Fractured Crystal strikes a self-dramatic pose on his previously-owned Emerald Point sandbox sim, one year ago, in happier days.
THE CROSS-MEDIA HIT!
#Emerald Gate -- an amazingly stupid but also complex story that only hardcore Second Lifers can really appreciate -- continues to deliver. At the center of the drama is the aptly-named and character-flawed Fractured Crystal, who used his l33t skills as a coder to script what amounts to an attack on notorious griefer Hazim Gazov's website using customers as unknowing drones.
The ever-resourceful Oliver Szondi has made a paper.li out of the twitter tag that makes it look like a newspaper -- I love paper.li but which it let me customize more. But Oliver is so resourceful that he's kept *my* blog with the longest running critique of Emerald out of his paper : ) Social media is so...social!
Not only was there the breathless avatar scrum last night at the Treet.TV which was like old home week -- 2003 people like CrystalShard Foo or 2004 people me or RacerX Gullwing showing up made it seem like some sort of grotesque family reunion.
There was the wonderful Treet.TV show -- audio here -- which reminded me for all the world of one of those Latin American soap operas dubbed into Russian that they show in Moscow (Bogatyye tozhe plachut or "The Rich Also Weep"). If you were an outsider not familiar with either Latin American culture *and* didn't know Russian, it would be incomprehensible to you!
Arabella Steadham, the figurantka, as the Russia press always call the main characters figuring in a criminal case, was on hand outside the studios an hour before, AFK with a BUSY over her her head, with high-prim hair and attachments going grey in the lag murk, but soon her necklace came into view with its set of trinkets featuring two pawn pieces.
Pawns of course were what the users were in this DDOS attack made on the notorious griefer Hazim Gazov's fake anime site. No angel he -- rapist of my tenants and spammer and crasher of sims with racist and obscene junk. He notes people were turned into "drones" as he described to attack his site. Of course, he's injured, but not innocent himself, adding to the drama.
This is a textbook case in cross-media marketing so Solutions Providers take note! There's the twitter stream with its own hashmark now and Hamlet nee Linden Au even embedding it in his site (hey, we should all get one of those? Where do you get them?)
The Treet.TV show is probably their most popular ever, and featured the lovely Paisley Beebe grinning with that strange avatar animation borrowed from the Lindens' only known facial animation from the avatar -- the wince that he makes when he is blinded by flash from his own snapshots. Some enterprising soul has made a "smile" based on that functionality while waiting for the Lindens to put touch points on the avatar face or whatever it is needed to make those wooden creatures smile more naturally.
There's the youtube of Arabella telling Hazim that she "can't help him" which gives some credence to the story that the DDOS attack on his site (which she denies is a denial-of-service attack, because technically it didn't take the site down) is a cover story for something else. There's the "how they describe their lies to themselves" youtube.
There's Tateru's blog saying Arabella was "asked to lie" and expressing due skepticism.
HAMLET DRINKS A MARTINI
Then there's Hamlet exposing his own criminal-minded hacker culture with support for the theory that the DDOS attack isn't an attack but only "a boast".
I liked what oldbie Frans had to say as well as respected scripter Ordinal:
You could put some more in it Hamlet. what do you think about it? do you support such a act? Does their apology even make sense, dive a little deeper.
That really is a terrible attempt at justification; it doesn't make any sense at all. Multiple hidden iframes to assorted content on someone else's site is "boasting"?
Yeah. And Hamlet's not saying...Or rather, here's his fucktard non-answer:
Frans, I think it's worth blogging about, so here it is. I also think it's the weekend now and I'd like a fucking martini.
Oh, and it gets better, as ethics-challenged Pathfinder joins him with some manly locker-room talk:
Hamlet says: "... I think it's worth blogging about, so here it is. I also think it's the weekend now and I'd like a fucking martini."
Fucking solid, man. Pour one for me too, my friend.
The only thing that really matters is how all of Emerald's customers feel about these events. The customer is king, and it is the king who ultimately decides the fate of a kingdom.
Customer is king? Then why did it take the customers so long to get across to the Lindens that Pathfinder was not worth the freight?
As @AbelUndercity
"The fact that the target was a douche or whether it was the deed of one bad actor is irrelevant. It is a question of trust."
As Hazim points out, the only person impressed with the traffic that is thereby indicated, referred from the ModularSystems (Emerald) site, is...him. He could let us know whether Araballa's statistics of "somewhere between 30-50 percent of SL concurrency" (or 1.4 million 60-day log-ons?) are accurate or not.
That *is* the one figure nobody -- not even the Lindens -- or especially the Lindens -- can ever supply in this story.
WHAT'S A DRAMA WITHOUT CHEST-NUT?
Then there's that awful sullen and arrogant bitch Chestnut Rau, running to the Metanomics sims after the show and ranting indignantly that everyone should stop being mean to the Emerald devs. Chest-nut turned in a stirling performance herself in the pre-show avatar mob, snarling at me that I 'wanted her GF" and it was "pure jealousy" that I was criticizing her snarky remarks as she landed and began to bitch about SL's performance. As I said, I haven't been teleported back to the 6th grade playground in ages...
This sort of indignant "root for the underdog" bullshit permeats the Grace Oclockers and Plurkers -- Botgirl is also writing indignant editorials saying we shouldn't demonize Emerald. I guess they never crashed his sims or killed his chickens. Whatever. Mob mentality? Mudslinging? No. Customers demanding accountability. Deal with it. And once again the Grace Oclockers are exposed as an utterly useless and even sinister class of people covering up malfeasance in SL and justifying it. *They're worse than the griefers because they have the Lindens' ear and they can pass as respectable. Awful.*
There's also Paisley's back story -- if I were Wiz, I'd be hiring talent just to keep writing and producing this story now because it's his biggest traffic hittage to date and has lots of spillover effect. Paisley was forced to retreat to an undisclosed location to film the show after "anti-Emerald griefers attacked".
What was hilarious is the twitter and audience chat claiming that it wasn't grief, but lag. Of course, when a sim repeatedly crashes with the notorious woodburies and day-old alts on it -- duh. Paisley's no dummy there, she knows a grief attack when she sees one. With only 37 avatars lagging horribly down to .13 time dilation, something else was "up" on Tropical Treet and on Northpoint its neighbour.
What's also funny is that nobody speculated -- except me -- that this could be *pro* Emerald griefing as well, so that Arabella wouldn't say anything untoward.
THE SHOW MUST GO ON!
In the event, she came with communications manager Jessica Lyons in tow and turned the interview over to her early on to "tell the story". Jessica actually turned in a SLoscar-winning performance with actual RL tears and a quavering voice.
I'm telling you, this story delivers. Buy advertising now on Treet.tv if you want your business to benefit from this traffic!
Of course, the blogosphere is rich with interpretations, too. Some of them already rather skeptical of the Emerald line; others describing a deliberate malicious attack like this as "just a youthful error" (and yet what's MOST malicious about this story isn't that they attacked known griefer and attacker himself Gazov, but that they used the users like a botnet).
WHERE'S DAD?
There's been endless speculation about the youthful Frac, who is said to be only 18 (and sounds like he is). Frac's Mom wants him to go into therapy, some of the tabs tell us. If I were running a SLewspaper right now, I'd be trying to get that all-important interview with Mom, who could tell us if all the Ritalin or Risperdal she may have fed her kid all these years paid off...As always, we need to ask: where's Dad?
Speaking of Dad, the Lindens aren't talking, other than having removed the Emerald viewer from their third-party viewer list. The Lindens' only contribution to the never-ending story was for Soft to ask on the opensource dev list if anybody could supply any other reason why there'd be so many links going from the Emerald site to the anime site -- like he was still looking for exonerating information and "keeping an open mind". Every time I look up @soft to go read his feed on Twitter I first come up with another account named "soft dick".
Also revealing was the IRC mania on the Treet.TV. I'm not happy that they've chosen IRC as their chat "solution". I loathe IRC. It's a horrid little geeky cult hangout with all kinds of horrid little cutesie memes, like you can "slap" somebody in the list of participants and the system will yieled a message about slapping someone with some kind of fish. Sigh. IRC channels -- meh. They breed idiocy because of the rapidity with which anonymous people can come and go, make fake sock puppet remarks, reveal themselves or not, reveal themselves with one nick or another and just endlessly blab. The chat moves at a more rapid pace than SL group chat -- and that's actually a negative, becuase it doesn't *hurt* to have a chance to read a line for a second before you respond.
A RL TRAGEDY
There's another sad element to all this which is that the figurantka, Arabella, while playing an avatar on SL and playing a drama queen on Treet.TV as a kind of wacky Wendy to the Emerald's Lost Boys, in real life has suffered a horrible personal tragedy with the death of her RL son. It was only three weeks ago that she buried him, and now she's thrust into the limelight. Three weeks is definitely not enough to grieve. Three years might even be required to begin to feel as if you can appreciate the flowers again. Having lost a child I know. To lose a child who is already an adult an launched on their life is even more impossible to bear.
Of course, Arabella has a choice. She could have shut off her computer and said, "I'm not available for this now, sorry" and everyone would understand -- but she didn't. Maybe plunging into the Emerald rescue drama is her way of coping.
In a way, she is put in an impossible position -- unless she exerts personal responsibility at the worst possible time in her RL, Emerald will go down in flames. There aren't any other adults there. It's all kids, and some of them very bad kids like Phox/Lonely Bluebird (who killed 50 of my tenants' chickens to the one killed by Discrete Dreamscape). It's interesting to me how many people indicate that with Phox still in the chicken coop, they don't trust Emerald -- and that's not because he killed my chickens -- er, helped my artificially intelligent life forms to behave as expected.
With Second-Life enhancers like these, who needs enemies?!
WHO'S THE GROWN-UP HERE?
There are two new Lindens who signed up to help, but they don't count as adults. I'm sure this is going to sound prejudiced, but if I have to pick -- and I don't because I'm not an Emerald customer -- I'd rather trust Arabella managing it than two Lindens named, um, Qarl and Data.
Paisley said she used Hamlet's question -- why the anonymous avatar in charge again? -- which of course would be many
people's -- these are anonymous avatars. Arabella stuck to her guns
here and insisted that if she was known to the Lindens, that was enough,
and that she couldn't reveal her name because she suffered the most
outrageous attacks, and couldn't give out her name or she'd be horrible
griefed.
Sorry, but no sale. The worst griefing attacks against Emerald members have been *from other Emerald members in the core group*. If you can't form a company of people who can behave themselves at least long enough to refrain from calling you at home and harassing you or involving your relatives or DDOSing your website, and you fear giving out your real name mainly because of *them* (they're the ones with the worst track history of griefing on all kinds of alts!) then what the hell are you about?!
If you are running something as popular as Emerald says it is, you need to put your name and address up on a website. And hey, your server can't be registered in...Portugal (these people are most decidedly not Portugese) or resolve to dummy corporations that resolve to websites of chicken farms in Germany, claims made by those who have examined the trail of their domain registrations, which of course can be hidden by the registrars on request.
As someone whose identity was forcibly linked to their avatar 6 years ago, and who decided the path to follow was simply not to fight it (it's not really possible) but also to request that people call me by my avatar name, I can only say that Arabella should be putting up a RL name and company address and phone number. That's the way to show you're responsible. BTW, I imagine there is no actual registered company behind this operation.
Of course, we're told -- not very persuasively -- that there is no money involved and this is only for "the community". I'm finding that hard to believe, given the traffic and possible ad sales and other forms of payment they may get as consultants or customizers or...whatever. I actually think there's nothing wrong with paying for software, and if they had a premium account that had customer service and extra features, they'd have revenue to pay grownups.
BUYING EMERALD IS LIKE BUYING A USED COUCH ON CRAIGSLIST
I wonder if the Lindens will attempt to GOM Emerald now in order, ostensibly, to save it. This way they can save face and hire back these two Lindens that were fired, Qarl and Data. That may have been the plan, in fact.
Buying Emerald right now is a lot like buying a used couch on Craiglist in New York City -- you might be spending the next six months getting the bedbugs removed from it. The Lindens would theoretically delouse the code and get rid of the malware -- but maybe not. They've always been evasive about the problem of third-party data-scraping in SL and the TOS basically says you're on your own -- LL makes no warantees about third-party datamining, but only vouches for its own policies when it data mines. Perhaps that grey area is the perfect way for a company to get around its own restrictive mining policies -- just as with RL mining companies in the extraction industry -- you have the third parties and the dummy corporations do this job for you then buy their results. The question isn't "no they would never do such a thing" but "what's to stop them?"
THE GOLDMINE UNDER THE EMERALD IN THE ROUGH
Emerald is obviously sitting on a gold mine. Like I would be sitting on a gold mine if I had technical capacity and some way to save all the information about all my customers and all their purchases and land visits. I don't, and even if I have some visitor trackers to help me keep an eyeball roughly on conversion rates from office visits in order to place offices better or in different locations, I don't have any tools to somehow capture all that effectively and work it automatically -- there are such tools but I don't have the money or time to bother with them.
Emerald likely has a database rich with the data not only about how many people use their viewer and how many times they log on, and from which countries (itself fairly useful, but not really that profitable), they have information about where those avatars went once they logged on, and possibly other things like what their purchases were or who else they talked to -- that's all worth a lot more because it helps reveal the real traffic patterns and the real consumer demand for this or that sector or product.
The guy who said that the Lindens wouldn't be able to get that much of an audience at Treet.TV is they had a show on Viewer 2.X said it all, eh?
THE DAWN OF SOCIALWARE
And this brings me to my other sociological point about this fascinating story. While in a terribly bastardized and awful form -- involving griefers, liars, users, idiots, etc. -- the Emerald story is one of socialware at the dawn of this next phase of software. An era where coders don't just include customer feedback as "optional" or "desirable" or "controllable" but where the project literally lives or dies based on whether there is democratic participation by users.
It's about a piece of software that has users shaping its production in ways that they never do in software projects, whether or the closed or opensource type, and where you don't get to say "the company isn't a democracy" or "coders know best" if you want to exist.
This software has public participation *not* because it is an opensource offshoot, if you will, of the Lindens' own opensource program. If anything, the closed nature of hacker culture is responsible for the lack of transparency and accountability.
But by sheer force of circumtances and dynamics, it is forced to *become* accountable to the public in ways that opensource projects never, ever do (like Drupal or OpenID, because they never become accountable to ordinary users). That's because it is software for a virtual world with people directly interacting with the software -- socialware.
THE EMERALD DOESN'T FALL FAR FROM THE LINDEN TREE
Emerald hasn't done anything different than its open-sourcerer masters from whom it gets ideas: Lindens kept Viewer 2.0 in an "opensource program" in a black box hidden even from their volunteer coders for nine months; Emerald has kept what they've been doing with the thing called emkdu or whatever (if you Google it, you only find them as a source on the subject) in a black box, too -- along with many other things (the Onyx/Emerald relationship, etc). The Lindens went through a huge session of rending their garments and sobbing and saying they won't be bad anymore and will now work in the open; Emerald is now following suit. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree. As above, so below, as the ancient philosopher said it...
But what's interesting is the dynamics around this very popular viewer run by a gang of cynical exploitive griefers. Emerald has privacy-destroying features, some of which the users don't even know about, but it also has a number of things users like, either legacy 1.x stuff that people wish wasn't removed out of 2.x, but other stuff that makes SL fast, easy, and fun -- like the jiggling boobs.
When they mess up, the users give them instant and harsh feedback and demand answers and action -- and get them in ways that the Lindens never deliver.
M Linden is gone -- but not because he made Viewer 2, merely because he didn't make Viewer 2 successfully -- others pursue it. Other Lindens are gone inexplicably.
But in the #EmeraldGate saga, Fractured is falling on his sword publicly and Arabella is stepping up to the mike and describing the internal workings with more cross-media play than any Linden. To be sure, her recipe for curing the faults is a reiteration of the Linden scrum: the new Emerald team will work collectively, in a group where they all have responsibility, ostensibly without any leader. Sigh.
I'm not betting that this early experiment in socialware will succeed. I'm betting that it will die or the Lindens will GOM it. Meanwhile, stay tuned to the story.
As I tweeted:
Well at least with #EmeraldGate the Lindens have succeeded in distracting everyone from viewr 2.x & their other sins like display names...
again, a lesson in the ever expanding epidemic of MIPs in society..
Like most conditions it'll take 2 decades to finally be noticed.
media induced pychosis...
its must have been like this in the last days of the bunker..
Posted by: cube inada | August 23, 2010 at 03:16 PM
Actually, I disagree. You sound like Chestnut or Botgirl, claiming there is "mob hysteria".
There isn't. Most people outside the hardcore fan base are saying "this is enough, I'm done" for basic reasons of decency and ethics. It's actually a triumph of the human store on the 3D Internet, cube, if only you'd get out of your 15-year-old funk and see it.
There isn't any FUD. There isn't any hysteria. There isn't any hate. There's just "I'm done, I don't trust this, bye."
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | August 23, 2010 at 03:29 PM
no no.. you seem to believe media induces only the mass...
its the individuals psychosis that i speak of, the fact that many more have it 15 years after diagnosed, is how a virus works.;)
my funk isnt 15 years old..;)(its just peaking after 15 years old..lol) and i still beleive the machine will stop.... but that itll be built again...;)
my issue is that i see the triumph of non sustainablity killing off the mess of LL... but i dont see those lessons being applied to the next one.
in fact. all i see after 20 years of following the tech tales wagged, is that as more humans keep thinking like machines and code, is that they will act like them. fashion/ or whatever, and with or without God or Job to save us... its our individual choice to see the way things work or not, and to change them or not.
the fact that "relevance and recentness" is now considered the GOOGLE wisdom of the wise..( meme in blogs this week) for all information and communications..is just the obvious next step in the change from human centric to machine centric values in culture.
BTW did you hear the NPR with philip? we live in the world od science faction today.. with all that had value in science fiction removed and we're left only with the shiny toys.
also ray bradbury is 90... and did you also see the lastest geek net sensation video "Fck me ray bradbury"?
science faction indeed.;)
Posted by: cube inada | August 23, 2010 at 04:51 PM
every culture has its heroes..
http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/23/the-end-of-moore’s-law-a-love-story/
of course this culture requires them to be built up/ shot down/ and respawned every few nanoseconds...;)
Posted by: cube inada | August 23, 2010 at 05:14 PM
/me gazes into "The Wave" (remote viewing) and renders up this prediction:
Nothing will happen. LL will not turn on their black hats. (They never have after all. I recall reading of permabans the black hats are apparently immune to.)
Stupid people will remain stupid and in a display of stupid solidarity will become even more stupid and become rather public about publicizing how stupid they are. (Well this is not a prediction as I already witnessed mouth droolers going on about how emerald is from LL because it has the same version number. After all a file property typed in is absolute proof right?) After all the entire reason some people are in SL is because of jiggling titties and, even though that feature is in other viewers, they refuse to use them.
There is an off chance some of the quality talent will soon add much desired features to the SLv2 code base and in conjunction with LL finally deliver 2 major windlight promises. Maybe.
Posted by: Ann Otoole InSL | August 23, 2010 at 06:59 PM
Yes, you've probably called it accurately, Ann.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | August 23, 2010 at 08:05 PM
Modular Systems *does* make money — thousands of dollars in fact. It comes from advertising. Thanks to all the downloads, they get perhaps some 500,000 hits per month or more, more than enough to attract the attention of serious advertisers.
Source: former Modular System employee, and corroborated by LordGregGreg on his own post, too.
So, no, it's not "all for the community".
Posted by: Gwyneth Llewelyn | August 24, 2010 at 06:27 AM