine my shock when he wheels out during the Metanomics discussion a "policy" he says CNET has (when did they institute it?!) that they are just fine with having only avatars' names. Here's what he says:
"We made a decision in our newsroom, not just for SL, but for other games and so forth, that we're ok with using somebody's avatar name to identify them; we accept that an avatar name is still a representation of a real person, and what we're interested in what the person has to say whether we know their real name or their avatar name."
If that's the case, my God, why couldn't Anshe's real-life name be removed at her request??? And if that policy came later -- possibly as a result of this very incident? -- why couldn't the request be honoured retroactively? Why couldn't Anshe's point be *conceded* for God's sake, and why couldn't Terdiman admit this in his panel discussion on Metanomics?!
Answer: because it would make him look bad. And his failure to act on this matter cost him Anshe's participation in the book -- which of course leaves the field wide open for the next journalist to come along and get the story right.
When more and more non-tech and non-insider media gets going on Second Life, it will be evident how craven they were, how cautious, and also, sadly, how the Herald lost its way. Uri is absolutely right about the media ecology bit, but he isn't doing what needs to be done to *sustain* the flora and fauna, having veered off the expedition to go cover the flora and fauna itself like the pony girls.
Example: The Herald shouldn't fall for a cheap trick like the consulting security gurus setting them up to hype the purported Apple exploit, which merely fanned the services of security consultants, despite what Wayne Porter, who is merely protecting his comrades in the industry, claims. The Herald should have gotten the story about the hype just as they once did about the fake SL Liberation Army creation by another security consultant.
Example: the Herald shouldn't be playing catch up with the Blingsider, who scooped the Cory Linden departure on massively.com with leaked e-mails, and putting up lame ads for having a CTO at the Herald; they should have been interviewing Cory himself over tequila shots; they once had that access. Uri personally has simply lost his curiosity, interest, and feel for following the Linden story, and now is focusing on what he thinks "the tribe is," that he thinks will be "followed to the next platform". Uri is mentally packing his bags for Twinity or Sony Home or some Multiverse Verse where he thinks the Next Big Thing will happen, even though the Herald does about 0 spelunking in other worlds these days since I stopped reporting there.
Uri is absolutely right what is needed for the media, for SL, for all virtual worlds:
"We don't need things people to vet things; to make sure there is no falsehood; what we really need is the opportunity to float hypotheses that are under discussion and not have the media vet them for us."
We sure as hell know it won't come from Hamlet nee Linden Au. Here's what he has to say, invoking the bludgeon of business interest to silence the press:
"Now there are entrepreneurs that make a living, they could argue that it hurt their business; they could take a blogger to court; two cases have settled."
Snakey. Even he later concedes these cases aren't related to libel, but while he may weasel his way out of this, the reader can see that the stories the Herald has covered bravely, and been accused of "libel" over, aren't libelous. They are gathered and published in good faith to float the hypothesis; and furthermore, they are investigated about as much as anything can be in SL, given the terrible culture of NDAs and closed elite structures that run it or make use of it.
We aren't getting that from the Herald; the wealth of blogs around SL, even this one, can't make up for the lack of press outlets that do this. Let's hope they will appear in 2008.
Fuck you, Prokofy, aka "PROKY PIG". That nickname sticks! You have too many words, too little actions, and you should really shut the fuck up and advance the human race instead of coddling it as it backslides into an idiocracy. I'm of the firm belief that you should be taking care of your children instead of wacking off your shama-lama-lama-dingdong.
More people gotta AWAKE that you just spew septic sewage all over , you are a haiku's worst enemy but luckily for them, time is not on your side beeeeeeeyotch
You, Sir, are an obsessively old, diseased cunt,, and,,, a,,,, toxic fossil.
Posted by: Dan Larson | 12/14/2007 at 06:28 PM
Score.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | 12/14/2007 at 09:44 PM
Poor Danny boy. Unable to write any coherent rebuttal, he sinks to verbal abuse. While I may not agree with every point you have made in all your posts, I have found then engaging and thought provoking. So I for one, as a year end comment, thank you for being "engaged" in SL.
Posted by: Connie Sec | 12/14/2007 at 11:58 PM
My goodness, nobody deserves to get a comment like Dan's.
Posted by: Nicholaz Beresford | 12/15/2007 at 01:23 PM
Well, of course not, glad you noted that Nicholaz. but anyway, this was a very long article -- too long -- that I should have divided into 3. I figure a lot of people read the first page only anyway, and I mainly use writing to think.
So I will rewrite some of it as another article coming down the pike.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | 12/15/2007 at 02:58 PM
I'm glad you kept Dan's comment up there, to prove how bad saying something like that really is.
We've had our differences. I still think you're wrong on some things, and I do think you can be obstinate and rude at times. But I'd never - and I think you'd never either - resort to such a rude, pointless, blatantly abusive attack.
Dan Larson, please feel free to help yourself to a bar of soap and wash your mouth out!
Posted by: Untameable Wildcat | 12/16/2007 at 12:21 AM
My rules about posts are:
a) you must post with a Second Life avatar name or recognizable bloggers' name or real life name. I just don't have time to go check whether "Dan Larson" is any of those 3, because his link is to the Ron Paul campaign (one more strike against that, eh?)
b) you must not incite or cause SL or SL damage to me. Calling me even the most foul names, or making even the most malicious criticism is not what I mean by "damage". Damage involves things like griefing my land and forcing a tenant to move out, destroying property or disrupting an event, etc. in SL -- and in RL it involves things like stalking, calling at home, or using a bully puppet like the Blingsider or Second Cast to excuse and explain away such stalking as "deserved".
It's also important to see who it is who is affected by my writings criticizing open-source: the malicious asshole hackers who form the heart of the movement in SL, who are from somethingawful.com And that's why one of them has come on here particularly to this article and put such a vile comment -- my post goes to the heart of the thuggery that they in fact promote with their ideology, and they know it, and react viciously to its exposure.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | 12/16/2007 at 06:49 AM
hehe bully *pulpit* -- but puppet works too lol.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | 12/16/2007 at 06:50 AM
This is a really good post Prok. I do have to mention on thing though. To call Hurliman slimy or to judge his character based off of Copybot I think is a little off base. I've gotten to know the guy, it's not the case at all.
In fact, there is some legitimate perspective in that Copybot actually should force Linden to develop the tools to better protect those who use the platform. If this is not done, it's on Linden.
I was part of that Prim-tax revolt, as you know, and the unfortunate reality is that protests such as that no longer work in the same regard. SL has gotten to large. A group of 40 people standing in a region with signs is going to make no large dent at Linden. It's people like Hurliman who, while potentially jeopardizing in world business, also force Linden to recognize what needs to be changed, fixed and addressed.
Either way, great post. You have this Ex-Linden's respect.
Posted by: Chadrick Baker | 12/16/2007 at 01:47 PM
Thanks for the post, Chadrick, and I appreciate the praise coming from you, on an article that is kind of sprawling and not my best. I'm actually perplexed what it is that you liked about this piece, but I'll have to follow up sometime. Meanwhile,but I simply disagree with your premises about Hurliman.
The purpose of John Hurliman wasn't to disclose a gap or exploit -- if that were the case, he would have quietly told the Lindens of it, and not exploited it *himself* and ridiculed people and lied about it and tried to buy off the press.
You're absolutely right that "it's on Linden" if they can't respond to this Copybot challenge but...do you see that they are? And the TOS doesn't count -- that's a sop.
I don't care if he's a nice guy to his friends and his Linden -- and ex-Linden buddies. As a public actor, he was destructive, and unapologetic, even in making an apology.
To this day, we are feeling the affects.
As for "prim tax," that only worked because it fit in with the Lindens' own socialist goals, as you surely know. They were sold on the "revolt" (which could only happen because they let it) because they realized it harmed *creativity* and they privilege that above all other things, even private property and the rule of law.
I take your point about the atomized nature of SL, and the ability to get a social movement of protest to have legs in such a widespread diverse environment.
But...The Copybot saga in fact involved not "40 on a sim" protesting as you definitely must remember, but thousands of people who shuttered their businesses, demonstrated on many sims, mobbed the stores where Copybot was being sold, wrote on forums, addressed petitions -- it was a huge amount of activity with groups and meetings and rallies and it wasn't acknowledged precisely because it was about protecting people's private property, which Lindens put second below the overriding need to develop the platform.
And in fact, Copybot wasn't addressed. Because it never could really copy. And it was put in the TOS -- but that was merely symbolic. It took Stroker's lawsuit outside of the platform and in spite of LL to do anything about protecting copyright.
As for the open source working group, we don't see any indication from them that they are going to work overtime to protect people's IP or land value. They could care less. On land value, they REALLY REALLY don't care and are busy egging their friends on to stick it to landbarons and open up cheap opensims. On IP, they only care if it's a scripted thing, then they'll worry about it. Otherwise, it is in the way of progress.
If you think there is something different about what the Lab is doing, then...give me the links. Would love to see it.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | 12/16/2007 at 02:05 PM
Copybot is so 2006 Prokofy. It’s almost harmless compared to this:
http://blog.crystalstudio.ca/2007/12/planet-builders-re-orientation-island.html
The *entire* SIM of Orientation Island was extracted and imported into another engine! According to the people behind the “company”, this “project is proof of concept… that it's possible to export anything you own in Second Life”!
Oh, they say on their demo video that “you can export avatars too”. I wonder why none of the SL News blogs reported this so far.
Posted by: Alex Nikolaides | 12/18/2007 at 04:14 AM
Alex, I don't know if you have ever studied the humanities. Quite probably not. "Copybot" in my essay is clearly used as a symbolic term to describe the problem of copying and copyright theft in general. In fact, it even states, in the facts known about Copybot, that it doesn't even pose any real threat, as it copies, but it's quite hard to make it then go into inventory for resale. Everyone knows that now, and there's no need for any more lectures.
Once again, I *did* report this issue of Crystal Studio, boosting the Cory Linden "information is free" copyleftist movement, in my past blog. I didn't specifically mention the issue of copying Orientation Island because that post was just put up. But the entire thrust of what I've been saying in all my posts this week, including the one about Open Source being criminal, is all about this: the ability to copy and export SL. We get all that. It's silly to rank the literal ineffectual Copybot as somehow less an issue than this OrientationIslandbot -- when it all comes from the same mindset, the open-source movement that thinks "all property is theft, therefore, I get to steal it".
What will LL do about this? Nothing. Those coder cowboys will pride themselves on being nonchalant and even inviting them to the next SL views or something.
Ultimately, they'll have to figure out what to do with these rogue sims that won't pay hook-up fees, and which keep logging on alts to pipe content out of SL.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | 12/18/2007 at 10:21 AM
Good year end summary, Prok.
Posted by: urizenus sklar | 01/01/2008 at 04:10 PM