Second Thoughts

One Big Step for Script Kiddie, One Giant Leap to Cornfield?

Photo by Nimrod Yaffle from Clickable Culture.

I heard a delicious rumour that I hasten to publish in the hope that, as Uri used to say at the Herald, "the true story will come out in the comments".

Apparently Gareth Nelson, the nuisance case here on my blog nipping at my heels 10 times a day, got into some hot water with the Lindens. Could it be that Gareth is sitting on the tractor as we speak, watching that bad boys reform movie cycle endlessly in the twilight, waiting for the Children of the Damned to come out and zombify him?

I had a strange IM from Garrulous Gareth the other day which I studiously ignored. He said he was going to try this new teleport experiment, where he was going to try to go from his opensim-like thing, which has a name like Lite Sim, over to real Second Life, or was it visa versa? Does this thing run only in one direction?

He wrote something like: although it seemed counterintuitive, and you'd think I'd be the last person to come on this junket, he wanted me to come on this TP with him. It sounded like trouble to me, and finding that Gareth is a total tar baby, I wanted NOTHING to do with it. I ignored him.

Come to find out tonight that the scuttle in the AWGroupies is that Gareth got in trouble for somehow accessing agni. Now agni, for those of you never follow the tech talk, is the name of the Lindens' main server. If you look up at the top of your game screen, and pull down HELP and pick ABOUT SECOND LIFE you will find a URL for your own server location with "agni.com" as part of the address. So that's where all the inventory and whatnot is held.

It seems that somehow, Gareth got access to this agni during his TP misadventures, and got a look-see into the entire world's inventory and chat. Yes, your inventory and chat. Apparently this was a "read only" kind of thing, but still spooky to the Lindens.

Now, what will happen to Gareth? Probably nothing. We know how the Lindens love their gimps, said my source, far less politically-correct than I. Yes, the aspies in SL are always "high-functioning" just like all the children are above average in Lake Wobegone.

You know, I always said that once you punch a whole in this thing, the stuff will leak out. Just doing all this interop stuff, and letting goofs like Gareth near it, you will definitely put the world at risk. We saw this time and again with the way LL libsecondlife run around and griefed people as they fabulously found bugs and reverse-engineered. (BTW, they've renamed themselves now due to the "in SL" trademark thing, forget what they call themselves now but I think it's "virtual" something).

Well, what do you make of all this? And what do you know?

LL Circling the Wagons

I swear I should hire myself out as a clairvoyant and Psychic Friend for something more than the $500 Lindens I pick up now and then to read the Magic Compass lol. This evening I had a very strong sense that the Lindens were about to do something big and bad. I think I even said this to a few friends, they are my witness. I even pulled up Robin Linden's profile to write something like, "Hey, my spidey sense tells me you're about to pull off some caper that's not going to be so good for us," but then I froze, couldn't type, had to crash out, and then got busy with house work and forgot about it until I looked in World of SL and saw some trackbacks.

Obviously, as we've been noting here and there in the blogosphere, the Lindens are circling the wagons again and calling it "better communication". Now Robin gets on the Blog and tells us why Bitter World is Better World.

o the forums are being outsourced -- hooray, you might say, if you are me, and have asked them to outsource them to a professional company for ages, because they can't moderate their special friends, especially the ones with NDAs. But oops, this big, impersonal, multilingual unnamed "group" that is going to just watch for misfiles and spams is more likely than not simply to delete lots of stuff that doesn't fit

o the blog comments are going to be...reworked. Rewired. They will be sent off to the forums if they are general topics, ostensibly because of the 150 limit, the wackiness of trying to follow such a long scroll without search, etc. But...the trend has already been to send such separate discussions to forums where the Linden who exiled them only pokes their head in now and then and then cuts off the comments anyway, by date, if not by number.

o there are to be subjects by "experts". But that's like constantly telling intellectuals in the capital that they have to go out and pick potatoes or sew the harvest and stop shirking work. That is, it drives people to seek only "socially useful content" like "how to make Windlight pretty pictures" or "how to weave a basket with sculpties" when what people want to talk about is "what's your plan for protecting our intellectual property?"

o there is now to be more Linden time for "a conversation," freed of rerouting, checking for spam or repeats and siphoning off expert stuff to experts. But...who will be holding this conversation? Katt Linden? So far, she really has had nothing interesting to say, but a lot of superficial hypey corporate things that are so content-free that they actually make you long for the high-octane overcheery vacuousness of Torley -- and that's saying something!

o nothing is said about delinking permabans on the forums with world permabans; nothing is said about vacating past permabans. Nothing. Ok, then. Without the former, the latter would be an empty gesture anyway.

Lindens Won't Touch the Third Rail

Photo by Herbert Ortner.

If you're tired of looking at turnips, try looking now at a picture of a third rail, the rail you electrocute yourself on if you happen to go down on the subway tracks. I found a great picture of a third rail in our New York subway with two birds sitting on the protective cover, oblivious to the danger of electrocution.

Judging from the lack of more blog posts on the specifics of interoperability and IP protection, and Rob Linden's announcement on SL Dev that LL will not be adding any flag about crossgrid permissions (see below at the very end), the Lindens are not going to touch the third rail of intellectual property, or more broadly speaking, "What happens to our land and all our stuff and its value after you open source and/or interop?" because...they simply wish to limit their liability to litigation for "bait and switch" or any other type of lawsuit that would complain about them changing their product offering without due notification. (It was the invocation of the "bait and switch" concept that got LL to do the right thing and compensate telehub mall owners in 2005 when they pulled telehubs from sims they'd sold way above other market prices due to their hub proximity, and had continued to sell them, even after they knew they'd be removing them. Bragg v. Linden also tried to use the concept of "miscommunicating the product offer" as well).

The Lindens aren't going to tell us now, and maybe never, what their plan is to protect intellectual property because if they did that, they'd have to...protect our intellectual property, and they don't want to. (Land value, I'll leave aside, because there is much less law in real life to back that up). Theyt want people to protect their own intellectual property, and merely not get in the way of them claiming it, when it is produced/displayed through the use of their service. They want to take the lowest possible denominator on this. They are driving everyone back to pointless JIRA debates, like this one, that go nowhere, and which the fanboyz declare as needing to be closed now because the Lindens have blogged vaguely and ineffectually about this, as I've indicated.

That's why we're getting half-sentences, incoherent blogs, stalls, and diversions.

Putting the Turnips First

Photo by Peter Presslein

Below, rendered with the usual tekkie idiocy of such text-quote-full listserve discussions, an interesting glimmer that perhaps the Lindens are prepared to form another group besides the Architectural Working Group to discuss the business and social requirements of interoperability that have been mangled so badly by the extremists in the AWG. Hooray!

But before you cheer too loudly, note that Mark Lentczer (Zero Linden) is trying to pre-control and pre-shape the debate so that his point of view will prevail -- pre-cooking it among Lindens who may disagree among themselves, too. "This isn't a debate," he announces at Metanomics, something we might have missed if it weren't rehashed on this list, "because there aren't two sides." Um, yes, there are at least two; yet it is a debate; and no, in freeing YOUR property to the dogs (opensourcing your server code) you don't get to free the residents' property (their IP). In fact, Darien Caldwell is on the money by pointing out that it will go on being a debate precisely because LL hasn't articulated their mind on this clearly, other than Hamilton Linden's wishy-washy blog post about how "LL will never do anything to make it so others can violate copyright" but not specifying how they will PREVENT THIS TECHNICALLY THEMSELVES.

Zero begins at Metanomics by making one of those feints and dodges that are meant to disarm by seeming to admit an obvious problem, as if by merely admitting it, it isn't a problem anymore. He says, "This may have seemed like a technocracy..."

Um, yeah. It didn't seem like one. It is one. And still is.

Next, there's a rumble of discussion about putting turnips in carts on horses and carting them to other grids, whether people wanted those turnips carted or not, and how turnips should have been considered before carts, then horses. Well, that is the problem -- technocrats wanted to make the technology just because they could, then shoe-horn and solder in reluctant people to the results. Always the case.

There's also the problem of the Linden cagedly not speaking, and letting someone else attempt to read and report their Hive Mind, namely that they "won't" go to the extreme of the Black Lock Box of Sheer Obfuscation or the Extremist Stallmanism of Freetardness -- when of course they will tend to the latter, not the former, and we won't be finding them in the middle ground. Already we see Sean Linden burbling about putting up licenses on URLs and putting URLs into products.

Abusive New Abuse Report Categories

Wow, I guess the Lindens really do want us out of there, in preparation for the creation of some super-sanitized edu-biz grid.

A whole boatload of very bad stuff coming in the beta/preview version of the new abuse report categories, discovered by Suezanne Baskerville.

A new offense is called "Commerce" -- "Failure to deliver product or service" which is a hugely capacious, baggy and abusive concept, as any nit harassing me about land they think should be for rent and is taken (as you saw in previous posts) and continuing to harass me and incite hatred can AR me for "failure to deliver service" and make it stick, have me banned, and have my land taken away from me.

FUCK THAT SHIT, Lindens, and seriously, I mean that sincerely, and you better not put that in the viewer. It has no business being there, as the complexity of consumer problems in a virtual world with anonymous providers is not solved by a very abusable and overbroad category like this.

Oh, sure, people LOVE the idea of being able to go after bad business. SOMETHING has to be done about the chronic "failure to deliver product or service" we all suffer from. But...that's up to residents to devise in their own organizations, and with their own means, whether by notarizing agreements and having groups like "Honourable Land Dealers" or rigorous consumer reports (which just never get started properly in SL) or whatever it takes. But a ridiculously vague "abuse" like this will not only flood the Lindens with reports, it will make it impossible for anybody but the Lindens' most precious pets to do business in SL, as they will be completely vulnerable to prosecution of arbitrary trifles.

Back Off Katt Linden, Or People Will Leave

Those of us who have been in Second Life for a number of years understand that this isn't just one game or world, but a kind of super matrix for social media and the Metaverse and the 3-D web. The experiences and policies and prototypes being done here are going to have a great impact.

Therefore it matters when the Lindens get it wrong, and it matters that people fight back vigorously, or they are ceding territory for free speech and freedom of creativity not just in one place, but everywhere.

I don't follow the forums that closely, because there is rarely an intereresting conversation, and in fact, it has become quite toothless and tame, despite what the scaredy cats think about it now. But even they are shocked into anger and silence by recent moves made by the new Communications person hired to manage the forums, Katt Linden.

I've been totally unimpressed with Katt Linden for months, mainly due to her smarmy and supercilious posts on the blog and annoyed by her over-moderation, but I didn't think it was worth bothering to criticize. I figured either a) the Lindens are not serious about really making a good forums and have sent her in to destroy it, so it's not worth bothering with or b) the cringing types willing to go into such a sanitized forums will rule the roost and you won't want to be there anyway.

The supine bunch on the forums really need to start engaging in outright civil disobedience to get the Lindens to stop pressing further their draconian new "forums facelift". It rots, it sucks, and I hope Robin Linden personally responsible for this -- it cannot be done without her knowledge and consent, and it was she who hired Katt Linden. Every single poster should be putting up a post with a URL linking to their blog or any blog related to SL, get thousands of people to do this if you have to, and get the Lindens to stop this nonsense.

When Robin discussed changes to the forums some months ago, she held out the promise of lifting forums bans. None of that has happened. That turned out to be totally fake. Instead, a rather worse thing happened: a vague connection between permanent forums bans and inworld banning, which hadn't really pertained in any real way, since "Prok's Law," i.e. the invocation of this "scare" *after* I was banned in June 2005, but the failure to apply it to some really bad offenders like Ulrika Zugzang or Siggy Romulus. Now Katt comes along and tells us that in fact it's very much going to pertain, and only after lots and lots of people protested (mercifully, they aren't THAT supine), she backed off only a tad, saying permabans on the forums MAY lead to permabans on the world. Sorry, folks, that's not good enough. In fact, it's more of the same, and it's unacceptable. No one should have property and inventory confiscated without due process over a speech offense. It is not the law in the United States of America and many of the other countries where SL is reached. In fact, to have any confiscation, due process or no, over speech, would require really extreme circumstances, and might be in the form of a fine for a non-public figure who could show malice and show loss of livlihood and couldn't mount a truth defense -- three factors that few SL posts would meet as a test, since most people are speaking their minds sincerely and believe what they say; LL's livlihood isn't harmed by some post on some forum seen by some tiny percentage of people, and what bothers the Lindens the most is the truth. That's why I'm banned -- my permaban is a disgrace and an injustice, and should be reversed.

The Six Economies of SL: Why They Clash

Vasnetsov, Four Horseman of the Apocalypse (1887).

If you think about it, you can see how the six economies of Second Life, far from being integrated and helping each other, inevitably clash, because each one is animated by interests that conflict with the others. The six economies include a spectrum of outworld to inworld, running from 1) Lindens 2) Solution Providers; 3) Educators and Non-Profits 4) Inworld Content Creators, Realtors and Sole Proprietors; 5) Hobbyists 6) Workers and Welfare Recipients

1. The Linden Lab Economy. This is Linden Lab's own economic interests as a real-life company, not the inworld economy. It is the most relevant outworld economy to us all. Linden Lab of course makes the world and its economy and holds it on its severs, so of course at one level, we're all grateful.

At another level, as it turns out, our interests clash in the inworld economy:

o Supply Linden sells Lindens on the LindEx to make money for LL; this is like Yeltsin printing and selling rubles and leading to the ruble krakh. RL countries try to avoid policies involving too much dependency on printing currency to "help the poor" yet LL feels they have to do this not only for their own income of some half a million US per month, which covers all or much of the cost of running the LindEx itself (though may not make up for fraud costs); LL says they have to run it "for the sake of the children," the newbies who need cheap currency or they won't come in. Thus Supply Linden erodes our wages, but enables content and rentals to be purchased. LL also prints stipends for premium accounts which also erodes value but enables premiums to pay for their accounts if they annualize them.

o LL prints and sells land on the auction at will. This is the chief synthetic feature of the economy, after printing Lindens. It is here where the land policy of glutting has really harmed economy no. 3. Yes, content providers are so closely linked to realtors (virtualtors) in this economy, that when one suffers, the others will too. LL gets more money from sales from especially newbies wanting land, and supposedly brings in more customers that helps the entire economy to float higher, but it doesn't quite work. By dropping prices over night making people in this economy lose their investment by 40 percent, then breaking the back of regular private island and mainland land barons further by releasing thousands of low-prim sims into the market, along with $750 mainland auctions, the Lindens made it hard for rentals and land sales companies to keep attracting paying customers. The customers went and become end users, buying their own land, but then...those customers, often in the hobby economy, no. 4, couldn't get their part-time rental hobby started with all the competition, or couldn't get anyone to buy their land for a profit, once the thrill of paying $75 a month wore off.

o LL created and developed Bay City, thus getting directly into competition with Economies 2) and 4), making high-priced built up communities that sold for fortunes in Lindens. This land, priced in Lindens, soaked up land baron and lingering casino and bank cash that then found its way back on to the LindEx, enabling the Lindens to collect on cashout fees, although lessening the need for Supply Linden to print cash. BTW, I think Supply Linden must be selling less now as for the last two months, you've been able to wait about 24-48 hours with a limited sell and sell it for 264 or 263, not 265. The months previous to this, you could put a packet out all month and it would never sell at 263, there were too many ahead of you.

The Six Economies of SL: Outworld, Inworld, Inbetween

My own economy was up $1373 tonight to help pay tier on the dam...thanks!

Before you can devise solutions for "the SL economy," you first of all have to understand what it is. It is not one, whole integrated economy the way a RL country's economy is; it's more like the complexities of the global economy of very rich and very poor.

1. First, there's the Linden's economy. They are the ones who are doing the best, selling server space and maintenance for their 3-D streaming world, keeping 300 people fed and clothed, paying off investors. They illustrate that making software and selling space to play it on is more profitable than, say, babysitting or working at Wal-mart or selling vacuum cleaners. They collect US dollars from PayPal or credit cards.

2. Then there's the top 1-2 percent of the SL-related economy that is the Solution Providers' Economy. They buy and sell consulting, design, scripting, etc. for outworld corporations or educational institutions or governments or foundations. They are mainly paid by checks or wire to RL banks in US dollars, although a tiny portion of them to pay or receive Lindens they cash out.

3. Next comes an increasingly privileged group, Educators and Non-Profit Economy. Educators and non-profit charities or projects for social good, usually funded by grants from the private or government sectors of real life. The Lindens are increasingly playing to them and advertising capacity for them. They pay dollars, and they give away rather than sell content on the theory that they need to be part of a "culture of giving", are often imbued with "Creative Commons" ideology, and often stumping for students they believe are poor or are in fact disadvantaged.

4. Below this (as yet) very top thin layer above the Inworld, that is very much Outworld, starts the Inworld Content Creators and Real Estate and Services Class in the Remittance Economy. These are possibly 8 percent or so who can make as much as $60,000 US a year, but by making items and selling for micropayments. They collect Lindens and possibly pick up a little outworld consulting, but by and large, they work Inworld. They are a Remittance Economy as they basically have to send all their money back home to their real life self to pay RL bills. Land barons and continent owners fall into this class. Scripters who work for individuals and businesses inworld, i.e. not outworld companies, fall into this class, which is the middle class of SL.

5. Next, comes the Inworld Hobby Class. These are people who spend money on SL and make very little back, or make just part of their tier. They may sublet. or they may sell stuff at yardsales. They buy Lindens with US dollars, or pay their tier, and Lindens they do make tend to stay inworld or just pay tier.

6. At the very bottom is the Inworld Working and Welfare Class. These are people who work for content creators, providing services, or work at low-paying sex or clerical jobs. They may also merely camp or have sugar daddies buy them stuff. These people either don't buy Lindens at all, or buy some, but they tend not to cash out their earnings, using them soley to pay tier, or to use to buy more content. While poor and working or soaking up welfare, these people are in fact on DSL lines with high-end graphic cards and have disposable time and/or money from RL, so they aren't in Darfur or anything like that.

These economies aren't integrated at all. Nobody plans for them or thinks of them as interdependent, moving parts making up a whole. That's why some of the top classes keep displacing, exploiting and destroying the other classes. That's why the lower classes either resent the higher classes or vote for their feet and leave this world. Understanding the classes or "economies" and their interdependency and inherent destructive as well as creative capacities is vital to "fixing" the SL economy as a whole, whose aim should be to provide economic opportunity FOR EVERYBODY, not just a narrow class of elites, nor just a mass class of consumers, but everybody in between.

Useless Nits of SL Hijacking Keywords and Making Black PR Picks

You'll never cease to marvel at the useless, petty nits of Second Life. People have time on their hands to fulfill their dreams of petty vengeance, and SL provides a rich substrate.

I'll catch up on the last few annoyances by focusing on this topic: people who misuse search terms, or rather, to put it more bluntly, who hijack search terms just to show up in search, hijacking traffic using your avatar or company name. This is of course low-life trash behaviour, such as HIPPOS inventor did for a time.

The other day, I have the following annoying conversation with such a nit:

Darkrose Skytower: (Saved Tue Aug 19 20:28:41 2008) hi there, i was on straits of asia yesterday as i was interested in the land.one of your group memebers killed me and sent me home without so much as to ask why I was there. I am very disappointed by the person's treatment. Please do advice yr members to treat others with less hostitiy especially if you want to rent/sell.
Prokofy Neva: Uh, stop being a total entitlement-happy ass. This land is not in search, it is not offered for rent, because it is TAKEN. There aren't any rentals available, so the tenant there has every right to eject you, you were obviously bothering them. I'm not obliged to do a single thing for you just because you try to grab a sim already taken, that's absurd.
Prokofy Neva: I don't put up red ban lines because they aren't allowed in Dreamland, but if my tenant wishes to eject a trespasser, that's their right, your insistence that somebody h as to accommodate you is totally absurd.
Prokofy Neva: WTF are you even in my group for? are you mad? There is no rental offered there, no ad, nothinhg in search, why are you even there? it's ridiculous
Darkrose Skytower: 1) your land is in search. that was how i found u. 2) It is STATED in YR LAND that it is for rent. THAT WAS WHY I WENT THERE IN THE FIRST PLACE! Your answer is more absurd and unreasonable than your tenents . Thanks you very much for your stupitity.
Prokofy Neva: 1) it is not in search, don't be an ass, Straits of Asia is NOT in search. You must be mixing it up with the next sim over
Prokofy Neva: 2) it is not for rent, Straits of Asia is NOT in search and NOT for rent
Prokofy Neva: 3) you are a total ass
Prokofy Neva: It's TAKEN DUN
Prokofy Neva: Straits of Asia is NOT in search, I double checked. It's not in classifeds or search, and hasn't been for ages, so you have no call to go there
Prokofy Neva: the next sim over has one small townhouse available, but that doesn't mean you get to fly into the next sim and bother people and act all pissy if somebody ejects you, seriously, get a life

Crime, Corruption, and Conspiracy Harm the Economy

Intlibber Brautigan, Second Life's resident goofy Libertarian and Extropianist extremist, seems to be on another ideological jihad these days, using the Herald as his bully pulpit, or should I say bully *puppet* as the Herald has abandoned all pretext of independence these days (does Intblubber buy ads, I wonder, or donate to the uh, SLH pension fund?). Int even parachuted into our dam meeting last Friday to declare me a "PTA fascist," which is what he calls anybody who references the rule of law or civilization norms to bring about civil society.

Pixeleen has also been filing faux ACLU-style rants about the State's "deathsquads" and overuse of force on terrorists -- by which he means Harry Linden's banning of Tizzers alts, and a few other Tizzers-named accounts that Pixeleen himself and Intlibber himself made to taunt the Lindens. It's good the Lindens have been dropping this really ridiculously overdone concept of "each account must be treated as innocent until proven guilty," since surely the formation of the first zillion Tizzers or other b/tard griefer accounts (like "Comrade Morpork") that instantly join griefer groups and join my groups and harass my tenants, should have shown them by now that when you have enough offenses accumulated, you do have "probable cause" for an arrest. I'm the first to jokingly accuse the Lindens of making "executions at dawn" -- because they don't create a transparent police blotter to explain and justify their actions -- which I believe they should do. But it really is rather overblown to call the actions of a game company terminating a patron's account for griefing "like a death squad" eh? I guess Intlibber and Pixeleen have never seen a picture of their colleagues killed by death squads in RL, their arms cut off and crossed raggedly on their chest holding a propaganda sign, or gunned down in the doorways as their horrified children look on, or...they'd understand the difference. Oh well, I know they're hopeless.

What's completely preposterous -- as in "tell a Big Lie baldly and repeatedly enough and people will believe it" -- about both Intblub and the Horrid Herald is that they've extrapolated this completely justifiable and normal action against the griefing "Tizzers" into a totally overblown claim that "repression is harming the economy" and fabricated versions of what goes on behind the scene in Linden councils. Of course, the closed nature of our society and our one-party rule here are primarily at fault for this sort of hysterical ranting, because no one *can* know what the Lindens are doing or thinking *really* (and a lot of them don't even know themselves, sometimes because they make it up as they go along). "Hi, I can't take your call right now as Intlibber has accused me of a conspiracy to slay furries and ruin the land market and I'm trying to make up what I do think about these topics. Please leave your name and a detailed message."

So, down the counterpropaganda list we go: