The Lindens Cave to Open Source Thugs on the Third-Party Viewer Policy

Happy May Day, Kids! Happy technocommunist workers with the third-party viewer policy in hand.

Well, as a social experiment, it was interesting, but it didn't last. It was my hope that when the Lindens developed their initial Third-Party Viewer Policy, it would help them follow their own rules better, and help others follow rules, such as to create a rule of law environment -- not that you get that without a proper free government with separation of powers and checks and balances, mind you, but it's a start.

In order to address the growing problem of crime from the opensource movement -- content theft, griefing, invasion of privacy, all amply documented -- the Lindens devised the concept of the Third Party Viewer (TPV) policy *with responsibility"

With such flexibility comes responsibility -- for all parties. For the benefit of the community, we have published standards that govern viewer behavior and viewer interaction with our infrastructure. The Policy on Third-Party Viewers clearly states the requirements that each third-party viewer must meet in order to be permitted to access Second Life. These requirements apply to all third-party viewers, not just those in the Viewer Directory. The Viewer Directory is intended to highlight viewers that have self-certified their compliance with our policies so that it is easy for interested Residents to discover and explore their potential.

It is the responsibility of third-party developers to ensure that their viewers' features, functionality, content, and code are in compliance with our policies. Third-party developers who apply to include a viewer in the Viewer Directory must self-certify that the viewer software complies with the Policy on Third-Party Viewers. This is critical because Linden Lab does not oversee third-party viewer development and cannot make any guarantees regarding a third-party viewer's code or operation.

Users are also advised to take reasonable precautions, such as scanning for viruses, before installing a third-party viewer.  It's important to know that Linden Lab does not provide customer support for issues specifically related to third-party viewers.

Today, that policy has now been gutted completely, with all dev responsibility removed from it, and with only *user* responsibility kept as a notion to guard us all against griefing and theft:

Your Responsibility for Third-Party Viewers

If you are a user or Developer of Third-Party Viewers:

1. You are responsible for all uses you make of Third-Party Viewers.
2. Linden Lab does not provide customer support services for issues related to Third-Party Viewers. If you are a user of a Third-Party Viewer, you may contact us for customer support, but if we believe your issue is related to your Third-Party Viewer, we may not be able to assist you and may direct you to the Developer of the Third-Party Viewer. If you are a Developer, we urge you to provide customer support services for issues related to your Third-Party Viewer.
3. All use and distribution of Third-Party Viewers must comply with Linden Lab policies and applicable law and must not:
1. Violate or promote violation of the Second Life Terms of Service or Community Standards.
2. Violate or promote violation of any applicable law or the rights of any individual or entity; or
3. Expose Second Life users, Linden Lab, or third parties to legal liability or harm as determined by us in our sole discretion.
4. You assume all risks, expenses, and defects of any Third-Party Viewers that you use. Linden Lab shall not be responsible or liable for any Third-Party Viewers.
5. If you are a user, we suggest taking reasonable precautions, including virus scanning, before installing and using a Third-Party Viewer. We suggest these precautions even for applications in the Viewer Directory because self-certification is no guarantee of an application’s compliance with this Policy.

Gone is the notion articulated in the Feb. 23 blog post, "It is the responsibility of third-party developers to ensure that their viewers' features, functionality, content, and code are in compliance with our policies." and which was in the earlier redactions of this policy you can follow on the OS list. Only the developer as *user* is captured by this policy now; the developer as *developer* is not captured.

Along the way since February, the Lindens have been beaten to a pulp by their own offspring, the AWGroupies and other assorted opensource freaks that come to their office hours, rant at them on listserves, and even come and drink with them in bars around Linden Lab in real life.

Immediately, all the opensource zealots told them that "it can't be done" because a) you can't stop copying due to the analog asshole argument ("if you can see it you can copy it") and b) you can't stop rogue viewers logging on because they can spoof credentials and c) it is a violation of the GPL license to make a dev responsible for something that someone else might do modifying his code.

So all the script kiddies loudly and obnoxiously screamed a) and b) and c), especially people like Discrete Dreamscape who had posted a copybot patch on the JIRA that sat there for months, to make the analog asshole argument, "if you can see it you can copy it" and especially people like Morgaine who raged that this was a horrid violation of the GPL. During this period, people with Emerald and other various spinoffs or precursors of Emerald and other griefer viewers also made the point that rogue viewers can evade estate bans and override god mode to be able to grief, and that they can out IPs and online status and other features of privacy. Oh, and they can encrypt chat so that no one at the Lab can make a chat log of their crimes.

Thus, it all seemed, after these months of copying and griefing and invading privacy we had all throughout the fall of 2009, which included numerous outrageous examples of massive copying of people's intellectual property in SL, even the dumping of huge boxes of stuff with thousands of items for people to copy, and of course, many invasions of my properties and the killing of my tenants' and my chickens by the Emerald devs (artificial life on socialist Svarga=cool; artificial life on capitalist Ravenglass=not cool), we were being "taught a lesson": "it is impossible to control third-party viewers, they will do what they want, embrace the inevitable".

A thread was started about the opensource viewer that also achieved what we already knew: that the opensource devs are mainly thugs, and will use the most outrageous arguments and methods to get their way, including the most vicious harassment on forums. The thread was finally closed. Rob Linden, who was in charge of these thugs, sicced them on this thread, telling them to go "make their case". Um, I guess they did. Eventually, Rob left the Lab. He was the one who had allowed Discrete's patch to remain on the JIRA. Now, more prudent Lindens removed it -- after all, no sense in making it easier for people to be the analog assholes that they are, copying other people's stuff.

Then, Emerald went into mysterious and frequent "talks" with the Lab. At first the Lindens had floated a possible rule for viewers would be "no encryption of chat" They had put it up as a blog post I believe as a trial run of their TPV. This seemed eminently reasonable. There are some teenage thugs on Youtube screeching at me like banshees that I don't "understand how the Internet works" and shouldn't advocate this -- I made the point on Massively and got voted down into invisibility (more thuggishness -- the Internet is ruled by thugs). Um, yeah, I get it that banks use encryption. Also governments, investigating crimes and terrorism. And health care facilities. And counselors whose patients need confidentiality. And let's see (although the teenage thugs didn't mention this): priests! clergy of various religions. There. Would that last bit now help you to understand the problem, kiddies, if our banking collapses didn't?

First of all, Second Life isn't a bank. I answered the script kiddy laconically at first, "Oh, um, Emerald is running a bank?" Banking/investment schemes/stock markets have all been outlawed in SL. I don't think Emerald or its users are running international espionage operations against Al Qaeda, or taking care of cancer patients or wounded war veterans, either. Encryption is needed for business and non-profit work on the Internet, and people use PGP just because they can, too.

But in the environment of SL, which is already anonymous and already notorious for its outbreak of crime with the pyramid scheme scandals and gambling and theft of copyrighted items, encryption isn't warranted. It's if anything a marker for copyright theft, griefing, and child pornography, and if the Lindens see people encrypting, if anything, they should watch them more carefully to see what ends up in their inventories and what abuse reports are filed on them -- which they can't encrypt. After all, if you are a business, hospital, church, you can use either the SLE sims with their stand-alone behind-the-firewall capacity, or you could do projects that don't involve confidentiality, or you could lock down your island so that no other agents with data scrapers and chat loggers can come on your island (that leaves you only with the problem of Linden Lab, and it's not always trustworthy employees getting at your chat, not ideal).

But by and large, given that Second Life is a community, a private corporation's company town, its managed online community in which it has a TOS, it seems warranted to bar encryption as it hampers the ability of the platform provider to govern that community.

Despite these eminently sane and logical concerns that Linden Lab began with, somewhere along the line, mysteriously, abruptly, Lindens threw it out the door. They dropped the ban on encryption. Likely, they were told, "We will go on encrypting anyway so you can't stop us and we have 75,000 users" (the figure always invoked of Emerald users, wildly inflated, because the concurrency isn't even at that number most of the time -- the number of people downloading the viewer doesn't equal the number of users as quite a few users had problems with it and didn't use it, or dropped out of SL, which has high attrition).

One thing is certain: Emerald devs, heavy users of encryption, don't need encryption for banking, health care, counseling or international espionage and crime-fighting, so...what do they need it for? Oh, that's "not our business!"

Of course, all the privacy-defeating features I raised again and again as concerns, the outing of people's online status, the ability to jump up to skyboxes, etc. -- this was all let go. The Lindens weren't going to bother with this -- they didn't care. The privacy of customers isn't at the top of their list to safeguard. They let it go.

So that left two major areas that the Lindens still wanted to accomplish with their TPV policy: curbing of copyright theft and mitigation of griefing (they didn't set the goal of "ending" these phenomena, but wanted to reduce it).

Well, as we all know, you can't stop copyright theft, right? We've all been in a million forums fights, Linden office hours, inworld brawls, where we've been scornfully told a zillion times that "if you can see it you can copy it" and there is "no technical means" to stop copyright theft! The educators on SLED are once again reinventing the wheel with this debate, with some of them purporting to tell others "universal truths" that you "cannot" stop copyright theft so you shouldn't try, etc.

Except...it turns out you can. Who knew!

It turns out...a miracle is possible! Go know!

While you may not be able to stop the mechanical function of copying, which is rapid as me clicking PRINT SCREEN on this page and CTR-C into Paint, what you *can* do is sniff out the use of rogue viewers, those viewers which have been determined to contain features in them that violate copyright and the Linden TOS.

Wow, you mean you can do what Sony and Apple couldn't do with music for ages and lost millions of dollars of business! Wow! So tell me this secret, please!

If you use the Emerald-dev created CDS system, it turns out you can detect the users of these criminal viewers, some of them based on criminal viewers the Emerald devs themselves made (which is why they are good at making a detection system for them!), and automatically boot these thiefs from your land. Of course, there's the problem of the false positive, and the problem of the unjust punishment ("I was just logging on with my friend's account, I didn't know" "I didn't realize this viewer could do that") etc.)

Skills Hak, close friend and confidente and builder for Rodney Linden, and Emerald dev extraordinaire, has brought this lovely product GEMINI CDS to Xstreet where you can buy it for $700 for a one month license (US $2.60) and put it out on your land to catch bad guys.

Here's another piece of indoctrination:  "sion chicken feed needing to be bought once a month for 12 chickens for $1190=bad; CDS license needing to be bought once a month for $700=good.

Avatars will stay in the database forever and treated as potentially harmful, even after returning to a harmless viewer. CDS is a networked system, banlists are automatically shared so CDS users benefit from each other. All the heavy-lifting and calculations are processed outside of the grid leaving CDS lag-free and secure.

Now, naturally you're wondering right about now: "But, hey, wait just a minute here. Aren't these the same people who themselves made copybots and set them loose in the wilds? So now they're selling you the package to get rid of the same things they make? What's up with that?"

Right! That's one thuggish piece of this enterprise, precisely. Create a problem, then sell people the means to defeat it.

But there's more!

If it has a networked system sharing ban information and doing all the um "heavy lifting" offsite on a third-party website, then how is that different than the JLU's crime-fighting device that was exposed by me and the Herald, leading Mark McCahill even to out his real-life identity, so zealous was he in revealing the pervidy of these spandexed crime-fighters themselves engaging in criminal methods!

And you'd be right to wonder that, because...there isn't any difference!

Except, remember your ideological training now, kids: "socialist Svarga artificially intelligent life=good; capitalist Ravenglass artificially intelligent life=bad". 

And JLU Brainiac Wiki griefer database=bad and Emerald GEMINI CDS griefer database=good.

As KT Furman noted in comments to this past blog, there's a possibility that Onyx, which is Fractured ModularSystem's bot that scrapes data for...some purpose...is related to the dbase that GEMINI CDS must make.

CDS claims there have never been false positives. Well, yuh. I should think that people making a detecting devise for their own viewers would know their own business lol.

Read the comments if you would like to get some, um, alternative user input, including from people who say the appeals process is a joke, a point which, while not inspiring credulity from the particular person who made it because he was testing ripper viewers, still stands, because it would be hard to expect otherwise in a closed system like this.

A German commentator claims that it does not violate privacy, and only those outraged thieves who have been caught complain about this, and yet others have raised the concern about the tracking of IP addresses or tracking of other data that when retained and collated and triangulated works to out alt IDs and hound people with extrajudicial vengeance.

  Sandrina Koolhoven on 2010-03-22
27 of 71 members found this review helpful.
THIS system is indeed using a hack through Quicktime that gains access to a persons hard drive. This system has been torn down and looked at. Scanning yours or my HDD is a clear violation of USA Privacy laws and only LL has a right to know who your alts are, not the designer of this system. Innocents and the guilty alike are being banned but the bottom line is that anywhere this system is running money will be lost far above any loss of content they may have suffered. The fact that it violates real world laws is just one point in the abuse this system is spreading through SL. A glorified griefing tool that LL has not signed off on, they simply are sitting on the fence for the time being

As always with this subject, it's awfully hard for the average consumer with limited technical knowledge to follow whether the system itself created by known thugs is "good" and whether the criticisms of the system made by suspect people are "right". It's anyone's guess. Perhaps the Lindens know. They aren't talking.

Which brings me to my next point. People who had always said that surely there must be a way to track copying, if nothing else, to record who does the copying, to harden against crime and then note where breaches take place, would be surely vindicated, instead of getting sneered at that they still believed in DRM. Remember your indoctrination again, kids: DRM=evil, because it puts rights in the hands of platform managers and individual creators who chose to put it in. Right? But CDS=good, because it puts the catching of copyright violators in the hands of one development group. Um, right?

Well, call me silly, but I'd rather have an "evil" system that puts copyright management -- DRM -- in the hands of the platform provider with a DRM device (coded c/m/t functions) with a choice by each creator whether to turn it on or not (c/m/t or not) than put the *catching* of violators in the hands of one group. That's just common sense and logic. But in our indoctrination, remember, we can't use common sense and logic but just have to do what the tribe says!

So now that we've put paid to privacy violation (the Lindens didn't care enough), copyright (the Lindens were willing to tacitly sit by while thugs did the catching of other thugs), that left griefing.

There's the curious case of Woodbury University, where some people might think they were banned for griefing me, my tenants, and other communities who chose to be less vocal , and others "in the know" insist they were banned because Emerald set them up, and dropped the dime on them to the Lab for...using rogue copybot viewers (which they could do using CDS or through social hacks, infiltrating their groups).

There's the curious case of the proof of this charge, which is a screenshot of Tizzy taken from the perspective of the user of Tizzy's account showing him logged on and copying stuff with a rogue viewer (or that is the impression, anyway). I don't know what that means. If it isn't Tizzers himself taking the screenshot and bragging, it's either a Linden with log-on rights to any account, or its somebody hacking the account, or somebody in the room with Tizzers who happens to get at his account.

Then there's the side stories -- the Linden brownbag transcript and the machinima that outs the fact that some Emerald devs called this Neil fellow at home and talked to his dad to scare him into stopping his rogue viewer.

So basically, we have the opensource answer to the eternal opensource "analog asshole" argument:

o no, you can't stop copying, but you can detect the use of copiers and ban the shit out of everyone suspected of using a ripper viewer

o no, you can't stop copying but you can call people at home in real life and scare them into stopping

My, what a plan!

So, with all these lovely "features" in place, both technical and...social, shall we say (needing third-party data bases and enforcement calls to people's homes -- neither of which interested the highly, um, conscience-driven Herald which crusades against the violation of people's civil rights), there now comes the problem of the TPV for those still whining.

Curiously, the Emeralds had stopped whining in recent weeks. They had gotten theirs. The Lindens basically said, we'll sign you up and bring you into the tent, be good, here's a custom last name. I don't know what transpired, whether the Lindens approved or acknowledged CDS; where the Emeralds made some sort of deal, or even used intimidation, threatening the mass exodus or mass griefing by their 75,000 members (sigh). Some day, perhaps the story can be told.

Meanwhile, some people have picked on their actual compliance, as they haven't seemed to sign up with an identifiable domain and real name, which is still apparently a requirement.

Boy Lane -- no angel he -- began to crab in the OS list -- asking the same questions that I've asked for months, that Angela Talamasca has asked for months much more expertly with the technical details on her blog. Boy is a new addition to the Newly Acquired Conscience Club -- we have so many newbie members, alway! -- but, here goes:

On Thu, Apr 29, 2010 at 8:38 PM, Boy Lane <boy.lane@yahoo.com> wrote:

                We certainly should follow the bright example of Emerald / Modularsystems,
                where you Discrete are a member of. A pseudo company set up and owned
                by known banned griefer JCool aka who revived his banned account(s) under
                the names of Fractured Crystal/Fractured Modularsystems.

                Back to their registration. JCool set up Modularsystems. A mailbox company
                with the following contact details:

                http://modularsystems.sl/
                P.O. Box 5702
                West Columbia, South Carolina 29171-5702
                United States
                administrator@modularsystems.sl

                That is an untraceable anonymized entity without any name attached to it and
                unknown legal status, registered with a domain name in Sierra Leone, a
                country
                that does not even have a WHOIS.

                This information was used to register and self-certify Emerald in the Viewer
                Directory.

                As I as a legally uniformed hobby programmer without commercial interest can
                evaluate this situation and validity of the Emerald listing, it is meant to
                circumvent any means of the viewer directory to hold a developer accountable for their
                viewers. It is also meant to avoid any possible litigation from LL in case
                indeed some malicious code may be found in their viewer(s). Besides Emerald,
                Modularsystems also develops and uses a malicious viewer named "Onyx" that is in clear
                violation of ToS/TPV.

                So no, Discrete, all these things completely contradict your argument. As
                shown a listing in Lindens viewer directory doesn't add a single piece of safety or
                security. To look for a legitimate viewer the Alternate Viewer list in the community
                edited SL Wiki is a better place to, for the simple reason malicious clients may not easily
                slip in as this is possible with self-certification. A blacklist is a good thing and
                could at least complement Viewer Directory and Alternate Viewers list. But of course it
                would include most of the malicious viewer from the key developers behind
                Modularsystems which obviously you try to avoid.

                Additional question to Linden Lab: How can for repeated ToS violations
                permanently banned people just circumvent that ban by creating new accounts as many of
                the Emerald developers did? Is it money spent for SL that counts rather than
                ToS?

                Boy

From: Boy Lane
          To: Brandon Husbands ; Discrete Dreamscape
          Cc: opensource-dev@lists.secondlife.com
          Sent: Friday, April 30, 2010 3:57 PM
          Subject: Re: [opensource-dev] Viewer blacklist to replace the TPV


          I don't know who you are Mr. Brandon Husbands, you are certainly not a viewer developer but a fly-by-night who want's to add some oil to the drama fire. It does not really matter.

          I stated facts here, not flames.

          Modularsytems is a "company" with a legal status we dont't know, created and owned by a person with permanently banned accounts due to ToS violations.

          Modularsystems is registered as this entity in the viewer directory.

          Modularsystems develops and uses malicious viewers, namely "Onyx", with several other malicious projects done by key developers such as Fractured, Phox, Skills or Cryo. All who had their accounts permanently banned for ToS violations.

          I asked a legitimate question to LL, to repeat it once again: How can for repeated ToS violations permanently banned people just circumvent that ban by creating new accounts as many of the Emerald developers did? Is it money spent for SL that counts rather than ToS?

          As you haven't read my posting, rather add irrelevant accusations in your own posting, Mr. Brandon Husband, that are supposedly to confuse the reader and discredit legitimate questions, lI can only conclude you are the troll here.

          Boy

On Fri, Apr 30, 2010 at 3:49 AM, Boy Lane <boy.lane@yahoo.com> wrote:

    Your credentials are very much up for discussion if you engage in here. Firstly, you do not link to your sources where you post your binary, that is in the alternate viewer directory. A posting here in the mailing list is not sufficient. As such you are violating GPL. You are also violating redistribution licenses by distributing the vivox voice components in the same place. But that's not what this whole thing is about.

    As for the points you brought up, I'm not the one supposed to answer anything in regards of legal status, registration, permanent bans, newly created accounts etc. of Modularsystems and their key developers. I wrote what is publically available information. As this is limited I asked the question here about this because I do not know the details and I'd like to get an answer how this is possible and why permanently banned accounts can circumvent that ban by just creating new avatars.

    The ToS violations and bans are verifyable by the very own statement of JCool/Fractured, also the acknowledgment of the malicious Onyx viewer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRbV9SIbdCA

    Again, these are facts people should be aware of. Henri raised a legitimate qestion about creation of a blacklist of known malicious viewers, instead of relying on FUD spread by LL about the validity of listings in the viewer directory. Everyone can list a viewer here, self certify, and residents believe this viewer is legitimate. Which is nothing but wrong. LL has neither the resources nor capacity to verify every single viewer entry.

    In addition they also stated clearly that the Viewer Directory is meant as a marketing tool for those who need the publicity it may create. What I think it only creates is a false sense of security, and it will be only a question of time until a malicious project will be listed, and be it for the LULZ of some script kiddie.

    I have nothing against you personally, but I have serious concerns that made me stopping developing viewers. Even though they never had any malicious features at all.

    Boy

Which elicits this not-inspiring-much-confidence reply:

From: Brandon Husbands
  To: Boy Lane
  Cc: Discrete Dreamscape ; opensource-dev@lists.secondlife.com
  Sent: Friday, April 30, 2010 5:17 PM
  Subject: Re: [opensource-dev] Viewer blacklist to replace the TPV


  Sighs.

  Last post.... I am going to word this very simple like.
  GPL.  the actual locations are different. There no page nor www site for the viewer itself. Nor is it a active thing. You have issues with this... Please contact: <license-violation@gnu.org> by all means.

  Since your insisting on the credentials. I can hand you my resume if you like.  You said do not have any idea who I am nor what I do. Lets see i have contributed to many FOSS projects and have plenty of my own. Recently the LSL editor which was closed source was given to me by the copyright holder. I have open sourced it. There are plenty of other projects which are open source which I contribute. I also created DCS and have a active user base of over 150k in SL and since your so fond of if a company is real i assure you my company is.  If you like I can put you in contact with my lawyers to discuss your accusations and slander which you have recently brought up about myself and my works and such.   So please don't go barking at me about this or that as i do not have time for your petty games and epeen stroking.

  Plainly what it boils down to is you have a beef with emerald. Sorry I can not help you with this. But this is no place for your attacks on it.

  To put it in terms which i believe you might understand. drop it dude. No one wants to hear your crying on this list. I only chimed in cause to be honest your whines annoyed me.

  You are barking up the wrong tree here sir. So please cease and desist so we can get back to productive discussions.

  I will not reply anymore as I have contributed to this chaos way to much now. You can feel free to contact me in world or via email for further discussion or if you choose to continue with false accusations we can handle this in a lawful way but by any means his list is not the place so I will ask you one more time.. Please stop.

  To the rest of you I am personally sorry that you have to go through this. But I can not allow these type of accusations to go unanswered. I really am sorry that you have to go through this garbage.

  Dim.

Discrete Dreamscape also stumps against a blacklist:

 ----- Original Message ----- > Date: Thu, 29 Apr 2010 16:39:16 -0400
                > From: Discrete Dreamscape <discrete.dreamscape@gmail.com>
                > Subject: Re: [opensource-dev] Viewer blacklist to replace the TPV
                > directory ?
                > To: Tigro Spottystripes <TigroSpottystripes@gmail.com>
                > Cc: opensource-dev@lists.secondlife.com
                > Message-ID:
                > <g2nc38195a91004291339p41f404edgfe05a593c813c6c1@mail.gmail.com>
                > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
                >
                > This discussion seems to have been created with misleading intentions. Because some TPV creators don't want to reveal any personal information about themselves, they can't be posted on the TPV directory, and because of this, it's understandable they might view the directory as unfair. But, this doesn't strike me as a valid reason to criticize the list.
               
                It's certainly valid to say that the viewers on the list are not absolutely trustworthy unless a full code audit is done, but even then, do you really know that what's in the code is the same as what's in the binary? Isn't there a limit to what LL can do, given a lack of resources to perform such audits, especially when what you download requires trust that it's the same as what they've audited?
                But really, trust is supposed to be provided by the fact that the viewer has indeed registered using real-life contact information, because who would give such a thing knowing they could be held liable if they indeed decided to include malicious code? In general, there is no way to certify purity here, you can only provide a level of trust as a guideline. You can't rely on babysitting the users, because LL isn't going to compile every third party's code and release the binaries themselves.
                In this regard, you may begin to argue that indeed, a blacklist would better serve users. I argue that this is exactly the opposite. You may be able to pick out which viewers are explicitly untrusted, but you make no statements about the trustworthiness of any others. In this situation, a user is left to choose between either a viewer which is in the grey about its status, or an official Linden viewer. This point is key, as far less warranty is provided for users that they won't be banned for using a third party viewer.
                I suspect that in this case, many would simply give up and use the official client rather than risk their business, etc.
                If you want to provide a system where users can trust the clients they use, it seems like our current one is decent enough. In any case, a blacklist doesn't appear to be any safer.
                Discrete
               

In general, I'd be for creating whitelists rather than blacklists in consumer affairs, because the people ready to kill off competitors by making blacklists are always available to skew the results (that's why every "Better Business Bureau" fails in Second Life), and if you make a whitelist, it can, in principle, be a universality and a rule of law over particularisms and vagaries of exceptionalism by making a set of standards everyone volunteers to submit to.

Obviously, there are legitimate worries about how bad actors can sign up for this whitelist the Lindens have made, because bad actors, namely the Emerald devs, already signed up. So basically the Lindens fudged on their own effort saying, "We're going to put in a requirement that people have accounts in good standing without bans, but we'll make an exception for Emerald just because they are big and bad and we need to bring them in under the tent, but we'll use this against anybody we don't like when and as needed."

So they used it against Woodbury, but the mystery remains -- why? Because if Woodbury's Wrong Hands caper can out bad things about Emerald, so what? Those bad things were already known to the Lindens, and already forgiven. So maybe there were *different* and *new* bad things? But banning them wouldn't get rid of the allegations that everyone has already seen on Youtube.  Except, Youtubes can be removed, and "everyone" is a constantly shifting and amnesia-prone concept in Second Life affairs...

Even so, with Emerald in under the tent, and the Woodburies banned, or at least, the ones that were the most embarassing or the most obnoxious anyway that they'd like to ban anyway (bullying of Prokofy and others), what was the problem?

Why cave *further* on the one little piece of wording that demanded some accountability from these existing in-the-tent thugs, and other around-the-tent thugs?

That wording had to do with an undertaking in the TPV that basically said "You are responsible for the code you develop" with the caveat of "when you are logging on to our servers with that code".

This hardly seemed to violate the endlessly disculpable opensource crime regime -- do anything you want whenever with whatever because we say so -- the GPL license. It merely said *when* you play in our sandbox *then* you play by our rules and don't copy and grief.

This unleashed endless tirades from all the most looniest of the loons, Morgaine Dinova, Gareth Nelson and others on the autism spectrum who were literalist, Fiskist and extremist in imagining that this sort of accountability was a horrible violation of GPL (the Slashdotters didn't think so) and in general of some sort of universal creators' rights that must be extended infinitely, always and everywhere (creator fascism).

Joe Miller seemed to stand up to this for a good long while, making the arguments that it only applied to SL log-ons and did not attempt to restrict devs' code always and everywhere -- go on opensim and grief and steal to your heart's content, is basically what was being said there.

Yet something happened, and we don't know what. Perhaps Mitch Kapor, a zealous proponent of opensource extremism when it suits him, suddenly took the time to zero in on the issues in this company where he sits on the board, or maybe an Electronic Frontier Foundation lawyer, which he also controls, took notice or finally answered a memo -- or perhaps yet another legal advisor brought in said something less tentative than before -- who knows?

SOMETHING happened that made the Lindens suddenly pull a switcheroo on their much-discussed draft that they had endlessly defended, and made them pull out the word "responsible" as it applied to *developers* and make it only apply to *users* (game gods always like to stick it to users whenever possible -- all of the responsibility, none of the rights for monitoring, none of the democratic participation in enforcement -- that's how they like to keep it!)

So today, when you look at this policy, it is essentially a shell of what it was when I declared it a "Thing of Beauty and a Joy Forever".  I celebrated it because I thought at long last, the thuggish opensource movement is forced to be accountable for its actions, at least in one place, at one time, called "Second Life". At least they cannot extend their criminality of theft and griefing *here* with impunity. At least *here* there is the rule of law that they cannot anarchically overthrow, and in doing so, gradually we begin to "take back the night" of the Internet in its early iterations that these people made a giant incubator and committer of crime, destroying every media business and engulfing every privacy, undermining private property and the individual's rights, which are the bedrock of civil society.

But it was not to be. Now we have a shell of a policy, thugs in power with thugs' life, and only one set of thugs to beat up other thugs. This is not much progress.

The only thing that can be said is faintly positive about it is that it attempts to circumscribe bad behaviour by saying that ripper viewers will not be registered and griefers will not be registered. I'm not sure how Onyx bot got itself approved scraping data everywhere -- the Lindens haven't developed a policy on bots as distinct from viewers, although, they really amount to the same thing.

There is a kind of back-handed achievement here that is worth noting:

o the analog asshole argument -- that I get to copy it just because I can -- is put to bed, and trumped by the GEMINI CDS copybot detector -- no more can tekkies sneer at us for raising objections to copybots that copy our stuff mercilessly, and tell us to not care, because tekkies themselves -- Emerald devs of the most popular TPV accepted by the Lindens -- have themselves made what *they* claim is an effective copybot detector (at least for now)

o thugs are forced to pretend that they are compliant, even if they haven't been or aren't really, which one can use for social pressure on them when they inevitably get caught in their lies

Well, in the spirit of the opensource movement, here's what I'd call for:

o GEMINI CDS should be GOM'd by the Lindens and used in their arsenal of crime-fighting tools to enforce their TPV. It is a public utility that should not end up in private hands that charge money for it and use their own considerable criminal past to amass data about the violators on third-party websites -- that's vigilantism (quick! call the Herald! There's a story here about crime and justice! Where is Pixeleen!"

o The Lindens should put up a blog in which they tell us WHO has given them analysis about GPL license compatibility, what was their reasoning and WHY devs cannot be called to responsibility *just on their own SL servers*. In the spirit of opensource, one should be transparent about the discussions that take place about the nature of the software and its compatability with opensource licensing procedures.

Comments

[cube inada]

yep..the nature of the scorpion.

just like all of skills hak "blade runner- meta dsytopian" stuff in Insilico

it only comes in "black".

whats so funny is that no one ever gets the obvious....

that there cant be a "big" brother UNLESS there ARE "little" brothers...

or vica versa.... but the same small minded KNOW that they can SUPERSIZE a Fries at any time.;)

[AnnOtooleInSL]

Well it is good to see LL is stopping a ton of malicious viewers right at the gate and denying access to SL and they are being told to go download a compliant viewer. That takes care of 90% of copybotters because they are too dumb to know what to do.

http://annotoole.com/images/copybotnomore.png

[cube inada]

yeah you mean like BEFORE they open sourced the viewer code....and only AFTER they screwed with all those "users" suckers- who paid LL coffers thousands of usd in time /money/ value etc.

lol.... yeah and when the tulips ran out we sold them roses...:)

better world through technology-- better for US. for you... not so much.:)

one day, maybe in a hundred years... people will look at us. and offer the same "huh?wtf-" that "we-so smug smart meta folk" offer the Dutch of the 17th century.

dusans current blog is full of tulip peddlers..

[Amanda Dallin]

We've had our own "Tulip Mania's" recently. The Housing Bubble, The internet stock market bubble. The Second Life Land Market Bubble.

Your reference to Tulip Mania though just doesn't seem to fit. What are you saying is valued above it's intrinsic value?

[cube inada]

lol.. google- "tech news"
and pick something.:)

let that find something that's valued way above it's intrinsic value. :)

[SLUniverse General Discussion]

Prok why are you lying on your blog accussing cristiano of making death threats on you? You know that email was not a death threat you are a batshit insane crazy ass stalker!

[toni ormidale]

Good article, but Emerald has nothing to do with CDS apart from the fact the creator is involved into Emerald development aswell. They have no say and Skills Hak is not one of the people who made rogue viewers in the past.

[Saffia Widdershins]

We did a Designing Worlds show on the CDS tool: http://treet.tv/shows/designingworlds/episodes/client-detection-sys

It's one of those issues where you will never be seen as objective - one side's terrorists are another side's freedom fighters, and trying to compromise and call them the rebel army sucks too.

So ... having done a number of shows on content theft/IP violation, we took this as a tool that many content creators are leaping all over with relief, and looked at it from that perspective.

I remain concerned that such a tool acts, in effect, not just only as the security camera recoding the theft on the street but also as the police, the judge and jury and the appeal court. Too much, concentrated in too few hands.

Gemni's argument, made in the programme, is that they don't ban anyone - they supply their lists to registered estate owners who individually make the call whether or not to ban each individual (it can be fine-tuned that far).

[Prokofy Neva]

Saffia,

Your show is not the last word in morality.

The obvious immorality of this device is staring us all in the face. The people who made the ripper viewers then deliberately supply the remedy, and capitalize on it. That's evil. And by putting "both sides" on the show, as if one side is "morally equivalent" makes you an accomplice in that evil.

That's why I will enver go on your show, BTW. Because you always morally equivocate with these people, and that's wrong. You're so eager to be liberal and openminded, that you concede evil -- when there is no need to.

If everyone repudiated this evil, they couldn't make a buck like this. Those rushing to get "safety" from this are deeply deceiving themselves, because these people can simply make new rippers that aren't detected, and even keep selling the detectors, and yet steal. It's more than likely that goes on.

There isn't any "rebel" or "freedom fighter" thing going on here, but just plain old theft. Theft is crime, Saffia.

Don't ban anyone? What a lot of horseshit. The device *is* a banlink. They in fact have a feature to share all the ban lists. They facilitate the linking of ban lists, and don't even have the thin check on abusiveness that Ban-link put in at one point, which is that you could see who was on the list, to see if they had wrongfully put anyone on.

Of course it's too much power in one set of hands, and it's absolutely disgraceful that Mark McCahill and the Herald is bashing on the JLU, but not bashing on this, which is absolutely no different, but in fact worse, as whatever you want to say about the JLU, they didn't make ripper viewers to our knowledge.

Honestly, I find this entire thing sordid, and your own role in putting a pretty equivalency bow on it perhaps the most sordid feature of all.

[Cindi Mcgillivary]

Actually toni you're wrong. It is true Skills Hak is selling CDS, but she isn't the creator of it. The original script was made by Jcool/Fractured himself it was original used as a dataminer in his sim. Every time an avatar would enter Emerald Point it would log the name of the avatar and their ip. Also Skills Hak barley has any control over the system. Lonely and Fractured are the ones really running it.

[T Ormidale]

Fractured's "datamine" service has nothing to do with client detection. according to him it is some kind of protection from griefers, i am in that database myself with my alt which he outed and banned even though i wasn't griefing. Fractured and Lonely don't even have access to the database of CDS, why don't you ask them yourself?

[Prokofy Neva]

The idea that Fractured and Lonely would not have access to the CDS database run by their fellow business partner Skills Hak is laughable. In fact, some tell the story that Fractured really runs CDS, and Skills doesn't really control it. It's all bogus.

[Boy Lane]

@Prok
You're not an angel either, but that does not matter here.

I just want to add 2 things. My comments on the OSDev mailing list were not targeting Brandon Husbands/Dimentox Travanti who just jumped in without checking his own backyard. And I'm sorry he got quoted here with which was pretty much unrelated. Dim is not part of anything Modularsystems, so please leave him alone. Sorry again.

The second point I want to add are some interesting comments I took out from the recent Treet.TV interview where Ash Qin jumped in to replace the famous other Phox in the last minute. Just food for thought. http://www.sluniverse.com/php/vb/general-sl-discussion/40930-copybot-ban-link-system-clear-16.html#post925327

[Prokofy Neva]

Dimentox Travanti is covering for Emerald on that list, and that's wrong. The accusations made about Emerald aren't some "whining"; they aren't something peculaiar to Boy Lane; they've been aired by many and the Lindens should have a lot of explanation to do why they made a deal with these people.

So he should get a pushback. I have no intention of "leaving alone" people who behave this way and intimidate and bully others on lists from raising legitimate concerns. Nobody is saying he is part of Modular, but he's being an ass, anyway.

[Boy Lane]

We have some special occurrence of agreement. Perhaps Prok you just apologize for the earlier concierge list accusations and we can have peace.