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Did Google Use Second Life to Prototype New Algorithms?

 Well, gosh, that sounds like a conspiracy theory, doesn't it?

"That can't be," the Twittering masses tell me. OK, well, two people from the Twittering masses. "If the two had anything to do with each other, how come SL search doesn't work?" they rightly reason.

"Well," I say, thinking out loud. "Maybe our sample is too small? Maybe the reason our search doesn't work is because it isn't meant to make our world work, it's meant to make a prototype for the real world and we're just guinea pigs?"

And hey, it's not like there's some evil dark plan that is somehow hatched diabolically. It's more like...the entire California Business Model. That model is all about making big platforms. Letting people join them for free, easily, and uploading crap. Then datamining the hell out of them. Platformists have been doing this now so heavily and so extensively that they don't probably even think about things like "the customer" or are motivated by notions like "the customer is already right".

We aren't their customers. We don't pay anything to them. We're just "there". Their real customers are marketing companies. So plans that involve prototyping on our backs could easily and effortlessly be developed without even being consciously assessed as somehow "exploitative".

Nobody will listen to me when I tell them to read 4.3 in the TOS.

I was reading along here about the latest Google caper on a very rare New York Times tech story -- and one about Google at that -- that had *comments open*. Those used to be completely rare. So rare I conducted campaigns with the Times Ombudsmen and the kids who edit the tech page about this, and uncovered the whole fascinating story of how they moderate. In time, they have opened up a few more stories than they used to, but still, there's a feeling that unlike Krugman, tech is "off limits".

In any event, as I read the story and comments, I felt like deja vu all over again. Hmmm, where had I read a story *just like this* about certain businesses getting screwed...about certain devs deciding what was a "good" or "bad" business...about people's livelihoods destroyed in a day...about old ladies using he analogy of "skimming the fat off chicken soup" to explain how they read Google before this, and that worked just fine, but now they can't find anything.

Hmmm...Well, readers of this blog and denizens of the SL forums will recall -- it's Second Life.

We've been through a year or more of absolute horrors -- our parcels that used to be in some key words at the top flipped to the bottom; completely irrelevant people getting to the top; worthy people finally getting to the top; obscure key words being rewarded; strange policies like "everything has to be in search on the lot" or "too many things are in search on the lot"; big sims get higher in search than little parcels; picks are used; picks aren't used -- the list of tweaks riotously harming the economy as people got shafted over and over again despite trying to be honest and just put up a search ad with a key word each weak -- well, I don't have to rehearse it here. It has traumatized the community. It has always felt contrived.

Who ordered this, really, and why?

In a page that might have been taken straight from a Sea Linden blog about what they're doing now to the larger project of the Google search in the outside world, Google execs wrote:

“This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites — sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other Web sites or sites that are just not very useful,” Amit Singhal, a Google fellow, and Matt Cutts, who leads Google’s spam-fighting team, wrote in a company blog post. “At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites — sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.

So naturally, everybody wants to know who gets to decide what "high-quality" means. Original content might be something you can tell from a bot or an automatic process or the links people link, but "thoughtful analysis" -- who determines that? How?

For example, if there ever was a site that "copies content" from other sites and "Just aren't very useful' on a good number of topics its Google's evil twin and beloved brother, Wikipedia. If what Google says is true -- they're now going to lower in search those pages that copy from others, then Wikipedia out to be pushed down tremendously. The instances of their plagiarism and shameless cutting and pasting from other sites and paraphrasing without reference (or token reference with a footnote to one aspect of another original piece) -- these are legion. So, Google, how about it? How's Wikipedia going to do?!

What this effort is mainly meant to do is to punish sites like eHow which aggregate other sites' content and seem to be just link farms. Except, eHow is useful to some people wanting lite fix -- not everything has to be the deep tekkie "thoughtful analysis" with "reports" that Googlians think it has to be.

The sophisticated geeks who HATE gaming (when it's not their own sort of gaming) and are super honest and super high quality oriented (when it's not their own porn site) don't like eHow and various other paid content link farms because they say they sell ads on other people's content.

Hmmm. That sounds like Google and Youtube, eh? Upload stuff, sell ads on other people's content.

I hate aggregator sites that grab my blog and sell ads on it -- and you know how you are. But there does seem to be a gray area and I would love to know whether they have banks and banks of live humans trained like Medieval monks sitting at consoles determining what is "thoughtful" or not.

Thinking about all this, I began to wonder: did Google come and use SL as a whole to prototype this algorithm they've come up with, so similar to our own?

Gosh, that sounds far-fetched eh? Would they deliberately do that? How? Would they pay Linden Lab to do that, or give them the GSA license for free? Or how?

Or -- this is much more likely -- did they just *pay attention* to how it was going? Watch the issues. See how they were developed. Gauge the public's reaction when stores that Google -- and Linden Lab -- thought were "cheap" and "tacky" and "should be removed" were removed -- to see how much live pain there was.

In what way did they watch? How does this work? If you use the GSA, that doesn't necessarily mean that all its results and issues and fixes get piped back to the Google Mother Ship, right? I mean, it's like buying a copy of Word -- that doesn't mean Microsoft grabs all your documents, right? So it wouldn't work that way...would it?

Well could it work more informally? Google engineers hang around the same bars. Or the guy who is the vendor of GSA to LL chats them up, solves problems with them, etc. I mean, if you buy or rent JIRA, it's not like you would never talk to the JIRA people and they might not know your issues, right?

So I just don't know how tight or loose, full or empty of data such a process is, and I ask. I get to ask, because it affects our livelihoods.

I'm not afraid of conspiracy theories, although contrary to popular belief, I don't promote them and I don't have a tin-foil hat made out of the foil wrapper of an egg salad sandwich. The theory of the FIC isn't a conspiracy theory -- it's a field report which then became further validated by Linden Lab's own on-the-record statements or statements from inworld chat transcripts (oops, maybe that's why those have to be discouraged now in the new TOS).

The problem is, we live in a closed, authoritarian society. We don't know what decisions are being made, we don't have much input into them, we don't know the reasoning for things -- it's all opaque. Less and less information is available; the world's statistics are getting more and more filtered. We don't have the figures we used to take for granted available any more.

The Lindens Try to Reach Out and Control the Rest of the Internet

Looks like Rod Humble is bringing another MMORPG special in to SL with him -- he's taken out voting on the JIRA, he's put back in Plastic Duck (just like Maxis/EA.com allowed the Sim Shadow Government to "make the game interesting") -- and now he's going to reach out and try to control the rest of the Internet outside the confines of his company's server -- like a typical game company, known for how much they keep their customers in thrall.

Along the way to dousing the fire started by zFire Xue and Red Zone, Linden Lab has currently had their lawyer remove a phrase from the "Privacy" clause of the TOS/Community Standards that makes it look as if Linden Lab is reaching out to try to police speech and deter criticism on the rest of the Internet, not just their servers, by enabling their smarmy little army of police informant types to abuse-report publication of chat logs even outside of SL without consent -- without specifying *where*, as they used to:

1. Disclosure

   Residents are entitled to a reasonable level of privacy with regard to their Second Life experience. Sharing personal information about your fellow Residents without their consent -- including gender, religion, age, marital status, race, sexual preference, alternate account names, and real-world location beyond what is provided by them in their Resident profile -- is not allowed. Remotely monitoring conversations in Second Life, posting conversation logs, or sharing conversation logs without the participants' consent are all prohibited.

As the Wayback Machine lets us know, they used to have the phrase "in Second Life and on the Second Life Forums."

Fatty Mariner is having an absolute spasm of malicious glee, because he thinks this is somehow aimed at me, and that somehow now I have been hit with a dose of Kryptonite.

Only small-minded, insular self-aborbed geeks could find this somehow a good thing, to run all of Second Life as if somehow it is under Chatham House Rules, and to threaten anybody publishing a chat log -- or commenting on SL in ways that LL doesn't like -- on their blog or forums.

Crap imagines I will now somehow be "chilled".

Well, no, because I don't intend to change a thing I do. I publish transcripts of meetings at the Sutherland Dam or Ross Council on Virtual Relations or other venues. At those venues I have a large sign that says ON THE AIR. It has a hover text that says all conversations are logged, and you can click on the side and get a notice. At least I have that sign and that notice -- many others don't, such as Metanomics. If you don't like being in a transcript at a public meeting in SL on an open public sim, don't come to the meeting or sit in silence.

So I don't know what that obsessed old broken robot hag has to cross the street to harass me for, plenty of other people will be hit before me.

Indeed, he himself acknowledges that there seems to have been an incident with Chestnut Rau publishing the chat log off an SL Press conference.

Now that beats all: huh? The Lindens call a press conference, with the press, and then have some sort of fit about the transcript being published??? Apparently someone threw some fit and complained about community standards! Over that! What the hell! I hope everyone who did NOT do that will come forward now and say they did NOT do that so we can narrow down who did and boycott their publication and business.

Already, this net-nanny notion that LL gets to harm people over what they say outside the servers is fairly deep-seated and used as a threat. In fact, even a Linden once used it against a blogger who published a mildly humorous remark about how when voice came to SL, all those lesbians in the dress business would suddenly not talk on voice because that would reveal that they were really men. So a Linden who was transgendered in real life from male to female came on and raged at this resident on her blog, outside of Second Life, on her Linden account, threatening her with banning. It was just the most over-the-top thing I had ever seen from a Linden. This Linden kept banging on this theme and intimidating the person as if she had said some horrible anti-LGBT statement that was inciting violence against gays. This Linden made a big production of the fact that he had been assaulted in real life and simply wouldn't stand by while people were harassed.

But it was a psychotic, over-the-top reaction. There was nothing anti-gay in the statement. It was a reporting of what we all knew to be true, and it was a natural sort of joke that was being made everywhere. It did not mention any specific names or out anyone specific so it wasn't even "disclosure". What, we're not supposed to tell the truth about these things? Somehow, the Linden's name then got changed on the post to the resident account -- I blogged in protest at the time.

I cite that incident so you get a really clear picture of what it means to celebrate the idea that people cannot publish chat logs and cannot make criticial speech outside of SL, or else raging Lindens will come after them -- or raging sock puppets of Lindens or raging Linden fans. They will come for you, so don't be so quick to agitate for it. In fact, the first thing they might go for is @SecondLie, and the parody of messages said by Linden inworld, for example.

Many people would like to police other's speech outside of SL. They certainly cannot. Many states of the U.S., starting with California and New York (where I reside) have "one party consent" rules -- only one party in a two-way telephone conversation has to consent to the publication of a chat log. That would be me. If you want to see how that works in RL, see the Buffalo blogger who prank-called Gov. Walker in a political gambit to force him to say more than he intended, pretending to be a Koch brother. He taped and published the convo. Absolutely nothing will happen to him for doing so.

Of course, the Lindens can ban people "for any reason or no reason". It's a private club. Even so, they have been somewhat deterred in doing this just because they have had lawsuits in the past seeking compensation by people they banned (Bragg v. Linden), and they also don't want a reputation of a place that loses large amounts of tier by expelling people who complain at a Linden office hour, say, and publish it to get a Linden on record.

As for a private IM you are having with someone, as distinct from an inworld chat on an open sim, or a public meeting, I can and will publish those when they turn abusive, when I don't have any recourse, and when I need to deter bad behaviour. Sure as hell will. If you look at my "rental dementia" type of columns, the point at which I decide to publish a chat log is when somebody threatens to abuse report me (when I haven't done anything wrong) or begins otherwise to behave like a douche, threatening to boycott my business, etc.

There is nothing in the TOS about threatening boycotts or threatening libel in RL/SL. In RL, you might get a legitimate harassment case going around such a defamation suit; in SL, you have no hope in hell as the Lindens refuse to police defamation inworld, ever. You have a greater chance of having your DMCA takedown notice solved positively than to have someone slandering you inworld and harming your business and livelihood groundlessly get some kind of ban or sanction.

Here's what I'm putting on my profile right now: "I reside in one-party consent New York State. Your abusive IM to me constitutes your permission for me to publish your chat log."

It's hard to know what motivated the Lindens in this latest gambit -- breaking one thing while fixing another about the privacy clause missing, which was "outing of alts" -- which as I explain in a comment below, in fact was always an abuse you could report and a category of abuse the Lindens act on (as Tyche Shepherd's helpful archive of the police blotter instantly shows you: "disclosure" is an offense for both Second Life and First Life.

Like all California Business Model set-ups, the overreach on to blogs and forums is something the Lindens are likely not to pursue on their own; they'll wait until they get an abuse report.

Anyway, if Chestnut Rau has any spine, she will stamp her little foot right now about this. Publishing a transcript of a frigging press conference isn't wrong; it's normal. And if some neuralgic and thin-skinned geek in that meeting is having a hissy fit, ignore them. 

But Chestnut is a suck-up to Lindens, and will probably do nothing. Other people won't fight for this either. The Herald will do nothing because they don't really report inworld events any more and don't pursue people and grab chat logs as they once did.

This idea had to have come from Rod, I suspect, because this was central to the way EA.com ran The Sims Online. The game became riotous as people began to post on the forums how upset they were that people were taking over their parcels. The dynamics in TSO were such that the room-mate system required to grow out larger lots, and the group job objects that Will Wright conceived of to sort of force collectivism and collaboration on line to get people to cooperate to get ahead, also proved the means by which griefing occurred all over the place. It was trivial to land an alt -- they were incredibly easy to make -- on somebody's skill lot that they needed to grow out their parcel to a bigger size to hold more stuff. Once burrowed into a collective, you could sabotage things like the tiles and wall paper and grief the place or else start psy-ops on the various members and get people fighting and force people out and get "votes off the island" or just buy your way into control of the parcel.

People losing their hard-earned land and place in search by various nasty maneuvers began to complain on the forums. It was negative. The griefers lied about what they were doing (like Woodbury and Anonymous). The mods responded by devising a rule: you could no longer publish anything negative about individuals *or groups*. The groups were of course the Sim Shadow Government.

With this rule about never complaining about groups or individuals -- which was harshly enforced -- nobody could ever criticize the bad things in the world, and they got worse. Much worse. The lack of free media always and everywhere incites crime and corruption.

In addition to quelling any criticism about other residents and groups, EA.com had another draconian law: you couldn't have any links in your profile or forums comment to what they viewed as illegal sites, i.e. to game gold selling sites. They were able to nab Peter Ludlow (Urizenus Sklar) on that technicality because he put a link to GOM on his profile.

Blizzard takes this notion to the extreme -- you cannot post any links to third-party sites, i.e. other games, or discuss other games *period*. That's the legal climate the mind of Rod Humble inhabits.

And many little mediocrities will be just fine with that. But just imagine what Second Life would have been like if you couldn't reprint any of the chat logs involving the confrontation of the host of scammers, fake bankers, dubious stock market operators, etc. in SL running various Ponzi schemes. Just imagine if the public couldn't out these people and try to prevent more fraud and try to persuade them to give money back. Just imagine if no third-party forums could try to gather chat and publish it in an effort to deter and out these scams.

And just imagine the story of Emerald without the rich trove of chat logs. Without chat logs, the criminality of Emerald would never have been established enough to convince the Lindens -- any one of the Emerald goons could have abuse-reported any one of the whistle-blowers for their printing of chat logs on other third-party sites -- and stopped any investigation or allegations cold.

If the Lindens start getting hosts of ARs on published chat logs of various types, even a quote from an IM from a Linden, let's say, or some bossy BDSM queen running a store and pissing somebody off, and they start banning people, they may have a riot on their hands -- because people are going to feel newly empowered by having won the Red Zone battle (or so it seems -- all that's actually happened is that a sort of placating phrase is put in a weaker section of the law, and 4.3 is still there to let the Lindens' third party friends scrape away as long as they don't out alts.)

But if they use this new overreaching redaction just to pursue one avatar they don't like, and whom a few FIC like Fatty Mariner don't like, because they need some demonstrative scapegoat, or are looking for some technicality to ban someone (like EA.com banned Peter Ludlow), those who will smirk in glee will have to concede that the entire world is diminished when the freedom of speech for all is taken away.

 

Mark McCahill of Duke University is Feeling Insecure and Needy Again; So is Patrick Sapinski of Pleiades Consulting

Pixeleen Mistral (Mark McCahill of Duke University) is going through his Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) again, feeling insecure, needy, and compulsively having to poke other people so he can feel himself alive.

In a slump for weeks without able to write anything or even IM anybody, with traffic at the Herald plunging to half of what it was last year, Mr. Pixeleen, who role-plays a badly-dressed lesbian newspaper editor with too much space between the eyes in Second Life, has finally been goaded into writing something again (largely to goad and attack me) -- that he helped cooked up because...Mr. Pixeleen is in Anonymous. It's supposed to be the "scoop of the century" according to the grumpy and weird Allen Parks -- Plastic Duck is back in SL.

Yes, this 54-year-old man has so little going for him in real life that he had to go fetch Plastic Duck (!) and bring him back to Second Life and thereby win his spurs to get into a higher eschelon of the *cough* "loose hackers' collective" which is in fact as intricate and rigid as a cult like, oh, Scientology or something lol.

Plastic Duck, whose real name is Patrick Sapinski (as he himself disclosed it) is somebody that supposedly the Lindens once called the FBI about because he crashed sims and crashed the entire grid. It's a tiresome story and I'm not interesting in rehearsing it all -- go Google it.

A year ago this time when Pixeleen was in the grip of his SAD that year, I wrote a longer piece, Mark McCahill's Velveteen Rabit, rebutting his slam on me in the Herald that followed him actually taking place in the repeated griefing posses of attackers of the Sutherland Dam meetings -- which of course have been witnessed by a number of people. There's even a machinima of this, but it was one that then-friend (now enemy) Crap Mariner took, and then took down from Youtube because one of the people in it, a secret sharer with Anonymous, objected to being shown in the video, and pressured him to remove her -- she's the manager of Metanomics.

What I will note is Mr. Pixeleen's lies, however.

Duck somehow conned the Lindens into letting him back in, apparently performing various software chores for them or impressing them on Open Sim with something or another. Don't forget that Duck's next alt, Gene Replacement, famous for building the mega prims used in IBM's build and many others, also got himself banned due to his exploits and griefing. Naturally he was back on more quiet alts, but those are probably among the various alts that stalked and harassed me in subsequent years.

Let me note that Patrick Sapinski is the creep who called me at home in real life one afternoon, and when my young daughter answered, asked "Is this where Prokofy Neva lives?", she ran frightened from the room, crying, because who could possibly know my home phone number and call me by my avatar name? He said "That's all I needed to know," and hung up -- that's what freaked her in particular. I dialed *69 and called back.

Indeed, I couldn't understand who could be doing that, although I had prank calls from anonymous fucktards occasionally. When he answered, I said "Who is this" and he said "Plastic Duck" and rambled on with some shit -- I let him talk long enough so the call could be traced, I then hung up, pressed *69 and also called the operator -- but the number traced back was Con Edison's public number -- obviously he wasn't calling from the Con Edison building, as he is located in Toronto, Canada, but he spoofed the number somehow. He was to call again a number of times rambling about something, or leaving messages, or playing the Soviet national anthem.

There was more to this story -- it was a famous incident, in fact. Once he had my telephone number in real life, and now could also get my address from the New York City phone book, he could make another alt in Second Life as if "from me," spoofing my identity. When I went back to the computer a little while letter, I saw an email: "Welcome to Second Life, Ol Fitzgerald!" -- the announcement of the making of a SL account which I *did not make*. It was using a version of my RL name.

I logged on to SL to see what was up, only to find an IM flashing from Anshe Chung, "Are you griefing me? "You didn't give this griefer penises, did you?" I couldn't understand what she was talking about -- I wasn't present at the event she was trying to run which was now being bombarded with flying dicks, from a minutes-old alt that seemed to be identifying itself as my alt with my groups. I immediately called Linden Lab, and couldn't seem to get anybody to get on this -- I kept explaining what was happening and getting put on hold. I figured the situation would be dealt with quickly by someone as experienced as Anshe -- she could just ban the offending alt, clear the area of his prims, and move on.

Of course, Plastic Duck had deliberately spoofed my identity in this fashion to the Lindens so that they would think it was me -- and to Anshe -- so she would think it was me, and then ban *me*, thinking I was some sort of jealous fellow landlord out to sabotage her press conference (it was a griefer-twofer, see). Of course, that was crazy, there was no such thing, and obviously the Lindens didn't buy it -- for one, they can see from where the accounts are logging on. They banned the account eventually. But Anshe couldn't get rid of the harassment so easily *because she didn't have control of CNET's sim in Second Life*. Daniel Terdiman of CNET didn't either. They had passed it off to a now-defunct solutions provider with the usual goofs who didn't bother to set the land up right to deter griefers, and who seemed to be MIA during this attack. Anshe moved the entire thing to her own sim in order to take over the land controls -- only to be griefed again.

I really can't ever forgive some creep who would actually scare my child. That's just plain wrong. And harming Second Life's ability to do business by attacking a high-profile tech journalist interviewing a high-profile SL resident -- that was really wrong -- and criminal -- too. That was a DDOS attack. And that was just more of that old-fashioned griefing communism, trying to destroy the economy, destroy business, make it unusable for anything but infantile sandbox play. It's a profoundly conservative culture, griefing, not at all the cutting "progressive" thing that Griefer Professors like Gabriella Coleman or Peter Ludlow or Burcu Bakioglu pretend it is.

That's just one of the many hundreds of grief attacks this creep launched on me and others, lying always about what he was doing and pretending that he was there to just "test software exploits". Brainless little dips like Moo Money gush that they found Patrick "fun" or "edgy" and he was on the SF Woodbury Linden party circuit for awhile I guess. Whatever. He's a thug. He's a thug willing to get somebody private information from *a child* and scare that child; he's willing to harass high-profile businesses to cripple the ability of Linden Lab to succeed.

What's amazing is that I care more about this than Linden Lab. But as I've always said, I guess that's what happens when rich people put in their own money...

I was a critic of big corporations in SL; many of us were. That didn't mean we were for barring them or keeping SL an open source freak playground. That didn't mean we were for crashing their business sim. These events in SL were precursors -- trial runs -- for the crashing of much more important targets, PayPal, Amazon, Master Card, by Anonymous in their defense of the hackers' cult WikiLeaks. Oh, you can't tie Patrick to the WikiLeaks attacks because now he's "gone straight" *cough*. That's why, um, he needs to come back to SL on his griefer account, Plastic Duck, I guess. But...the problem is you'll never know. The reason they call them Anonymous is because, well, they're Anonymous. Or at least, even if you get a name, they are unaccountable.

So Mark McCahill lies horribly when he claims that the problem is really just me, and my "drama," or that I whine about being in "shared spaces" in his interview with Plastic, celebrating his return to SL:

Pixeleen Mistral: I have long maintained that the shared land model in SL is the source of most of the drama – colliding virtual narratives create conflict. anyway – my advice is stay out of the sandboxes – the JLU terrorize them with ARs

Pixeleen Mistral: what you end up with is people who like conflict hanging out and arguing in the shared spaces – the poster child being Prokofy Neva

Er, no.

That's not it at all.

That's a huge, fat lie. A Big Lie.

The problem is that McCahill and Sapinski and others in Anonymous or its related groups won't allow others to have freedom -- which is freedom *not* to share, especially on your own land you rent.

This, er, "shared space" McCahill is smirking that I am "arguing" on is in fact *my own land*. Land I rent from Linden Lab. It's not a sandbox. It's not a public park. It's not anything that is "shared" whatsoever.I'm not "arguing," but holding a discussion which these goons are trying to disrupt -- they've come to me to do their own arguing in fact.

The reason they can endlessly harass me despite me banning them because I *do* have land controls is because a) they endlessly make alts and b) I'm next to Linden water and road almost anywhere I might have land in SL, because of the metaphor of contiguous geographical space. That metaphor that is meant to be a simulcrum and re-create the civic spaces of real life is anaethema to McCahill, who is still rubbing the mangy tummy of his Velveteen Rabbit at Croquet, a failed virtual world built on a different principle than contiguous space.

I stand by the contiguous space, and I like having neighbours, and I don't feel we should be hounded from our land because of people trying to exploit it -- who then try to displace the problem of their bad faith and bad behaviour as somehow a "defect in the tools."

If I happen to invite friends to that space, or announce a public meeting at this space, that isn't an invitation to grief, and it isn't me somehow "arguing in the shared spaces".

A space I rent and invite people to is a shared space only in the sense that I decide for that time to share it and open it up.

If someone comes and sits on my head, rezzes grief posters, puts out pieces of dead bloody furries, pokes giant dongs, etc. -- all the sorts of things that Plastic Duck and the voted 5 griefer group did constantly before their own sim was taken down and they were expelled, that's not somehow me "arguing in a shared space".

That's Pixeleen being a total fuckwad, and being a member of Anonymous himself, using their methods, participating in their griefing, and joining in their fake manipulative narrative.

So this is what's new now, really, Pixleen taking off the mask -- or in fact, putting it on -- and finally just joining the griefing movement outright.

Up to a point, Pixeleen was not coterminous with Anonymous, although he would chime in with them, chuckle with malicious glee along with them, etc. But there was a certain distinction of sorts -- he was making the news as much as he was writing it, but he was still somehow a bit over the county line from Griefville.

Not anymore. Not Pixleen has become part of the griefing narrative and active measure because I guess he's at an emotionally low place in his life. I gather things must be kinda slow at Plastic's software company, too, or he wouldn't have time to care about coming to SL and trying to grief people again (which he instantly began doing again).

Plastic also strings along the Big Lie:

you’re right about Prok, I would put Allen Parks in that same category
without the drama they don’t have a reason to log in
it’s not like they’re making any substantial amount of money from their petty business

I don't claim to make any substantial money, but I don't "need drama" to log in and have plenty of things I do. All the positive projects I keep going in SL -- the infohubs with tutorials, the SL Public Land Preserve, the International Bazaar, the SL Sacred Places, etc. -- plus serving my customers -- these are reasons to log in and are enjoyable. I also like chatting with friends, exploring, playing the "game within a game" of the breedables, etc.

I use Second Life the way I wish, and I will not be stopped from doing so by nihilists and cynics trying to prevent other people from being free on the Internet. These people come from a very backward and actually conservative place, like the rural, provincial nature of communists who filled their cities with buildings that looked like big yellow grain silos and granges. They need ritual and they need things to be the same and they need to keep the Internet in the dark ages.

Rod Humble apparently is from that era of MMORGPs too that only can understand that dynamic of game-god/customer players.

Interesting that Rod Humble comes in, and the first thing he does is take out the vote from the JIRA. Then he lets back in Plastic Duck. Those two things go together. Both are profoundly authoritarian and backward acts.

Plastic Duck was creepy. He used to materialize at my elbow, and creep me out -- using god-stalk mode. It was his idea to try to get the griefers to get land on my sim and use it as a base to harass me -- he just personally wasn't able to get that achieved before he was banned but he goaded it on alts and his other pals in Woodbury did it.

Finally, Plastic Duck is the person who chalked my name on the walls of Linden Lab in real life: BAN PROK he wrote. BAN PROK -- with the w-hat icon. Gosh. The Lindens are shocked, shocked...

Can you imagine a software company, or even a MMORPG, that would allow this to happen, and allow a customer to be harassed in this way? Even Philip apologized for it to me but yet he was ultimately the enabler. He never really pursued Patrick via the FBI because he was reluctant to prosecute a fellow coder. He may have used the excuse that Patric was in Canada and a Canadian citizen, but something that was that major a crime, repeatedly crashing the entire grid of the whole of Second Life, so that the service was down for an entire day at a time in those days -- sorry, but that's unacceptable and should have been prosecuted. The Canadian press followed up, and Catherine Linden, the spokesperson at the time, was very firm about seeking to have the case investigated, but Tony Walsh (Zero Grace) and other "progressives" of the era thought there was something somehow "oppressive" about this and created the kind of peer pressure that Lindens often cave to.

Uri is quoted as Mr. Liberal Cool complaining about the evil Game Gods, the Lindens, who banned Plastic:

If in five years, when many of us have migrated to these virtual worlds to work, do we have to accept that their owners have the right to be despots?”

Over the last four years, no, I've found the most totalitarian forces in these worlds to be the griefers, and those from Anonymous in particular. They obliterate all freedom of association and speech by technically blocking you completely.

Rod Humble may take out voting; Philip Linden may preside over my speech being curtailed by banning me from the forums or town halls; but the only reason you need those freedoms in fact is to fight against the greater fascistic (and communistic) extremes of other people in the world, starting with various individual Lindens and their fanboyz ruling various sectors (like the JIRA).

Uri had this to say to the Canadian Star reporter, that sort of prefigured all those endless debates now between cyber-utopians, cyber-pragmatists, and cyber-skeptics:

"It was a fantastical place, a place where people's imagination was the sole limitation," said Sklar, who in the real world is Peter Ludlow, a professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan. "Now, it's looking like a simulacrum of the real world."

Why on earth -- or in the heaven of the Metaverse -- SL can't be a simulacrum (or versimilitude, as I call it), and can't be like real life, and can't be part of real life, is beyond me. If it is to be free, it has to be.

When I asked Philip directly at SLCC some years ago whether he had planned for all those marketing companies and corporations to rush into SL, he had this interesting to say:

"I didn't engineer for it. But I wanted Second Life to be for everybody."

Doesn't that sum up about 100,000 things you could say about Second Life!

Eric Rice (Spin Martin) made a similar remark, although more San Francisco snarky, when people complained about how the large corporations were displacing the work force and skewing the economy:

"We can't have separate drinking fountains."

But far from having shared spaces, what Mark McCahill and Patrick Sapinski want are walled gardens of the coder and code-as-law which they control, harshly discouraging anyone else who wants to do anything different than they do, anyone who wants to have a business or a real-life experience. If it isn't "fun" and "goofing around" like an endless day at the playground, it's not authentic for these overgrown toddlers.

More sinister is there insistence on controlling the space even when it is not theirs -- crashing simulators other people rent, ignoring the notions of private property and privacy that have made civilization on earth work -- and deliberately, and cynically.

The space isn't shared, and doesn't need to be *that way* but what Comrades McCahill and Sapinski are doing are *collectivizing" other people's land, and *collectivizing* their culture, suborning anything anyone does to the griefer narrative of memes, particle spewings, mockeries, etc. As I've said before, it's not Theater of the Absurd (and I'm not Theater of the Absurd), it's a jackboot in the face, stepping down over and over again.

That's why I call them Bolsheviks and technocommunists -- people that keep coming again and again to land you've banned them from, to try to coerce you in a totalitarian manner to participate in their violent collective farm.

 

 

 

Kara - Ice Bay

Kara - Ice Bay Check this out! Visit Kara (44, 61, 27)

Posted via email from Prokofy's posterous

Creative Commerce, not Creative Commons

See this logo? It was created by cube Inada or c3 as we know him in Second Life, Larry Rosenthal in real life. He is a long-time digital artist and coder, creator of various properties and content in Second Life and other virtual worlds.

It is designed to provide an alternative to the Creative Commons regime that deliberately discourages coupling creativity with commerce by consciously not allowing a license in their list that says "take a copy but pay me money". While there is a CC license that allows commercial use, it is allowing it *for the person who took your free copy, not you* -- unless you simply dispense with the CC "license" crap entirely -- which I can only encourage you to do.

You don't need any "license" to prove copyright; it is inherent. It's a good idea to register copyright if you are serious about your business and expect to fight lawsuits, but the Berne Convention does ensure that your copyright is inherent. Real life is based on copyright tightly coupled to commerce. The purpose of copyright is to promote commerce. Commerce is good and normal and helps people make a living.

The online regime of Creative Commons, which I call Creative Communism, defeats the efforts of ordinary people to make a living online, harming their livelihoods in fact by creating a regime subsidized by the wealthy to browbeat and peer-pressure people into giving away content for free in some sort of altruistic utopia. This concept is the hand-maiden to the California Business Model (cube, send me that lawyers' link again!) that serves big platforms like the Google-owned YouTube or Facebook, whereby people are encouraged to register for free and upload content for free -- and any questions about copyright are pushed on to the creator to defend to enable these platforms to have "safe harbour" from liability to lawsuits (enabling them to make more money). So if someone copies your stuff and uploads it, you have to fight a DMCA takedown war or litigate for your copyright. Good luck, if you are poor and don't have a lawyer.

So don't joint the failed cyberutopians of web 1.0 and web 2.0, come along with us to web 3.0 and get paid.

This new CCC logo doesn't somehow magically guarantee a payment -- the SL interface does that so use SL!. But it helps ENCOURAGE and PROMOTE the idea of paid content online, which isn't evil, isn't feeding rapacious evil big corporations as the Creative Communists always creatively and cunningly claim to get you to sign up, but which helps ordinary people like c3 get paid.

If you are a share-bear, you don't have to freak out about copyright somehow "interfering" with your desire to share, because Tim Berners-Lee and many other Internet pioneers already defaulted the Internet technologically to enable sharing, making it technologically impossible due to "technological determinism" to *not* share. Various devices and javascripts that make right-clicking and copying *harder* are defeated by "Print Photo" on your computer keyboard. Anyone can take a copy and not credit you. You were supposed to be magnanimous, helping mankind, and not caring about that, right? Oh, but you *did* care because you do this for vanity, and not payment.

Ok. Want to be credited but want to share? Well, maybe the silly and ultimately destructive Creative Commons regime is good for you, but think about it. What, you don't even want a dollar? Not even a donation? You're not willing to write a sentence yourself on your website that says "Pay me for a copy and credit me correctly?" You can write that, you know, without joining the silly "commons" that rich people fantasize about using poor people's work.

Second Life is different; SL enables you to put settings to "copy for free and transfer if you like" "take a copy and pay me" automatically. And you're credited, as the system automatically indicates the name of the person who made the creation and it automatically copies along with the entire object. No arranging of licenses, no fuss no muss. All automatic. Right click, pay the avatar money, take the copy -- which is either transferable to enable "first sale" rights -- your one-time sale of that one copy -- or put on non-copy.

There's no reason why this regimen can't obtain on the Internet now. That is, sure, there are plenty of reasons -- the technocommunist ideology that prevails everyhere; the net nannies of the "progressives", Electronic Frontier Foundation which actively undermines copyright and actively promotes payment-free distribution of content. There is a huge lobby fighting paid content and the livlihoods of ordinary people like you and me trying to make a buck online. They try to make their technocommunism appealing by making it seem like it's a fight against "big evil record companies that exploit artists" -- but that's ridiculous in this day and age way, way past the era of Napster.

c3 has a brilliant logo with a simple concept: creativity -- community -- commerce. Read his website for more on these great ideas.

He also devised a logo you can use and put on your website -- get a copy from his website for better quality.

I've put it up here to show my support and offer my articles here for sale for $5 a piece, payable on PayPal or inworld in a tip jar, links to which I've provided. This should be simple, people. PayPal exists, as long as the anarchist thugs of Anonymous don't DDOS it;

Every blogger should have this on his website. Instead of providing even a paragraph, let alone the entire site, to various news aggregators that make money off your content you've provided for free with their ads, you should put this logo up and encourage at least donations if not fees.

People who make photographs, content for SL, they should be all the more enthusiastic about a "take a copy of you pay me money".

To put up a permanent item on the Typepad page, you have to have a dedicated photo site, and then put it in the HTML script widget for custom HTML script and drop it in the content box.

I figure c3 would not want gadzillion people linking back to his original of this automatically with every click on the picture as it might overwhelm the Wordpress site. Or maybe he does? c3 let me know.

And if you can make the HTML that would render this better in that small space, I'll replace it.

The War on the Second Life Economy

It's important to understand that there has always been a war on the SL economy by communists in the opensource movement who hate the economy as such, and hate that people buy and sell in it, and hate that people keep copyright coupled to commerce in order to do that, using the tools of Second Life itself put into it by its framers.

I noted in my report on Ina Centaur's latest "liberation front attack" that if I had world enough and time, I'd sell her freebies to undo her communist sabotage. I think it's the sort of partisan war one should definitely take part in to combat communism -- if you have the stamina.

I do this first and foremost with Linden objects made some time ago that they put on all perms because they are part of that goofy Creative Communism culture. I modify them (sometimes they cry out for modification as they are so crappy) or I keep them as is (some of them are really good) and I re-sell them in my shops. Usually I charge $1 or $2 because they *are* freebies and you *can* get them elsewhere -- they aren't in the library, but they are here and there at various depots. I get to do this, and should even charge more

I first got the idea for this when I saw a Linden tent for sale for $100 on Baku flying around as a newbie. This tent was nowhere available that I had ever seen, and I loved it, it was perfect for something I was building. It was modifiable, too, so I could change its textures. I thought that the person who had gone to the trouble to find and tier and display that item deserved $100, and paid it. Yes, I was aware that it was likely out there somewhere -- but I hadn't seen it at Stillman Bazaar or anywhere else. Yes, $100 was a lot to pay. But it was what I needed just in time -- and paying that "just in time" price is something SL will let you do, and let sellers do.

What is an economy? An old friend of mine who is a wealthy retailer once explained it to me very simply:

"It's the place where a willing buyer meets a willing seller."

He explained various features of how this formula can go wrong. If prices are too high, the buyer won't sell his stuff. And if you have an economy where the seller won't make good stuff and charge more for it, and makes a lot of crappy stuff and charges less, he essentially has an unwilling seller who buys but may not forever and it collapses (the Soviet Union).

The GNUsenses, copyleftists, opensource freaks, various hobos, etc. have barraged SL deliberately with freebies to try to undermine what they saw the Lindens doing. I've seldom covered their war, mainly because after about the first year, they had absolutely zero effect. Many's the time I've seen Jai Nomad's hugely insane prim-heavy Dutch table (a pretty work of art to be sure with its inlaid woods) for sale for at least $100.

I once approached Jai and asked her if for God's sake, she could put some of her pretty items on mod. They were just so frigging prim-heavy. I was making a newbies' community, wanted to use her houses to inspire people to build cool space-age kinda stuff (this was back when I was a naive noobie landlord) but I only had so many prims. Could she please consider giving me a special set of them on mod?  She had them on copy/transfer but not mod. She was reluctant to do this, I think like others she may have believed that if only she didn't put stuff on mod, she could realize her communal dreams of spreading free content throughout the world to "help da newbz" but also undermine the Man's copyright economy -- it was kind of a deterrent.

Well, here was I, a landlord, willing to give people free houses, willing to charge them only one dollar a prim, the barest of rent that would barely break even on the tier (and not really), but she was asking to help by enabling prim reduction (also, enabling taking some of the "glow" light-box stuff off -- at that time, the light was blinding and spread across the sim). Finally she relented and I got a set of the stuff that I was able to get defatted and put it out. It was put on no-transfer, though : )

The GNU store, ironically supported by certain famous FIC types who were happy to copy anims available on the Internet and resell them in SL for a fortune (LOL), was something the Lindens promoted, and all the newbies were told to go there. It actually didn't have much of a selection. Some of the stuff was odd. Some of it was hugely annoying. Like one widely-distributed orange coloured A-frame house that the maker put on "lock" -- which was another thing that oldbies did to stop further copying and defeat of the "first sale" doctrine while still styling themselves as Lady Bountiful with free stuff. You wanted to get rid of that ugly orange or at least be able to resize the thing -- but you had to figure out the "unlock" at first and that took time -- some newbies never figured it out.

The heavy-prim Jai houses were there; but some other ugly skins were just an infliction on the grid. And don't get me started about that widely-flushed turd called "the Beach House" by Siggy Romulus.

For a time, Hamlet ne Linden Au and even the actual Lawrence Lessig, given an account with his custom name, appeared in SL and tried to flog Creative Commons. They put it on Democracy Island (Beth Noveck's short-lived and failed project) as a kind of "machine" that dispensed the "license" -- but I once checked how many items it had dispensed after it had been out for months: the number was at 30. It had zero appeal. It had almost no use. Just like CC itself, which you NEVER see in SL. And for good reason: it harms commerce and undermines copyright, and we all know that it does that, and SL is an ideal laboratory to prove that point in spades -- which is why Lessig stopped liking SL, and why even its founder Mitch Kapor stop liking SL as much as they liked it at the beginning when they imagined that people would step into the regime easily, producing copies that they would release for free with the California Business Model and then...and then...um...get paid somehow.

Fortunately, the Lindens put the "pay" function right into the viewer on the object, and people quickly figured out it was better to get paid *something* than nothing; in fact, it was better to get paid a lot, than a little. And hence the economy was born -- without the Lindens. It was accidental. The convertibility of the Lindens' communist currency (they were willing to accept it for payment of tier only at a terrible rate, an option very few people used at that time) was also something that happened completely without them, but ultimately with their consent, and that was via Gaming Open Market, later forced closed (a long and important chapter of SL history I'd have to find the links to, because it served as the source of the term "GOM" -- which is a term to describe what the Lab has done, and means "to coopt a resident's creation then use it yourself without their involvement" (something the TOS enables them to do, ultimately).

Here's a response to my email from the lovely Ina. My note in italics. Note that unlike Masami Kuramoto, who claims that "it would be copyright infringement' if you sell freebies (it's not), Ina doesn't make that false claim.

1. I'm not aware that there's any serious constituency in Second Life -- if there ever was one -- that believes that release of freebies on all perms constitutes a revolutionary act "undermining the economy". Such acts disappear without a ripple. It's such a huge and diverse place now spanning many real-life countries with an enormous amount of commerce on it of all forms -- for-profit commercial, non-profit, donation, etc. -- that it would be hard to conceive of the actions of any one agent or even a concerted group of agents releasing freebies as "undermining the economy". Indeed, when Linden Lab itself threatened to remove all freebies from the SL Marketplace (they certained harmed *its* economy of commissions on sales!), the community of merchants put up such vigorous defense in support of their loss-leaders that Linden Lab was forced to step back with the plan.

I concede that the macroeconomic overview may have little apparent effect with respect to such financial numerics, but the effect on both individuals and taxonomies of creators may be quite nontrivial. By citing only the SLX case, you seem to neglect the actual creation other side of this creative ecosystem. In my opinion, the proper examples to cite would be that of Arcadia Asylum's MetroCity and related full-perms freebies and Eloh Eliot's “Another Skin”. Unlike promotional freebies released per promo, these two freebie collections are released 1) in a truly opensourced fashion, 2) not as a promotional swag for a particular merchant.

The caveat rests in the fact that these items were opensourced in a way that anyone can modify, or steal and resell, repackage, and even take over, with their own “rebranded” name as creator. They were not merely full-permission items, but textures and other source material were provided. As a result, you see a profusion of these freebies repackaged being sold to unsuspecting users. Since Eloh Eliot released her .psd and .ai opensourced skin, the skin market has become supersaturated with Another Skin's. With actual value put in by the intermediary creator, said creator reselling the content seems perfectly all right. However, when the intermediary creator simply repackages the same content with no-added value, then tacks on an “industry-standard” premium of L$3000/skin, that she or he obtained for no cost, the fellowship of the potential creative meritocracy that SL could have been, becomes abjectly violated.

My goal is to try to keep this fellowship of creative meritocracy.

I hope this clarifies the issue at stake.

2. The notion that a *if* such an act is actually (or could be construed as) damaging to the economy, that it is mitigated if it is mediocre quality is a novel one as well. It implies that copyright permissions are only legitimate to keep coupled to commerce and commercial activity if they are on *good* content or even really high-quality content. It implies that those who *might* worry about an economy-sabotage should stop worrying, and simply *make better content* -- work harder and better! But in fact, the persons most undermined by freebies of mediocre avatars are the makers of *other* mediocre avatars that they can still sell -- and that's ok. Having a huge diversity of content in the world from amateur to professional is all a good thing.

Eloh Eliot's skins were released at a useable, professional quality, but with plenty of room for improvement. They are considered by the more elite creators and patrons of SL to be of “medium quality,” but are considered by more plebeian users to be “good enough” or “wow, waaaay better than my n00b skin.” As a result, masses were resold with absolutely no improvement or variation from the original released set, purely because the customers were not aware that they were buying repackaged free content. This is blatantly unfair to creators who actually create, c.f. fellowship of a creative meritocracy.

I believe that the only way to responsibly release quality content in this world of ephemeral and highly portable virtual goods is to notify the potential customers, and in this case, being geared for OpenSim, I would hope that the many educational and nonprofit institutions making use of OpenSim and SL would not be scammed into paying for content that was originally provided for free.

3. To be sure, constantly decoupling copyright and commerce with a conscious desire to hammer a wedge between it to undermine copyright (as Creative Commons does) is indeed a political act and you imply it as such. But it's a political act that the overwhelming majority of merchants in SL ignore. The overwhelming majority have no interest in Creative Commons as it doesn't serve them and doesn't help them make any livlihood.

Because this content is released under the most liberal Creative Commons license, the intermediate creator is not forbidden to resell them – this makes sense, as there is really no way to track what happens to all this. However, as I mentioned above, I would really like the potential consumer benefactors to not be scammed into paying for them, when they are freely available.

4. If you are worried about people selling your perm-free items, you have to click the box "no-transfer". Trying to use social injunctions against the selling of freebies doesn't work anymore in this very wide and diverse world. And you really can't ask people anymore to tier the display of your loss-leaders for free anymore. It's the attention economy -- they want a penny at least.

When your content is released open-source (i.e. with textures, sculpties, mesh, etc. freely available for anyone to download and modify), it becomes a nontrivial matter that these limited SL permissions cannot solve. Anyone can just upload your source, plaster it on their own prim and call it their own. No SL permission box can help you in this case. Getting the word out and making sure that your endpoints are aware of what's available is the only way to avoid this from becoming epidemic.

How's your Whack-a-Mole score these days?

Thank you for your time and concern.

***

The fellowship of creative meritocracy -- what a term! -- is best kept by charging a lot for your stuff so that it is valued.

The communists always hide their altruism -- which is in fact a sabotage act designed to "expropriate from the expropriates" and I out it as such here -- in this caveat that they "just don't want people to be scammed".

If you REALLY don't want them to be scammed, then don't put your junk on transfer? Hello!!!

But if you are engaged in communist liberation acts, you don't do that, do you, because then you don't get as much eyeball space and inventory share for your cause.

It's good Ina outed herself -- and her clan -- with the actual intentions she has here. It focuses my mind better on what these people are really up to, which I hadn't quite put all together in one way before.

The opensource professors who whine about costs and whine that their students need free stuff seemingly out of concern for the poor and seemingly out of creative altruism, and who believe there is a "stampede" to Open Sim (there isn't) are actually footsoldiers in a war. It's a war led by John Perry Barlow, Lawrence Lessig, Cory Doctorow and others, and is indeed a war. It's a war on copyright, and that means *it's a war on your livlihood* if you make a living in SL, or even if you just get costs met.

These people have always tried to use the social injunction against selling freebies.

For awhile, there was one of those Ayn Randians who called herself the Queen of Second Life, Jamie Bergman, who used to deliberately collect all the oldbie freebies, especially the weapons, and deliberately sell them in a popular store. The job of aggregating and displaying is one the market appreciates. They don't feel "scammed". They pay $100 for a good weapon -- or more. Too bad for you, communists.

They tried to bully and harass her endlessly on the forums, but she was playing war with these commies and refused to be budged. She kept on selling freebies happily for ages, but then got bored with SL I guess, she's gone now.

There is absolutely nothing in the TOS the Lindens can invoke to punish the sale of freebies.

I once saw a group of zealous Lindens land like a ton of bricks on a neighbour with a yard sale who wa GASP reselling Yadni Monde's freebies *he* sells for $1 *for a $1 too* which he "forbids". This was in the days when Lindens were wilder than they are now.

They deleted the content and warned this guy he couldn't do that. They were thugs. They were pals of Yadni, a beloved early adapter, and they used this vigilante method of destroying property and intimidating a relatively new resident into stopping the resale of freebies.

But then they couldn't scale that. Thousands of people came and resold freebies. The Lindens had to let it go. You don't sell server space and get commissions on goods if you stop the resale of freebies. Either you play economy, or you don't.

I suspect that the website Copycense is right, that this war is going to heat up, and more and more there will be a challenge to copyright but also to copyleftist thugs like Lessig and Creative Commons. While once Lessig tried to invoke the legion of online digital artists in his army against RIAA or big media corporations trying to maintain copyright and preventing resale or remixing and modification of resale of content, and it all seemed like a glorious struggle of the People.

Of course the People that Lessig had in his army weren't *the* people -- the were the affluent hippies and coders that he had gathered around him in the EFF and related networks who themselves were either rich kids like John Perry Barlow to start with, or had become rich through...the sale of software (imagine that!) like Mitch Kapor, who now presides over Firefox (and Second Life and other projects with open source freebies), or various other people working in big IT firms or simply living in Mom's basement.

But now there's a different army. Now there's an army of people like Stroker Serpentine, a plumber in real life, who starts an online business and wants to get paid for his creations. Now you have thousands of people who aren't rich, who aren't connected, who aren't working for big IT, who aren't in the Silicon Valley magic circle, and they make content online, and not only in SL but on all kinds of other websites, and they want to get paid. And they want copyright coupled to commerce, and they want to have the system work to keep their livlihoods intact. *Livlihoods* are important for people to eat and have a home -- people are not SL avatars

One of the biggest indictments against Creative Communism is Flickr. In various jobs I have, I often have to go to Flickr to research photos available and also in a sense follow news, because some news events are followed by what people post there. And I sometimes have to search out a CC photo because I work at sites that want pictures, may not have budgets for photos, and also support the CC stuff (I don't, but I don't have a choice as a mere worker in these situations). So I look at Flickr a lot -- and I also look at the various SL groups on it and SL related content -- plus -- and here's another whole group of people -- my children's work, their friends' work, their school photography class projects, etc. etc.

And here's what I see on Flickr: the default is NOT CC. (There was probably a war over that; it was lost very early on). The default is ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. And the OVERWHELMING MAJORITY of people keep that default, either because they haven't thought about it, but in many, many more cases, because they have. Some people put CONTACT GETTY PHOTO or some other agency if you want to buy the rights to their photos. Sometimes in a few cases you do find CC licenses.

But the OVERWHELMING MAJORITY of the content IS NOT ON CC AND NOT ON COPY PERMISSIONS. And that's a good thing. It'd not like I can't contact the creator if he has "all rights reserved" and no info about any agency like Getty, and not write to him to seek permissions and arrange payment if relevant.

The artificial "problem" that CC induces by saying that people "don't have an easy way to share" otherwise is bullshit, as the default is share without credit on the Internet due to the technological and ideological regime set up by Tim Berners Lee and co, and the same Internet that makes that possible also makes it eminently easy to put a notice on your freely viewed Internet page: write me for permissions or contact my agent.

 

Were the G-Men Going to Use Us as Guinea Pigs in an Evil Experiment?!

Jim Korpov hovering over Ravenglass supervising an attack by the PNs and Woodbury and pretending he was monitoring it to control it.

I covered a little bit of this bizarre story about the purported plans for the use of Second Life by a private security contractor here on my other blog about gov 2.0 and tech police, Wired State. I think there's a number of "dogs that didn't bark" on that HBGary story and I wondered whether it was a possible sting. The story was supposedly that among the many "dirty tricks" that HBGary planned was the use of SL to perform psy-ops to test the spreading of various memes.

c3 has helpfully pointed to another story that digests this more clearly than the really long Ars Technica piece which I can't find now which has a blow-by-blow account about how the hack on HBGary was done. Ars Technica really pisses me off -- I tried to make an account there to comment on this story and it kept telling me my password wasn't the correct kind, I tried everything and it kept harassing and bouncing me. I tried logging in with what I thought was an account I made some time ago. It probably banned me or something, who the hell knows. These tech sites are for the birds. At some point I'll go back again but honestly, they are such thin-skinned geeks, forcing a registration to leave a comment on their damn blog and being too opensource geeky orthodox to put in a "walled garden" Twitter or Facebook sign-on system so I could use that identity.

And let me recommend this great piece on the longer history and deeper background of such ops.

I had to chuckle reading this story because it was EXACTLY LIKE the story Intlibber came to me with in 2007 when he claimed that a university -- Woodbury -- had a government contract to organize a psy-ops in SL -- to test griefing on people and see how they react. I remember sighing and listening to him rant, going to check out this strange Woodbury sim on my hippie alt Random -- and the rest is history. There was this story, too, "I'm sure Tizzers is in on it and works for the prof." This is before Intblub "coopted" Woodbury by hiring them (he thought capitalism would cure them) -- and wound up being coopted himself again, then hustling them back, then -- well, following that story is above my pay grade.

Anyway, interesting in October 2007, there was a discussion of how the government could run a program with a university to test psy-ops in SL -- but I think it was hyped and wasn't true for a number of reasons.

BTW here are some long pieces I've done lately on Anonymous in SL and the traits of Anonymous.

I wish I had the Photoshop chops to make a comic book like this -- maybe someday if I have 96 hours in a row to spend making another SL book, I'll make this, but it would look something like this, using the HPGary script:

Messages could be spread through Second Life via "an in-world advertising company, securing small plots of virtual land in attractive locations, which can be used to promote themes using billboards, autonomous virtual robots, audio, video, and 3D presentations,” according to the document examined by Ars Technica.

So, picture a shack on the frontier of Second Life (like that gold-digger's shack that Philip told us "not to get too attached to," remember lol?). But it's like really bleak -- sort of like the house that Courage the Cowardly Dog lived in with the old folks, remember? Maybe parched cracked earth and a windmill turning somewhere and the sound of creaking doors.

This bleak landscape -- it being Second Life -- has spinning for sale signs, AnnMarie Otoole's crashed vehicles upended in a slag heap, some bots clustered in the corner bobbing in the water, stuck, some discarded dicks and gift boxes -- the typical SL scene. Somewhere, you hear a noise griefer prim shouting FRIENDLY GREETINGS FRIENDLY GREETINGS FRIENDLY GREETINGS and you're afraid to zoom in because it probably goes with a blinding watermelon coloured prim on max GLOW.

There isn't a soul for miles. There's just AnnMarie's vehicles crashing, the bots bobbing up and down in the water...

It's that way on the next sim. And the sim after that.

The sign on the house says "HBGARY ADVERTISING INC" or something. And a guy emerges on the front porch and begins to fiddle with some Shared Media, swearing, rezzing it out again, having it return on autoreturn, switching the group, swearing some more, trying to put the texture on it, crashing, trying again to get it working, swearing.

Somebody TPs in and tells him that he needs Quicktime to be upgraded. Somebody else says go back to 1.23.

He's swearing and muttering. Finally he rezzes out his cartoon and perches it at the side of the road.

An hour goes by. Nothing. Two hours. He's AFK. Suddenly, he jerks to a start as his visitor sensor has dinged.

In the distance, a busty avatar sashays into view. She's chewing gum and actually trying to look at some of the big ad billboards but on some of them she crashes into ban lines on 16 m2 lol. She gives up looking after about 6 of those, but then she spots what HBGary has put up.

She flies up and crashes into it and says, "Oh, I don't have 2.5 on. I don't like it, it strips off my clothes."

HBGary guy: "Um, well, that's ok. Why don't you relog with 2.5 and I'll see if I can help you."

She logs back on with 2.5, naked, with her prim hair missing. "Waaaaaa" she cries and makes one of those giant AFSCME siggies with tears showering. QQQQQQ.

The guy is leering at her and finally she manages to tug a dress on herself out of the library.

She begins struggling, clicking on the ad board, trying to pull it up. He's swearing and crashes again.

They both get logged on. He tells her to look at the billboard and asks if she can take a copy and show it around to her friends in malls and stuff.

"It's still rezzing for me," she says.

Five minutes go by. Ten minutes. She's in IMs. You hear the sound of clattering keyboards.

"Well?"

"Oh! I forgot about you" she says. "*Giggles*". She looks at the board. "What's that?"

"It's Ahmadinejad. Holding a puppet."

"Who?

"You know. Ahmadinejad? Holding a puppet. See, so it's like..."

"OH! she says. I know what that is. That's Hazim's new alt. And that must be the Prok puppet."

"Huh?" says the HBGary guy, confused. "Whuhhh?" No. It's Ahmadinejad. And, well..."

She's bored. "I gotta take this TP," she says. And she's gone.

Another hour goes by. *There is not a soul in site*. The HBGary guy goes and puts an event on the calendar. He waits. No one comes. He goes back and adjusts the text to make another event. He offers freebies. He changes the event to M later and puts in a wet-t-shirt contest and rezzes a pool into the parched earth.

Finally a newbie drops down, and types, painfully slowly, "Do u know wher I can get the sex?" He spots a box with dicks and begins to stumble over to it.

"Look, I have this cartoon?" the HBGary starts in again.

"No, I want real girl," the newbies explains.

Well, you get the idea. The thought of trying to use Second Life sims with their "advertising capacity" to "spread memes" -- well, it's like those people who came in 2007 and thought they could do "marketing" in SL *bursts out laughing*.

Of course, many a meme has spread in SL. And many a meme-spreader has tried to spread them. I noticed there were anti-Mubarak cartoons on "copy" that the SL Unity or somebody was trying to flog. The WikiLeaks people are there with their hourglass on all perms which of course I *sell* for $2 at my shop, deliberately.

Certain memes do get around -- through groups, through events, through networks and Picks and such. Unfortunately, in my view, isolated and atomized groups in an authoritarian setting, where in fact it seems there aren't open lines of communication, can be very vulnerable to memes and manipulation of thought -- much more than in connected, open societies. For example, it only takes one actor to go to 100 closed islands as a griefer and override bans, or one hustler to get in bunches of groups and talk to people to spread just one idea.

For example, who spread the rumour -- and how -- that zFire Xue is about to dumb a huge dbase with thousands of people's names and their alts -- like those files that Julian Assange sent around as doomsdale files? The forums -- Twitter - IMs -- it gets around, everybody talks about it.

They pay attention to memes like that because it's about the politics and events of the world itself. But to try to get this world of a million disperate and diverse people to focus on and be influenced by some real-life political meme -- well, it would take extraordinary effort -- effort that no government or company could justify because they could reach the same people much easier through Twitter or Facebook.

But that doesn't stop these self-righteous folk from trying to roll the Lindens about this:

The Kanomi Express is a progressive content train, delivering original news and commentary to and from virtual worlds, online games, and social media.

sigh.

So they felt:

Given that firms like HBGary are, as Forbes' Andy Greenberg notes, involved in: “cyberattacks and misinformation campaigns, phishing emails and fake social networking profiles, pressuring journalists and intimidating the financial donors to clients' enemies including WikiLeaks, unions and non-profits" a statement from Linden Lab and new CEO regarding the HBGary Federal PsyOps proposal and related issues would probably be welcome at this time.

Oh, what prissy little net-nannies.

God bless Peter Linden, he didn't bite this progressive bait:

Hi Kanomi,

Thank you for your email. While we appreciate the opportunity, we will not be offering comment on this proposed use of the Second Life platform.

Best,

Peter

Apparently it never occurred to the goons at Kanomi that people like privacy from progressive content trains, too, and don't feel they have to comment on every single wacky idea that the hackerverse comes up with.

Peter -- never leave me. My invitation to the Press Club is lost in the mail, but I know someday, someday, you will send it.

There's a whole other way this has to be addressed. FOIAs should be filed with the request to release any and all Second Life avatar and real-life names of any and all government officials, because government officials in the line of duty should be showing their names, not nicknames unless of course they're involved in covert operations actually under the supervision of the CIA or something, but that isn't supposed to operate against its own civilians on U.S. territory, right? And the FBI can spy on people, but it needs some kind of probably cause of a crime committed or in progress.

There are hordes of government folk in SL. A lot of them are up to completely anodyne and politically correct crap. You know, there is a real preserver and disseminator of horrid political correctness -- and that's our government, if you ever actually watched them in action.

There are also some useful programs, public diplomacy programs, for example, that are open to the public, such as some that were interacting and engaging with Egyptians more than a year ago, way, way before it was the cool thing to do for anybody, "hacktivists" included.

Another thing to be done to research this story properly is to go around to the solutions providers. They know where all the bodies are buried. They are a known quantity. Everybody knows that they know, and they know everything because they are like the bars around embassies in foreign countries, the barkeepers hear all the stuff from all the diplomats and become paid informants sometimes.

So you file some FOIAs, you flutter the SPs, you ask around to the bloggers and the sychophants that go to the Linden Office Hours, etc.

SL is a great prototyper and generator as I've always said, and such things as psy-ops can be generated too. They probably already are. Probably not in ways we think.

 

"Immensely Disillusioned by the Heavily Materialistic Second Life System". Sigh.

I happened to come across a public notice that Ina Centaur has been sending around to lists on one of the lists I subscribe to, and I decided to challenge her glib self-serving "content liberation" radicalism. The moderator of course barred my post as off-topic, although hers was let to stand -- that's often how it goes.

So I thought I'd reprint the exchange here -- of course, readers will be familiar with the antics of Ina Centaur from the incident where she went and deliberately tried to kill off the high score of Adric Antfarm, after he died in real life, just to be an asshole -- just because she can.

Dear Educators, Nonprofits, OpenSim / SL Creators and Users -- and
Believers of Laissez-Faire:

Today I am announcing the availability of OSAvatars.com ? an open source repository of avatars and avatar components for OpenSim. The Spring 2011 Collection is currently open for advance preview (with a few items more to come). The entire archive and source will be available for download for free by the public in March. Yes, this repository is available for all to use, for free!

I want those in the OpenSim and Second Life ecosystem to be aware that this is a collection of quality avatars being opensourced. It is my hope that this helps provide a much-needed source of freely-available quality content to be used and modified, bypassing the need for participating in a cut-throat microeconomic system. As some of you may be aware, I have become immensely disillusioned by the heavily materialistic Second Life system. In that respect, consider this content the stark opposite of that:

Here's free love -- via free content, to use and reuse, and to grow from. Please spread the news! - http://OSAvatars.com

For OpenSim educators and nonprofits:

OSAvatars.com content is provided freely ? please don't be scammed into paying for it!!! New items will be released periodically on OSAvatars.com, and requests taken per demand and time constraints.
While I cannot accommodate all requests, I hope that this selection and future items will be of use in your endeavors in OpenSim-based virtual worlds.

For Creators:

In creating and releasing an open source collection of virtual goods, in an ecosystem where third party creators rely on micro-transactions, I run the risk of disturbing the economy. In other words, by releasing free content, I am in danger of being labeled as a traitor to creators. To this possibility, I want to assure creators that, while of good quality, the content I have open-sourced is not that of the
finest quality that you see on SL. I consider these mainstream medium-quality content items. Anyone is certainly free to modify and finetune them, and those who put in the immense amount of time to
create those highest quality items in this economy should not find their markets affected.

Ina Centaur,
Feb 2011

MY REPLY:

Dear Ina,

I'm not sure how much interest this list has in the politics of Second Life, although I agree SL is an important proto-typer for social media issues and really deserves more serious attention precisely for that generative value it has -- long ago, people in SL began grappling with the complex issues of governance and privacy and copyright and commerce now common to newer platforms.

Since your release of OS Avatars seems to be a liberation statement of some kind regarding a novel concept of "laissez-faire," I thought I'd address some of the underlying theses:

1. I'm not aware that there's any serious constituency in Second Life -- if there ever was one -- that believes that release of freebies on all perms constitutes a revolutionary act "undermining the economy". Such acts disappear without a ripple. It's such a huge and diverse place now spanning many real-life countries with an enormous amount of commerce on it of all forms -- for-profit commercial, non-profit, donation, etc. -- that it would be hard to conceive of the actions of any one agent or even a concerted group of agents releasing freebies as "undermining the economy". Indeed, when Linden Lab itself threatened to remove all freebies from the SL Marketplace (they certained harmed *its* economy of commissions on sales!), the community of merchants put up such vigorous defense in support of their loss-leaders that Linden Lab was forced to step back with the plan.

2. The notion that a *if* such an act is actually (or could be construed as) damaging to the economy, that it is mitigated if it is mediocre quality is a novel one as well. It implies that copyright permissions are only legitimate to keep coupled to commerce and commercial activity if they are on *good* content or even really high-quality content. It implies that those who *might* worry about an economy-sabotage should stop worrying, and simply *make better content* -- work harder and better! But in fact, the persons most undermined by freebies of mediocre avatars are the makers of *other* mediocre avatars that they can still sell -- and that's ok. Having a huge diversity of content in the world from amateur to professional is all a good thing.

3. To be sure, constantly decoupling copyright and commerce with a conscious desire to hammer a wedge between it to undermine copyright (as Creative Commons does) is indeed a political act and you imply it as such. But it's a political act that the overwhelming majority of merchants in SL ignore. The overwhelming majority have no interest in Creative Commons as it doesn't serve them and doesn't help them make any livlihood.

4. If you are worried about people selling your perm-free items, you have to click the box "no-transfer". Trying to use social injunctions against the selling of freebies doesn't work anymore in this very wide and diverse world. And you really can't ask people anymore to tier the display of your loss-leaders for free anymore. It's the attention economy -- they want a penny at least.

How's your Whack-a-Mole score these days?

Catherine Fitzpatrick

***

If I had world enough and time, I'd dl all her free crap and sell it. I encourage any or all of you to do so.

Wait. We Didn't Use to Have a Linden Named Moderator Linden Before Did We?

Uh-oh.

I was on the secondlife.com website and my eye was snagged by an unfamiliar Linden name. "Moderator Linden" it said.

I clicked on the link, which was on a post about Valentin's day smooching, and I got the UNSAFE SITE CERTIFICATE message. Erks! Well, never one to be intimidated by some geeky thing, I made sure my virus catcher was on and pressed forward. I had to click a lot and then I came to this profile I've snagged in a screenshot here. A faceless entity with "apprentice" level already, born February 10, 2010. Maybe it's been there all along -- I never saw it, did you?

Well, at least it wasn't born February 14. Or February 23, Soviet Army Day. Or something.

We never had a Moderator Linden all this time before. Even thought we have had Pink Linden and Blue Linden and Pony Linden an Pirate Linden.

So it's a sad day in Sadville -- well it was, whenever this happened, and I didn't see it...

I'm trying to put a good face on it. I have often imagined a kind of *better* Linden interlocutor and perelustrator. You know, like those really well-educated KGB men with the tweed jackets and pipes who have read Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment of course but also Yerofeyev -- all the way to Petushki. Somebody who understands your needs and finishes your sentences for you -- although of course, that means sometimes *removing them*. For your own good. You know, like a good editor would.

I imagine this personage intervening early and often. Sus-sus-piria raises her ugly head, and he immediately plays whack-a-mole. "Take that forums sig off," he admonishes. "It's deliberate trolling and incitement of anger. We can handle our own publicity, thanks."

Or he sees one of Han Held's sly, under-the-radar nasties, and he says, "I saw what you did there, that was a sly, under-the-radar nasty" and bans him for three days -- just because, well, he saw what he did there. We know it, and he knows it.

Or he spots Darrius Gothly being a total crashing douche. And he says, "You sir! You are being a total crashing douche! If you keep this up, well..." And it stops. It stops!

But of course, then he comes for you -- or me. He speaks in the dulcet British tones now of Jack Linden -- whose email from 2008 when I was being warned of bans from the JIRA -- I just happened to read.

"You've stepped over the line one too many times, Prokofy..." he says.

Oh really, Jack?

I think anybody who reads these two JIRAs will figure it out: VWR-5491 and VWR-8049.

Harry Linden played nasty: he rejected my appeal of the disciplinary action (even though he, as the prosecutor, shouldn't have been the one reviewing his own decision):

Note how casually the "world ban" was invoked as a threat in May 2009, despite what many believed at the time (and still believe):

Hello Prokofy,

Linden Lab just completed its review, at your request, of a disciplinary action taken against your account.

Our investigation shows that the suspension of your account from public jira was correctly applied in alignment with the public jira rules.

Your account received a public jira misconduct warning regarding your previous posts on May 6th 2009 and were asked to comply with the posting guidelines.  Your main account Prokofy Neva was then suspended for 14 days from public jira on May 15th 2009. 

During this time, you continued to post on the same issue via your alt account, Random Unsung continuing to post on the https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-5491

  We have now decided to suspend your access to public jira indefintely on both accounts.

 Please note, if we see any further misconduct on public jira with any new accounts, further disciplinary action may be taken against your Second Life accounts.

 Sincerely,
Harry Linden

BTW, what happened there, truly, was that I didn't know I was banned. I didn't get the notice of the 14-day sentence. Nothing came in my mailbox. I tried to log in as Prokofy to the site -- it bounced. I didn't think anything -- the JIRA always worked badly. Later, I logged on to check my Random Unsung accounts and happened to try again and post -- before knowing of the ban. That's all. I don't circumvent bans. Not after I did years ago to try to defend my good name when I was falsely being accused of plagiarism in the forums, and then got essentially threatened that I could face and inworld ban. In fact, some people called my ban from the forums WITHOUT a world-ban, at a time when world-bans got to then be used as threats on the forums for a time, as "Prokofy's Law," and me getting off scott-free.

Back in 2009, I recommended this:

At the very least, it's time for LL to have the JIRA, forums, blogs, XStreet all moderated by the same impartial, outsourced company that handles all expression equally on all platforms on LL servers. Currently the policies are wildly different and wildly at odds, hugely uneven and terribly biased. on XStreet, threads are entirely deleted. On the JIRa they are allowed to stand (because of the technical obsession with documentation) -- which is a good thing, because then one can see how unfair the disciplinary action is. Comments tolerated on XStreet or the blogs are not tolerated on the JIRA -- far from it. A small group of thin-skinned and insecure coders at the JIRA are able to block any criticism of their agenda and their fanboyz' support. It's really appalling, and people notice it.

Really, when you see the things getting banned on the JIRA, they really are far, far less awful than the speech on the forums. And frankly, if the spirit and letter of my famous Web 382 were kept, and people were UNABLE to close a JIRA entry that was NOT their own (which supposed was a rule put in), then there'd be no editing wars -- except with Lindens.

Most people accept a Linden closure. But they won't accept the closures of the little Lindens enforcers on the JIRA -- they're disgusting.

What will the new moderation system be like?

I read somewhere -- and now I can't find it -- that somebody was on a beta test and it was some other software that does...something.

But what happens on the forums may not be as important as the outer social media, hence this new position of social media manager.

Do you think this job called Creative Director could fix Viewer 2? Or explain to me what this job really is, exactly.