Second Thoughts

The Evils of OpenID

Wow. It's bad enough that this 25-year-old college-drop-out-turned-tyrant Zuckerberg is about two steps away from world government -- now there is a serious drive to have OpenID established in government, with DOD and Nation socialist geeks nodding in unison at #tcamp909 that it would be great to have. Facebook taking over the world isn 't *that* bad -- world government never works, and perhaps the FB World Parliament will be so busy vampire-biting each other and looking at pictures of each others' cats that they will stay out of our way. But OpenID in *government*. As in...the government of the United States of America?! Are you friggin' on *drugs*?

I should explain for those watching at home -- actually, we're *all* watching at home now because only about 277 people on the East Coast still have big expense accounts to go flying around to conferences or even take the Acela to DC -- that #tcamp09 is Twitter-speak for Transparency Camp (groan) a New New Authoritarian Left concoction that had the Personal Democracy gang all salivating along with wonky Clintonite geeks who have been in the wilderness for 8 long years inside government agencies and now at least have been free to do some real damage. "Camps" of course come from the early Silicon Valley new media meet-ups called "barcamps" which were sort of "happening unconferences" where the topics were made up as they went along and everybody just kind of hung out and chilled and drank at the bar, I guess, while they thought up stuff and noodled on their laptops.

But what's wrong with OpenID, you ask increduously? Why, it's the perfect thing. Why, it's free. Why, no one owns it. Why, it's opensource! Why, you'll be able to have one log-on everywhere and never have to make up new user names and passwords for every site! Why, it's so convenient!

To which I say, no, no, no and -- no. It's deeply fucked. And here's why.

First, any opensource project that claims "it is owned by no one; it belongs only to the community" is deeply lying. Because it belongs *to them*. To the small group of coders who originated it and divulged it only to others like themselves, not explaining themselves. Not to the general public, with its institutions of accountability. But to a bunch of unaccountable and often no-show geeks who run it. The community isn't a geographic location where you can see the people next door; it's not an agency accountable to Congress. It's just a bunch of geeks. On the Internet. Who take over...just because. Because they show up. Something as monumental as forcing a log-on identity system on to the United States of America should have been (and perhaps it's not too late to make it so) something that is debated, and which becomes *legislated*. Yes, *legislated by our representatives that we elect?* Remember them? And then signed into law by you, know, that guy in the White House we elected? Through a process. Not off his Blackberry to his friends in SiliValley.

Opensource always = closed society as I've often said precisely because while it claims to be "open" and "anyone can join" and all the other shills, in fact, it's closed if you are not a coder, and if you are not prepared to join the hive-mind IRC coding culture. Don't even THINK of criticizing ANYTHING about OpenID EVER, because here's what happens: you are told, as in SL on the JIRA, to "Patch or Get the Fuck Out". In other words, as a user, as a member of the public, unless you are willing to go spend 2 years or more aquiring a degree in computer science and learning not only how to program in a bunch of languages but negotiate the really arcane rules and regulations which ABOUND in any opensource project (as anybody who has spent one second in AWG or MMOX could tell you), you can't demand that it work.

Here's how the geeks on Twitter answer me. I note that OpenID is wonky and not user-friendly and adverse to criticism. Here's the answer I get from Daveman692 (sigh) on Twitter.

"OpenID is getting simpler as is natural for any technology that is less than 4 years old. What are you doing to help fix it?"

In other words, we get to fool around for four long years and never have to explain ourselves -- we're freeeeee! We're the commuuuunnnnity! And if you don't like that, "patch or GTFO". Go and mix it up with the freaks in the dev groups and join the other nasty and insolent asstards like that Tweeter, and try to make headway. Hey, good luck with that?

So in a defensive sulk, he tells me that OpenID has had only 4 years to develop, and it will be getting better.

Hahahahahahaha. No. That's no good. I don't mind if a multi-user 3-D streaming virtual world takes four years to develop, but...this is just a thingie to log in to a friggin website for God's sake. You need four years to do *that*? WTF is wrong with you? What the HELL have you been UP TO for four years? Could your vast global domination fantasies about making this "everywhere" yet "decentralized" um, maybe have something with why it's taking too long lol?

I persist in trying to explain how the opensource culture of insolence, defensiveness, wonkiness makes it so hard to get simple concepts across about why OpenID doesn't work. So I get a slightly more polite geek than Daveman692, @ilabra, where I explain the 4 or 6 things wrong with OpenID. He plays dumb, saying how isn't it open? The dev process isn't open? The licenscing process isn't open? But, despite making it very simple -- it's not user-friendly, you freak -- I still get a geek who keeps being unable to grasp the obvious -- he golf-whispers in an aside to his pals that he is going to play naive because he suspects I am "polemicizing". I tell him he's still not getting it. Answer:

"Thanks for your attempt at communication".

Like...I'm the problem and tongue-tied and incoherent because I explain in simple English why OpenID is hard to use and not worth replicating? The absolute insular, cynical refusal to listen to people with feedback, which should be heard in any scientific project, is astounding. Stunning.

Let's go over it again, shall we? Here's why OpenID is not only a pain in the ass to use, but threatens privacy and freedom:

Facebook's Fake Democracy

After a huge revolt from its users over a naked user content grab, Facebook is now instituting a supposed "open, transparent, and democratic" set of Terms of Service. '

Nothing could be more fake, more closed, more manipulative -- and ultimately more authoritarian -- than what they are calling "democracy". It's a loopy geek's idea of democracy incorporating various utopian ideals they have absorbed here and there from the extremist left (and right!) ideologues they seem most exposed to on the Internet -- and hopefully it will sink of its own weight and/or be overthrown. If it doesn't, we have to actively worry, as Mark Zuckerberg, among the biggest egomaniacs on the planet, will port these geeky methods to real-life and real governments outside the entertainment and social media networks (when he won't be busy destroying them outright), and we will lose our freedoms.

The most awful thing about this besieged company's claim to "democracy" is that a lot of the tech media, which shills for anything tekkie and buyable on the face of it, will laud this begrudging experiment in allowing a smidgeon of user feedback to be mistaken for authentic "democracy" -- and they will set the tone for the lapdog mainstream media outlets uncritical of tech, still confused about what new social media is, scared they will be left behind as newspapers close down everywhere. The MSM will likely grab on to this faint signal of customer appreciation -- the kind that real newspapers had to learn how to do hundreds of years ago -- as something revolutionary and grand. It's not. (It's not Metaplace's carefully-thought out and serviceable Bill of Rights!) It's stupid -- and I'll repeat -- sinister, and here's how:

Ash Wednesday

Brueghel's Battle of Carnaval and Lent.

Happy Ash Wednesday!

Just as I told you back on Groundhog Day February 2, when Jesus came out of His cave, he saw His shadow, so then we knew it would be 9 more weeks until Easter. And sure enough, here it is, Lent is starting! You know, there's Mardi Gras, which of course you've heard of, when you eat pancakes and all the things you are supposed to give up during Lent, but you may not have realized that it's not just Mardi Gras, but then Ash Wednesday, the day of Memento Mori, when, "Remember man that thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return" as the priests used to say when we were kids. Now they say something different, I'm trying to remember, I think it's "Give generously to the Cardinal's appeal and sin no more."

OK, so as you may know, during the 40 days of Lent, which match the days Jesus went and prayed in the desert, you give up something so that you can remove obstacles between yourself and God and a prayerful life, leading up to the Resurrection. This could be smoking or chocolate or something or it could be some grander act. Chocolate is an easy one because it's not that hard to do but it's considered bad form to give up something that you'd give up anyway. For example, my son told me solemnly that he is going to give up skateboarding for Lent. Given that he sits on his ass playing WoW, this isn't much of an authentic sacrifice. Of course, this is the same son who told me last night, when I told him to do his homework, "Mom, have you heard that there is a really severe homework shortage in the world during this global economic downturn? And so I thought it would be the right thing to do to give my homework to the little children of Darfur. After all, they don't have any. So I shipped it out, and I feel better inside, knowing that somewhere, somebody is getting some homework tonight, that I don't have mine anymore, but the world is a better place. Think of the children..."

Who writes them these lines?! How do they *get* this way? I responded that President Obama himself said to put away the video games in his speech the other night. The president himself! If it were an offense to tell the president to go fuck himself, I'd be visiting a certain Male, Caucasian, 16 up at Spofford right about now..."

No, I am not mommy-blogging, God know *shudders*. Hell, no. During the week, I work as a male rentals agent in a virtual world, it's a job, somebody has to do it. But ok, perhaps you should know, on nights and weekends, I love to role-play and I go absolutely wild and crazy and play a 52-year-old single mom of 2 doing the dishes. I know it's kinky, but try to be tolerant. OK, so you may have guessed what I'm giving up for Lent!

Metaversal Reversal

Yesterday, I decided to pop into Twitter all day as an experiment to see if you could get anymore value out of it watching it all day (a definite time suck!) versus coming on a few times a day only to read the replies on the page online like an inbox and fire off a few thoughts. And it's true, if you cull enough, you find the gems, but who has the time? Pretty soon, whatever news operations are left will hire ticker-tape watchers and copy boys and instead of the editor barking "Wires!"  or "Copy!" he will bark "Twitter!" and some flunky will immediately IM him their digest of culled Twitters lol.

@giffconstable tweeted yesterday, "if you need a top notch social media bizdev guy, or a good agile-software developer manager, let me know". Uh-oh, I said. So I tweeted back, "Downsizing?" and @poinky tweeted back, "Is ESC imploding?" Giff (Forseti Svarog) said no, just a bit of downsizing in these lean times, no implosion, but then a few seconds later when I saw @swords (Johnny Ming) tweet that he had been laid off from the Sheep, I realized that an implosion might well be under way. Ultimately five have been let go. Johnny was also the nicest guy at the Sheep, which contained lots of not-so-nice guys -- and gals. I've been very critical of the Sheep, and I don't wish any SL-related business to "implode" but I have to wonder if arrogance helps or harms business today. The problem isn't that they "did it wrong" as losers like Reed Steamroller tweet -- he's the nit who was banging on Reuben Steiger the other day. The Sheep builds were proficient, they got it about organizing community stuff, they did staff up, etc. etc.

No, I think the reality is that there just isn't that much appetite for virtual world development and the financing is drying up and the jobs just aren't...there...even if they are here now. The Sheep weren't talking about their layoffs but poking all around in these last weeks, I've been noticing a few quiet departures here and there from some of the companies that almost look like the normal churn in these agencies, where the hours are very long, the bosses very nasty, and the pay sometimes just too low, especially if you labour on the grid. It stands to reason that virtual worlds, which, at the end of the day, depend on real people in real societies, are experiencing a recession, too, and aren't in a magic circle.

Socialware, The Next Stage of Computing and Communications or Here Comes Everybody Except Clay Shirky

IBM card punch machine, 1964.

I've been thinking for some time now of a new theory of what could be called "socialware". I don't see anybody else using this term except some Koreans in 2002 or something, but I think it might be a good term to use to describe the next stage, as long as it can be kept free of any connotation of "socialist" which of course for some, is what social media is *for*. That's not the idea.

First, there was hardware, which worked mechanically. Even the instructions to make it work were mechanical, hole-punching cards. Years ago I worked in offices where the computers took up an entire room and we were kept busy managing the cards and being careful not to fold, spindle or mutilate them.

Then came software, which was on discs that you put in the machines to run them, but you had to be careful not to magnetize or spill coffee on those floppy discs, and then they became smaller -- and breaking the corners off them became an issue. Then it was about downloads that took forever, and then about downloads that were fast but wonky. More and more, computers in fact got harder to use even as they got more ubiquitous, because there were all sorts of menus, wizards, filters, anti-virus to keep malware-free, etc. etc. But basically you, as a user, had nothing to do with the machines, the hardware, except when you might risk your motherboard and install a graphics card, or even the software, which you usually took sight-unseen already installed when you bought the machine, or had a geek install and then tried to use with all the non-user-friendly help menus and giant impersonal knowledge bases where you'd be sent if you went to a website.

Now I think it's time for the third stage of the evolution of these computing and communicating machines, which is socialware. And this is the creation, through software, on the hardware of servers, of programs that people use as "social media," i.e. to interact with each other in real time or asynchronously, and to collaborate and build things together. And I think now is a good time for the engineers and geeks who dominated the hardware and software scenes all these decades, because of the technical complexities, to step aside, and certainly ratchet down quite a few notches the insular and insolent geek culture they developed around these machines and their code, which I've called The Geek Religion, and to start to realize that they are no longer alone, unaccountable, and arrogantly in charge anymore with this new stage of development of machines impacting people more directly and intimately.

What socialware means is that user feedback isn't just an option, just a nice "customer relations" add-on module, where you incorporate "uility," as ichabod and Khamon have said on comments to my post about MMOX. What it means is that it is consciously incorporated into the software instructions as much as an automatic routine would be, to make the mechanisms of democracy more explicit and usable and validated.

So that means that opensource creators of social media and virtual worlds no longer get to say that because they code it, they own it (one of the fallacies of the "opensouce ownership" is that everyone owns it; in fact, only coders own it) and they "get to say what it does" because they are "not paid" and if you don't like it "patch or get the fuck out". Sure, anybody can sandbox away to their heart's content, but when you make a world with people in it, or a free social media service with people in it, they get to decide what it's about *too*. This is very hard for engineers and coders to accept: they think they should decide everything, and they know everything, and know what's best. But they don't. There are all kinds of other walks of life besides computer science, even if everything is digitalized. The ubiquitousness of the digital doesn't mean that the users of the digitalized Internet and its related machines are outside the production equation. No, they are most decidedly inside it now.

Oh, you say, I can rant on about this all I like, but freedom of the code belongs to him who codes? Well, not exactly, because if you build social media for free, or build a free virtual world service, and people come and you get to use them as load testers or even charge them for use of the services, you enter into a social if not legal contract, and no longer can you expect to code in isolation. In fact, to succeed, those making virtual worlds and social media services had better grasp this sooner rather than later (Mark Zuckerberg still hasn't grasped it, despite the faceless Facebook apology for the recent TOS debacle). That means that intrinsic to -- and not a component, and not an add-on -- socialware is governance, and that means liberal democratic governance if you want it to have a hope of success. Sure, build a Gorean republic wit Restrained Life viewer if you must, but don't expect to replicate it to millions without massive revolts. What we see is when geeks like Zuckerberg build a Restrained Life like the TOS of Facebook, making a big content grab, people revolt and he is forced to step back. And there will be more and more of that. That's why suddenly, Clay Shirky is terribly unhappy. "Democratic legitmization via the web is not enough!" cries Mr. Web 2.0 Democracy -- by which he means you will still need if not representative government, at least small task forces and committees run by operatives like himself to really run things lol.

"Little Dressmaker Genocide" and the Logical Fallacy Fallacy

Not surprising, the kooks and lifers and extreme goofs of the AWG are even more aggressive on the MMOX, because they have a bigger audience. Well, kinda. I never see any real grown-ups answering them lol. One of them even admitted that the MMOX is a bit of a brake on their usual trolling and bad Fisking and literalist behaviour -- good!

One thing that geeks do when they are losing an argument and can't get out of the code cave (worse than Plato's cave) is to begin spouting about "logical fallacies." These are old Latin boy school's rhetorical gimmicks that have to do with how you win points on the debating team. Geeks love them because they define speech and discourse horribly rigidly, and enabling what they imagine to be "clear thinking" that is "scientific". But...of course it isn't anything of the sort because it always requires a judgement call, and human discourse is based not only on logic but emotion and intuition as well, and these have a right to exist. Indeed, geeks invoke them at will when they scream all kinds of stuff, like "karma is a bitch," suddenly dropping their science and their logical rectitude to embrace the wacky concept of an omniscient god who not only controls the payout system universe-wide, has the interest and the accounting tools to follow every single moral transaction you've ever participated in *and* assign a good or bad value to it and follow up with a wallop later on. Our God is a great God but He's nothing compared to the god of the Geek Religion and his karmic accounting system!

What is a "logical fallacy," you ask? Well, often one of these little dweebs will spring up and scream "ad hominem" when in fact a characterization or a label isn't a personal attack, it's merely a characterization or a label -- one that needs to be said, because he compresses lots of discussion and description, a kind of shorthand, if you will. For example, to say "He's a Leninist" is ok. In fact, even to call someone an asshole or a fascist is ok, too -- there isn't a law against it and it is certainly protected speech under the First Amendment. The First Amendment, and Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, don't say you can't speak or debate or call names and can't violate "the logical fallacies". In fact, except for Nizkor and his gang of imitators, there isn't any international standards body -- even the IETF doesn't seem to include this in their governance rules -- that insists on full compliance with logical infallibities lol.

Adam Zaius' Smoke and Mirrors

I've heard Adam Zaius (Adam Frisby) speak in real life at conferences and workshops and Metaverse Meet-ups, I've seen him reply to forums (he's not much of a poster, trying to "preserve his image") and I've read his blog. So I don't have any illusions that Adam is to make sure that any grid he is founding, co-founding, developing, running is going to have digital rights management (DRM) or any kind of permissions system such as copy/mod/transfer built into the heart of the software. That people continue to have illusions about this, or to lie about it, as Dale Innis does, is only a strategy of theirs to distract and divert and prevaricate. Here's Adam's blog of July 2008 that explains in living colour what his philosophy is in his archive of articles about copyright:

First, start with his post, which is a carbon copy of Cory Linden's 2006 blog, that tells us -- gasp, who knew?! -- that "if you can see it, you can copy it" and "due to math, trying to defeat this is impossible":

"First, the obvious one - content must be displayed on the users screen. This means it must be presented to the video card in an unencrypted form. I’ve heard a few silly ideas to prevent this one, such as encrypting the texture and using a shader to decrypt it on the video card (just run the shader in a virtual machine).

At a very fundamental level, the laws of mathematics do not allow you to say “This number cannot be copied.”, computers which are based on very high level mathematics are still subject to these immutable laws. There’s a parallel law here which states that you can always modify something - sure you can make it a house of cards that breaks if you make a change, but someone can always employ superglue to prevent that."

So in a nutshell is the philosophy: a) you need it to be copyable to show it b) we will do nothing about that because we believe it is crackable due to math propabilities.

 This religious belief is absolutely irrevocable for Adam, David Levine and all the others camped around this issue without open minds or pragmatism or a desire to safeguard commerce. Their very pro-forma nod to the problem of IP and commerce works like this:

• Custom Content - in a world where everything is mass produced and cloned, unique content that has been hand crafted for what you want is a drawcard. It’s unique, it’s yours, it’s $50.00/hour design fees.
• Keep on keeping on - The current model is unlikely to collapse, brands seem to matter and people like being able to say they have legitimate content. Systems will likely appear that allow you to verify whether someone has paid for a piece of content or not. Piracy goes on in virtual worlds today, but sellers seem to keep making sales (I’d like to know more from specific sellers how their sales have gone when a piece of content has been pirated significantly).
• Mark your intent - Tying in with the above point is the idea that you can mark your intent - this is ’shallow’ DRM - it’s nothing that cannot be removed, but it does signify what the creator wanted you to do with this content and has licensed you to do. If someone violates these terms, you can deal with them the same way copyright infringement is handled in the real world, courts. For all the complaints that go on about the DMCA, the act does provide a relatively sane way to deal with IP infringement from a content creator perspective (however beware, filing a false DMCA claim IS perjury).

Of course, this is beastly stuff, because there is absolutely no scientific proof, or even journalistic investigatory indication, that enabling the pirating of your copies enables you to sell more of them. It's one of those urban legends that someone thinks this was possible once with...a book in Africa online that the guy sold...somewhere. It isn't a business model or system. Custom content? Please. Second Life already *is* custom content write large. People already make unique custom content and have that ripped too, duh. Mark intent? This is David Levine/Zha Ewry's panacea too -- just put a notecard in, make a CC license (!) and call your lawyer. But make sure not to file any false claims, boys and girls!

So everyone can see here, in spades, large and life and twice as natural, what Adam Frisby and Davide Levin think about how to protect IP, and how to respond to technical exigencies.

To go on claiming that they support permissions, DRM, and technical implementation of copyright is to fly in the face of their own words, and engage in endless propagandizing, distraction, false-flag operations, etc. etc. Why these two would ever pretend that they are in fact for something they're not is beyond me, except...it's politics. They want to look good, and look as if they've given a nod to the concerns not only I raise, but many others.

David/Zha has also made some very clear statements about OpenSim which are good to hear as he is not as close to it as Adam, yet knowledgeable. He says it doesn't support permissions. Right, it doesn't! So Adam hastens to clear up that bad piece of propaganda in another blog, where first he quotes Zha at the Metaverse meet-up:

Linden Takes a Lens to Inworld Business

For the first time I've ever seen, Linden Lab has sent out a survey of inworld business, polling content-makers and merchants of land and services about their businesses. The survey takes about 15 minutes to fill out -- but actually longer if you actually try to answer it accurately, tabbing back and forth between transaction history and the survey monkey.

Frankly, I have to say I was looking for something with a little more...warmth...than a data scrape when I've been lobbying for more attention to inworld business all these years. I kinda feel like those people who were abducted by the aliens, and the outerspace beings then took a bite out of the back of their knee, which they discovered later when they awoke back on planet earth.

Somehow, I was picturing this bouncing, avuncular Linden appearing something like Dick Van Dyke enthusiastically asking me about how my widgets were moving and whether there was anything he could do to *help* as we sat at some fireside office hour chat. Instead, the probe has reached out...

Among the questions are some about whether and how much people take payments outside the SL servers on PayPal. Of course this is a big question. Linden would like a piece of that no doubt! Quite a few rentals and service providers like builders and scripters are paid on PayPal outside the system so as to avoid having to hose money twice through the system and lose all around for everybody. I'm happy to take PayPal for larger parcels if I'm not dealing with some day-old alt. I have absolutely no idea what this "black market" of SL is in size, but it could be huge. I always pay builders and people making licensed content outside, on PayPal; so do many others.

The other big questions asked are how much people make from their businesses. I wonder if anyone will answer this truthfully. One problem is that it is VERY confusing how it is worded, and I greeted this with total dismay, because I'd really like this survey to succeed and be accurate, and it won't be the way it is set up.

The Lindens of course start with a muddle with their "Positive Linden Flow" hype which doesn't factor in tier. On this questionnaire, they really should have specifically asked: "What is your revenue?" and then "What do you pay in tier?" To be sure, they have a question "What are your land fees?" but this could become messed up because some people pay for land in islands in PayPal, and then appear to have all their SL income as profit, the debits aren't visible. I think it really should have been very simply explicity asked to avoid confusion:

o How much is your revenue
o How much do you pay in tier to Linden or other parties on the SL website or elsewhere?
o What are your inworld expenses and outside payments?

Or some such. That is, I looked at it 4 times trying to figure out whether I put in tier as my "expenses" or only inworld costs like buying plants for rental areas.

Agoraphobia

Alexander laying out the city of Alexandria by Andre Castaigne 1898/99

Well, I didn't wait for the game gods from MMOX to authorize me to have a meeting about interoperability or to be admitted into their august councils which are likely to be open, but not really open, so I just called an open one. About 25 people came, but over half of them never uttered a word. Some were obvious alts, and there was at least one libsecondlife griefer but she left early fortunately. One heckler who has been a heckler at past meetings was dispatched eventually. The rest of the people hashed out the issues merely in a non-technical layman's way, although at least 2 of the people talking are programmers and coders and have huge experience in virtual worlds, but they simply don't see the need for interoperability or the reasoning for the rush for it. But of course, this isn't something that even the broader technical population got to decide, let alone the wider population of SL.

What's clear is that for a certain very determined and extremist wing of the geek opensource movement, interoperability=removing all copyright protections as unjustified. Bubblesort represents that silly, aggressive extremism. Then, another extreme is Orange becoming overly obsessed with Mickey Mouse copyright protection. I think here, it's all about sales. If I wanted to upload a Mickey Mouse image from the Internet into my SL home as a picture for my personal use, I doubt the Disney people would waste time coming after me, but if I start selling that poster in SL, they might. And if Bubblehead had to make a living selling content, he wouldn't be so cavalier about demanding its freeness. The person who talked about having CC licenses on content in fact was subsidized by the government to do that -- and that's why CC is essentially such a fraud.

What really surprised me was to hear Crap Mariner, who I think of as very creative and geeky and intrepid, say he didn't want to port to other grids on the same avatar. That's actually an opinion that is more widespread than the geeks in MMOX admit. Crap says he has enough trouble teleporting off his island to another island in SL lol. That set me thinking about how much the geeks ranting on about this in other worlds don't realize that in SL, you already have that feeling of travelling all over the world with the same avatar and same inventory. You can hop over to a South Korean or a Russian or a Brazilian server, pick up their stuff for sale, and give them something as a gift or if they have a mall, rent a space and sell your stuff. Interoperability of the kind that the MMOX shill as a cover already exists in that sense within the context of SL. The guy in his Batmobile who is cited on the MMOX list as "needing" to drive from one world to the next and arrive with all his guns still blazing already does that between SL sims.     

I think I summed up the issue best this way: if there are other worlds that don't have user content as a premise, like SmallWorlds does now, and the gameplay is different, your SL content is irrelevant. You don't need to take it, or your avatar for that matter, over there. In WoW, you don't want your SL name which might be your RL name, you want something more warlike. But if there is a way better world, let's say that World X out there, yet to be made, 10 times better than SL, you don't need or want your more primitive SL stuff and more clunky avatar anyway. You'd want to roll your own new one and make new stuff with those way better tools. Interoperability only plays as a concept if you have roughly-equal worlds, but the push for them is coming with those who have lesser worlds, as OpenSim doesn't have the SL content, although it's made by those coming out of SL who want to reconstruct SL better. Why do they need their SL inventory uploaded if they have all these fabulous things like RealExtend blah blah? The need will evaporate if in fact the other worlds are "better". Interoperability seems like merely an excuse for a forced wealth transfer. Who profits?

I'm calling this post "Agoraphobia" which is a word that means "fear of the marketplace" (that has come to be used as the term for the psychiatric condition of fear of open spaces). In fact, somebody like Bubble fears the marketplace, the arena of sales of property and protection of copyright. He would like to portray someone like me as fearing the opensim spaces of freeness, but in fact, I don't fear that at all, like I wouldn't fear Death Valley, I would just say "it's difficult to sustain life there" and cross through it but not live there. The fear of the marketplace -- capitalism and commerce -- is so big among technocommunists that they wish to kill it. It's amazing to watch. Are they essentially insecure, that they would not be able to compete if everything weren't free and copyable?

Make Mine MMOX

It's interesting, this MMOX with moxie. Rather than have me bore you with replays, I'd urge you to just go join the list, it doesn't lack for comedic value for those of us who have been watching this at home in SL for the last 3 years. Right now, some guy is trying to get the SL avatars to come clean with their real names. He's directed his call at me, thinking that he can shut me up by a demand for a real name. Nice try, he gets it. Next? Zha comes on to invoke a rule that says you don't have to put a real name as long as you are consistent; some other anonymity in the SL coding gang insists on retaining only their SL name because the IETF has said it's ok, but the original guy thinks by peer pressure they can make the SL people buckle. Interesting! The list already has John Hurliman, maker and seller of Copybot (Eddy Stryker of libsecondlife); it has David Levine of IBM (Zha Ewry) who affectes a troubled stare into the distance about the socio-political issues of content protection but basically, along with technocommunist land baron Adam Frisby (Adam Zaius), tells you to call your lawyer or tuck a CC notecard into your product. It has Morgaine Dinova, a long time extremist Extropian who terrorizes the Thinkers whose real name isn't given; and all the other frequent posters of the AWG who posture without accountability like they do inworld, prompting more button-downed types like JW to scold them for "sound-byting" and declaring themselves as "first".

But then there's JW himself, CTO of Forterra, who, objectively speaking, has no interest in the success of Second Life, and in fairness, can't be expected to police the laxness of Linden Lab on behalf of some putative "international community". To be sure, I've never seen the There executives dump on Second Life the way There residents can dump on There with abandon in high-profile settings like Metanomics. Unlike Mark McCahill of Croquet (Pixeleen Mistrale), editor of the former Second Life Herald, now Alphaville Herald, the Forterra people evidently don't solve their differences with Linden Lab by inciting and conducting industrial sabotage.They are what is known as "collegial," despite JW's inevitable digs at SLers on this list -- but that's ok, they deserve a slap.

Apparently the stakes are higher these days, given Mark's sinister griefing activities and his Herald antics, which I've recently had opportunity to re-confirm are his 110 percent, and the unseemly drive of the AWG into the IETF to put one over on the engineers there who won't be briefed up on all the issues as they deal with the flat 2-D Internet.

I can now see clearer why some of these other world platform operators have no interest in things like copy/mod/transfer on SL objects which seem like parochial concerns that Linden Lab itself should resolve. They don't have c/m/d on objects in There because they don't need them, the Company clears all content through a centralized system and they decide whether something is copyable or transferrable or not. While There.com/Forterra doesn't clear content for customers that use their software on their own servers, those people protect content behind a corporate firewall, they aren't connected to a "world". I never heard in depth how content-creation in There works for people, whether they consider themselves fairly compensated or not or whether they have IP issues. There is very much a closed world. When I once mentioned to Michael Wilson, CEO of There.com that the SL Herald might open in There.com and it seemed to be getting more interesting, he looked at me in horror -- and he was right to.

There is nobody to care about the rights of content creators in SL but themselves. Linden Lab will not be caring; the slowness of their DMCA takedowns (still no answer on mine of 3 weeks ago, to cite thousands of thousands of examples), the indifference to the 1003 votes on the texture theft issue; the silence on the permissions regime planned for interoperability -- all that lets us know.

I understand today a lot more about this than I used to four years ago, and it makes me sad. Here's my correspondence with Mr. Big, JW of Forterra: