Our Red Zone Revolution

Everybody's watching the Egyptian demonstrators and the Wisconsin striking workers -- at what point will the powers-that-be in the world wind up forcing them to a compromise, or even crushing them? And perhaps, in the case of the well-fed and provisioned Wisconsin state employees fighting not Mr. Big Moneybags the Evil Capitalist Man who owns a factory, but...the people of their state who pay the taxes to make government work, there will come an epiphany: we have met the enemy, and he is us.

Our little world is a microcosm of these struggles, and we have to realize that in the same way that Egyptians are forced to make compromises (accept the army -- for now) or the Wisconsins will run out of sick days to use, world-provided pizza, and stamina for sleeping on cold marble floors in large drafty public buildings and end up making some bargain with Gov. Walker, so that will happen to us -- and is happening to us.

I think a clear sign of it is what happened with Stroker Serpentine's lawsuit announced today. He stopped trying to settle it *in* court -- always the best place to settle lawsuits that were started over matters of principle -- and settled *out* of court -- probably for some symbolic amount not worth what he actually does lose when everyone copies his hard work and undermines his business. Remember, Stroker is a common working man in real life. He's a skilled worker with a plumbers' license who decided to enlarge his horizons by creating a wonderful sex bed empire online that has enriched the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. He's not the RIAA. He's not Disney. He is someone making his livlihood on line, like we all will be doing likely in years to come. But his pockets aren't deep enough to keep lawyers running 24/7; and the Lindens had a wonderful comeback defense revolving on the doctrine of "unclean hands," i.e. that they deliberately collude to allow copyright theft due to their indifference or negligence. They said their hands are clean; they said that they have polices and procedures and precautions and will work to strengthen them.

Well, give me an afternoon with those lawyers, a set of all the posts to VWRAP, a copy of my recent debate with Infinity Linden, my emails with Brent Linden and his indifference to my reports to [email protected] about a common texture copying exploit -- and bunches and bunches of other stuff, and I think I alone could make a really good run at the "unclean hands" concept -- but in the end, the Lab could say "those employees no longer work with us and didn't represent our corporate policy in any event".

In any event, here we all are at Brokeback Mountain -- the movement is going to have its back broken, and its painful to watch -- unless *this* time, people take a stand, and like those tens of thousands of ordinary middle class people who actually don't have it so bad off (they didn't run out of pita like Egyptians; they just ran out of extra money to pay for their already handsome health care policies), take a stand on an ideological matter, which in their case is the right to collective bargaining, a right all unions, whether of private or public employees, simply must have if we are to live in a just and civil society.

The Lindens kinda took the starch out of the Red Zone Revolution in several ways:

o They announced removal of voting all together. While not tying this act to the ever-growing list of votes for VWR-24746 let's face it, VWR-24746 is one of the largest votes in SL history (I think there might be one that had 3,000 somewhere about homesteads or something, maybe someone knows, but this is the most substantive doable one I've ever seen). Unfortunately, the energy behind VWR-24746 isn't available to save *the system of voting itself* which has scarcely attracted a whimper, except for me. I'm the only SL blogger who has protested; indeed, most haven't even mentioned it.

If you care about Red Zone; if you care about ANYTHING, get on down and vote for the vote to remain!

I'm astounded that WEB-3668 only has 11 votes. Look at the poll on the left of this column and vote on this, too. Already about 90 voted, and the overwhelming majority are voting AGAINST removal of the JIRA voting function and those who think it's ok to remove it because it does not bind the Lindens or even affect them is a distinct MINORITY.

o They added some changes to the TOS about not collecting data about avatar alts inworld -- that was a sop to the Red Zone Revoltion. Yet it's fairly worthless as I've explained, and it led to the Lindens doing another bad thing along the way, making it seem as if the zone for chat log privacy concerns is the wide Internet, and not just their servers and the context of Second Life (the removed the phrase "In Second Life and on the Second Life forums" from the text of the CS.)

The redactions we've gotten to the Community Standards (NOT the TOS, which is really the law of the land; the CS is merely a kind of guideline for interpreting law) is insufficient. The pop-up of consent is insufficient too. Even if Red Zone is off the SL Marketplace; even if it is run out of town on a rail, others remain (CDS) and others will come back. Green Zone has reportedly stopped working.

In this entire saga, I've never gotten the basic thing I need to fight this war right: a list of the major stores to boycott and urge my tenants to boycott. Now, was that so hard, girls? You couldn't give me a list of all those places that you fear have grabbed your alts and are going to out them? Well? You didn't want to badmouth a girlfriend, in fact? You're afraid? You're afraid of doing what really needs to be done? Well, why are you displacing your lack of courage back on *to the Lindens*? allowing them to net-nanny once again? They make a patch. They make a policy. But the milk of human kindness isn't replenished inworld. You didn't tell your girlfriends in the mall biz to knock it off -- with RedZone, CDS -- with anything. *Or you won't shop with them, ever*. That has to happen TOO.

So I’ve also been debating people who think that solutions lie in merely the pop-up consent box — which is a cop-out because you are still tracked in the end anyway and may wind up being barred from thousands of shopping and other sites if you don’t cooperate. Think of the vampire bite antidote -- you buy the necklace to get rid of bite invites, you're still in the guy's dbase now on the national "Do Not Bite" list which is a kind of "Do Not Track". But what if he decides to declare war on everybody who wasn't cooperative with the vampire sects? He could handily now use his dbase to ban everybody from all the land he owns. Just like they get your IP even with Autoplay off, so they get your name if you click "no".

I’ve also been debating people menacing us all with EU privacy law — this is America, as far as the Lindens are concerned, they’ve closed offices abroad, and they will abide by U.S. law, which doesn’t have that stringency about privacy. So stop it with the EU swagger -- it won't work, save your breath, use some other methods -- like make a list of stores to boycott.

I’ve also been debating people that think that Linden Lab can just fix this with some mechanical patch that blocks the ability of the media tab to grab your IP address and keep it, regardless if you have auto-play off. While mechanical injunctions are a good thing in SL and I’m all for them even if they don’t have 100 percent effectiveness — I’m not hobbled by the binary thinking of coders — I do have to point out our real problem:

4.3

It is not 8.3 that admonishes the user not to expose privacy. That’s fine, but the context is *RL privacy*.

4.3 deals with the refusal of Linden Lab to accept liability for what any third party does on their server in terms of scraping data. Nothing about 4.3 is changed. And nothing about 4.3 is likely to be changed, because unless Linden Lab can sell their platform as a data-miner — just like Facebook and Twitter are already selling pieces of their platforms and accepting investment funds on this basis — they will not be able to sell it. No one will buy a cat in a bag that can’t be assessed. And that means that Linden Lab will not be acting on this substantively. They can’t, if they are to be like every other company in Silicon Valley operating with the California Business Model, which amounts to letting everybody do what they want, upload what they want, and scrape what they want in order to gain revenues from ad-clicking and datamining and only after an abuse report, a DMCA takedown, then acting — sometimes.

The change to Community Standards is a lesser effect than the body of law that is the TOS. It’s a sap to this movement against Red Zone and for privacy, and it is insufficient protection because it doesn’t not deal with the essential clawback in 4.3.

So basically, those struggling against these rapacious companies datamining have to decide if they are prepared to struggle to the end, or accept compromise.

If you deny the right of platform owners to sell data, even in aggregate, even if disconnected to your personal life — which is what this is all about, and may have been staged with preciously this in mind — then you deny them their bread and butter. It’s like saying “don’t have ads on your blog, I don’t like them” to a blogger who makes his living from the ads.

It's like saying to the democratically-elected governor of Wisconsin that he can't cut the budget when the state is broke, and if you tell him he has to kick the deficit can down the road to yet another generation.

If you insist on having a total shrink-wrap of privacy in this virtual world — and I respect that — then you deny lots of people who could make money the way people make money on the Internet everywhere else — with datamining and advertising — from being able to support the platform itself. How do the costs of the platform get paid? I’m happy to have them paid by tier and not scale as fast. The Lindens are not. They don’t have that luxury. They aren’t growing; those platforms that sell datamining and ads are growing phenomenally — Twitter is datamining you as we speak; so is Facebook. You’re already RedZoned over there — and with far more RL information, most likely.

So what is realistic to ask of this company that may have to sell itself in a year to survive, so that we can keep our homelands?

That may be the following:

o Maximum program — do not track, i.e. have a real-life equivalent of not being tracked and ensure it by technological and TOS means (vote for that on the JIRA not only as a patch, but add to it a change to 4.3 that says third parties may data mine *only with consent*.

Vote for this JIRA, then.

o Minimum program — accept the truce Linden Lab has offered now, by changing the CS to say “and SL alts”, accept the pop-up of RedZone, and demand that all such future products have the same feature.

I see no reason why we can’t go for the maximum, and fall back to the minimum only after a great struggle.

In the meantime, do not forget THE VOTE ITSELF.

I hold Soft Linden personally responsible for the vandalism of the voting machine in Second Life. If the visibility of those votes as a historic document is gone in 2-3 weeks when the function is deprecated, if user content is destroyed and no longer visible, I will hold him personally responsible for vandalism against user-generated-content. The thought of these feckless and ideological Lindens destroying the voting and not even saving a copy makes me have the same feeling I have about the Taliban destroying the Buddha statues. It really comes from the same bad place.

Comments

[Ann Otoole InSL]

LL doesn't care what you say. They have official block lists. Anyone critical of @rodvik 's little company gets silenced.

Nothing will change.

[Prokofy Neva]

What are these "official block lists" of what you speak. You mean the way LL used to blog the visiblity of the Herald from inside the Lab? Well that's silly, Lindens would read it on their own time anyway.

[ArgusC]

"o They added some changes to the TOS about not collecting data about avatar alts inworld -- that was a sop to the Red Zone Revoltion. Yet it's fairly worthless as I've explained, and it led to the Lindens doing another bad thing along the way, making it seem as if the zone for chat log privacy concerns is the wide Internet, and not just their servers and the context of Second Life (the removed the phrase "In Second Life and on the Second Life forums" from the text of the CS.)"

Actually that is moved, not removed. It appears in paragraph 5 of the heading section

http://secondlife.com/corporate/cs.php

"All Second Life Community Standards apply to all areas of Second Life, the Second Life Forums, and the Second Life Website."

As to a list of RZ merchants, a list of merchants *not using RZ* does exist and is updated frequently. If you were to publish a RZ list yourself about folks using it, I am sure it would reach a very large audience.

[Jasper Tizzy]

I hear that the Lindens are going to add your name to the block list since you can't keep your trap shut long enough to catch a breath.

[Prokofy Neva]

? Add my name to what block list? for what?

Say, aren't you that person who scammed everybody in a bank or something?

Argus, I know about that. But I'm concerned about it. Because while it seems to remove it to the header to describe the entire environment, I'm worried about what it means when they pull it away from the context where it was clear before.

Also, before it was clear. That line now in par. 5 makes it sound like it *could* still apply *elsewhere*. That is the thrust of the meaning of par.5 is "it applies all over" not "it only apply here" in case you thought it only applied in the forums or only inworld.

Well I like the idea of a list of those NOT using RZ. Add me to that list. That's another way to do it.

[ArgusC]

Yes, I see what you mean but would hope that it coming at the beginning would emphasize it applying to all below. Will add you to the RZ Free list.

[Ann Otoole InSL]

twitter block lists Prok. If you can find lindens and try to follow and are blocked from almost all of them, and blocked from things like the snowstorm project twitter account, then you will know LL's actual leader, whoever that is, has ordered you be blocked and to be ignored and your emails filtered to trash because you are a critic. That must be Rod Humble's idea of improved lines of communication and transparency.

As for this:
"In this entire saga, I've never gotten the basic thing I need to fight this war right: a list of the major stores to boycott and urge my tenants to boycott."

Here you go: http://rzreports.tumblr.com/
And/Or follow http://twitter.com/#!/rzreports

There is a civil war in SL now. And every person using redzone or other spyware does not agree with the SL TOS at all. I won't be holding my breath for LL to get rid of the people that openly scoff at and violate the SL TOS.

Evil always wins in this backwards dimension.

[Prokofy Neva]

Thanks, that's very helpful.

I don't think I'm on the "block list" but I'll see.