ostiabs, sparklespice and kristedesl lounging about their sim PetPlay with a giant Rez Day board.
So I wondered who was behind bonniebots, the grid-scraping venture that has the forums all riled. The site speaks for itself -- it is grabbing a lot of stuff that people don't feel should be amplified on the World Wide Web even if it is "public". And it's also publishing a lot of INACCURATE data.
The "Top Merchants" is based on a scrape of the "What Customers Are Buying" box on the Marketplace.
The web site makes absolutely no reference to the PEOPLE behind this, not their SL or RL names. Only the BOTS are shown with names like bonniebots95. There's a link to Lou Netizen's site, but that doesn't mean he's involved -- his site is a generic site about bots.
The Lindens don't require bots to be marked in anyway inworld, although their names and slumped posture can be giveaways -- and they really should mark them both on the profile and the map in a different colour. But for some reason not clear to us at all, the Lindens have gone full-bore pro-bot and anti-data-protection on this issue, closing thread after thread after thread after thread (last count was 4), with now a Word From Our Sponsor from Patch, who has been away from the forums for quite some time, to my mind.
Patch needs to read the threads he and his staff are closing. Bonniebots isn't so much about information WE provide; it's about information LINDEN LAB provides on its own website, about our profiles and our shopping habits and land we have abandoned or decided to visit. LL displays this; not us. They have allowed their service to be aggregated and amplified in ways that are inaccurate and misleading and it is now out of their control. They need to rein this in in the worst way.
I thought a good place to start was to go to this idiotic Rez Day board on a sim named "Petplay" (arrgggh). I don't need a board inworld that tells me my birthday -- do you? I can see it on my profile. I hate venues that grab your profile to display to show you've been there -- after first asking permission (this took a fight back in the day). I couldn't care less about my "privacy" on the Internets and I'm a very public blogger. But I don't feel I need to contribute to the profile scrape insanity which only adds lag and annoyances to a sim. Don't have those, people. Everyone hates them.
This is a GIANT version of that stupid profile-grabber, with numerous people's profiles whose rez day it happens to be -- because bots are going around and grabbing this PUBLIC info -- they didn't come on the sim.
I clicked on the board object in "edit" to see who was the owner, as I figure that would be the bot wrangler:
Answer: sparklespice Resident with the display name "Dog", owner of a furry supplies store.
Caution: At first I couldn't be sure that he and others on site were involved, but having been in SL lo these 18 years, I have a feel for these things and I'm going to take a WAG and say: it's them. Listen further.
I marvel that no one on the forums asked this question and I seem to be the only one asking it on Twitter. Who runs this site?? It DOES NOT SAY ANYWHERE.
Come on guys, this is basic stuff. If someone scrapes all the grid's data and does -- whatever -- with it, they need to present themselves with at least their main avatars, preferably their RL contacts, explain their business. It's not enough to claim they aren't selling the data -- THAT IS NOT THE POINT.
It's not enough to say "oh, it's public". Because what's happening is that it's being AMPLIFIED AND WEAPONIZED. When THAT happens in SL, we have a right to protest. Nobody thought when they signed the TOS and read the privacy policies that their annual sales data and their raunchy profiles would go into Google and be read by RL bosses or spouses or whoever can cause havoc in an avatar's life. So let's not be children here. AGGREGATIONS and AMPLIFICATION is the issue, NOT the mere act of scraping what is there, as the odious Theresa says, for them to "put their mouths under and catch the drips."
I'm hardly surprised knowing how these capers go that "Dog" is a BDSM practitioner who favours sites where he can be put on a leash and be mistreated -- and as always, he has allowed his "lifestyle" to leach out from his private life into the public domain and held us all hostage to his bot-scraping. No thank you. Where's the "safe word," Master?
Hey, can we all focus on YOUR profile and picks, Big Guy? Sure we can!
Within seconds after landing on PetPlay, the following conversation ensued, and then I felt a giant paw on my back kicking me from the sim. I think it's safe to say these are the people behind Bonniebots -- that they are not practicing their "Be Excellent to Each Other" idiotic geek mantra on anyone who asks normal questions about their operation -- and even if they are NOT the people actually running the site and the bots, they're related. Because: Rez Day Board.
And now hilarity ensues:
[17:01] osti (ostiabs): Prokofy! I can't believe you're here. I read all your insane tweets about the Bonnies. [17:01] Dog (sparklespice): Welcome! [17:01] Prokofy Neva: Yeah, I was trying to see if you goofs had your main accounts anywhere [17:01] Prokofy Neva: which you don't put on your web site [17:01] Prokofy Neva: and my tweets are accurate, thank you [17:01] osti (ostiabs): You're an insane motherfucker. [17:02] osti (ostiabs): I'll say that for you. [17:02] Dog (sparklespice): snapshots! [17:02] Dog (sparklespice): ?? [17:02] Prokofy Neva: so gosh that doesn't sound like you're being excellent to one another! [17:02] ღ ƇƛƧƧƖЄ ღ (kristadesl): I can give you a picture you dont have to cam on me. [17:02] Prokofy Neva: oh well I like to get candid shots : ) [17:02] ღ ƇƛƧƧƖЄ ღ (kristadesl): Not candid when I can see you looking [17:02] Prokofy Neva: so you took the avatar profile search down guys? [17:03] Prokofy's New Mountain Retreat - All Welcome, Rowling (196, 253, 70):
Are these people Scottish? "Bonnies"....
That last bit means "teleported home". My current home -- a sim riddled with Sith Obelisks -- for now -- is open to the public.
You can read my tweets on this subject here and I don't see anything "insane" about them because I'm not yammering on about the "privacy" angle. We don't have privacy in SL or on the Internet. I have a different point to make, as I noted on the forums. These people were neither elected or acclaimed. This is yet another grid-wide power-grab by one group which the Lindens have blessed for whatever internal business/political reasons they have. It's wrong.
It's entirely disingenuous, however to claim this is "public data" when in fact it's a context where on the Lindens' very site, it shows a profile -- but not groups and other tabs, and offers you to click on a bar and LOG IN. You have to be a registered member. Not everyone wants their avatar profile in Google's giant maw. And again, data about sales and visits and abandoned land is displayed by the Lindens, not us, in a context where we do not expect the PROXIMITY of ourselves to that data to be exposed.
Interestingly, since the break-out of the forums furor, the Avatar Search function on the Bonniebots site has been "down" for 2 days, sparking speculation that it is "removed". I don't see that it's "removed" -- they may only be waiting for the furor to die down.
Abandoned Land
Just tootling around today to a dozen of the "abandoned land" sites, particularly on sims where I have land, I found them inaccurate. They purport to give you a SLURL to land you on abandoned land; they don't, sometimes they land on my current owned land with tenants on it, or on a Linden road, or under water. To be sure, there might be abandoned land on that sim, but then you have to hunt for it. The amount of meters is wrong in some cases; the info is outdated. I suppose that's because the map itself is not operating in real time but can be hours -- days -- behind.
I found the device mildly helpful to find some bits and bobs I had overlooked (who has the time to spend all day going 16 m by 16 m through an entire 65336 m2 sim?!) to try to pre-empt the Sith Lords or the other asses of SL with ambitions to spread their e-peens over the grid and deprive them of that glee -- before the Lindens sell them the land, which they do.
Top Spots
Looking at the "top spots," I found them to be the usual gaggle of BDSM lots and "Skilled Gaming" where it is not always possible to tell the traffic bots from the real people. I don't know why Linden Lab is encouraging this -- it's nuts. Their Destinations is curated and decent, and not only in the "G" sense -- they take you to high quality destinations with Things to Do. What Bonniebots turns up are the sinkholes of SL which will make newbies or returnees leave.
Top Merchants
The "top merchants" has people really riled up because it's misleading -- the data scrape is open on the Marketplace, but they aren't merely duplicating it. They are aggregating it and representing it as "14-day sales data" and making a Leaderboard -- of the type we had at the dawn of SL, showing who had the most Lindens and the best pos-rates as they were known. The Lindens retired that ages ago as it was a conflict vector.
Like they also ceased publishing the economic data they once were happy to roll out, like how many premiums there are etc. Bonniebots is misleading.
Inaccurate and Misleading
I'm amazing that Patch couldn't figure out with just a half hour's perusal of this site, such as I and others are making, that this site does not do LL or the SL public a service.
o The data is inaccurate for "abandoned land" -- there are better-functioning HUDS for sale on the MP
o the Top spots are adult avatar traps
o The "Top Merchants" info is misleading as sales inworld or even MP sales scientifically gathered aren't included -- the "What Customers Are Buying" is only a SAMPLE.
Anything that enables one ambitious group of people to take over the publication of economic and land statistics which the Lindens themselves decided to cease publishing years ago simply can't be "harmless" or "good". The process by which the Lindens agreed to this and then vigorously championed it on the forums, silencing even the most polite and normal questions is odd, to say the least. What's up?
And with their sassy talk and booting a reporter from the sim, these people have proven handily that they are the typical bad-faith goons we always deal with on the grid when these "grid-wide" projects are foisted on us by techies (like the pods or programs to cross sim seams).
It seems never to have occurred to these millennials that even a one-line disclaimer about the clearly PARTIAL merchants' information was in order.
Now let's come to ostiaabs, who appeared to be "the brains behind the business" and the better dressed. Is he this suspended account?
Ostiabs partner was also on site, with some RP game tag babbling over her head. Her name is: kristadesl
Out of the three loafers on the Rez Day PetPlay sim, she was the only one with an actual profile describing bonniebots -- information which "may be public" but which is NOT ON THE WEBSITE at this hour.
Note that only one of these creatures (there appear to be dozens zipping around the map) will talk to you -- and perhaps isn't a bot, after all.
While the Lindens may have talked to these honchos, we didn't know who they were until I went to look.
kristadesl also favours BDSM Pet Play.
This Land is My Land, This Land is Not Your Land
You're welcome to form your own judgement about all the silly things on these people's profiles -- they're kids. I'm old. These people look to be younger than my own kids. I don't care what other people do IN THEIR OWN BACKYARD.
When they come into MY backyard and other people's backyard, I care.
Their style of BDSM is the sort of uneducated bubblegum inch-deep mile-wide crap that likely makes the kind of old refined masters of this "lifestyle" wince and shake their head. Of course they can do WTF they want on their land.
But they aren't on their land. They're on our land. They're on Linden land. Scraping data that is public. But then aggregating and amplifying it in ways that cause conflict, stress, misinformation, confusion, anger, forums fights, drama and all the rest.
I personally wouldn't bother to ban these creeps from my land -- they might change the account names constantly anyway. I totally get it that my "privacy" --which was shattered with the help of top FIC personas and the Lindens in the IRC and on the forums 18+ years ago -- is not at issue. I don't share Coffee Pancake's views on a great many social matters, and I don't think she or any person in her community is harmed by this as such.
I think it's more about the Lindens once again essentially awarding a franchise to their little friends. That wouldn't be so terrible if they picked good friends. They didn't here.
I never, ever, delete blog posts -- ever. If there is some factual correction to be made in them, I will insert it into the text at the end. Rarely, the platform provider may get bombarded with utterly specious copyright claims and get a post removed, but I can only think of one or two times that has happened in my entire life of blogging spanning some 23+ years. I also don't delete tweets unless I've made a typo or name spelling error in them, and then I repost them. Extremely rarely, I might notice that an effort to get a point across in a normal conversation among a few people isn't effective given the ugly pile-on propensities of Twitter especially now. So then, I might delete and make the point elsewhere inworld or not at all. But generally, my policy is never delete. Ever. And the setrecs (setting the record straight) can be made, but they aren't as numerous as imagined.
So far, given every fact I have, I have absolutely no reason whatsoever to ever, in my life, to delete this post, this post or those updating it that came after.
Why? Because those alts are all belonging to the same person, as any idiot in Second Life can tell. They have similar names, dates, and groups. And the payments they made came immediately right after another, within seconds. These are universally recognized in SL and any other virtual world as alt behaviour.
Let's say, if in the course of publicizing these four original alts -- and a fifth that came on still pretending they were all unrelated -- I accidentally included a name of someone unrelated to the alt nest.
Or let's say, one of the four isn't the alt, and four out of the five are.
That person would most likely do the thing most people do in SL: ignore it. Because it doesn't matter. Because they stand for themselves, and their alts, known or unknown, and what some landlord thinks in some two-bit 50L rental about his customers chiseling him in a policy of "limit one per person" in cheap rentals, and his blog, which is hardly seen by anyone these days, do not matter.
Let's say said person mistakenly included in a list of alts decided that they still had a discomfort level from this low level of "publicity". They might IM me once and say, hey, that's not me, would you mind taking me out of that list? To which I could say, "Oh, sorry" -- if I checked, and you really had a case. Or, "Oh, I'm not convinced, and I need to deter people who repeatedly do this to me and shake down my cheap rentals."
What Would Normal Person Do
If they were rational and normal -- and many people in SL are, although I understand a famous artist in SL once said, "Everyone in SL is broken in some way" -- which is also true -- they would shrug, chalk it up to life on the grid, and move on. Because my blog would sink below the fold and into the sands of Internet oblivion where in fact my blog actually stays, because of Google bombing -- SEO techniques to ensure the Internet either "never forgets" or "forgets forever and never becomes findable" -- both of which are practiced by amateurs and even large, expensive firms.
What a normal, rational, human being whose alt has been outed would do, had they used four of them to shake down 4 x 50L rentals in a one-per-person rental unit (80 cents US), would say, "Oops, what can you do, my bad" or "Those are not my alts, good sir, why the very idea!" in indignation just to defend the honour of alt-uniform. But then they'd be done. They'd be gone. We would never hear from each other again -- and believe me, I have plenty of these experiences in SL so I know the difference.
If a person really was wronged, they could say clearly, "It's a coincidence, those are not my alts." They wouldn't keep repeating like a broken record, "I did nothing to you" -- not actually a claim that they were NOT alts -- in the mistaken conviction that grabbing multiple rentals in a limit-one-person area "does no harm." But it does. It's deception. And it takes cheap rentals from other people. My response to this chronic deception is just to make less and less cheap areas. I have probably a quarter of the number I used to because people are assholes and grab and deceive in this particular arena more than others. I sometimes have larger areas at the exact same price so they don't have to take four little rentals and put one skybox in the sky over them; they can just go on a platform that is larger and be done with it. But not endlessly; so the problem persists. So the hell with it, find somebody else to torment.
Absent Accountability
"I did nothing to you" is first of all, a failure to recognize when personal and community harm is done, and I'm here to keep you getting that lesson forever if I need to. Secondly, if the claim of "I did nothing to you" is "my gender deception is not your business," then sorry, it's the business of all of us in a world that makes this easy, but not free from consequences.
What would a person do, if they were ignorant not only of the Streisand Effect, but 0blivious to common sense, or they were in some private jihad they needed to pursue? They would continue to harass, harry, threaten, bully, rant at me. They'd enlist strangers in this jihad. They'd enlist tenants in this jihad. They would endlessly stand around on a Linden infohub where they also had a beef against a Linden and another resident, and add my company logo and name to their "Picks" retailing their grievances. They would stand in front of my office on the Linden road so they couldn't be expelled and picket me so that all prospective customers would see a demonstrator and I would lose business (didn't work; we all AR'd them; finally they were gone.)
So that's what "lexdisia" and "troppicolor" and "troubletrixie" etc. and her legion of alts do. Any normal person -- or even in broken-people SL -- could tell her: by constantly bringing this grievance to public attention over and over for years, you're ensuring that your alt nest loses its privacy. Otherwise, you might still have it.
Motivations?
If they still do it, then they are mentally unbalanced but usually you can ban and mute such people or LL eventually permabans them because their insanity isn't limited only to you. That this person can keep recurring despite multiple ARs from all kinds of people on various issues, and not just my alt-abuse-in-cheap-rentals issue, lets me know one of three possibilities:
o the Lindens allow this crazy person to harass me as they find it useful;
o the alt of a present or past Linden is behind it -- it's hard to imagine anyone else would have that long a memory; most griefers grow up and either work for Intel or become professors;
o the Lindens can't control their grid effectively because they are unwilling to ban popular anonymizer sites or effectively ban frequent flyer griefers with hash bans or whatever they need to do.
Modus Operandi
I've lost track of the many times this person has harassed me, my tenants, and strangers (and sometimes pretended to be "concerned strangers" to boot). But the latest one takes exactly the same form as all the others:
o the same person with the same or a similar name of someone who should have been banned contacts me, threatening me and giving me "one last chance" to remove a post.
o they put my company log in their profile with insults or threats, telling everyone not to rent from me and my "legion of alts" (LOL) which then is reported to me by various passers-by;
o since they are immediately blocked, they get some passer-by involved in contacting me to deliver their threats; or that's an alt; or they're all related;
o they hang around the same Linden infohub sim (Barbarossa) they always do, related to another grievance they have with a Linden which sounds crazy to me;
o a person repeatedly contacts me with cryptic remarks on yet another name which is likely related;
o the person marks their profile with "deleted" except it isn't lol.
Etc.
So...Block/ban/move on.
AND PUBLICIZE. Because you have to do that to eradicate vindictive insanity in a virtual world; ARing, blocking is not enough.
Why?
Because ignoring griefing does not work, and ARs don't work, yet publicity does get rid of it -- it can simply take a long time
So this time, we will have a post on this subject to instruct the general public as to why this sort of thing happens, in such crazy fashion, and so often.
Why is this happening?
Answer: because this person is a disturbed male deploying female alts to harm others. Sometimes these profiles speak of being a "ladyboy" or some kind of variant of m2f. Sometimes they don't and appear only as women -- and ah, that's the problem. I would simply take them as female -- unless over the years, I notice the same person griefing me now has "ladyboy" or some version of m2f now on their profiles.
I'm not here to help you enact your broken gender issues on my time or in my rentals unless you a) pay the rental box b) abide by my simple rules and the TOS; c) don't grief me or your fellow tenants.
Likely, somewhere in this broken person's online history is someone they gender-deceived who is furious/hurt/won't speak to them now that they've discovered this on Prokofy's blog (let's hypothesize) and now said broken ladyboy must raise Cain in order to get Prokofy to delete this connection so they can go on deceiving that other person (let's say). Maybe not. But likely, given the frenzy around the demand to delete the post.
Well, sorry, I don't help you with your gender deception. I don't practice gender deception myself and I expect others to be decent and not practice it either, although it has been practiced on me a number of times. I lost my privacy at the dawn of Second Life because vicious assholes think that the way you win an argument online is by outing somebody's real gender and their real life details -- a practice now known as "doxxing" because of the "documents" posted on Pastepin or elsewhere, often with a gleeful note that these facts were all discoverable online and therefore "fair game." Sorry, but I don't think my elderly mother-in-law's name and address being discoverable on line means she gets to have police or pizzas at her door because some git in an online game has a beef about their e-house.
Jump, Tor Will Catch You
Just like I don't think the former Linden (!) and Tor gal should get the pharmacist in NJ fired from his RL job because Ms. Privacy -- who felt her identity should be hidden behind seven seals on Twitter but who posted herself on top of the Washington monument in RL -- doesn't appreciate the hilarious satire that said pharmacist delivered to her: "Jump, Tor will catch you." That's not misogyny; that's not incitement of violence; it's the perfect putdown to these legion of fucktards who think Privacy for Me and Not for Thee is a viable life credo.
Now, I'm totally aware that the story of this particular sad loser in Second Life may not even rise to the dignity of having had some important online relationship ruined because their gender deception was uncovered.
Transgender Totalitarianism
I'm totally cognizant of the fact that this may work an entirely different way, as it has all too many times: Lexdysia/TroubleTrixie/Colors may simply be a typically nasty m2f who hates, hates, hates women, lesbians, and f2m, especially f2m who don't hide their virtual or real status. I've sometimes wondered if the reality of my just not caring sweet dick-all if you fuck with me online in this way - and fight back -- is something that makes these fragile, insecure gender-challenged youth go ballistic -- because they live in such fear and self-loathing. We all know that Tizzers, once she finally completed her transition (she looks great BTW), and found happiness, began to grief less. Right? As did her RL husband, deployer of the Giant Refrigerator of Ravenglass.
I do have one question. Did Tizzers have her dick cut off? That might help me and other frequent, long-time victims of her griefing know if she is really serious and Grief-Moor has ceased, you know? Hormones can be stopped; surgery is forever. That's the kind of brutally serious point I make to people who griefed me for five years or more in a virtual world, causing actual damages, merely because I publicized their antics and abuse-reported them and because -- and this is the important one, an insight I got from none other than griefer-coddler Peter Ludlow -- they didn't want me or others to use the Internet in any other way than they did, which was a sandbox. That's all that's about. It's not an argument about creativity or "transgressive behaviour." It's a debate about whether you allow totalitarianism in the world or not. This streak of atrocious behaviour lasting for years isn't something where you get together for "old time's sake," and you kick back and have a beer and chat about these hilarious antics with the griefers themselves as the moronic Intlibber writes in comments I don't publish because you can't grief me and have your comments posted here. No. Say, how's your crypto account doin', big guy?
Transgender Rights
I believe firmly in transgender rights; I believe firmly in the inherency of transgender. That's precisely why I fight transgender extremism that tries to take away choice from other people and to coerce people to adopt their beliefs. And it is indeed about trans-totalitarianism, the most extreme end of the transgender movement -- transgenderism, and yes, I'll call it that -- that lives in a violent, rigid, ideologically controlled world and wants to extend that rigid, ideological, and violent ideology to others by coercion.
In other words, transgender extremism which is the last bastion of male chauvinism.
I first encountered transgender extremism in Second Life; now I see it in Real Life.
Men adopt female alts in games and virtual worlds for all kinds of reasons. Some claim, given our non-mouselook view in SL, they just want to look at a female butt as they fly around instead of a male butt, it's more attractive. Some are just involved in RP and stories of various light or heavy types, which is their right, and I stand by it. Some merely like to experiment, because you can, and that is their right, and I stand by it. Some are actually in transition in RL, and that is their right, and I stand by it. Some are only in transition in SL and may remain there and that is their right, too.
But some just have found an effective way to grief people, by a particular kind of culture jamming, and an f2m simply seems like a good target to them, whether they do this out of a motivation of fear, hatred, self-loathing, or lack of empathy. That isn't their right and they can go fuck themselves with that attitude, and I can and will AR them and publicize them when they do that, the end. They might be in any one of those legitimate categories outlined above -- but they don't get to use any of them as cover for harassing and attempting to silence or coerce other people, no they do not.
So I'll say this again and again and enlarge on it in another post.
But for the purposes of this post, we have before us just some sorry-ass SL loser who can't get gone and who thinks they can keep agitating with their efforts to gain totalitarian control over what others say and do -- by threats and coercion. "Last chance to delete a post"-- or else. Or else what? A lawyer contacts me? An AR is filed against my blog or inworld? Some effort is found to frame me? Some RL violence occurs? That's why I publicize these things, and don't play the game of "don't feed the trolls."
And I'm here to say: no you can't get your way, you infantile loon, go away.
Again, I also like to record these incidents when they happen so that in the event a sorry-ass loser like this "takes it to real life," and hits me over the head with a hammer, the police know where to look.
Jack Linden: "thankfully there will always be a mainland. v"
The nearly 20 years of Second Life's history are replete with ambitious experiments on the geographically-contiguous Mainland, both by Lindens and residents, and I think it's safe to say many of them ended in tears because of unintended consequences ("the tragedy of the commons") or damages to this or that legitimate group interest.
There is always the inherent problem of the Lindens' contiguous Mainland and its many discontents and support tickets, way more than the minimal Linden staff can handle, and their seeking recourse in favoured resident volunteer groups who are not particularly deserving and generally serve themselves and their friends. This ultimately causes the Lindens to disband them or cease rewarding them.
The Linden Greco-Roman style palace in Tenera is a particularly vivid example. (I have my Silva Beach community across from this build in Sylvia). It housed the 8,000-strong (!) group of selected resident volunteers, managed by Lucy Linden, who were used as volunteer mentors and translators into "foreign" languages and other chores. It was essentially abandoned as a group and this Linden left the Lab, but not before one enterprising more-equal-than-others volunteer used the advantage of the land group settings to build a home in the sky for himself and his friends, not noticeable unless you happen to scan all levels of the sky regularly as I do as a nearby landlord. It's a gorgeous build and I'm for leaving it exactly untouched and for NOT reviving any volunteer groups of this nature.
This week, the ambitious owner of Operation Mainland (operation! like a war!), Feorie Friman, rolled out yet another project, involving a "subway in the sky" or metro of TP centers across the grid to "help explore historical Linden builds." It's actually another resident who has quietly and efficiently catalogued and promoted those old builds -- Aethelwine on the forums, who is also involved in the sailing community -- but Feorie is poised to coopt all that labour now into her "Operation" and "drive traffic" to old Linden builds in the hopes that, as the now-deleted thread revealed, she will be allowed either to put her stamp game in them (so far she has been blocked as the Moles favour only the BBB) or even be allowed to "repurpose" them or help in deleting and improving others. I personally don't want to play with empire-builders who work with forced and deceitful cheer combined with blatant suck-ups to Lindens (she may have mercifully removed her off-key singing tribue to the Moles) and other powers-that-be in this small pond to buff a resume that it is hard to know where else may be used. I originally took this in better faith than I do now -- I have withdrawn all my sites from "Operation Mainland" and blocked Feorie inworld. I note that the Lindens leave her provocative and deceitful post up about what Patch Linden allegedly said about "repurposing Linden builds" but removed all my content. I do get how it works. The only way to win the game is not to play at all.
So the "subway" follows her other ambitious projects, some of which are neglected (like the stamp game, which never got Mole love, and is now sprawling and hard to follow), and others which outright failed, like the plan to buy up and "beautify" abandoned land for $1/m, and flip it as a completed "community" for slightly more $$, which didn't work because people can do this themselves for less and with less overstuffing of landscaping to save prims. Having failed to get Mole sites in her stamp game, Feorie ambitiously bought into expensive Bay City, the urban enclave built by the Moles and populated with their best friends, whose land is among the most expensive in SL. It's not clear to me that she has been lovingly received there by Maryanne McCann and the other worthies, but like draws to like. Aggressive persistence can pay off in SL.
In recent weeks, she and other Bellisseria royalty launched an ambitious Linden-loved NatureCon, building on her recent funding (or only management of?) the Corsica South Coast venue Glastonbelli in collaboration with Bellisseria. This may or may or may not fall into disuse -- the history of Corsica Coast South, formerly Campbell Coast, has been tortured with the usual resident high-tier woes and land baron exploitations and is now going through yet another revival (I own some small amounts of land there which I rent out and sponsor some roads there).
Feorie, who was born in 2009 and took part in some little-known building projects for more than 10 years without fame, may tire completely of SL and go back to RL or to another world more suited to her ambitions (this may take awhile to come into being). Or perhaps she will live and thrive and finally obtain that Linden/Mole love she so desperately seeks.
Fortunately for us all, the Mainland is still vast enough and untilled enough that anyone can maintain or start their projects without impingement from these aggressive management types, and that's what I and others do. I maintain my 14 or so sims' worth of land across 55 regions and do not look for Linden love and try to walk around Linden indifference or hostility. I show my appreciation to them by payment of tier which I try to cover from my small rentals business and content sales. This is still possible; I encourage you to do this all on your own without interference as it can be hard, but very rewarding. I maintain about 3 sims worth of public land open in the SL Public Land Preserve which I believe is the oldest "nature preservation" project in SL and certainly one of the largest.
At one level, a project like the "Sky Subway" is "useful," and can't likely aspire to grid-wide or multi-continent presence unless the owner has endless resources to buy sometimes highly overpriced land. While focused on "the community" and "historical Linden sites," it *is* on resident-owned small parcels of 128 or higher to show up in search and fit a small "subway" build. Feorie might or might not use it to advertise other aspects of her business or her commerce circle's business and non-profit projects enhancing reputation. That's how SL works and it's fine -- people need to get tier paid and need to draw people to their projects in a world with crippled search and advertising capacity.
But I think it's important to pan out and take a wider look at the history of aspiring grid-wide projects and how they impact the Mainland, and mainly for the worse. It's not merely about this or that person's project. It's about the nascent Metaverse and how that replicates. Philip Rosedale has been very vocal about what the Metaverse should not be and really alone in the wilderness of Metaversal wannabee Big IT -- and that is he is adamant that it is "not for everybody," should *not* be built on blockchain; should have capacity for collaborative builds and a contiguous nature and so on.
I think he himself could focus more on inworld governance and democracy. His own world is replete of examples, some of his making, of the "tragedy of the commons" which isn't just about one person's sheep eating all the grass on the commons but about the nature of the commons itself and how it is governed. It is not merely about commercial interests but the interests of non-commercial reputational enhancement such as to gain recognition and social control in a closed society.
Here is some history.
Generally, the Lindens' formula seems to have been in the last 4 years to throw up their hands at the ills of the Mainland, some of which came from conflict vectors they themselves created, and to drive customers to Bellisseria, their zoned and managed communities with limited types of housing and landscaping and prims. Then, seeing they needed to still get reluctant Mainlanders to take the plunge to Belli if they had premium accounts (or not), they devised the BBB (Bellisseria Bureaucratic Bureaucracy) "Embassy" system, the stamp game, and NatureCon and "friendship" between their legacy customers on the Mainland and their more-resourced "Game of Homes" players in Bellisseria, and encourage more premium accounts and "exploration of the Mainland" as "things to do" is the perennial problem of all Metaversal engineers.
While these all have their pluses, they have decided minuses in that they funnel Mainland traffic to a select few groups and ignore or avidly block others, and they tend to turn the Mainland into a safari, where you make short, safe trips to culled and vetted locations in the hands of a few, and where land, if it is to be bought, is to be managed closely by select groups with restricted activities.
But some of us do live here. And not all of us want to stand by the roadside trying to sell our beads and glazed pottery and posing with tourists.
So let me cite some of these historical experiences over the years, not necessarily in chronological order and see if better proposals and outcomes could be sought.
o The Lindens created a "dwell" system whereby visits to people's original venues acquired points which then converted into actual monetary value in the awarding of Linden dollars, convertible to real cash. This quickly became gamed so that the most popular clubs, not necessarily the most beautiful, artistic builds, got the "dwell". On group land, the dwell could either be distributed equally to all members or accrue only to officers. Islands did not yet exist, so this was about the Mainland, and when they did come into existence, few afforded them, so it remained a primarily Mainland experience. The Lindens retired this system when they realized they weren't sponsoring art and education but wet t-shirt contests.
o The Lindens created a reputational point system with plus- or minus-ratings of points in categories like "appearance" and "building skills" which then eventually degenerated into popularity contests where people even paid for the points or held events and point parties where they could collect more points. Neg-rating became a form of griefing. The Lindens first nerfed, then removed the system.
o Now here's where it gets more interesting. The Lindens permitted a Features Voting System separate from the JIRA in which anyone could write in plain text a proposal for addition of features to SL or venues. So these ranged from "a pony in the welcome area," the famous meme directed at Lindens to "give the residents everything they want", to sandboxes or roads in continents where they were missing. This was beneficial and interesting but began to get sprawling and develop duplicates. People could still hold voting parties and even pay for votes, as they pay for "Picks," but the system was big enough to be self-correcting and not reward such gaming (the way the original Bitcoin was supposed to work). Eventually one empire-builder enamored with Capture Roleplay sites named Angel Fluffy (!) decided to take over the system. Concerted tyrannical forces always appear in virtual worlds to make the Internet be what they want, under their dominion.
So he scripted his own system to scrape the feature voting pages and volunteered to "get rid of duplicates," creating lists for busy Lindens that they were grateful to receive. On the way, he simply removed proposals he didn't like, or as on the JIRA, felt the Lindens "couldn't do," thereby sparking a lot of dissent. The Lindens nevertheless let him "clean up" this sprawling Feature Voting System which they couldn't devote staff time to do. When some groups of people saw how one resident was allowed to change and destroy one system and saw their favourite proposals missing, and began loudly protesting, the Lindens got tired of the forums drama and one day Torley Linden simply deleted the entire system, not even allowing an archive.
The Lindens created the telehub system, based on Philips admiration of famous urban planner Jane Jacobs. These functioned as planned to enable exploration and shopping and expansion of residences across the grid, but also became highly valued adjacent real estate selling for a fortune on the open auctions, so that only two large mall builders (Anshe Chung and Blue) began to win every high-priced auction because they had the investment of venture capitalists or their own resources. Rentals at these malls were also high priced, yet they democratized the oldbie guild system of stores very far from telehubs (which is why they vehemently protested them), in which older players would give newer creators a corner in their store until they got on their feet sufficiently to buy land themselves and attract visitors.
o Facing protest particularly from oldbies in older locations on the grid about lack of traffic to their stores, usually cloaked as concert about malls as avatar traps and builds that were laggy and hard to get around in, the Lindens built a whole new series of telehubs providing more access at least on new continents, which were more bucolic, with 4096 m2 of grassland or waterfalls instead of concrete around them. They built things like the Juice Bar in Brownlee. As fast as the Lindens could build these, the same two land barons and perhaps a handful of newer ones bought up this land.
o The Lindens sponsored a contest to win a sim without purchase price (then $1500 for islands and more for good Mainland auctioned sims) but with ongoing tier costs (also higher then). Very few residents responded, because of the high recurring fee. The famous "socialism on one sim" experiment of Neufreistadt was launched, as well as an experimental game sim whose owner then got fed up with the limitations of SL's code and performance. The socialism culminated in terrorism by one oldbie who destroyed all her builds made on the sims -- communes in this controlled world often end this way as I can attest to from personal experience -- but the group re-organized and has what is claimed as the "oldest democracy" in SL, although Luskwood is a democracy of sorts, too, and if democracy needs an adjective like "socialist" which is even hidden in this case, you can guess it's not too democratic. One of its other short-lived members more on the right-wing sidse also stirred up havoc on the forums and JIRA before leaving SL.
o The Lindens sponsored a building contest to build their inworld office by Waterhead, won by Adam Zaius' group, not surprisingly. It's one of the builds that other oldbies now itch to remove or refurbish and is no longer used.
o The Lindens promoted the SLRR and various rail enthusiast groups were born, notably the Virtual Rail Consortium in Tuliptree. I had the idea to have a building contest for a mall or park or other public property along the borders of the SLRR to encourage its use. When I publicized the contest on the forums and inworld, it was horribly griefed by people wishing to discourage any "realistic" or "business" use of SL in any way. While the Woodbury griefers and 4chan types were among them, I think there were Linden alts among them. Nevertheless one Linden (Garth Fairchang, who died in RL) gave me a model train to use in promotion. I persisted with the contest, but in the end I had to drop the "railroad" concept and awarded the build to Aliasi Stonebender who created Solar Plaza in Hartwick, and supported a resident-made railroad through 4 sims for a time.
Meanwhile, the Lindens coopted my idea and sponsored their own contest to build railroad stations along their route, for which they would donate the land (in my plan, residents would tier their own land, but Lindens will forego income rather than let go of their favourites, through whom they hope to rule their empire, like Russians through Central Asians). Some of the most interesting historical builds resulted, such as the train station by Fallingwater Cellardoor in Neumogen.
o Another resident-made railway got a lot of Linden support and support from me in the form of donated land and through passage through rentals land. Nevertheless, this resident blighted the view with huge pillars and overpasses, forcing move-outs and abandonment, and then left SL himself, abandoning all his hard-won land. The Lindens grabbed it and dubbed it "Linden Right of Way," but never built anything on it. For a time, a clack of furry RR fans badgered me to give up land to put another railroad through, and urged the Lindens to re-start their railroad. Michael Linden appeared to mark the "Linden Right of Way" in Grote, but then not long after, was let go from Linden Lab (which was a shame, as he was a leader of the Moles and a long-time and experienced Linden). The furry caucus ranted that Lindens "sold me land" (they didn't; they auctioned some of their own protected land and a flipper bought it, and I bought it from him). To date, the "Linden Right of Way" remains fallow.
o The Lindens originally had two zoned sims, Brown and Boardman, where a 512 could sell for US $100 on the auctions, it was astounding. The same people who were in TSO's old Sim Arts, of which I was a member, Ingrid Ingersoll and Barnsworth Anubis and some others decided to "beautify" these sims and built a lot of Craftsmen-type houses to fit the suburban tree-lined streets. They began a campaign to get Jack Linden to tear down the old, dead palm trees (he removed a lot but not all of them) and re-build the marketplace to be less ugly (it now has wooden stalls that are passable) but he left a few odd old Linden things like Ryan Linden's very early prefab home which is more like a stall than a home you can move around in. The strange SL logo hand that came looming up at you from every mailbox on the properties was removed. It never really looked THAT great and its curious persistence in selling for high amounts doesn't seem justified, given that Brown is General and rents poorly. The Lindens ceased to police a rule they had there that skyboxes could not be put up in the sky (it's General) and never policed much the rule that commerce could only go in the MP area.
o The Lindens built another zoned area called Schermerhorn which also had houses to provide it a better look but residents bought the land and returned them, as they always do. This area was wildly popular and then suddenly wasn't, maybe when Linden Homes were built. The same thing happened at the sci-fi themed adult continent of Horizons, which sells for a fortune and has easements, beaches, and roads that help it look better, and even a "something to do" Linden-made game in the middle, but it has little use. Linden zoning efforts basically failed until Bellisseria, where Moles finally got the right mixture of house styles, easements, and better looking landscaping than in the original Linden Library -- and forced residents to keep homes good-looking by not allowing them to return them, although supply a half dozen or so styles in each theme to chose from.
o The Lindens retained the traffic system from the old "dwell" program, although they retired their leaderboard of the "most popular venues" as these were gamed with "camping" and other rewards system. But at a certain point they modified search to be more random and contain other algorithms not based on raw visitor numbers so that search would be "more fair". Then they began slowly to break search in many ways by incorporating Google Service Appliance. As fast as Lindens changed search, residents would develop new ways to game it and still do.
o The Lindens created a "First Land" system whereby only newbies of X age could buy 512 m2 of land to get started in SL at $1/m. They made postage stamp sheets of this land on new sims, which then quickly filled up with untended plywood and ugly builds. They tried to scatter them around more, but oldbies created alts and bought them. Soon land barons could see the advantage in making a lot of new accounts and scanning sims to buy First Land and flip it, sparking anger and protest on the forums. The Lindens tried cracking down on this, in part with their rule (which they say still applies) of "five accounts only" presumably on one credit card.
o The Lindens rolled out a map in which Anshe and other more alert land barons could see a PTP system was in the making, so they bought up telehub land and this time sold it, rather than renting it. Unaware players, thrilled with land going for sale which had previously been out of reach, bit hard. When the Lindens announced PTP and the impending removal of the telehubs, land barons, especially the bilked newbie barons protested loudly and threatened a "bait and switch" lawsuit as the auctions continued right up to the announcement, despite the plan. The Lindens offered a compensation of $7/m for all telehub land, or the prospect of entering the program for resident-run infohubs. The Lindens then rolled out new sandy coastal mainland, forcing Anshe and other land barons to now spend all the Lindens with which they had been compensated on that new desirable waterfront area, or lose business. The Lindens always win. It's their game.
o In the early days, the Lindens allowed 16 m2 parcels by -- imagine this! -- allowing all abandoned land to disintegrate into numerous 16-m parcels. The theory was that people on that sim would come and take only what they needed for a few extra prims. Instead, such land was abought by ad farmers and ads were placed all over, sometimes in the middle of pristine waterfront. Extortionist prices were put on the land forcing people to "buy back the view". One enterprising fellow put "Impeach Bush!" billboards on the extortion-sale land, figuring that liberal Lindens and many residents would not successfully complain about them and get action. Another less "idealistic" ad farmer just put a big happy face on his billboards. New continents began to sell far less on the auctions (back when entire sims were auctioned) because their views were so quickly despoiled. Land owners lobbied for four long years for the Lindens to develop an "ad farm" policy, which they eventually did, although it is unevenly applied today and certain seemingly non-commercial things like obelisks infest the grid even more.
o When the Lindens created the brand-new, pristine "nature" continent (then) of Heterocera, the Moth Continent with builds from the Magellan legend and the famous Moth Temple in Iris, they placed NO telehubs. You could not teleport there by any means and had to fly long distances -- which in those days was difficult across the void sims where sometimes your computer would jam or crash. Players with more expensive rigs would jeer at us newbs who needed "flying lessons". A few enterprising residents such as one on an old "colour" sim with an airplane system and another with a boat on the shore charged to haul residents to the new desirable continent. Some created "log-in lots" such as myself and charged low rents for them so that you could log right in to that continent. But without telehub transportation, sales and commerce languished.
Forums "nature lovers" complained bitterly about teleport lag and commerce blight and land barons and urged the transportation systems not to be installed. The Lindens went all out, putting Linden trees and grass on Heterocera plots that did not count on your prim count. We were all hurtling toward "All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace" with computer drives turning into spinning flowers, when finally, a group of land dealers who had bought the land on the auctions informed the Lindens that they would dump the land and/or cease buying new land on the auctions -- those paying Linden's bills for this new continent -- if they didn't stop listening to the forums hippie caucus, made up of people who didn't own land in the area. They relented and put in about 4 telehubs only at first -- it turned out that all you needed for a telehub was an invisible prim disc, just like those made for landings on private islands, and you could put any build around it, it didn't have to be those squat brown urban uglies of the earlier era. So they put them within the Moth Temple or at Hyles Swamp. Eventually they added more as they realized "nature" wasn't selling -- people value "nature" tiered by Lindens or other residents but don't want to pay for it.
o Before there were scripted bot avatars, land barons bought up ad farms and deployed scripted boxes to scrape land-for-sale data and therefore get on top of the deals quickly -- then remain at the top of the land-for-sale list by flipping land they grabbed which had been put to sale for fire-sale prices or abandoned (whereupon they would request it). The Lindens eventually banned land bots, and some of these land flippers went out of business, but scripted boxes evidently used for land scanning (although who knows) still persist in many places.
o In the old auction system, all persons who bid on the land, as well as the winner, was visible, and therefore residents could see which land barons were deliberately bidding up prices to keep land prices in general high, and avoid them, and also see which land barons bought up smaller pieces of isolated land on sims to put extortionate prices on them to force people desperate for prims to buy them. Eventually the Lindens changed to a new auction system, based on e-bay (a founding investor of SL was Pierre Omidyar, the e-bay guy), that showed no names at all after the bid although they do briefly leave up a record of the sales so those patient enough could fly around and observe what's happening. It's still a system only a few land barons control. An effort to create resident-based auctions to try to defeat this rent-seeking failed, in part because of land barons disguised as ordinary end users as alts, and buyer's remorse leading to drama and further abandonment.
o The Lindens permitted two driverless vehicle systems, enabling the scripters to send vehicles of various kinds over the grid at will. One of them enabled some of these cars on Linden land to be purchasable, a violation of the TOS, and they also tended to crash and pile-up on other people's land. That person had most of their accounts banned. The other person was more discreet and the cars crashed less and was rewarded with selection of the system also for Linden-run events like SLB. Still, the Lindens didn't permit these driverless simplistic "pods" to spam up Bellisseria, likely because residents there wouldn't tolerate them. On the Mainland, they spam every 15 minutes and nearly 100% of them are empty. Polls I have done whether larger or smaller show significant percentages of residents oppose or don't even know about the pods, which is denied by their supporters.
o A resident concerned about the failure of vehicles at region crossings proposed a system whereby the BDSM viewer called RLV would be used to pick up residents and forcibly cross them at sim seams. This was rejected even by RLV users and the Lindens didn't adopt it, but continued to encourage grid-wide monitoring and proposals for vehicle crossings.
o The Lindens permitted a Grid Survey which used bots to scrape information on new islands, demise of old islands, and percentage of Linden and resident ownership on the Mainland. This was widely accepted as useful and interesting, but the owner faced problems both of a bot nature and of RL time needed for such a project to be constantly updated.
o Surveying the Mainland wreckage they had wrought, while paying their server and other bills, and noting that the revenue was so far less than from islands or even content sales on the MP, yet sucked up the lion's share of customer service time, the Lindens finally decided to build Linden Homes and give the residents what they wanted -- nice homes with predictable landscaping and the view never getting ruined in the commons by neighbours or barons, with plenty of roads and waterways (which are entirely missing on some newer continents, laid out hurriedly by Lindens for quick sales even as past continents filled with blight). This "Linden-Assisted Living," as it was dubbed, didn't really take off until the Lindens made bigger homes with even prettier landscaping in Bellisseria, then Fantasseria and Sakurasseria.
o Enter the BBB, a resident created RP group aspiring to be the bureaucracy that ran municipal services in Bellisseria which was then blessed to run various public events on Linden land and an exploration system with the stamp game, which included Mole or Linden builds, some new and expressly built for stamps, and some old, to which they were added. Alone among residents, this group now has a home on a 4096 m2 parcel with 936 prims and two rez areas surrounded by water, unlike ordinary mortals with only 1024 and 351 prims, often island. No commerce is permitted as this is banned in Bellisseria -- although very active groups expressly targeting Bellisseria events have enterprisingly figured out that the way to sales through Bellisseria is to create groups and events where freebies are distributed, and then spam people with sales IMs later. The stamps had to be vetted and accepted and a kiosk issued on a discretionary basis, which meant that the appearance of new locations was slower and more controlled. A second resident group appeared (Operation Mainland) with a more democratic system whereby essentially anyone could register and upload a stamp site and provide gifts, with stamps allowed at commercial sites. This quickly acquired many more sites and traffic but wasn't tended as well, had uneven quality especially on commercially-driven sites, and could be hard to navigate if you aren't facile at Google Docs.
o The Lindens endorsed NatureCon, an ambitious event to bring together all nature recreational/explorational groups mainly from the BBB and related circles with LDPW endorsement and participation and a system for build applications and booths which remained closed and at the discretion of the organizers. This event, coupled with the BBB stamp game, places an emphasis on "Bellisseria as premium account ownership for residences, Mainland as exploration and recreation," while steering it away from Mainland *residences* -- which spawns the need for more customer service and unleashes protests about the blight induced by ad farms and grid-wide would-be monopolists. If you only temporarily visit the Mainland on a controlled tier, what's to complain about?
o The Lindens tolerated the Get the Freight Out game (founded in 2016) which has deployed miles and miles of concrete trucking terminals across the grid, causing those nearby not to buy or to move out. There isn't any perceptible link between GTFO and LL -- possibly they aren't compliant enough -- and they do not appear to have been "blessed," but let's just say that unlike the breedables space, where there are plenty of other breedable companies besides KittyCats and Teegle horses, there aren't any other transportation games that have ever gotten started. Yes, this seemingly "free game" in which the players tier the land their huge concrete monsters are built on, does have a HUD and add-ons you have to buy to play. GTFO often appears with big ad billboards and near ad farms, and that precise relationship has been documented in some cases with GTFO management but also remains unclear.
For months on end, due to the Virtual Railroads Consortium leader Qie reselling some 16ms I had in fact given to him back in the day to GTFO operatives, I had a giant ugly ad billboard in the middle of the sim next to my rentals. So I built a brick wall on it. Another VCR operative put a "night watchman" with a chair on another 16m2 roadside and kept returning the (invisible) prim on a build of one of my tenants, mystifying him. I finally got Qie who I had always respected and found helpful to stop the specious prim returns, whatever their "encroachment," but the GTFO took a lot longer to get off the sim. It was most definitely the billboard of a GTFO owner, not leader, whose land was right next to their headquarters. There has been a changing cast of characters owning GTFO over the years, and one of the current owners and operators, Famous Dismantled, a fae, claims she is conccerned about 16m2 blight on the old Teen Grid (evidently she means the Sith obelisks -- agreed).
I also dealt with a witless booster of GTFO on the forums claiming that only "some" of the builds are warehouses when anyone can see with their two eyes all over the grid that MOST of the builds in this FREIGHT game are WAREHOUSES with acres of concrete. The fact that a few farmhouses or parks or whatever are mixed in to claim otherwise doesn't cut it. Again, I'm all for having "things to do" and I don't complain where I haven't bought the view. In Adscita, until I had to deal with Winning Witte's machinations, I turned my back to a GIANT and LAGGY GTFO hulking over the lake there and put out rentals which I ran for a few years more or less happily. But it is a buzz kill. That 2000 regular players in the group get to despoil the view and drive away residential lots for numerous sims across the grid is a key example of "tragedy of the commons". Long ago, the Lindens could have made zoned areas -- beach, urban, mountain, country, off-beat -- as The Sims Online did with naming categories of sims. Then GTFO could go on the urban sim along with all those giant tall buildings that ruined the value of Nautilus in its early days and forced me and tenants out after laying out $50,000 Lindens on the auction for a 1024. Of course they didn't have the staff for policing zoning, and weren't content to leaving it to the Gladys Kravitz's of SL to AR. Then came Bellisseria, where zoning is built in.
I will likely think up more, and so can you, but you can see the patterns. Monopolists aspiring either to crude money-making schemes -- or more typically, more sophisticated reputation-enhancement schemes that lead to social influence and power -- get the Lindens' ear (within the staff, among residents-turned-Lindens, or residents chosen by Lindens for that "successful failure" combination of "competence but compliance."
Fortunately, entire swathes of Mainland (not to mention the bulk of the grid, private islands) remain out of the reach of the Monopolists and the Influencers, especially in the non-English speaking world, and there are still wild and untilled vistas where you can build your dream. For how long?
04 10:41:49 2017)listen up cunt read tos harrasment you been reported 5 times [14:38] Davld Pearl: (Saved Mon Dec 04 10:44:50 2017)Harassment
Given the myriad capabilities of Second Life, harassment can take many forms. Communicating or behaving in a manner which is offensively coarse, intimidating or threatening, constitutes unwelcome sexual advances or requests for sexual favors, or is otherwise likely to cause annoyance or alarm is Harassment. [14:38] Davld Pearl: (Saved Mon Dec 04 10:45:02 2017) https://community.secondlife.com/forums/topic/403539-community-standards/ [14:42] Prokofy Neva: This is a griefer obviously, and has nothing to do with me. Do you have any common sense? What sane person in business for 12 years would have "advertisements" using day-old racist bots?! http://3dblogger.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2017/11/a-reminder-that-no-i-dont-have-day-old-racist-griefers-spamming-ads-for-ravenglass-.html [14:42] User not online - message will be stored and delivered later. [21:12] Davld Pearl: your are an idiot spamming yoru shitty rentals instedad of paying for seach your causing lag and violating TOS [21:12] Prokofy Neva: Um, obviously it's not me, who would do that if they were in business for 12 years? Have some common sense [21:12] Prokofy Neva: abuse report the griefer and move on [21:13] Davld Pearl: how dare you jump om rental sims and do unwanted comrerencing I have and so has 40 tenants of mine [21:13] Prokofy Neva: http://3dblogger.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2017/11/a-reminder-that-no-i-dont-have-day-old-racist-griefers-spamming-ads-for-ravenglass-.html [21:13] Prokofy Neva: Uh...because it's not me doing it, it's a griefer impersonating me, get a grip [21:13] Davld Pearl: its you iys open your blog you run bots [21:13] Prokofy Neva: abuse report the account and the Lindens will remove it [21:13] Prokofy Neva: I do not run bots, in fact, I state I have no bot [21:14] Prokofy Neva: further more, that isn't a bot but just a griefer pretending to be one [21:14] Prokofy Neva: get a grip, abuse report it, and stop harassing me [21:14] Prokofy Neva: block/ban/report
This is a useful thread from VirtualVerse One to review and more systematically rebut when I have some time some day. I've copied it because they, like the Lindens, disappear content there often.
For one, it helps in making my case that the trans women community in SL, many of whose leaders are on Virtual Verse One now (the old Sluniverse) are utterly intolerant of anyone who changes their gender in any way that they haven't approved of. They are horrid exemplars of totalitarianism. If you think your condo board or your office performance committee is authoritarian, wait until you see these people.
They also curiously imagine that if someone hasn't transitioned in the way they imagine, and hasn't had surgery, let alone cross-dressed in SL, that they must have some psychiatric issue, some "dysphoria," or something wrong with them.
It's amazingly hard to change your avatar's gender in SL for this reason, in any direction. The wall of intolerance, the wall of hatred and harassment from people who themselves say they have been harassed all their lives is just astounding!
In RL, I've given birth to three children, one of whom died, and I have had a number of surgeries over the years for various conditions, some related to my rare immune disease, and I can't imagine anything worse -- for me -- than going for any kind of surgery at all. I've never gone to a surgery, and emerged better off than when I went in. It's always worse. That's just my own personal preferences. We get to have those, right? Or we don't? Even if I had no personal history of other medical surgery, I would never wish to perform that surgery, and that's fine, correct? Or are you medical totalitarians like Mengele and Sudoplatov?
If someone wants to have any and all surgeries to transition from one gender to another to a gender they believe is inherent (and which I am happy to accept as inherent for them), that's their call. Why would this same set of people get to harass and heckle and bully other people who either didn't make this choice for themselves, or due to their traditional beliefs, can't accept it? Eventually people with old-fashioned beliefs die out. I don't know anybody reliant on a horse and carriage now. But if you need to hasten their demise and bully them into non-existence, yes, you are totalitarian.
I'm not interested in changing my gender in RL just to have an SL avatar of the opposite gender. Listen to yourselves! Do you really think that is required? Do you really think we are not free?! Why did I choose a male avatar in SL? As I explained for Designing Worlds: because I can. That really is all the reason anyone needs or should require. We get to change our genders in SL. Have you?
But...If you criticize tech bros; if you criticize the open source cult; if you criticize big or small tech (something I had no company doing 20 years ago, but have plenty now), it means you have just lost all your rights, if you ever had them. Criticism of tech -- which has many, many features that are eminently open to criticism -- doesn't mean you are stripped of your right to change your gender or not change your gender, or PS to have privacy in RL, something that all these people feel has always been fine to deprive me of for "higher reasons," namely, my criticism of tech.
If you criticize the high priests of our little world, or the tech world at large, these harpies believe that OF COURSE you have to be hounded, harried, doxxed, and exposed as punishment. OF COURSE. You lose your rights.
Today, those immersed in the transgender movement have a term for this: "transmedicalists". See, there's a term for everything. I personally don't make any of this my cause, when there's been the war in Ukraine for the last 8 years, my more immediate and I think deserving focus. I mean, paragraphs like this have about three too many buzz terms I'd need to look up for me to play:
Maybe I’ve just become more aware of it recently, but there seems to have been a rise in the amount and vehemence of people identifying as transmedicalists/truscum online, which is an ideology stating that people have to experience dysphoria to be transgender, though the severity of the ideology varies, to the extent some people think you have to be binary and want every kind of medical intervention possible in order to “pass” to be really trans. And many of the people who believe this make it their life’s work to harass trans people who don’t fit their idea of what a “real trans person” is — for instance, Kalvin Garrah (a truscum youtuber)’s multiple lengthy videos on gothfruits (a non-binary transmasculine gender non-conforming makeup artist/youtuber) calling him a transtrender.
Of course these authors I'm quoting would never use the term "trans totalitarianism" as I do, but that's how I see it. I could gather enormous numbers of examples of how this has worked in SL, where I first recognized, and on social media, where we can all see it now. Some of them are in this thread.
Under this rigid totalitarian cult, if you once had a female avatar (I don't recall any avatar named "Elizabeth" at all and I don't think one ever existed), why, you are not allowed to have a male one, and you must then "shut up" if someone exposes this. Even if someone produces some screenshot with me in an avatar with the name "Elizabeth," so what? Everybody has alts. I have my name. His pronouns are he/him. You do believe in pronouns, right? Or not? Or you believe some people who don't believe as you do get their pronoun rights stripped away? Then, you are totalitarians.
TORLEY IN WATERHEAD IN 2004
In 2004, I remember going to the Waterhead telehub. I had on a pilot's outfit I believe I got from Cubey's venue. That avatar had a female appearance -- I had a variety of avatar shapes and outfits I had experimented with when I first came to SL -- one African female got enormous attention from the Herald at the time -- but then I picked the male avatars because I wished to do so. You get to do that in SL.
So at Waterhead, I ran into an old friend from TSO and she remarked that I had a female avatar, which I rarely had had in TSO, where my main and alts were male, and I said, oh, yes, that's the one today, but I don't think I'll keep it, etc. Nearby was sitting Torley Linden, at that time Torley the resident, playing Mahjong with another resident whose name I don't recall.
Torley on her alts, or Cienna Samiam (Cienna with other last names) as an alt of Torley, or whoever that resident sitting with her at that time, would then endlessly invoke this incident as if it were some kind of "gotcha". They would never admit they were a Linden, then or now. They would never admit that they were a friend of a Linden, then or now. They would replay this incident over and over on the forums as if this was some kind of grand expose.
Imagine doing that. Imagine Lindens being like that (they were and are). Torley is a male who had a female avatar and another RL male who had a female avatar as a partner. THAT was the root of the animosity -- the greatest chorus of haters and totalitarians I've experienced frantic to misgender me are totalitarian trans women in SL.
When she became a Linden, Robin Linden insisted that Torley remove her partnership. (If it were me, I wouldn't have become a Linden then, but people need to work and live.) Soon enough that took a toll on that relationship when she agreed to do so to become a Linden. That person, who, unlike Torley was always nice to me, later married a woman in RL. That vicious Cienna, who made eyeglasses that were about the only ones available in SL and who was immensely popular, endlessly heckled and harassed me on the forums and inworld on the mistaken belief that she had some kind of "gotcha" merely because I didn't choose to reveal my RL gender when I began SL and didn't choose to note that I remembered exactly what incident she was invoking. Later, my identity was forcibly dragged from me by both the Herald (whose editor was mad that I criticized his take on TSO in the New York Times) and by the forums, with Lindens approvingly presiding. I'm going to describe this in more detail soon, it's important.
You can change your gender in SL -- but only if you hang with the posse and obey their rigid, totalitarian rules. I choose not to.
CRITICIZE THE ELITE AND LOSE YOUR RIGHTS
It's helpful to remember why the vicious mob on the old forums, some of whom remain today, decided I "needed" to have my RL identity and gender "outed," something which I always took in stride, "making lemonade out of lemons." I'm not anonymous. You are.
It's because I criticized the privileged insider relationship that some of the scripters, designers, and other kinds of "creatives" and devs had with Linden Lab, a system I called "the Feted Inner Core" or "FIC". I criticized them for obtaining inside knowledge of discounted sims, always obtaining media interviews when the media contacted LL to the exclusion of others, obtaining endorsements for their businesses, winning contests and saying later that it was because no one else applied -- and so on.
To their credit, later, LL cleaned up some of this obvious favouritism and graft from the early days, when 1/3 of the staff came from the user base so it was a revolving door of insider privilege and commerce circles elevated to staff powers. But back then, these people wanted to get revenge. A Linden falsely told a resident, based on reading my RL name on my account and Googling me (a gross breach of resident privacy for which that Linden should have been fired), that I was on alimony and wealthy and sitting with the box wine all day dabbling on SL. I've never been on alimony and had only modest child support from my partner with whom I have raised our children over the years and I've never bought a box wine in my life.
Other Google witch hunters, or that one, decided I was a journalist who had been fired from a newspaper for plagiarism and announced solemnly to the forums that I was "indicted for RL crime". Of course, plagiarism in academic and journalism isn't exactly a "crime," but it is actionable. But...I have never been accused of, or have been found guilty, of plagiarism. The problem is that I have a very common name. The people with my exact same name, even including the middle initial, even with the same age and location, have done all kinds of things -- worked for the State Department, worked for other government agencies, worked for Greenpeace or worked in journalism or worked or had very public messy divorces. None of them are me.
EXCEPTIONS FOR THE RULERS
Most of all, I criticized and exposed these people for never getting disciplined on the forums. Ulrika Zugzwang, among the founders of "socialism on one sim" in SL, copied my forum avatar and turned it into a bloody exploded head, and made that into her own forums avatar. Nothing could be done about it. It was "creativity" or "parody". But when I said Aimee Weber's name was "like" a cheerleader's name, one of those people who put little hearts as the dots above their "is," I was permabanned. These children, some of them directly related to the Lindens, were terribly thin-skinned! And still are. The nearly 20 years they've had to grow up hasn't helped one bit.
Today, when friends of the Lindens get to have their virtual wedding in a new community center in Fantasseria, when the BBB gets a 4096 and double prims for their RP game in Bellisseria, when certain businesses are touted in front page videos and blogs and others ignored, causing forums drama, I don't have to explain about the favouritism system at all. If only if were just a favouritism system! If only it didn't also involve selective Governance inaction, and even the enabling of griefing of dissidents who won't worship at the altar of the selected ones, and call out their grift. I think some of you have no idea what it's like to live in a world where you see the Lindens hanging out and partying with people who have constantly griefed you and crashed your sim.
The other point is that I have never worked for the US government or any government as any kind of "agent" or staff person or analyst. I was a freelance translator and news writer as a contractor for RFE/RL, which is a US Congressionally-funded set of radio stations and web sites broadcasting abroad. It properly has "state media" as a label on Twitter. It was and is a tremendously valued resource. That it was funded by the CIA at its origins in the 1950s, and was closed in the 1970s when I was in junior high school as part of a general whistleblowing on CIA support of various US organizations, is irrelevant to my career today or even 30 years ago. When you work for these kinds of agencies, or Russian state TV as a translator, which I did for a time at a NYC TV station, it doesn't mean you are a government agent. And most of my jobs have been for non-profit organizations, and this is all a matter of public record. I'm not suffering from some kind of angst or nostalgia from "my days as a Soviet analyst" because a) this isn't the kind of job I had -- journalism isn't government analysis -- and because I've always had jobs up to the present related to the post-Soviet space, which of course, has many features that grew out of the Soviet Union.
I wish more of these kids would study the history of the Comintern to understand the origins and methods of their beloved Anti-Fa movement as well.
Weatherwax, who is evidently a failed creator who left SL for a time and now has re-spawned as a live musician, falsely denounced the makers of gatchas as greedy grifters. He got static not only from me, who will be the elephant who never forgets on this one, and partially beat a retreat, and remains a non-entity.
Prok? Now there's a name I haven't heard in a long time.
I think trolling Prok into a meltdown is a rite of passage in SL. Most of the time you never hear of Prok, but when you do run into her, even if you aren't naturally a troll, it's just too hard to resist messing with her a bit. She just brings out the inner troll in regular people.
Don't worry about the clubs, David. Nobody will take her seriously at those venues. Every time I've seen you, you've put on a great show. No club owner who knows what they're doing will ditch a performer like you over Prok's weird drama. If they do, just tell the FIC about it, that'll show em! LOL
sounds like I'm blessed to not know who the hell this person is...
Prokofy Neva, Salome calls her the Crazy Cat Lady of SL. Hates anyone more successful or popular than her, calls them FIC. Also hates Linux users and MTF transfolk. Don't call her she, he uses a male avatar. I suspect Prok is a self-hating FTM. Prok is one of the few SL users I've WANTED to troll when I see her. Basically I'd call her Comrade and wave around a kitschy Soviet flag that plays the soviet anthem on Kazoo. Not that I've actually done it, I've just wanted to do it.
I only know about him indirectly, from forum stuff, but that's enough. When I was land shopping once I noticed the plot next to the one I was looking at ease one of his. I noped out of there.
...Also hates Linux users and MTF transfolk. Don't call her she, he uses a male avatar. I suspect Prok is a self-hating FTM.
ewwwwwwwwww, nothing I can't stand more than people in oppressed groups who think they should be a special exception to their own bigotry... Kind of like gay men who hate lesbians and feminists or immigrants who want to shut the door behind them.
ewwwwwwwwww, nothing I can't stand more than people in oppressed groups who think they should be a special exception to their own bigotry... Kind of like gay men who hate lesbians and feminists or immigrants who want to shut the door behind them.
Noted and edited. He may be a jerk, but I'm not OK with misgendering. Da5id, what did you say that set him off? I couldn't find it. Was it one of the ones that Kristen Linden removed?
Noted and edited. He may be a jerk, but I'm not OK with misgendering. Da5id, what did you say that set him off? I couldn't find it. Was it one of the ones that Kristen Linden removed?
Until that one (Prok) directly states that they are - indeed - Trans, you are not misgendering whatsoever.
I am amazed. I thought Prokofy left a long time ago. Maybe he just stopped posting on the forums. I see he is still a land-lord, running Ravenglass Rentals. It is not that easy to run a mainland rental, because you don't have the privacy and control of a private Second Life island.
I've been using Grumpy Cat "Good" quite often lately.
Prok is Prok, If I was running LL I'd have banned her from the forum AND the grid years ago....like 2006.
Prokofy Neva, Salome calls her the Crazy Cat Lady of SL. Hates anyone more successful or popular than her, calls them FIC. Also hates Linux users and MTF transfolk. Don't call her she, he uses a male avatar. I suspect Prok is a self-hating FTM. Prok is one of the few SL users I've WANTED to troll when I see her. Basically I'd call her Comrade and wave around a kitschy Soviet flag that plays the soviet anthem on Kazoo. Not that I've actually done it, I've just wanted to do it.
The only time I've ever interacted with Prok, was on a walk around Mainland, led by Cubie. Prok didn't say much but was quite civil and quietly participated in the walk.
I didn't understand what was happening then , and I certainly have no more clue today, but it's always been one of my strongest memories , reminding me we can't always predict what will happen in SL.
He was banned from SLU, and because of that, Cris asked that we not discuss Prok in our forums since any discussion was one-sided. Aside from the occasional oblique reference, we pretty much held to that line.
Yes, you can combat Copybot, although not in the ways you imagine, and the knowier-than-though geeksplainer -- Contraption's scripter -- on this subject actually don't have it all right, either. Particularly outrageous is the idea that his notion of "best practices" that he's pulled out of his posse's trading-post culture will work. I'll light a prayer candle to St. Jude, thank you, Patron Saint of Lost Causes. PS The notion that you could combat Copybot in 2006 because the viewer was closed leaves out the part about how it was crowbarred open by libsl reverse-engineering it, leading to Copybot in the first place.
If you find it hard to read anything longer than a tweet or a short thread or anything bigger than your hand, it's unlikely that this text will help you to understand the all-important SOCIAL history of Copybot and how it was fought, but then, it was always beyond your ken, anyway.
The Copybot of 2006 copied prims and sculpties; mesh didn't exist yet. The mechanism for this function wasn't the same as the function of today's Copybot which copies mesh. It doesn't matter. The nature of the mechanism is not the issue.
Top content kings like the people of Contraption can't really imagine what it is like living in the lower depths of the SL economy and the "long tail," as much as Walton styles himself as a helper of the little guy, and his arrogant scripter -- who thinks he can substitute his imagined best practice as law when code-as-law fails him (!) -- likely can't imagine what it is like trying to make a living in SL as one of the "people with no talent," either. I can, and I can only watch as my tenants and others do this; I never quit that day job. I'd advise them not to do so, either.
When the Copybot of 2006 happened, there was first an interesting series of events that the biased account from Glyn Moody, himself a copyleftist and extremist on these issues (although compelled to be more measured when filing copy for certain more mainstream tech magazines) only partially reports the story of the wielders of Copybot.
libsl was a group in SL of reverse engineers, or as those of us trying to run small businesses or live our little second lives called them, perverse engineers. They reverse-engineered the viewer not because they altruistically wanted to find bugs and help their beloved Lindens as fanboyz, although there was some of that, but because they wanted to terrorize anyone who didn't want to use Second Life -- or the Internet in general -- as they believed it should be used in their radically fanatic software cult. They particularly hated people who wanted to use SL for commerce, in virtuality or reality; to use it for religious meetings or self-help meetings or education; to use it even for a critical discussion group on the nature of SL itself. They griefed and harassed and destroyed all these activities mercilessly in the way Something Awful, WHat, 4chan, Voter5, etc. do in the Internet at large, often accompanied by outrageous racist, sexist, homophobic, antisemitic, obscene, and grotesque textures spewed as particle spam across sims. I doubt Walton Wainright ever had to spend days on end getting [email protected]#[email protected]#[email protected] textures rapidly spewed into his inbox so he couldn't even log on by the same people who created the Phoenix, then Emerald, then Firefox viewers. (Yes, I'm aware that history is erased, and the current devs think all these projects are separate).
So first, in a staged operation, knowing that my blog was among the most popular at the time with high traffic (hardly the case today, 16 years later), they sent a script kitty to tell me lurid tales of a new invention that could completely and instantly copy avatars, their clothing, and attachments -- and proceeded to do so before my eyes. I think even Walton, with his identically-dressed adoring fans arrayed around him in one of his tableaux, might be shocked to suddenly see 100 identical versions of himself overpopulating and then crashing a sim. I was deliberately told this was a project of a then-popular consulting agency, one of the "Big Six" of the day (none of which exist anymore), the Electric Sheep, and that they needed to copy avatars in full for a RL client who with a clothing store. Later, this was corrected to say only one of their number had a client who wanted to put on a rock show on shards, with identical band players and dancers on every shard (sim); still later this was amended to merely some staff who crossed over to membership in libsl as well prototyping and bug-testing. As a journalist, I got at least three sources; at least two were in libsl; another was a known griefer with relevant information; two I met in RL; a fourth had to be discounted once he told me he had been deliberately paid to misinform me. Sadly, completely separately, one died in a car accident in RL.
A lot of money was at stake in those days when the likes of IBM, CBS, Coca-Cola, Sears, etc. all came into SL, all bought sims, all hired the top designers -- something I complained about to the NYT in that era because the world was dealt a severe blow from which it never recovered. SL became not a world, but a platform; the talented people who bootstrapped themselves to livelihoods and made money for themselves and the Lindens were stepped on, hard. Only a select few of them -- and as in RL, not necessarily the most talented, but the most connected -- were hired by the RL companies, who sucked them away from the world, leaving it the worse. And it wasn't an accident that this happened because a consultant for big-name clients was cynical about the world and -- as the expression generated at the time had it -- indifferent to the suffering of "little dressmakers".
It's hard to convey to cynical and literalist programmers or designers with their nose in blender and convos in Discord who rarely touch the earth of the Mainland what a shock and horror this was at the time. Most life still occurred on the Mainland, where everything from griefing to grey goo to rumours to fashions rippled quickly across the contiguous simulators unchecked.
When griefers deliberately came in and started copying entire people's avatars and outfits inworld, it spread panic and fear and hatred -- but in fact, the cohort exactly like the griefers (and intermixed with them) -- graphic designers who were also technical experts and in some cases programmers and scripters -- quickly organized to combat this menace. The first thing that an organized group of merchants did was organize a strike of sorts. They locked down all their stores, refused to sell anything, and put up CLOSED DUE TO COPYBOT signs, and assembled for visible demonstrations at the telehubs and welcome areas.
At that time I didn't make anything myself, but in solidarity with all the merchants in my multiple malls, I enabled "no access" on groups (something I never do in my rentals), so that no one could enter the stores (I had more of them then because commerce took place in them in ways it doesn't know, since the advent of the MP and the large shopping events). Many creators began using what they thought was an effective antidote, a spam script that sent a string of text that ended in "quit!" -- which was supposed to force the Copybot to stop. It didn't work much of the time.
The strike grew and people began to complain vocally to the Lindens and the crisis was covered in the blogs and Alphaville Herald, the top resident online newspaper of the day. It was a smaller world, and the Lindens didn't adopt the pose they often did with certain exigencies in the world -- for example, saying they "couldn't" deprecate the bounce script used by Psy and other security merchants to teleport people home merely for flying near somebody's private home -- because they "needed it for elevators" -- of which there were about...two...in SL at the time. (In fact, remarkably, first Philip Linden conceded that the obnoxious script should be deprecated when he saw its effects; then his own staff rolled him because as I've often commented, the Lindens never met a script they didn't like (they love scripting creativity) and because the top resident forums and photo site, beloved also by Lindens of that era, were funded by the maker of the bounce script.
The Lindens, like Walton's literalist scripter sent out to make more public pronouncements today, even disagreeing with Walton's concession about some uses for these scripts, could have held town halls and workshops patiently explaining to their user base -- their beta testers and early adapters who had handed over thousands of dollars to them for sims and content, from which they took a percentage in LindEx sales by that time -- that nothing could be done. On the Internet, not only nobody knows you're a dog; dogs can copy your stuff because if you can see it, you can copy it (a phenomenon known then as "the analog hole"). Of course not only could anyone screenshot a texture and copy it; more relevantly, they could use a device like Copybot on a rogue viewer (this was the dawn of third-party viewers and they had not been accepted yet by LL which did not formally open source its viewer until January 2007) simply to copy quickly an entire avatar, and entire house, an entire vehicle - oh, except the scripts. The scripts, if they were on no-mod and no-transfer, could not be copied because they were server-side. This gave scripters a corporate advantage over other kinds of creators which continues to give them an arrogance all out of proportion to their actual social value.
PEVERSE ENGINEERS
So what did the Lindens do to combat Copybot? Obviously they had a number of urgent -- and private -- talks with libsl, which their COO, Cory Ondrejka -- had encouraged privately and even publicly at various SL and RL meet-ups, to the chagrin of some of us who felt that reverse-engineering of the viewer -- technically banned under the TOS -- shouldn't be something that a few special friends of the Lindens get to do, who -- like Eddie Haskell on Leave It to Beaver -- say "Gee, Mrs. Linden, such a lovely dress!" as they stick out a foot to trip us up and make us fall and crash our sims.
If you think griefing is just a lark, if you think you solve it by ban tools or closed groups or closing your island, I think you have no idea what it is like to be endlessly targeted by people who can circumvent those tools. I do. And when you read the comments of the word-salad chefs, you realize the chief feature about them: they lie.
Many people think that you shouldn't give trolls air time; that you shouldn't publicize griefing because it only encourages them; I don't, as a person relentlessly griefed for my outspoken criticism of the tech bro class and as a person who had changed my gender in SL, I knew that as in RL, you had to publicize abuses or they only grew worse. You had to document them, take names, file abuse reports, publicize them, and while it took awhile, justice would eventually prevail. And it did.
The Lindens decided to declare that Copybot was illegal. It wasn't just a fun sandbox tool to do "debugging"; it wasn't just something that people who took themselves too seriously should "get over"; if it didn't affect all the economy (weapons makers always do well in any season), it was still very wrong and threatened the Lindens' bottom line. They understood that, even if the hackers didn't -- and still don't.
And libsl, which included some people who either worked in RL tech jobs or who worked as consultant to big companies in SL realized that they looked bad if they seemed to be destroying the world and ruining its capacity for creativity and commerce.
So the first thing that happened, and likely at the Lindens' prompting, is that John Hurliman (eddie Stryker in SL), stepped down from the head of libsl. If you still have doubts that he was the engineer of Copybot, do some Googling, it's not a secret. Like some politicians leave to "spend time with their families," Hurliman said "all he wanted to do was code" and didn't want the "drama".
That the drama was inspired by griefers who used his took as intended and not "not as intended" wasn't admitted, although every script kiddie and WHat loser in SL grabbed it to harass people and actually steal and flip content. "Business in a box" appeared all over with hot property and the fences, if banned, merely retrieved the copies from the group notices or sandboxes where their friends hung out, some of whom were always careful to keep their hands clean to help perpetuate the gangs' activities.
"WHERE'S DAD?"
I once went to a tech conference in San Diego where one evening a group of us had an intensive and interesting conversation with famed game designer Raph Koster, in which we tried to get him to appreciate not-a-game SL, and he laid out his plan for making a better open-ended game world (which he did do and ran for awhile before it folded and he did many other things). There was a shy, overweight young man -- a teenager -- sitting on the edge of the group, never talking. Finally, as people began to drift away, he came up to me and introduced himself as the griefer who had shown me copybot. It turned out that he literally lived in his mom's basement. I didn't ask "Where's Dad." He did some sort of work and paid her part of the rent. He acknowledged his griefing escapades.
"Why?" I asked.
"Because the Internet poisoned my soul," he said -- sincerely.
Of course, now our entire society lives with this poisoning, that still might have been stopped 20 years ago, but that's a topic for another blog post.
THE FIRST RULE OF FIGHT CLUB...
The next thing that libsl did -- again, not as a coded, mechanical activity but a social, organic activity, if you will, was to make a rule for their club. Only core devs could be in their group. If someone wasn't a core dev -- and presumably peer-reviewed in some sense or kept honest by those who wished to be decent and not steal from others -- they couldn't be in the group.
Now, we totally get it that this hardly stopped the proliferation of the code called "Copybot," which sits on github or whatever to this day. We're not stupid. But these two actions -- changing the head of the group, and cleaning up the membership -- went a long way to restoring faith in the group (of course, not by me, who had personally and severely and repeatedly been griefed by these criminals).
When the Lindens declared Copybot "illegal," of course they couldn't catch every log-on. Whatever hashmarks or identifying features of IP addresses there were could be easily undone by anonymizing or by the Lindens' agnosticism -- if someone logged on from a cornfield in Nebraska, whom we knew to be a griefer because they wrote obscenities on our blog and their IP addressed traced to that cornfield, the Lindens would claim that maybe it was a dorm or a house in which multiple people were logging on, and you couldn't punish all of them. The Lindens refused to block anonymizer addresses, saying that freedom fighters from Iran might be logging on (they showed perhaps 2-3 people, likely foreign journalists or government officials who managed to log on at that time). Corner cases, thy name is Linden.
The Lindens and their code-cave denizens have always been impossible to deal with for us norms, although they have become somewhat more civilized over the years as their staff is recruited not from the user base or "the Internet," but from companies like Microsoft, IBM. Amazon, etc. Today, Cory Ondrejika works at Meta heading up the mobile team; Hurliman runs his own robotics company. Creative! Geeks! They rule our world! Better Living Through Codistry!
TRIANGULATION
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the Lindens used other methods to stamp out Copybot. It wasn't rocket-science. The same people who used Copybot, with that invisible or anonymized log-on, were still in certain groups. They still had all those anime and Bronies etc fetishes. They were still in the same sandboxes or at the same Vore clubs. Even as the world got bigger, you could find them because they victory-danced, that is, they always bragged about their exploits in the IRC channel if not in group chat inworld, and someone with a conscience would eventually AR them. Or they would crash enough sims, and harass enough people even outside the group of me and my tenants, that finally the Lindens had to permaban them and seize their islands. They did this multiple times as they kept coming back on alts, with various Medicis bank-rolling their "transgressive behaviour".
FIRESTORM IS EVERYWHERE
So fast forward to today. Yes, I live in 2022 quite solidly thank you, not in World War I in the steampunk era, actually. How could you combat Firestorm, which rules the world in more diverse and deep ways even than Casper, the Friendly Monopolist Vendor?
Look up all the groups they have in multiple languages, with multiple purposes, totally infiltrated throughout the entire user base even more than the Lindens who essentially gave up their non-English orientation work, once so robust that they even had offices in other countries.
When confronted by reporters like me, Oz Linden would claim the Lindens "couldn't know" what percentage of log-ons were from Firestorm because the same person might use both viewers. Or that dorm room in Nebraska in fact was really only one person with a bunch of alts. Why, IP addresses dynamically change. Blah blah.
Of course they really know and we all know that it is probably at least 90% or more of the population. Only newbies, critics like me, and a few animesh avatar creators who need to test on multiple viewers ever use the bog-standard SL viewer.
SAVING SEARCH AND SHOPPERS
One of the chief reasons is that Oz and company killed search back at the dawn of 2.0 in about 2012, and continued to cripple it especially in the last two years. Meanwhile, Firestorm kept it as it was in 1.23, imagine that, these "people who live in 2022" who are "not stuck back in the dark ages with Copybot I" kept an old viewer's search arrangement because it was better, and helped shoppers more, and that made our economy. If they hadn't existed, you'd have to invent them to save the world, as the Lindens acquired a religious fervour about their mangled search that we can only explain by some curious internal development like the way they ruined their auctions by buying the ebay guy's auction software instead of using the original inhouse version they had, which was better as it showed who had bid, how much, and who won, and kept a record. Now all of that is missing, and even the winning bid disappears after a week (which is why I try to save some of them at the castle in Sylvia).
The huge debacle caused by the Phoenix-Emerald-Firefox DDoS attack, for which Fractured Crstyal is blamed (but for my bird, Lonely Bluebird was always the more sinister gangster; Fractured was just a teenager) also got the Lindens to finally clean up the third-party viewer mess.
The Firefox team of today some of whom remain from that era constantly tell you that these different versions of the viewer are separate, that you can't speak of them collectively, but when Phoenix dies, and the next thing is named Firefox -- the fire from which the phoenix arises -- and that name still appears everywhere on their literature, you don't have to be Sherlock Holmes.
Like policemen who try to solve old cases by pinning them on a newly-arrested crook, the devs try to put all the blame on Emerald and a few devs. But we've been to the sandboxes because we were griefed from them and we've watched all the victory-dances on the YouTubes where all the name tags were visible. So let's not be children here.
Yes, that's my RL head in effigy, eating the Emerald logo on the eve of Emerald's banning. These children were obsessed with me merely because I AR'd them and publicized their antics to expose their endless lies and claims of innocent "debugging".
At any rate, the viewer was used to ensnare its unwitting users in a DDoS attack to make a point in some sandbox fight, and Pathfinder Linden (who plotted in the IRC channel to get me banned, another sensational story of the early years) scolded the boys that you just can't abuse your customers or web sites in that manner. Those directly responsible got permabanned; those who held the cloaks remained to victory dance.
WHO THREW WHOM?
Fast forward another half decade or more and there is only me to remember any of this, and all of it is utterly sanitized. The Lindens held very tense pow-wows with the Firestorm gang, and it's not clear who threw whom. Either party was capable of throwing the other and destroying the world to make a point, I suppose. Somehow they reached a deal. The Lindens insisted on a cooperation agreement, a kind of treaty. There was a list of demands the FS devs didn't want to meet. Possibly they demanded RL names and locations that some of their griefers didn't want to yield. The Lindens muscled them and they finally knuckled as others before them. Telehub mall land barons anyone? VAT taxed?
Today, Firestorm continues to be used to Copybot. The Firestorm devs claim they can't stop it, as you can see from their routine answer to my routine question just to see if they still say the same thing.
Our software is opensource. There is nothing we can do to mitigate users modifying our code except to close source our code. And that is not possible without violating license agreements and user trust.
— The Firestorm Viewer (@PhoenixViewerSL) July 7, 2022
But taking a page from the 2006 book, if Copybot grew more extreme and widespread -- and I don't think it is at this time but we are always only one crisis way from the collapse of our little world -- the Lindens could, in theory, if the situation warranted:
o demand that Firestorm CEO Jessica Lyon step down, and another CEO be found who can better rein in their goons -- and goons are their best customers, and the "users modifying our code" because they can't control their crime;
o demand that the Firestorm team create a core dev group in which others are not invited and not cleared -- obviously that leaves those Self-Compilers of Firestorm and other free agents to do what they wish but at least there is some optical effort at quality control -- optics matter, as generations of Linden PR people will tell you;
o through social ostracizing, group expulsion, land bands, etc. the people who persist in developing Firestorm in non-transparent ways or using it for non-transparent and criminal purposes (Pantera says she knows the forums where they all hang out and has urged me to go tell them not to be bad anymore; to which I can only say "No, you" -- because it's YOUR viewer and YOU are responsible;
o if this doesn't work, block Firestorm from logging on to SL.
Now, would the Lindens do this?
I can only say: watch them.
The high-end creators who sneered and heckled and harassed the makers of gatchas -- some of the finest craftspeople in SL and head and shoulders above the elites simply as people in some cases -- imagine "it can never happen to them".
I'd invite you to think clearly about the Gatchapocalypse. No RL prosecutor or legal authority of any kind in the state of California -- where it matters, because the US is a republic with states' rights and the state law on gambling is what matters -- had indicated in any way, shape, or form that gatchas were in any kind of violation. The lawsuits about children and lootboxes which are a different in phenomenon in games which were launched against Google and Apple failed. They failed.
Instead of taking an adversarial or even just practical attitude toward these developments, the Lindens, under their new owners, who included a politically-connected Harvard-trained lawyer and former US Trade official, decided to pre-emptively remove gatchas to "limit liability for litigation". There was no litigation. You can't say "But Japan" in California even if you have Japanese customers.
If you think they can't do that regarding a widespread IP theft issue, especially as they bring in more and more RL companies as they did in the past, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. Or jump, the viewer will catch you!
LAW AS LAW
Then there's another factor that people in the UK and elsewhere may not fully grasp, even though their own EU is bringing big tech to its knees these days. Section 230, the safe haven for big tech against any claims regarding the content on their servers, is more than likely to be redacted or even abolished.
Again, if you think laws that have been around, oh, for even 50 years, I invite you to look at Roe v. Wade and remember that in our common law system which is NOT LIKE your civil law system in X country, the interpretation brought by Dobbs can undo a federal law completely, devolving it back to the states. And here we all are.
You don't know. The electricity could go off or a comet might hit the planet.
But more to the point, your notion that "Copybot can't be stopped because Copybot can't be stopped because Science" is not immune to organic law and organic politics.
If top creators draw their wagons around them and tell the little dressmakers to go file a DMCA, or even offer magnanimously to help them (um, that doesn't scale, you do realize, right?), maybe that buys them some time, but ultimately, if enough people get angry or simply discouraged, either they leave SL completely, as quite a few merchants have done since the gatcha ban and then the application of the US sales tax and the cashout expenses, or they get more and more desperate and angry over copying, and they fight back.
CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE
You can't know that they may fight back with inserting anti-rez scripts in their clothing just to piss you off and keep you from their RP sim, even though they know how it works.
You can't know that they might not decide to boycott Firestorm en masse. There's always Alchemy or Catnip.
Of course, the Lindens are in very, very deep with Firestorm. Listen to any of these office hours and you might be horrified. There are more Lindens than residents in these meetings -- the residents don't even feel they need to bother to come. The summaries are on Inara Pey's blog later. The Lindens nearly grovel to theSE Firestorm devs, thanking them for fixing this or that thinglet. The Lindens apologize profusely -- you would think that Firestorm was holding office hours, and Linden fanboyz were coming to symp them.
Now, why doesn't LL just buy Firestorm? That is, Firestorm isn't "for sale," being such an altruistic volunteer open source bunch.
Why doesn't LL just retire its own viewer and pronounce Firestorm as the official viewer? After all, they buy Windlight or various other services for voice, etc. Why not the viewer? Since they can't turn back from having open sourced it back in the day.
Because they can't accept the liability of Copybot and any other criminal use of the viewer.
If they insisted on packing the core dev group, perhaps they could clean it up.
And it's not like there aren't other models for doing just that out there, for whatever reason. Look at Overte. A fork of the High Fidelity software (from Philip's company) decided to go non-profit, rather than commercial. The commercial part has likely formerly Lindens/High Fidelity staff in it -- they refuse to name them, which is of course irresponsible, but then they're coders.
What they are making, however, is a club. You have to be in the club if you want to be central to the development AND VOTE ON IT. (That touch was particularly nice; I presume they aren't going to just hum like the IEEE engineers, and unlike the JIRA, people will be able to vote "no" -- that's crucial).
Of course, when you hang a towel in the men's locker room in the gym, anyone can wipe their ass with it. And so the Overte people, like Firestorm "can't" control what happens to their open source wonder. And yet...and yet...they seem to have built an efficient hedge around it.
And yet...they are creating a cadre of responsibility around it which they have found necessary -- and we all know that it is vital for their to be TRUST in their world. Any open source world that doesn't have grown-ups and quality control in the form of at least a voluntary club of this nature ends up like Open Sim -- unpopulated. Let me suggest that they better make up their minds quick what their attitude is to IP theft. Open Sim failed there; so will they.
If you put permissions in your world, they have to be meaningful.
If the Copybot problem worsened, if Walton couldn't help all the little dressmakers, if the tide rose higher over people's heads, the Lindens might start taking actions. They might remove some of Firestorm's massive privileges, like all their access to newbies in their help islands, which of course brings them into their commerce circles.
So, once again, there are brand-new griefers impersonating me and a relationship to my rentals.
He has none.
I don't have employees with names like "TaktikaLenin2" which means "Lenin's Tactic 2". Please, don't be ridiculous. Another new one bothering me is called "Prokeye Resident".
I also don't use any bots whatsoever (sometimes they call themselves "bots"); I don't have employees with any version of my company name "Ravenglass".
The latest one is "RavenglassGreeter5 Resident". No such employee in my rentals.
Here's his typical stupid message -- unrelated to me:
(This is an automated message, I don't read responses) Tinkerbell is a nasty griefer who is exposed on my blog here: http://3dblogger.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2018/05/rental-dementia-our-dolphin-need-not-leap-when-we-are-not-here.html
I don't rent to griefers like him, I expose them aggressively across the grid! Griefers should take this as a warning. Liberals NOT WELCOME!
Prokofy Neva, Manager, Ravenglass Rentals. Questions about renting? Contact me here (your abusive IM is my permission to publish your chat): Prokofy Neva
Typical reply:
[09:59] Kreb Ansar: Yeah, I've encountered her before. She even attacked med on her blog. She's a mentally challenged, possibly schizofrenic old woman named Cathrine Fitzpatric. Heck of a troll on the forums apparently, horrible "rental" business with streams of angry ex-customers. She does this to make money.
Um, yeah, because spamming groups REAAALY works to get tenants --NOT! I'm neither schizophrenic or mentally challenged, but "Dave" may be with that spelling.
This one is writing the same script as before, just with a new name:
[14:46] TaktikaLenina2 Resident: Your name is Tyrone or Doris, and you're an ordinary resident? Rent from Prokofy Neva's Ravenglass Rentals today! We're in business in 14th year. We value conservative family values! #MAGA community! Build your own cottage! Weekly senior club! Artificial chicken farm! Note that hecklers and liberals aren't welcome. Your abusive message is permission to publish your chat! Contact us here Prokofy Neva to get your very own CHEAP cottage from only 2000L/week!
Not that it should matter, but I didn't vote for Trump; I voted for Hillary. I'm a registered Democrat.
Why people think a day-old idiot with a stupid name has a relationship to me, a rentals agent in good standing in SL for 14 years, merely because my name is invoked, is beyond me.
Or that such a stupid message would actually get you customers -- insane. Yet people believe this because they are primed for hate.
Do abuse-report the griefer. If you can't grasp this isn't related to me, abuse report me, too. The Lindens will sort it out. As they have the last dozen or so griefers of this type, all of whom have been removed from SL.
UDPATE: After I do posts like this, the impersonators then become more recursive and then start quoting this blog when they spam groups. The concept of the jackboot endlessly stamping on the face, really or virtually, is one dear to their hearts.
Several victims of the spamming have noted that they come on a sim and capture the names of everyone within 512 m, and then spam them by making a conference call with them.
Imo the turn over isn't that high, my little marketplace shop racks in a messy 1.5-2K L$ range a day while one of their held land, beach block too, has been sitting there for sale for over three month.
Maybe me jinxing it has an effect, IDK.
No. And if your business model depends on "jinxing" others, it is immoral and likely a TOS violation can be found to report you.
What you have to understand about a big operation like LIFE is rentals math, which I'm not sure you understand.
To look at one piece of land and say about it "wow, they are losing money selling it at that price when no one buys it, why I can run circles around them selling my little 512s" -- it's just fallacious. Because you aren't seeing their HUGE operation.
It's like in RL, companies buying in bulk and selling when the market warrants it, and warehousing it otherwise.
It is cheaper for a big landlord paying bulk tier, especially if they have a further Linden bulk discount which many of them have, beyond the group 10% or the bulk discount available after $195 tier -- to simply leave land for sale at a high price.
Why?
Because the tier they have to pay on that land -- even for months at at time -- is NOT going to be higher than the high price they charge for land. So they can STILL make a profit.
Look at ALL their sales on the many sims they own and you will see that the higher price they get pays tier and leaves them a profit; their keeping up prices also rewards them. That's why they do this; that's why they stay in business and others don't.
Only very large operations can do this; Anshe Chung could do it. I'm not in the land-selling business but the occasional times when I want to sell a parcel, I can't afford to do that. Nor can you.
To pay tier months on end on land that "yields nothing". To wait 9 months or 18 months for it to sell. It wouldn't be practical or advisible at my low level or yours.
For a giant company, it is, as they help keep prices in general high when they do that, i.e on Zindra. There is nothing illegal about this; it is the market, albeit in the distorted form that SL takes as there are no longer any freely-available public data on these matters.
You don't know who wins the auction often; you can't see if they bid up the price (you could see this before) and adjust your own purchasing accordingly, and encourage others as well not to buy from people who deliberately jack up auctions. That used to happen; now it can't, there is no confirmation or information. Seeing what you see in world is not confirmation as land can flip and change hands rapidly with many buyers after an auction.
So again, the question is this: why the harassment of people who sell land in ways you don't like, and the implication you are going to "get them"? With a provocative post like this, and with the comments that pile up it?
If you don't like those high prices, don't buy them? You have WAY more choice than we had 13 years ago.
If the Lindens don't like this, then rather than allowing griefers and forums posters harass people, they need to make a policy and then deliver it. If they don't like large land holdings and monopolies, they can bar it on their servers for any reason or no reason in the TOS, the end.
They used to try to "get rid of" Anshe by printing so many new sims they figured she couldn't buy them all. They were wrong.
At this point, I would guess that anyone buying abandoned land appearing on the open auction is doing the Lindens a favour.
I myself advocate that abandoned land NOT be put on the open auction until FIRST those who LIVE ON THAT SIM can bid for it in a local auction or simply request it. I believe the Lindens should just set any land to sale to anyone who requests it, full stop. Their notion that there are all these people who should fairly have a bid at land next to you is totally misplaced. You're the best caretaker of land on YOUR sim and you should imply get it on request. ONLY THEN should it go to auction.
Lobby for reasonable policies like that instead of heckling people with signs, putting up nuisances to drive away buyers, posting harassment messages in the forums. It's not all your world, either. It belongs to all of us. The Lindens need to end their aversion to governance and put in a few simple policies to stop driving conflicts.
[18:45] RavenglassInformationBot3: (Saved Thu May 17 17:10:46 2018)Tinkerbell is a nasty griefer who is exposed on my blog here: http://3dblogger.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2018/05/rental-dementia-our-dolphin-need-not-leap-when-we-are-not-here.html -- I don't rent to griefers like him, I expose them aggressively across the grid! Griefers should take this as a warning. Prokofy Neva, Manager, Ravenglass Rentals. A high-quality and drama-free rentals business. Questions about renting? Contact me here: Prokofy Neva
UPDATE: Latest griefer alts removed by the Lindens -- which you delayed because you AR'd me instead of them. I've been in SL 13 years. They haven't been in SL even 13 days, most of them:
o DochNovojJery Resident - badly spelled Russian phrase that means "Daughter of New Wife"
o TheRussianBot Resident
o DeloLeninaZhivjot Resident
o taktikaLenina Resident -- it means "Lenin tactic" in Russian.
o ProkofyDeneuve Resident
It sends me its spam:
(Saved Thu Mar 08 17:42:42 2018)Rent from Prokofy Neva's Ravenglass Rentals today! In business in 13th year with Mainland communities. Self-service rentals, open group to start building, no waiting, refundable! FREEDOM! SL's greatest rental service! Contact Prokofy Neva to get your rental today. (Note: I'm a bot owned by Prokofy Neva; any questions should be directed to Prokofy Neva, not me, as I don't speak "human.")
[16:12] DochNovojJery: Rent from Prokofy Neva's Ravenglass Rentals today! In business in 13th year with Mainland communities. Self-service rentals, open group to start building, no waiting, refundable! FREEDOM! Note that hecklers, griefers, high-maintenance whiners and clueless gits aren't welcome. Your abusive message is permission to publish your chat! Come to Alston to check out our properties and get your very own CHEAP cottage from only 1000L/week! (NOTE: I'm a bot. My main account Prokofy Neva is currently suspended (Linden abuse of power), so contact Telehub Ross or Henry Hutchence for help with the rentals)
Ask yourself if a real person in business for 13 years in SL would spout crap like this, unlike a day-old alt? Or ANY ad like that?! WHO DOES THAT?! GET A CLUE!
I will be abuse-reporting anyone who sends me hateful messages as they can't grasp this is NOT MY BOT.
Some brighter people like Eli Schlegal get this? Some people like Rosso Vespucciano appear to be lying as I show no record of him as a tenant.
[09:13] Eli Schlegal: You're very good at pretending to be Prok. So much so that you might be a little obsessed [15:43] taktikalenina: [15:42] Rosso Vespucciano: Sorry I realised that too late. And although Prok was the worst landlady I ever had and a total asshole that I would NEVER rent from again, I have never encountered a bot acting in her name. [15:48] taktikalenina: Rent from Prokofy Neva's Ravenglass Rentals today! In business in 13th year with Mainland communities. Self-service rentals, open group to start building, no waiting, refundable! FREEDOM! Your abusive message is permission to publish your chat! Come to Alston to check out our properties! [15:49] taktikalenina: (a copy of the current message) [15:56] taktikalenina: [15:54] SilviaMinor Resident: I just blocked the bot. May be I should do the same for the owner. She is apparently a crazy troll. [15:56] taktikalenina: 90 % true material, some exaggerated use of actually true material, 10 % false material [15:57] taktikalenina: and you'll win an election in SL [15:58] taktikalenina: Philip Trump is running for Linden [16:07] taktikalenina: [16:01] Freddie Chester: i shall write to the council [16:01] taktikalenina Resident: the council, Fred? [16:02] Freddie Chester: the sl high council [16:03] ThursdayNext Resident: lindens takti. Its called reporting abuse. You'll just end up in the cornfield for a week for first abuse of spamming [16:04] taktikalenina Resident: i pay them too much for that [16:04] Freddie Chester: ok to the sl supreme council ... there is no higher power .... apart from the NRA [16:04] ThursdayNext Resident: *laughs* prepare to be surprised then :) [16:05] taktikalenina Resident: um, i've been in SL for 13 years, cupcake [16:06] Freddie Chester: you can call folk cucake ... it's racist [16:06] taktikalenina Resident: i can call you what I like, dear
Also the bot is sending its chat to Henry Hutchence, which is how we get this:
[16:12] DochNovojJery: Rent from Prokofy Neva's Ravenglass Rentals today! In business in 13th year with Mainland communities. Self-service rentals, open group to start building, no waiting, refundable! FREEDOM! Note that hecklers, griefers, high-maintenance whiners and clueless gits aren't welcome. Your abusive message is permission to publish your chat! Come to Alston to check out our properties and get your very own CHEAP cottage from only 1000L/week! (NOTE: I'm a bot. My main account Prokofy Neva is currently suspended (Linden abuse of power), so contact Telehub Ross or Henry Hutchence for help with the rentals) [16:17] DochNovojJery: [16:12] Kreb Ansar: I see DochNovojJery is a 1 day old bot with the main account already reported, why cant Prokofy Neva learn to do his/her business properly? [16:15] Kreb Ansar: Oh and Prokfoy is a notorious griefer/troll. A woman named Catherine Fitzpatric who trolls on the forums too. [16:24] DochNovojJery: [16:21] BazZerfire Resident: and his main account is suspended for what he calls linden abuse of power
So yeah, Kreb Ansar, the usual creepy "Dom":
Dave ( KrebAnsar )
Maturity :AAdult
I am a gentleman Dom, firm and strict, who likes the D/s relationships, and nude submissives / slaves.
And you know what we think of such people -- not much, creepy totalitarians spreading their awful ideology outside their bedrooms. This is a good example. He'll get AR'd for exposure of RL information, you don't get to do that in SL, even if outside of SL, an avatar's RL name is known.
People like that would sure hate having THEIR RL name exposed, given what they are in SL. Ugh.
As for "Linden abuse of power" -- that's just some ridiculous deliberate garble. The real reason is for "encroachment" as explained here and here.
So...
Another round with the usual clueless assholes that can't use common sense and logic to understand that a) an avatar that joins a group and spams you is not a "bot" because actual scripted agents or "bots" in SL don't have the intelligence to either find a rentals or themed group and join it. Watch their chat and you will figure out it is not a bot.
We're told bots can collect friendship cards and make a nonce group and spam that group through the conference call function -- so protest THAT to the Lindens. The category to use is "Targeted behavior intended to harass"
UPDATE: Yes, we've had lots of discussion showing how yes, you can have conference calls without friendship cards -- cards known as calling cards that normally require CONSENT in response to a FRIENDSHIP REQUEST. That's a fairly new development -- that is discovery of viewable code and exploit of it to harass people and the mere fact that "you can do this because you can" is not an excuse for Linden inaction. In fact, they're "looking at this". And we all know that conference call annoyance is not just about this particular "use case" of a griefer impersonating me and using this exploit -- yes, I'll go on calling it an exploit -- as a form of VANDALISM.
Nobody likes racist spam about some creepy rentals guy who sounds like a Trumpkin -- but it's not me in any form, just an impersonator.
Could the Governance Team just get a LOT more curious about how this is done and stop it? It's not about me.
In addition to the exploits -- yes using calling card code for purposes NOT intended and SPAMMING is indeed an EXPLOIT -- or using illegal third-party viewers likely used, Linden Lab needs to stop these griefers at the root by removing the latest Tizzers Foxchase/Wooodbury/Whatever island (griefers tell me it is Winterfell, which I seem to remember was somebody else's sim, but maybe they bought it on the open market with alts or new RL cutaways who the hell knows -- there are reports that they are back once again and all the fake word salad they mix up (see here) is so much griefing, lying bullshit.
LL could also just make it OPT IN to be part of a calling-card conference, you know, like you OPT IN to have someone be able to map you, have your perms, etc. OPT-IN is a concept of civil society, LL. Use it more. Not OPT-OUT but OPT-IN.
So let me repeat once again:
o I do not use bots. These griefers do not belong to me
o I don't spam stupid asshole comments to groups. Who does that? Who in business in SL for 13 years would EVER do that? Who would EVER think they'd get customers that way?! Could you get a FUCKING CLUE people?
o Note that these attacks have gone on for months (years, really, but this latest round for some months). Dozens of alts with names like "Mohammed" pretending to be Muslims (they are not) or using variations of the name "Prokofy" or "Ravenglass" as if from my business (they aren't, I don't use my name or my business name on day-old alts, please, again, don't be FUCKING RIDICULOUS). Or using the Soviet/Russian theme. Dozens. All banned. Every single one. Not ME banned. But THEM. Could you use logic and common sense and grasp what that means? That people impersonating me are the griefers -- and you should AR them. That I am not the griefer or "owner of these bots" (not even bots) of course, that's ridiculous.
o My name is Russian (Prokofy) but I'm a) not Russian in real life b) only speak Russian and work as a translator and c) that's why I'm being harassed in RL and SL, for my RL work. Creepy, eh? Linden should be way more concerned about that than they are.
o Criticizing the Lindens also leads to these attacks, funny coincidence, that.
o Yes, if you send me abusive IMs imagining that I am wrangling these fake "bots" you will be publicized because you need to learn not to do that. There's no other way to teach you.
Here's the chat they usually send me -- note the clueless gits spouting bullshit about me they've picked up from somewhere -- but some of them are griefers themselves:
Saved Wed Feb 21 23:01:33 2018)Your name is Tyrone or Doris, and you're an ordinary resident? Rent from Prokofy Neva's Ravenglass Rentals today! We're in business in 13th year. We value conservative family values! Build your own cottage! Weekly senior club! Artificial chicken farm! Note that hecklers, liberals, chicken killers and clueless gits aren't welcome. Your abusive message is permission to publish your chat! Contact us here Prokofy Neva to get your very own CHEAP cottage from only 1000L/week! [23:04] TheRussianBot: (Saved Wed Feb 21 23:10:17 2018) [20:08] NightingaleShadow Littlebird: I love you russian bot, give me your children [20:08] TheRussianBot Resident: will you marry me? [20:09] NightingaleShadow Littlebird: YES! [20:09] TheRussianBot Resident: where? [20:09] NightingaleShadow Littlebird: Let's do this! [20:09] NightingaleShadow Littlebird: Right here, right now husbando [20:09] TheRussianBot Resident: can you marry a bot? [20:09] NightingaleShadow Littlebird: You can in japan, and I'm a filthy weeb [20:09] TheRussianBot Resident: i don't think Putin allows it. he thinks it's gay [23:04] TheRussianBot: (Saved Wed Feb 21 23:15:27 2018) [20:13] Hawkstir Resident: a 1000 a week oh my that is cheap????????????? [20:14] Norma Darkrose: right now that is to high for me [20:14] Sharon Ariantho: its a terrible price hahaha [20:15] Sharon Ariantho: and where would i go to kill chickens? [23:04] TheRussianBot: (Saved Wed Feb 21 23:25:57 2018) [20:25] LilyanaRose Resident: i rented from that guy before.. h's an asshat. [23:04] TheRussianBot: (Saved Wed Feb 21 23:29:03 2018) [20:28] ChipinDells Resident: fuck you russians its all your fault trump got elected [23:04] TheRussianBot: (Saved Wed Feb 21 23:30:50 2018) [20:28] lilkitteh Resident: Go suck a big fat whale dick. PUBLISH THAT [20:29] Seminole Resident: Take me off your mailing list or I will get angry :P [20:29] TheRussianBot Resident: Jew! [20:29] Seminole Resident: Tomahawk [20:30] TheRussianBot Resident: Hat! [20:30] lilkitteh Resident: Eat a bagel you Russian ass crack [20:30] TheRussianBot Resident: Cow! [20:30] lilkitteh Resident: MOooo [20:30] TheRussianBot Resident: Horse! [20:30] lilkitteh Resident: Neigh [20:30] TheRussianBot Resident: Cat! [20:30] TheRussianBot Resident: Crazy cat lady! [20:30] lilkitteh Resident: Meow [23:04] TheRussianBot: (Saved Wed Feb 21 23:45:25 2018) [20:44] rogerthornhill Resident: This is actually a hilarious spoof if you know whom he's referencing [23:04] TheRussianBot: (Saved Wed Feb 21 23:48:47 2018) [20:47] rogerthornhill Resident: Prokofy Neva is a crazy AF SL landlord who is obsessed with conspiracies, still has Sion chickens and is very drama prone [23:04] TheRussianBot: (Saved Wed Feb 21 23:59:14 2018) [20:56] Dex Eberhardt: I want to punch whoever keeps sending this [20:56] Vampiriclord Resident: uhmmmmm, go fuck yourself? [20:57] Vampiriclord Resident: i agree dex [20:57] TheRussianBot Resident: Do you agree with a clamick? [20:57] 99travis Resident: who is this [20:57] TheRussianBot Resident: Prokofy Neva [20:57] QuinnDarkrider Resident: Abuse report (help/Report abuse). Then Block. [20:57] TheRussianBot Resident: Why? [20:57] Exidy Resident: Reported to LL for spamming. [20:57] Saradivina88 Resident: hi [20:58] TheRussianBot Resident: Um, spamming, hardly [20:58] IrefulWolf Resident reprograms the Russian bot into a Russian ass twerker. [23:04] TheRussianBot: (Saved Wed Feb 21 23:59:17 2018)Come to Berlin! [23:04]
[23:04] TheRussianBot: (Saved Thu Feb 22 00:24:36 2018)[21:23] TheRussianBot Resident: Slavery isn't cool. [21:23] TheRussianBot Resident: Rent from Ravenglass Rentals!
[23:04] TheRussianBot: (Saved Thu Feb 22 00:25:22 2018)[21:23] TheRussianBot Resident: Sowing division in America since 2007.
Just as an aside -- amazing how the average American had to get WAY up to speed about Russian intelligence methods and tradecraft due to the DNC hack! They now understand more than anyone has understood in 25 years about this (in the Soviet era, there was better education).
One good thing about the Russian hack is that it has educated a generation of people really fast about the Kremlin's awfulness. The Mueller indictment helped. Of course there's all kinds of jamming, disinformation, whataboutism going on from the same disinformers -- but by and large, people are getting it -- the Russians hacked, they interfered, they set people against each other like this griefer bot from the group that has been harassing me for over 10 years has been doing using Russian-style methods, hello.
Re: LilyanaRose Resident - yes, she's a tenant and a clueless git unable to read lease cards, group charters, FAQs, my profile, or anything:
[2017/09/02 23:31] Lilyana 'Lil' Harbinger (lilyanarose) paid you L$1260. [2017/09/05 18:50] Lilyana 'Lil' Greymoon (lilyanarose): Hello Prokofy. I'm sorry to bother you.. i rented a parcel and am wondering if there's a way i can get the rights to it? [2017/09/05 18:52] Prokofy Neva: Hi, I added you to resident powers in the group [2017/09/05 18:52] Prokofy Neva: switch to the title resident (Deacon) to access ban media etc [2017/09/05 18:52] Prokofy Neva: this may require relogging [2017/09/05 18:52] Lilyana 'Lil' Greymoon (lilyanarose): oh great ty :-) [2017/09/12 07:26] LilyanaRose: (Saved Tue Sep 12 06:47:40 2017)Hello Prokofy.. are you aware that everyone in group is charged 5L by the group rights every week? You hae pay group liabilities and dividends checked for everyone.. [2017/09/12 07:27] Prokofy Neva: Yes, I'm aware as I've had that system for 12 years, and you have been notified of it 5 different ways. It's part of your rent. [2017/09/12 07:28] Inventory item 'Latest Group Liability Info' offered [2017/09/12 07:28] Lilyana 'Lil' Greymoon (lilyanarose): i see. thank you
And.....my latest to her
[23:52] Prokofy Neva: You won't be renting from me again, dear. Not with the lies you have spouted about me. [23:52] User not online - message will be stored and delivered later.
[2018/02/21 23:04] matronicon: (Saved Wed Feb 21 23:40:06 2018)Could you please stop your bot from messaging people on my piece of land? It's Croix, http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Croix/69/243/65 and I'd really appreciate it if you could make it stop. Thanks. [2018/02/21 23:31] Prokofy Neva: Could you try to use reason and common sense to understand that these "bots" are griefers, unrelated to me, and you need to AR them to LL, not harass me with this? It's a technique of griefing to smear people like me. I've been in business for 13 years. Meanwhile dozens of them are banned, not me. Get a grip. http://3dblogger.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2017/11/a-reminder-that-no-i-dont-have-day-old-racist-griefers-spamming-ads-for-ravenglass-.html [2018/02/21 23:31] Rayna Fairport-Moonflower (matronicon): User not online - message will be stored and delivered later.
Here's one I found especially aggravating, as I have not only purchased items from this merchant for years, I've had many a pleasant conversation with her in world, she has made these wonderful 1950s lamps that I suggested, bought, and advertised, and so on. Why people like this imagine a griefer is "yours" and never think a day-old account must be an impersonating griefer is BEYOND me.
[2018/02/21 23:04] Plato Novo: (Saved Wed Feb 21 23:26:15 2018)Hey Prokofy, I'm getting spam from "TheRussianBot" which says you are the owner of that account? I never signed up for any spam, joined a group, or clicked a subscriber related to your rentals. Please remove my name from the list. Thank you. [2018/02/21 23:28] Prokofy Neva: Hi, could you PLEASE get a clue? Try to use logic and reason, Plato, Good God on a crutch. [2018/02/21 23:28] Second Life: User not online - message will be stored and delivered later. [2018/02/21 23:28] Prokofy Neva: http://3dblogger.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2017/11/a-reminder-that-no-i-dont-have-day-old-racist-griefers-spamming-ads-for-ravenglass-.html [2018/02/21 23:28] Second Life: User not online - message will be stored and delivered later. [2018/02/21 23:29] Prokofy Neva: Why would someone in SL in business for 13 years ever use such a ridiculous insane bot? It's an impersonator and this is the method used to grief me. Abuse report THAT ALT, not me -- like the last 2 dozen of them? Watch as THEY, not ME are removed from SL? Honestly, I cannot understand why people are so FUCKING CLUELESS. It's a *method* used to smear people, and you should know better [2018/02/21 23:29] Second Life: User not online - message will be stored and delivered later. [2018/02/21 23:29] Prokofy Neva: Shame on you. [2018/02/21 23:29] Second Life: User not online - message will be stored and delivered later. [2018/02/21 23:30] Prokofy Neva: I don't use bots -- and this avatar isn't a bot. Do try to use logic and common sense -- how does a "bot" join a group? It can't do that. Use logic and common sense, again. And how can I "remove" someone from an impersonating avatar? I can't. Abuse report it, and move on. Try to help instead of being clueless. [2018/02/21 23:30] Second Life: User not online - message will be stored and delivered later.
So Plato Novo? I will not ever be buying from you again. I don't care if you apologize once you realize what a total asshole you were for imagining that I would send you crazy "bot spam" like this. The normal thing to do -- and about 20% of the people who get this realize this -- is to write and say, hey, I got this wild thing that says it's from you, is it? I can't imagine it could be!
That you couldn't see your way clear to me and had to write me a fucking prissy message about removing you from my spam list (!!!) -- well, it speaks volumes. So I am done. No matter my great admiration of your work, and my many nice and fun talks with you, that's it. Let is be a lesson to you to GET A FUCKING CLUE.
And people wonder how Russia was able to hack America. IT's because Americans are SO GODDAMN STUPID.
Saved Wed Feb 21 23:40:06 2018)Could you please stop your bot from messaging people on my piece of land? It's Croix, Croix (69,243,65) and I'd really appreciate it if you could make it stop. Thanks. [23:31] Prokofy Neva: Could you try to use reason and common sense to understand that these "bots" are griefers, unrelated to me, and you need to AR them to LL, not harass me with this? It's a technique of griefing to smear people like me. I've been in business for 13 years. Meanwhile dozens of them are banned, not me. Get a grip. http://3dblogger.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2017/11/a-reminder-that-no-i-dont-have-day-old-racist-griefers-spamming-ads-for-ravenglass-.html
[23:04] glitterandneon: (Saved Wed Feb 21 23:41:33 2018)Hey don't have your bots send mass chats to people at a show. That is pretty inappropriate and really not cool [23:23] Prokofy Neva: Um, I don't have any bots. It's a griefer impersonating me. Abuse report to LL and get a grip http://3dblogger.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2017/11/a-reminder-that-no-i-dont-have-day-old-racist-griefers-spamming-ads-for-ravenglass-.html
The ability of a "bot" which of course isn't a bot but a human with a malicious browser or abusive script to scoop up the names/calling cards of everyone at a concert and then spam them -- now Linden Lab, how are they able to do that? Can you be a LITTLE CURIOUS about how that is done.
This one was particularly smarmy:
[23:04] Ani Aunerfal: (Saved Wed Feb 21 23:41:28 2018)Hello! I'm an administrator at Sculptyworks in the clockwork region. A few times now you've sent mass IMs which have involved several of our users. I want to try again in a professional manner to make it clear that you do not have permission to send advertisements of any sort to our sim or the users within. I hope we can resolve this without a report becoming neccesary, but as I have attempted to resolve this with you with no response in the past, I will bring the matter to linden labs next time. Thank you. [23:24] Prokofy Neva: No, I have done nothing of the kind. These are griefers impersonating me, get a grip. Report that day-old alt to LL like the others in recent months and stop defaming me http://3dblogger.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2017/11/a-reminder-that-no-i-dont-have-day-old-racist-griefers-spamming-ads-for-ravenglass-.html [23:24] Prokofy Neva: And don't tell me you haven't gotten any response, that is utter bullshit, I send every single person who harasses me with this misplaced bullshit a statement explaining this http://3dblogger.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2017/11/a-reminder-that-no-i-dont-have-day-old-racist-griefers-spamming-ads-for-ravenglass-.html [23:25] Prokofy Neva: Do tell me how a person how has been in SL for 13 years and is not banned from SL and runs a business could POSSIBLY have bots like this. [23:25] Prokofy Neva: Try to use logic and reason [23:25] Prokofy Neva: Try to understand it is GRIEFERS and Abuse report THEM so the Lindens delete them like they did the last few dozen. The end. [23:26] Ani Aunerfal: There's no need to be so hostile. Thank you for the information. [23:26] Prokofy Neva: No, I"ll be as hostile as I fucking please with your witless communications to me you smarm bomb go abuse report the griefer not me and watch what happens, walla, they are banned not me, do get a clue [23:27] Prokofy Neva: blocking
This is your clue never to buy from Sculptyworks, whatever the hell that is.
It's also utterly false that this person ever contacted me. I have records of all IMs. Let's not be liars here, too, you smarm bomb.
o The Lindens need also to get rid of proxy log-ons. I've raised that issue numerous times. They have witless crypto-anarchy ideological tenets about this that make no sense. I'm told that it is technically possible to enable, say, a private island sim to have a list that would bar those log-ons, just like you would say, a spammers' list. But they don't like to make bans of this nature that a) might affect their alts and friends b) might somehow ding small categories of people they purport to care about, like, oh, Iranian freedom fighters or transgender violence victims. The reality is that Iranians don't log on to SL if they ever did in 2009, that was very fleeting; transgenders is a more serious and real category, but let's remember that most in SL in fact use Payment Information on File, even Payment Used, and have alt names as an SL avatar, but don't log on by proxies you know? Unless SL plans on releasing their identities or not securing itself against hacks, they are safe, no?
And to make people like me endure griefing by smearing impersonators like this -- and I'm not the only one -- that happens way more often than the putative inability of a victim of violence being unable to use a proxy to log on to SL. I seriously do not believe in this use case; if it really exists, it is dealt with on a case-by-case basis, and the logging on of Tor/proxy etc abusive assholes like this should be stopped, the end. PS they are the copyright thefts and child pornography criminals as well.
Fancy hash-mark and MAC banning and all that can be done way more than admitted because again, these old-fashioned putative use-cases of "dynamically changing IP addresses" (please) and "students in a dorm all logging on from one computer" (please, is this the 1990s? Everyone has their own tablet or laptop now. Stop it, LL!)
There's also just policing the latest island purchase which is easily matched to all the alt movements. If I as a dummy can figure this out, surely LL with more tools and data available can. But they prefer this to go on, for whatever reason.
The latest Privacy Panic in SL instigated by the goons at Sluniverse.com has spawned an epic Summer Blockbuster thread over at Sluniverse.com Sharia Court -- as I mentioned -- and I don't feel that the Justice League United (JLU) got to tell their side of the story, in part because GreenLantern Excelsior, a leader, was suspended from the forums for "disclosure" or publishing real-life information (in this case, of the already-self-exposed RL information of Deadly Codec, who died of AIDs).
Publishing this interview is just a public service to add to the public discourse -- it's not an endorsement of vigilantism. I just think with all the dozens of Woodburies and related grieftards at SLun, and the constant spinning and distracting and deliberate hoaxes and active measures (propagandistic actions to shape public opinion), the JLU story needs to be told.
I see yet another tendentious story in the Herald, this time an interview with an RP leader of the sim Antiquity, who is disgruntled with the JLU because he thinks it is capturing information. It seems to me all that happened is that he was incited and whipped up to a frenzy by the Sluniverse.com gang, and to protect his community he felt he should "opt out" of the Phantom Zone anti-griefing system. Neither he nor the Herald nor anybody on Sluniverse.com has come up with any real case of privacy violation that I can tell, although perhaps this is yet to come.
Why did I pick GreenLantern instead of Kalel Venkman? Well, a long-time friend of mine happened to vouch for GL, and said he was decent. I don't know about Venkman and I figured he would not reply to my request.
INTERVIEW WITH GREENLANTERN EXCELSIOR
Prokofy Neva: Can you start by saying in your own words in a line or two what you believe to be the JLU and its mission, your role in it, and what you believe to be the Wrong Hands and its mission. Who is behind the Wrong Hands?
GreenLantern Excelsior: The Justice League Unlimited (JLU) provides mentoring to new residents, patrols unprotected Linden land and any private sims where we are invited, educates sim owners about security, and supports charity events. I am a JLU officer. My primary role is as a patrol and anti-griefer specialist, and I also enjoy helping new residents as a Mentor. The group The Wrong Hands (TWH) was formed to steal and publish the contents of JLU's wiki. The founder is JimK Korpov, and the original members (all banned or suspended) were Cam Mitchell, Doctor Yootz, Haruhi Thespian, Information Core, Mullet Handsohn, Robble Rubble, and Tux Winkler.
The group The Wrong Hands (TWH) was formed to steal and publish the contents of JLU's wiki. Their objective was achieved on January 10, 2010. They used a JLU applicant named Haruhi Thespian who, when given login information, copied the wiki and gave the contents to TWH, who published it. These days, the group appears to be dedicated to trolling JLU. It has a website that's perpetually under development, linked from Tux Winkler's website.
The original members of TWH are all either banned or suspended now. Subsequent members were Code Slacker (banned), Codizzo Resident, Discostar Resident (deleted), geee spot, HogLogs Longspring (banned), Irate Resident (banned), kutchacokoff Resident (banned), Mullet Resident (banned), Pixeleen Mistral, Theta Darkward, VaginalSnot Bubble (banned), Xyz Wyx, and Zax Zero (left the group).
Prokofy Neva: It seems that this latest round of the Wrong Hands scandal began with the Lindens' closure of the sims Revolution and Red Square and the permabanning of Tizzers' alt involved in those sims, Intlibber Brautigan, whose alt was Overbrain Unplugged, and others. That sequence of event tends to get overlooked. What is your understanding of why these sims were closed? What triggered these events in July?
GreenLantern Excelsior: No one seems to know why Red Square and Revolution were deleted, but they were gone on July 19. At around that time, so were Atlas Saintlouis, Overbrain Unplugged, Rembrandt Flux, and Twinkie Swizzle [evidently the Tizzers alt--PN]. Rembrandt had hired Overbrain and Twinkie to build the Bronies sims of Bronyville and Derpy, which may be why those two sims were removed also.
Prokofy Neva: What was the name of Tizzers' alt on that project? Why did the Lindens allow yet another very thinly-disguised version of the Woodbury gang into SL again in the first place? Why was Ryokashi allowed back into SL after being banned?
GreenLantern Excelsior: Twinkie Swizzle, an alt of Tizzers, was the founder of the Bronies group (a My Little Pony fan club) and was also peripherally involved with TWH. Twinkie's account was removed on July 18. I don't know why LL can't keep the Woodbury members out of SL, but Woodbury does seem to be able to return at will, and they can't seem to stay in SL for very long without violating the Terms of Service. As I understand it, Ryokashi was suspended for age verification, and was having trouble producing the requested documentation. He finally came up with a birth certificate or something, so LL let him come back. I've been told that the only residents who were permabanned were Overbrain and Twinkie, and the rest are just suspended.
Prokofy Neva: Do you believe that the saga incited now on Sluniverse.com in the thread about the JLU's IP tracking to be an effort to distract the public from the wrongdoing of these Woodbury/PN griefers and Wrong Hands itself? Do you believe that the hacking into the JLU data base called "Brainiac" and disclosure on various websites is in fact the main crime here and should be the main focus of the Lindens or even RL law-enforcers?
GreenLantern Excelsior: I believe that the IP tracking issue on SLU was started by TWH to harass and troll JLU. The thread started out with a list of names and IP addresses that were said to come from JLU, but really came from another group of banned users who had been collecting that information. I believe the purpose of the thread was to get JLU removed from SL so the griefers and TWH can do whatever they want without worrying about organized opposition. So maybe the goal is not distraction from wrongdoing, but removing obstacles to wrongdoing. If it were my server being attacked, I would consider going to law enforcement with all the information I had.
Although a major focus of the SLU thread is how JLU used to keep private information in a password-protected wiki, not much is said about how that private information has been published in several places on the Internet by the hackers for everyone to see. If it's illegal to keep the information in private, it must be illegal to post it in public. Some of the SLU folks maintain that posting people's private information online after it's stolen from the wiki is a form of whistleblowing. I believe that is nothing but misdirection. The "whistleblowers" are just doxing each other like a circular firing squad.
Apparently the public revelation of real life information from the private JLU wiki has caused some problems. Pixeleen Mistral posted this on TheListSL's blog yesterday: "Thelistsl, can you please remove all your posts regarding rl info. Our site has gotten many reports for hosting the link to the thelistsl.blogspot.com."
Prokofy Neva: What was the relationship of Tux Winkler to these sims and to Woodbury/b-tards or related griefing groups? You say that Tux Winkler may have been banned for IP tracking? Why would Tux Winkler be operating any kind of tracking scripts? For what organization? Kalel Venkman is quoted as saying that Tux "arranged" the hacking. Is this a significant change in his allegation, and if so, who did the actual hacking?
GreenLanter Excelsior: I was told that Tux was not one of the major players in Red Square, Revolution, or Woodbury. Supposedly he and his friends just stayed in those Soviet sims to have fun. I only visited there a couple of times, and they didn't tell me their secrets, so I don't know the real answer.
Tux did maintain an extensive spyware network in Second Life, with tracking objects in many sims, placed there by several accomplices. I haven't heard that it was done as part of any organization. The objects may not have tracked IP addresses, just the locations of certain residents who were on his list. At one time, there were 26 sims containing probes, 9 sims where the probes had been removed, and 26 other sims that were shown on the website's tracking page. The information about who was online and where they were located was fed to Tux's website and displayed on a public page. It is my understanding that a Linden read an article about the spyware network on the Krypton Radio website , tested the items, and referred the matter to the governance team, at which point Tux lost his account. I have not heard that Tux was involved in the hacking of the JLU wiki. No one knows who did that.
Prokofy Neva: Why was Atlas Saintlouis also banned, when ostensibly he was just a mafia overlord running the sims and not directly related to Woodbury/etc? How much is he involved in griefing?
GreenLantern Excelsior: I don't know much about Atlas, other than his inworld character is an angry JLU opponent who enjoys using me as a verbal punching bag to take out his frustrations. He is said to be a former member of the Nicholas Mafia, and owner or financier of the former Red Square and Revolution sims.
Prokofy Neva: What is your own description of the JLU's Brainiac? Are you in fact maintaining a data base on SL residents that you have documented as griefing, or who you believe to commit acts of griefing? How do you yourself justify both IP tracking, alt-linking and any other gathering of data on SL residents?
GreenLantern Excelsior: Brainiac is a JLU database that associates resident names with reports written about them by JLU members. Reports can be entered and retrieved only from inworld. Most of those reports are about griefing events. The Brainiac wiki is a website containing articles about many different aspects of Second Life, including certain residents and groups. It can be accessed only from the Internet.
In my opinion, IP tracking, although allowed by LL is not useful, since IP addresses can be shared by different people. I think IP tracking should be avoided, because it crosses the line between SL and RL. I was in favor of alt detection when it was "legal," because if it were done accurately and used with confidentiality, it could slow or end the pattern of griefer harassment that some parcel owners have had to endure. Not everyone agreed, and some folks considered it an invasion of privacy, even though they were broadcasting their IP addresses every time they listened to a music stream in SL. The issue is academic now, because LL has made revealing alts in SL a ToS violation. As for gathering other data, as long as RL and SL are separate, I see nothing wrong with it. SL has even provided a way to keep your own personal notes in an avatar's profile, which is a LL-approved method of gathering data that only you can see.
Prokofy Neva: Do you include real-life information in this data base? Does this information contain medical information, information on employment, families, etc.? Is it maintained on a third-party website? How does it physically connect to Second Life?
GreenLantern Excelsior: RL information is not included in the Brainiac database or in the Brainiac wiki. The Brainiac database is accessible only from SL, and the Brainiac wiki is accessible only from the Internet. There is no connection between the wiki and Second Life.
Prokofy Neva: Do you believe that inworld griefing is justification for attempting to get the RL information of any individual in SL? Why don't you just leave it to the Lindens to handle abuse reports themselves? Do you see any civil rights implications related to this kind of spying on people? Or do you think its a necessity given the rampant griefing in SL? You have been widely quoted as defending McCarthy in that his methods were wrong but his cause was justified -- could you elaborate on what exactly your position is?
GreenLantern Excelsior: The original idea behind collecting RL information was that we could point out the bad guys to law enforcement authorities in case that was needed. Over time, I believe that members "caught the fever" to do research and find out more about Second Life residents, so other personal information was included in the wiki that had nothing to do with helping the authorities identify griefers. My personal opinion is that no one needs to gather RL information on SL residents. LL will contact law enforcement if there is criminal behavior in SL, and law enforcement will identify the perpetrators. I see no violations of civil rights or personal privacy, though, since the RL information was all available on the Internet through a simple Google search, or had been supplied to JLU members by the people involved. Currently there is no RL information contained in JLU's wiki. It's deleted, all gone, won't be back.
The world was a very different place in the late 40s and early 50s. The Soviet Union was engulfing eastern Europe, and China had become a Communist country. The threat of Communism was on everyone's minds in those days. Senator Joe McCarthy had evidence about Communist infiltrators in the US government, and his speeches on that subject caused a huge media response and resulted in Senate hearings. The final Senate report, written by Democrats, said that McCarthy's charges were "a fraud and a hoax," while Senate Republicans called the report a "brazen whitewash of treasonable conspiracy." McCarthy's strident style and frequent accusations irritated Democrats and the news media, and he was vilified in the press. McCarthy's tactics could never be implemented today, and viewed through the eyes of 21st century Americans, he was a "fearmonger." But the truth is that McCarthy was right. The US government had been monitoring communications between the Soviet Union and people in the US, and it turned out that there were Soviet spies in the US government, as McCarthy had alleged. McCarthy's reputation and career were destroyed by the liberal news media, and these days "everybody knows" he was a bad guy. He also happens to have been right.
Prokofy Neva: There's some speculation that Phantom Zone isn't really tracking IPs, or at least not to match with alts, or that this task is sent to some other foil that is doing this, i.e. SL Police Department. What's really going on here? What is the relationship of Green Zone to Phantom Zone?
GreenLantern Excelsior: Phantom Zone never did collect IP addresses. At one time, JLU considered working with the group **Police Department** (PD), who had a database of alts. There were prototype information retrieval devices that would show any articles written about the resident in question, and a list of "possible alts." Neither group programmed their security devices to automatically eject or ban residents due to this alt correlation. The response was planned to be an information display to show that two residents shared an IP address. Because the IP detection method produced too many false positives, JLU never implemented alt detection. The PD is no longer collecting and storing IP addresses. As for Green Zone, I know nothing about it other than some peripheral information about its purpose. As far as I know, it has no relation to Phantom Zone.
Prokofy Neva: There are about a dozen very active complainers on this Sluniverse.com thread. What is their relationship to the Wrong Hands, why are they complaining, and do you believe them to be in fact just griefers covering their tracks? Have you now made this a hit list or an enemy list of these people as they claim, and do you plan to take this further?
GreenLantern Excelsior: I reviewed 15 pages and counted 28 members in that thread who were vehemently anti-JLU. Nine of them could not be found in Search, and I know for a fact that four of those are either suspended or permabanned. Those four, along with one other who is not banned, were or are TWH members. The thread started with a false allegation that a list of resident names and IP addresses came from JLU's Phantom Zone. That was the original complaint, but once we proved that Phantom Zone was not the source of the list, the complainers dismissed that and said that they had moved on to other complaints, mostly associated with JLU storing RL information in our password protected wiki. I don't know all of the complainers, and although I know some of them are griefers, I can't say they all fit that description. JLU has not added their names to any kind of list, and I know of no action that will be taken as a result of the thread.
Prokofy Neva: The meeting that a JLU member purported to have with Pete Linden and then leaked, which was published in Herald comments, seems to indicate a changed attitude of the Lindens to the JLU. Do you in fact believe that the Lindens once endorsed you, and in fact valued your vigilante work? Do you have reason to believe now that the Lindens will cut ties with you, if they had them in the first place? Why? Is this part of a new anti-griefing methodology or system that CEO Rod Linden is putting into place?
GreenLantern Excelsior: First, please don't call us vigilantes. JLU is a Neighborhood Watch in Second Life. All we do is observe and report. Linden Lab takes any enforcement action that's necessary.
It's hard to say what the Lindens are thinking. I don't believe they ever "endorsed" anyone but the former Second Life Mentors group. We used to chat with a few of the Lindens now and then, but I think these days they are mostly too busy to get into long conversations. I recall a couple of years ago, after a Linden had worked hard to clean up some replicating cubes in the sandboxes, he dropped down to ground level for a while and we all made it a point to thank him. He thanked us for writing the Abuse Reports,and said that they would have more time to fix things like that if they didn't have to respond to so many personal arguments between residents. I've never been able to determine whether the Lindens recognize Abuse Reports from individual residents.
I don't believe that leaking the conversation with Pete Linden will help or hurt our relationship with LL. People have private conversations with Lindens all the time, so this is nothing new. It doesn't mean that JLU has some sort of special favors bestowed upon us. I'm sure that if we have legitimate information to convey in the future, the Lindens will listen to us just the same as they would listen to any other resident or group.
Prokofy Neva: It seems you have responded to a request from Joshua Nightshade to remove the entry about him in the Brainiac by deleting a page. Why was Joshua Nightshade in this database in the first place? He is not known to be an inworld griefer, although he has a history of stalking and harassing people on forums. Are you now going to enable anyone to request to be removed from your database? If so, doesn't that constitute an admission on your part that you were not engaging in ethical activity?
GreenLantern Excelsior: Joshua Nightshade's page was removed from the Brainiac wiki, as was all other personal information. The reason it was there in the first place is that he forwarded some emails between him and the PN to a JLU member, who then created a page about Joshua and placed the email text there. The first time I heard it was gone was when Joshua posted about it on SLU. I don't know the JLU policy (if there is one) about removing people's pages from the wiki. I suspect that anyone wanting to know what's on their wiki page or wanting their page deleted will get a statement similar to "I can neither confirm nor deny that you have a page in the JLU wiki."
Prokofy Neva: There's been a claim that Cummere Mayo has initiated some kind of law-enforcement inquiry about the JLU and Wrong Hands. Have you heard from any law-enforcers regarding this matter? Is it true as claimed that JLU leaders are in touch with the CIA or FBI or Scotland Yard? Do you contact law-enforcers in RL with information you have gathered about alleged griefers in SL?
GreenLantern Excelsior: Cummere Mayo has made many claims in that thread, but as far as I know, making claims is all that's happened. No law enforcement officers have visited JLU members at home, and the JLU wiki is still online. There has been some talk in the past about JLU making contact with different law enforcement agencies, but I don't know the current status.
Prokofy Neva: Why aren't you or other JLU members answering any of the charges and complaints on Sluniverse.com or any other site?
GreenLantern Excelsior: I posted many times in that SL Universe thread until I was suspended for "posting links to RL info" (I had posted a link to Deadly Codec's obituary, which revealed his real name, so it was real life info about someone who is no longer present in real life, which is a weak reason for a suspension). I have also been posting in the recent Alphaville Herald story that has my name in the title, and in another discussion thread on the Second Citizen board. Other JLU members have been participating in other discussions, notably Hewee Zetkin and ZenMondo Wormser. In my opinion, the reason we don't have more members talking in the discussion groups could be a mindset that "if we just ignore it, it will go away." To a certain extent, this is true. When the information releases taper off and JLU members haven't posted for a while in the SLU thread, the members there get distracted by shiny objects and lolcats and they rapidly lose focus on their objective. Now that the leaks are plugged and no more information will be released, that thread should grind to a halt in short order. I'm a big advocate of opposing public rumors and accusations, but I realize that not everyone enjoys arguing on the Internet, so I don't get upset when the rest of the members don't come charging into battle.
Prokofy Neva: Tux Winkler has a signature quote on Sluniverse.com that claims that Soft Linden was involved in his banning and told others about it. Is this true?
GreenLantern Excelsior: Soft Linden investigated a JLU report about spyware objects that were tracking residents on the grid. Later, he followed up with JLU to inform us that those responsible for the objects had been banned, and the objects had been removed. He didn't tell us any resident names who had been banned. Since most of the residents being tracked by the objects were JLU members, I believe it was nothing more than a courtesy notification. We found out later that Tux Winkler was gone from the grid.
Prokofy Neva: On Sluniverse.com, people are reporting that members of the JLU are leaving, ostensibly because they don't wish to remain in your organization, given these practices involving harvesting IP data and maintaining files on people with SL and RL information. Is this the case?
GreenLantern Excelsior: Two JLU members did resign recently. Tux posted in the SLU thread when he noticed the membership number had decreased. I didn't speak to the members about it, so I can't say exactly why they left. However, I don't believe they resigned due to any perceived ethical violations.
Prokofy Neva: Add anything more if you have any further comments.
GreenLantern Excelsior: Thank you for the interview. I want to insert a disclaimer here. I am not the official spokesman for any of the groups I've mentioned here, and any statements I've made are my personal opinions, not the official position of those groups. Any information I've discussed here has already been revealed elsewhere, so my part in the discussion has been to correlate the various pieces of information into something that makes sense. The official JLU position on the matter has been posted recently at Truth and Lies - the League Response.
Addendum:
GreenLantern Excelsior: I told Deadly's sister that I was a friend of his from Second Life, and asked if she would say hello for me. She thanked me for the thought, but at that point Deadly was already too far gone for speech or hearing. As far as his sister ever knew, I was just Some Guy On The Internet who wanted to wish him well. Anyone who tries to make that into a harassment case is lying.
I swear (or affirm or aver) that I didn't read this entry until after I submitted my interview response. I agree with both commenters and with you. This is a great article.
GreenLantern Excelsior: I told Deadly's sister that I was a friend of his from Second Life, and asked if she would say hello for me. She thanked me for the thought, but at that point Deadly was already too far gone for speech or hearing. As far as his sister ever knew, I was just Some Guy On The Internet who wanted to wish him well. Anyone who tries to make that into a harassment case is lying.
I swear (or affirm or aver) that I didn't read this entry until after I submitted my interview response. I agree with both commenters and with you. This is a great article.