"Until they became conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious." George Orwell, 1984.
Go and vote and put "watch" on this JIRA before it is closed, and while voting still exists.
And why aren't you voting to keep the vote in the JIRA?! I see only one JIRA proposal for this -- with only two votes (!).
There are rumours swirling around that some TOS fix is being put in to solve this Red Zone scandal, which has angered 1,381 people enough in SL to vote for fixing the problem.
It's too bad we don't have real media in and around SL at times like this. The Herald, which used to be the leading tabloid is down 50 percent in readership and the whole staff is on an LSD trip now looking at zoots dripping. A zoot, for those of you who were born way past this curious era, was a lengthy rope made of plastic garbage bags twisted and knotted together, then hung from a ceiling beam over a pan of water (important!) and then set on fire. It would burn slowly, but suddenly make long fizzling tongues of flame whizzing down like a bullet with a cool "ffft" and "zoot" noise before falling into the pan (so you wouldn't set the place on fire).
This JIRA is a lot like one of those 1960s zoots -- on fire over the Red Zone. Go read it before the Lindens "sequester" -- a practice they engaged in during 2004-2005 forums wars, when there were certain "hot" threads that they entirely moved from view while they examined them, and then put them back, sometimes redacted. (Now they tend just to delete them).
This JIRA shows you how the era of the software geeks is coming to an end. Oh, happy day! It's coming to an end because ordinary people get educated; they find out how stuff works; they learn enough about it to go vote on it -- and they vote.
And they talk. They discuss things like how parcel media tabs even if autoplay is disabled can still suck in the IP address to a scanner like Red Zone -- sophisticated stuff. They barely can spell some of them, and are probably not burdened with college educations in a number of instances, but they are passionate about fighting for their rights.
It's really a wonderful thing to see, after all the years of FIC oppression, incitement of hatred against ordinary people -- all the awful stuff the Lindens and their friends encouraged.
And of course voting isn't enough to change things -- it never was, and we don't pretend it was, and Lindens of course are lying that the only story is about "whether we have a democracy" and they "do what we say" in a vote.
And even if they take out the vote now, it will come back in -- the web routes around.
There's some great arguments in the thread but what's astounding is how the jackbooted Lindens come in.
Oz Linden is absolutely disgraceful. Skim down and find him on February 8:
"This is not a viewer issue, and should be dealt with through Support."
What a skank.
The originator of this world-historical JIRA, SugarPutty, says:
"Under what kind of surport Oz!? there are no options in the submit ticket. for this kind of tos violation.. How else are those of us with honest concerns surpose to point out the tos violations to LL."
Darren Scorpio adds "@Oz Linden, shame on you."
And that's the living end. When it's ordinary civilians -- not the proclaimed dissident Prokofy -- standing up to the odious Oz and telling him that he's shameful, you know there's a real rebellion. Not one easily put down. (They banned me from the JIRA in 2008 for complaining about a bug they claimed was a feature request, accusing me of "editing wars" although I merely re-opened a JIRA that was closed only twice, and others in the thread opened and closed it many more times without action.)
Oz then played hardball: he threatened anyone reopening the JIRA that his little myrmidons had closed with banning:
Regardless... this is still not a viewer issue.
If you reopen this here, your Jira privileges will be revoked.
Wow -- what a scumbag. And others on the JIRA let him know what they thought of that instantly. This is a mob that is learning how to be a crowd -- and there's a difference.
Says Denver Ghost, "The comments by Oz are incredulous. Unbelievable slap in the face and insult to the intelligence of every resident here. I'm speechless and disappointed."
I checked the date this JIRA was opened: February 7.
I checked the date that Amanda Linden posted the news of a new communications system -- and tucked the news that the JIRA voting would be closed: February 9.
Coincidence?
We can't know unless a Linden talks who decided to turn off voting and why -- and when. My guess it was Rodvik; he had to sign off on it anyway (although there is a belief that the CEO doesn't run certain things there). He may have taken one look at people standing up to Oz, the head of his viewer open source team, and said "Can the voting". Or there may have been a claque of JIRA Lindens -- Soft, Alexa, etc. -- agitating to get voting turned off as it was a "demotivator" and "demoralizing" to their work (showing up popular opinion over and over again against their narrow sectarian interests). Maybe the killing of voting was long in the works; I somehow don't think so.
Sling Trebutchet is the most vocal and passionate on trying to find a mechanical solution to this issue through turning off the ability to match the name of the avatar with the collected IP address, or collect the IP but then not inform the device of what is collected. Many people would trust Linden Lab to keep this info (they already have it) -- it's like how the government already has your social security number. They'd love LL to institute something in the regular viewer that enabled bans in parcel lists not just to be configured by name, but to automatically ban all that person's alts, and do this not by how they registered, but by the IP address they appear with at the moment, and even their hashes, i.e. the configuration of the aspects of their computer as an identifying set of characteristics, so they can be IP and hash banned. It's a tall order because of the false positives and ingenuity of griefers, but more to the point, anything harming Linden's ability to let third parties gather data on us means they can't sell their platform.
But this, while it seems "simple and doable" and admirable, is not something the Lindens may like. It hobbles the ability to gather the data they want to gather, and create that "investment climate" they'd like to create for data-miners.
Example: Zynga on Facebook has our IP and much about us -- what we like, what we buy, etc. If Facebook didn't let third parties scrape data, they'd have nothing to sell. We're the thing being sold here, and we need to play along.
The Lindens aren't going to hobble that just because suddenly, a diva is too stupid to shop on her alt in a different place than where she shops with her main.
I do get all the screaming. I do, truly. I just want the arguments to be sound. And I think argumentation about false positives and dorm sharing are retarded and stupid and the Lindens know that, and they have the info; I also think arguments involving elaborate patching of the media capacities of the patches are non-starters -- Lindens want a system where people share media and you are coerced into playing it as you fly around. But just as they now have an option even in 1.23 to turn off the automatic playing of media and just as your URL for music is hidden if you want it to be, so that can be done more elaborately to protect privacy.
There are wild rumours going around that zFire Xue is about to release the whole dbase of millions of items and out everybody's alt. I think that's unlikely. zFire does not comport himself like Lonely Bluebird and Discrete Dreamscape. He does not grief critics inworld; he doesn't troll comments; he just speaks like an indignant businessman whose cash cow is disrupted. He knows he has a winner -- people fear copybot and will stock up.
But here's an interesting comment from MilosZ Milosz an oldbie, an aquaintance I know inworld who has a nice furniture and plant store and great builds:
Greetings:
I am writing my comment as a 5+ year resident of Second Life. I am also writing a a former user of the RZ system. I ran an adult club in Second Life, and thought this would be an effective tool to ban griefers and people with throw away avatars who frequent adult clubs just to irritate people. However, I ceased using the product once I realized its true and obvious purpose. This tool is marketed to ban copybotters and griefers, when in reality all the product does is promote griefing, and it promotes drama mongering. The fact that this nefarious product is available as a wear anywhere, use anywhere HUD now is very disturbing. In fact, I saw a girls profile advertising her willingness to detect and reveal anyone's alts, for the modest fee of $500L.
Are there legitimate reasons a person might purchase this product? Absolutely. But the negatives far outweigh any positive aspect of this product. If I could turn back time and reclaim the $4000 I spent on this, I certainly would.
Linden, if you read these comments please consider the residents who dwell in this community. This product should be banned and stripped from the grid. And those using it need to look inward at themselves, and ask why they are really using it. I asked myself these questions when I, too, spend time looking to see who was whos alt. The compulsion to do this-even if it is not your initial reason for buying this product-is strong, and anyone owning this product who says they do not look at a persons alt is living in self deceit.
On that note, I'll end my comment and hope Linden makes the right move and abolishes this product.
MilosZ
He's right. Most people will not resist the temptation to check alts, and soon, that becomes the main purpose. Now that it seems more like zFire is selling a peepshow to take a gander at people's alts, and not really stop copybotting, the tide is turning more against him.
Years ago, I raised this issue of the harvesting of IPs regarding Cristiano Midnight and Sluniverse.com when the Lindens "graced" him with an astounding feting. For a time, they had a system where anyone could send a postcard of their SL to the front page of Second Life (imagine!) But because the postcard system has to have a destination, an email address to send the thing out, even if it stops along the way to display on the front page first, they decided to make that destination sluniverse.com, which already had a huge trove of pictures, like the Flickr of SL.
So that meant everyone excited about sending a postcard to get on the front page for a minute was now inevitably sending pics to Slun. And as they did this, Cristiano, the site manager, got the *email that people had signed up with for SL, often their concealed real email* and he got *their IP address and avatar name*.
I immediately began protesting strenuously in the forums. What happened is what happened to the RZ complainers now in that JIRA thread and on the forums (only with no company and reinforcements like they had).
I was pilloried. I was ridiculed. I was told that I was an ignorant asshat. Didn't I realize that "everywhere on the Internet" the IP address was harvested? Didn't I realize that "the Internet worked this way"?! Etc. etc. At one point in the heat of argument when I typed "ISP" instead of "IPS" I was ridiculed some more -- didn't I realize the difference between Internet Service Provider and Internet Protocol address? Blah blah. People were savage assholes, even though my point was absolutely crystal pure and correct.
No one should have been gathering the emails that people used to sign up to Second Life! And matching it to their avatar name and IP address!
Linden Lab should NEVER have sent out to a third party the entire list of emails people used to sign up with along with pictures and their avatar names and IPs!!! This was really an LL problem more than a Cristiano problem, but I didn't see the wider picture then (I hadn't read Julie Angwin's amazing book about the greedy data miners of MySpace).
Cristiano witheringly claimed that he "discarded" those emails as they came in to his server, but I didn't believe him. Of course, he was the one who published Nolan Nash's accounts that outed my real life as an effort to harass and stalk me and silence my criticism of the geek squad and the FIC on the forums.
Even Robin Linden conceded that yes, the e-mail thing could be a problem and said as much in this thread, something I pointed people to -- to no avail.
But then I was banned, amazingly, merely for raising a LEGITIMATE concern. I was suspended from the forums for a 7 day period not for flaming or trolling or anything like that, as it was told to me by Lindens, but because of a huge slew of people abuse reporting, and Lindens feeling like they "had to do something" because the "community wanted something done". They were able to make it seem like raising the LEGITIMATE concern about Cristiano harvesting data like that was a "personal attack" on a "community leader".
Even banned, I stuck to my guns and kept complaining everywhere about this. Cristiano squealed like a stuck pig. He kept saying that he discarded the addresses. I said we had no way of knowing that. He said the FICifying was forced on him -- he didn't ask for this set-up. He said the Lindens just wired it up and told him later. This was barely believable. Ultimately the Lindens took the system down. Not because of Cristiano, but because naturally people started posting not even so much porn to the front page, or ads for their rentals -- there actually wasn't much of that.
What they started posting were protests. People with signs protesting in the welcome area. I forget what some of them were now that got particularly visiblity. I know what mine was. SAVE OUR TELEHUBS. I posted protest textures inside the ad system at each telehub on the night they began deleting them, trying to stay one step ahead of them. I would post the ad and make a postcard and it would linger on the front page of Second Life for about a minute; the Linden assholes deleting the telehubs with malicious glee had prepared a nasty special effects -- they had made an "exploded and burning telehub" build that they'd show in the place of the deleted hubs, and they themselves would photograph that, then upload it as a postcard coming in after my SAVE OUR TELEHUBS. So we played cat and mouse. There were 40 plus telehubs. I struggled and struggled with about 20 ads, teleporting around, fiddling with that stupid annoying ad system that timed out. So I had my say. My protest was visible. But they deleted the hubs. Then, later, they deleted the entire system of postcards on the front page.
As for Cristiano, none of his little special friends at Sharia Court seemed to be bothered by his possession of all that data. But he did indeed use it to out alts. He got busy doing this immediately. He did this to Phaylen Fairchild, if I'm not mistaken, and some others. He did this to try to capture people making criticism of him in other forums and punish them. It was awful! He instituted a privacy policy, or invoked one already pre-written but that was beside the point (it was like his sly IM to me to ask if I wanted him to take down Nolan's disclosure of my RL -- when his job as moderator and enforcer of his own policy should have been simply to take it down, rather than thrust me into the role of censor -- I refused.)
Why do I go into ancient history? Do I have a grudge that my issues of a very similar nature were never dealt with 6 years ago, and I had no company, and today there are 1,361 people angry and prepared to fight back against Lindens?
No, of course not. These kind of struggles always take many rounds, with many peoples, and you can only be happy if someone else gets the issue finally on the table and dealt with.
Well, it's in part a cautionary tale. Those who do not know their history are doomed to repeat it.
Many people think of me as being banned for "vitriol". They can be shocked when they look at the actual text and find it isn't me, it's the others. And what this is really about isn't my speech, but the issues I raise -- issues lots of people raise, some of whom get disappeared and banned, some don't.
The Lindens hold their own close. Cristiano was an NDA's beta tester, charter member, and beloved seller of animations with a huge income. I was a nobody. Do the math. They didn't let me articulate legitimate concerns that the general public always does end up speaking about with these services -- instead, they let the junkyard dogs go after me.
Another beloved oldbie who was co-owner of then-X street was dispatched to scour the Internet for dirt on me. He came up with a story of someone who had the exact same RL name as mine -- it's common -- who was a journalist in Minneapolis who was found guilty of plagiarism -- it was an article about bikinis she had copied.
So this merchant of animators and founder of Awakening Avatars, the largest SL group at the time, and co-owner of Xstreet, posted on the forums that I was guilty of a RL crime and I should shut up, or he would out this to the community what I had done. I should cease criticizing people like Cristiano -- or I would "get it" -- in the neck.
I was puzzled and didn't get it. Huh? I was banned for 7 days, but I came on an alt and posted a refutation -- that no, that wasn't true. I hadn't committed any RL crimes. *For that* I was then *further* sanctioned for additional time in ban for "alt abuse" and given my "final warning". How about that!
My good name was being slandered; I could do nothing. I couldn't get anyone to act. Strange posts were showing up, including by the awful Maxx Monde, a really grade-A asshole, gifs with women riding a bicycle in a bikini with bouncing boobs. I didn't get it. Eventually, Cristiano revealed to me that they were all taunting me and threatening me on the basis of a mistaken identity. A Google witch-hunt. A story that the sinister and vindictive Soft Linden (Brian McGroarty) would dredge up later to charge me *again* falsely on Twitter of "plagiarism". I'm not guilty of plagiarism.
I flag this because you have to be prepared to fight and suffer, as I have, to try to curb the rapacious appetites for data of these ethics-free people. And they fight dirty, and they will try to ruin your reputation. Only human solidarity and persistence can save you.
Perhaps the tide is turning? Even Mitch Kapor has had something of a dark night of the soul lately and posted an interesting tweet that indicates the depth of his awareness of the immorality of what they all do:
@mitchkapor The more I learn, the more I see how the whole biz side of social networking is built on surreptitiously stealing personal data
Which brings me to my recurring points about all this:
o yes, the Lindens may patch the RedZone exploit, if you will, and fix that media thingie, and solve just that issue -- although hobbling their share-bear Facebook media stuff may go against their religion, so we'll see
o yes, they may take Sling's very soft option, which is merely a pop-up of warning. That's pretty retarded, frankly, as pop-up warnings don't stop people. It might be too late to stop the collection of data by the time the pop-up comes, or maybe all it does is remind the clueless git shopping at the same store on an alt that geez, that was dumb, they need to hide their tracks better.
o but more important is the issue of data-mining in general. Nothing is going to prevent Linden from behaving like every other California company which, as Mitch points out, makes a living on data scraping.
o so they may merely make this one guy a sacrificial lamb -- he was untrustworthy or he did some minor infraction or he gets a talking-to -- and it's a one-off. Not a policy or a tech fix, but just banning him
o he may retaliate with exposing the entire dbase in revenge -- but I don't think so -- if he does that, the Lindens will hunt him down and get him with real life law -- and it's no accident that they may be ready to sit up and bark on this finally because California passed a law making the zip code a piece of private information that stores and such cannot collect without your consent. This is engendering the usual software thinking from the usual Internet thugs on forums everywhere, scorning people for not realizing their zip code is "already public".
Well, no. Not next to the list of where I shop. Not next to a list of what I bought. Not next to my credit card number. Not next to a list of other people near me. And so on.
Is it possible to win the whole world and lose your soul, like the Bible says? Yes, as people will not keep fighting for the right to vote (like the right of collective bargaining); they will be bought off with one patch, one tweak, one pop-up, or even merely the banning of zFire and removal of his product from the grid -- and accept that voting is being deleted for evermore (like unions are often placated with merely a pay hike).
A lot of the work I tried to do on the JIRA (before being unjustly banned) was to get at the system itself:
o Bugs and Proposals on the JIRA Should Not be Closed Without Author's Consent -- obviously they figured out later how to do this in other ways
o Allow Votes While "Resolved"
Note also this interesting tid-bit -- the JIRA to open up voting itself on the JIRA -- in which the late Jesse Malthus participated, a devoted student also of the system who was tragically killed in a car crash in RL back then.
And this one -- a warmongering weapons salesman and Linden loyalist Oprichina type urges the closing down of the old Features Voting System -- which would have been better than the JIRA.
And this -- trying to get the "note" vote -- and the "won't do".
Or this from me -- Feature Voting Should be Separate from the JIRA and Reformed.
That's what we need, and hopefully we can get that struggle back on the boards.
Um... You yourself didn't vote to keep the vote. At least not visibly on this end. You may want to do that.
Tateru had an interesting piece a while back, and it does explain some of the thinking behind customer care.
http://dwellonit.taterunino.net/2011/01/24/why-you-shouldnt-listen-to-your-customers/
Posted by: Laetizia Coronet | February 23, 2011 at 07:39 AM
I can't vote to keep the vote. I'm banned from the JIRA. I literally can't click on it.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | February 23, 2011 at 11:00 AM
That is idiotic in the extreme. In any democracy (yes I know, it isn't) you need to do pretty nasty things to have your voting rights revoked.
Posted by: Laetizia Coronet | February 23, 2011 at 11:44 AM
I've not gotten myself involved in the hordes of Redzone & Greenzone discussions. It's truly sad to see this Civil War break out amongst it's community. It's very destructive & detrimental to the in-world economy as more and more people become aware of these Gadgets.
What today might be only 10's of thousands of SL'ers (readers from forums/blogs and wesbites)...might become 100's of thousands tomorrow through word of mouth.
These type of gadgetry creates uncertainity as regards to in-world shopping, .....so instead of TP'ing over and risk some details being scraped, it's easier to search for products on Marketplace.
...and there lies the rub. Why hasn't LL intervened to date.?
Well maybe Redzone fits in perfectly into LL's own strategy of having most of commerce channelled through its Marketplace. I know it's hard to believe especially as Land Tiers are still the main revenue driver for Linden Lab.....however since the summer and the opening of Marketplace, LL has heavily promoted it. It kind of suggests LL would prefer most of shopping driven to their shopping website (just like IMVU with their Catalog shopping site...that's hardly surprising given the smilarities between the 2 websites)...and have a select few/those that can afford-i.e high rollers/elite brands....being the only ones that can trade in-world.
The same could be said of their Land model...heading towards dealing with fewer entities and those being primarily the largest Land Estates (e.g maybe top-50 or top 100)
You can see how All Search for example is now heavily biased towards SIM size shops, courtesy of Sea Linden's manipulation of it.
This has led to increase of abandonment of smaller plots....both on Estate sims & Mainland (on Mainland it's more obvious as it remains empty more often than not). Same can be said how they have wrecked Places Search, Classifieds, Events and Land Sales searches in Viewer 2 by googlizing them.
All of this plays into the hands of fewer but larger entities surviving within the SL economy....be it content sales or renting land.
Who knows, maybe this model is what LL prefers and their forward strategy. My background as an Accountant however, i just cant't see it as viable business strategy instituting growth (in terms of profits to LL).
Lets make no bones here, LL are well aware of both Redzone & Greenzone systems.
Posted by: Rene Erlanger | February 23, 2011 at 12:14 PM
I have not done anything "nasty". I will find the two JIRA threads I participated in that led first to a warning, then to a ban, and you will see the appalling behaviour of these JIRA Lindens. Anyone outside looking at this situation would be appalled at their behaviour.
The people in these threads who harried and harassed me for copyleftism themselves got off scot-free.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | February 23, 2011 at 12:55 PM
Rene,
Sorry, but I don't buy this idea that "we can't have debates on the forums or free speech on the forums because then people are driven away from Second Life" or "driven away from the SL economy".
That's like saying "We can't have free media in the United States because then tourists and immigrants are driven away."
While some finicky German tourist who is appalled at our press freedom might be happy to restrain it with press laws that they have at home, they're happy to tour a country that they find attractive for all kinds of other reasons of interest. And the immigrant who comes here from anywhere may come from an unfree press situation, and may even wish to replicate it here, but he's usually happy that this regimen exists, so that it supports his own freedom of expression.
Most people don't read the forums, but that's not a reason in an argument; more should. And they are not driven away by uncertainty about copyright. Unfortunately, most people reach their hands out to take something free and ask no questions about the larger ecology. They themselves aren't a force you can rouse. You can make it harder for them to reach and take with DRM and enforcement so that they are not tempted for an easy grab.
But there's a social aspect to purchasing in SL. Most people buy something because they have a relationship to the person who is selling. It's different than in RL because there isn't an objective need for a house or a piece of clothing. So it's more social, and you buy the house because you know the guy and want to support his art work; you buy the dress because she's your girlfriend and she's starting a store and you want to show solidarity.
That dynamics makes for purchases and respect of DRM and more social support for fighting copybotting because copybotting is not participating in the social payment system which isn't about the object sold so much as it is about relationship. I don't articulate this to undermine Berne inherency or spout social media woo-woo like John Perry Barlow, because what ELSE makes up the market is that strangers buy from strangers AS IF they were girlfriends and art admirers because they sense themselves to be in a larger community of sorts, and they can be persuaded to see copybotters as disrupters of this. It's also the case that some items are bought because they are bought, not due to any social overlap. If I'm a landlord and I need a plant to decorate a porch in a public building I run, I go buy a plant from a stranger.
But whether this hurts the economy or hurts the image of LL or SL in your mind, I don't care if there is a "civil war" in Second Life. That's fine with me. Let there be. Fight it, and fight it fairly. Fight it by not trying to use alts and harness Lindens on this or that side of the issue. Of course, the fight it never fair and that's why you don't like it, but fighting is ok, and this fussy distaste for sharp debate is merely a way for one side usually to prevail in the argument on grounds of "civility".
There is a war to be had over copyright. It's a war against Tim Berners-Lee and all the framers of the Internet on down, including Mitch Kapor. It's a war against Google and it's a war against Cory Doctorow. If you want a livlihood, if you want creativity coupled with commerce, these are the people you have to fight, and fight hard, and fight hammer and tong.
RedZone appeared not only because of Linden ambivalence about just whose side they are in this war on the California Business Model, and their deep collusion with it. If the Lindens had effective action against copybotters, and weren't hobbled by their Electronic Frontier Foundation bullshit about the "impossibility" of doing anything about this (as a way of undermining copyright), if they cared and did the basics for deterrence, then there'd be no internal civil war. There'd be no need for one.
The problem is that the RedZone guy is not trustworthy because of the datamining issue he himself is indulging in like any California Business Model practitioner, and because of the alt issue.
The Green Zone guy is no more trustworthy not only because he may be a copybotter, we don't know if he, too, is datamining.
Ann Otoole keeps saying "hire a lawyer" and "the Lindens can't do DMCAs faster".
Well, no. They can. And they can do lots of things to spiff up their policy. It's probably been 2 years since they unveiled their copyright policy and their means of protection announced to the community under the initiative of Cyn Linden at that time. What have they done to upgrade it, refine it, enforce it through presence and protection? They haven't done anything. It's a dead weight that has no active life.
They stepped up on Emerald and the third-party viewer policy. They worked very hard to craft a policy, took endless onslaught from horrendous griefers bent on destroying the policy, got thrown and bullied on a few points and wound up compromising, but by and large they had a pretty workable policy.
So that is a good precedent. But it is a matter of resources and people and time. There are far less Lindens than there used to be to sit and craft policies, churn them through stakeholders and get buy-in.
Of course, the JIRA could be used for that if only they freed it up to be the Features Voter that it needs to be without all the little prissy sandbox foxes telling people to shut up, that it's not a bug it's a feature, that it's not possible to do, and then closing their proposal.
And Rene, listen up, please. Take your plaintive sentiments about refraining from violent civil war not to the community but to your beloved Lindens.
With Oz Linden telling people they will have their privileges revoked if they reopen a JIRA he thinks isn't "viewer" and should be closed; with Soft Linden seeming to concede it *is* viewer-related (as a possibly security patch); with now a WorkingonitLinden response, how on earth does Oz think he can threaten and bully like that?!
To be sure, he hasn't resurfaced to keep threatening people or banned anyone, but that ugly response from this tech thug (and that is exactly what Oz Linden is, a tech thug) lets us know where the real civil war is. It's still within Linden. It's still with people even more extreme than Mitch, who is a kind of gentleman farmer copyleftist, not an industrial workers union copyleftist, even if he has more clout and money than they do.
The Lindens canned interop and its implications. They've reined in some of the open-sourced sillyness. Zero Linden, one of their worst Stallmanites, is gone. But there are still a substantial number of coding and program Lindens who want information to be free (that means YOUR content!) and scorn "little dressmaker genocide". They are the enemy, make no mistake about it.
It's not some hustler like zFire, who saw an opportunity and exploited it. It's Oz Linden, head of the viewer opensource team. It's Soft Linden, Ayn Randian zealot though he is, believer in OS software as a business opportunity. It's other nerdy and less smart Lindens who follow this cult for social power. And their hangers on in the user base in the AWGroupies and such.
They are the inciters of civil war, because they keep thwarting the community at every turn, and become a problem even to other Lindens. Management can't just say to everybody, "all your content are belong to us and we're flushing it to Open Sim for IBM and Maria Korolova et. al. and their business opportunities."
If they did that, they'd have even more of an uproar on their hands.
The struggle over copyright is a struggle for power. Those who want to undermine it want to do so only to empower and enrich themselves with it and suppress others. Those who want to retain it want to establish a power base away from those others undermining them, but in their struggle, they don't hesitate to use the same thuggish methods or worse, and the creator fascist problem of people willing to side with oppressive companies if they make deals is all too prevalent.
If Linden offered a merchant registry as a means to help save copyright, and essentially created an A-list group with Good Housekeeping Seals of Approval, and told the rest of the poor NPIOFs to fuck off unless they gave a name and ID, there'd be a sizeable population who would be happy to screw over their fellow man just to get more "protection" (that would be rather dubious).
Now as to your speculation as to why Linden is doing nothing, well, why is this a mystery?
o they don't need copyright, objectively speaking, in the long run
o they do hope to drive people to the web rather than inworld stores, but they don't care if there are some inworld stores, and they have to leave at least some -- but let them be big ones on islands, with big systems of protection
o you're right they prefer to deal with fewer and bigger entities -- but they can't move too precipitously there because the hollering of unfairness and the screeching of those left out is too loud for now
o it's in the interest of any system, Google or Linden, to reward large players with search returns because they can't physically fit the long-tail into the view.
o I wonder why you are coming only now to this big epiphany that Lindens want to deal with prosumers and large aggregators, not mom and pop. That's been the story for as long as I've been in SL. They gave enormous latitude to Anshe Chung, because she took care of a problem they faced: volatile land auctions and wildly fluctuating prices because there were too many players and too many amateurs. She lowered and stabilized prices to make the market more predictable and comfortable for newbies.
o Your notions as an accountant don't make any rational sense. Everything on the Internet is an economy of sale where only the big and the aggressive win. The notion of the long tail is a fiction. There is no long tail because it can't fit into the viewer.
Social media undid that unfair situation by routing around Google. With 100 Facebook friends, I can ask where to get a sofa on sale and get 10 really good recommendations from people in my neighbourhood, and not have to fight Google's idea of what I should see, which is whatever pays them the most or whatever is linked the most -- which ends up gamed.
Google hates that, so it is constantly banging on Facebook in all kinds of ways, and FB has caved in some areas. But FB is an important bastion.
Picks was the social media workaround to the old Linden search as was traffic, because it was mainly merited. The Lindens had to kill all that off the way Google has to kill Facebook.
But not too much. Because surely they must realize at some level that social circles and smaller actors are important in the ecology. Yet they don't need to really nurture this the way Obama might need to launch Start-Up America to ostensibly nurture small business in the recession. The Lindens have never had a small business vision. They either hate arbitrage based businesses (land) or hate and distrust commodities based businesses (copies of things on DRM) because they set up the Lindens with expectations they refuse to act on.
The Lindens love the idea of selling service or experience and that's why Desmond is perfect for them. But while getting a fair amount of loving from Linden, Desmond never gets enough, because at the end of the day, the Lindens sell servers, reward large server re-renters in the Atlas program, and try to move people into residences where they consume content and become a landlord's problem rather than to inworld stores where they merely become a lag and server overload problem.
Growth does not come from sustaining little businesses. I wish it did. I believe it does at some level or I wouldn't be in SL. But let's face it. It really doesn't. Growth does not come from opening a little book store. It doesn't even come from opening Borders and selling coffee and chocolates with the books. It comes from beating everyone else and being bigger, like Barnes & Nobles.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | February 23, 2011 at 01:38 PM
Apologies, my initial above was not supposed to be for this Blog. I tried loading it in the other Redzone blog (a few days back)....but it wouldn't load and i got frustrated and gave up, so i posted here...when i saw "Redzone" in the headline. I just presumed it was another Redzone follow-up blog.
To be clear on a few points in your reply :
-If you've read any of my postings on any SL forums or Blogs, you'll know i'm hardly a fan of Linden Lab.(more of a descenting voice on the fringe of being suspended or banned) In recent times, I've rarely complimented LL...because they've rarely done anything good in the last 2-3 years that I agree upon.
- So i'm kind of right then, They do nothing about Redzone as it will help drive traffic to Marketplace and therefore dilute the number of businesses in-world. Which is part of their game-plan
- As regards your quote "I wonder why you are coming only now to this big epiphany that Lindens?"
For such a long time, I guess it didn't want to believe it. I remember Ann O'toole bringing it to my attention a couple years back...i thought she was being a bit OTT....but it looks like she called it right.(and you too I guess, although i was unaware of your position)
- The Accountant quote...well it's a case of crunching the numbers. I find it hard to believe that losing land Tiers & Premium fees would be compensated by extra 5% commission (sinks) from sales made on Marketplace. It leads me to believe that Linden Lab at some point will introduce Listing fees (an idea they had about 18 mths ago) on Marketplace once it all finely tuned and working efficiently.
My problem is that i'm very much pro in-world shopping and would prefer Marketplace be more of an add-on (like SLEX & XStreet)and not so heavily promoted. I joined Second Life a 3D Virtual World....whereby in-world shopping is one of those social experiences that I've always enjoyed. I'm not interested in the IMVU route.
Posted by: Rene Erlanger | February 23, 2011 at 03:03 PM
Dear Prok,
I must comment on what you say related to myself:
"Sling Trebutchet is the most vocal and passionate on trying to find a mechanical solution to this issue through turning off the ability to match the name of the avatar with the collected IP address, or collect the IP but then not inform the device of what is collected.
o yes, they may take Sling's very soft option, which is merely a pop-up of warning"
You appear to be confusing me with somebody else. This is perhaps understandable given the amount that has been posted in various places by many people.
My preferred option is a SL Policy that enshrines data privacy for Avatars in SL.
The only mechanics that I have suggested are:
1) Nuking of the in-world devices that provide the essential link between avatar name and IP.
2) Analysis of sim logs to identify (new) third-party servers that are receiving grid-wide traffic. This would be with a view to identifying those that are engaged in privacy invasion.
3) Hidden association of a hash ban (and possibly a hidden short-lived IP ban) with a parcel ban. This would be more effective than anything RZ or similar could enable to combat serial abuse by alt.
My raising in SLU the idea of god-mode for the common avatar to avoid detection was pure mischief, and I think detectable as heavy humour by anyone who appreciated the general mayhem that would cause.
Perhaps I should have flooded that one with animated emoticons.
My initial noises in the Forums and in JIRA concentrated on what was happening and how it was enabled.
I also highlighted that the linking was totally dependant on in-world objects - which are completely open to LL ability to stop them. This was to head off the "Oh we can't control what happens on third-party servers" excuse.
I have never suggested a pop-up solution. Rather I have expressed doubts on it as it imposes a load on residents who may not be informed enough to (1)realise that there is an issue, and (2) be able to make a decision on accepting a media stream based on this strange information.
Suggested patches to Phoenix to intercept media requests are already in train and demonstrated. These are the work of others - not myself.
While I welcome those. I welcome them as a way of detecting previously unknown threats - and as a stop-gap measure pending a Policy and enforcement thereof.
In no way do I see them as the solution to the issue.
Currently, the only solution is to disable media completely.
My hope is that the campaigning will result in a strong Avatar privacy statement in TOS.
Such a Policy statement would encompass not alone the alt-linking via IP, but also the avatar location tracking which is not dependant in any way on media in IP harvesting.
So much has been written about this.
Should any of your gentle readers wish to acquaint themselves with my thinking on the topic, they might like to refer to the JIRA
https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-24746
And the Forums. That's a morass of postings. For something relatively clear and digestible, a thread that I started is remarkably even-tempered, and also affords a good overview of my thoughts.
http://blogs.secondlife.com/message/623258
The point that I am trying to make in that thread is that this is NOT just about alts.
The alt-outing does not affect me personally.
Location tracking affects *everybody*. It's not about hiding some secret. It's about being trackable by any random nutter.
That's why my sig includes:
Second Life - "Your World, Some Nutter's Database"
I have been banging that drum in the hopes of alerting people who might dismiss the privacy issues as being "Alts? Who cares? Meh!"
Posted by: Sling Trebuchet | February 23, 2011 at 05:44 PM
Sling, what you're proposing *is* a pop-up. It's all there is on software, no matter how you elaborately describe it. You yourself proposed it in the thread, warn the user. Even if you have some more elaborate tracker hash banner blah blah, you've proposed a pop-up. Why you'd dodge that now is beyond me.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | February 23, 2011 at 06:06 PM
Uhm....
I'm only a part time journalist for the Herald, maybe not a full staff member, but anyway: I'M NOT ON LSD!
I used to prefer psylos anyway, but stopped using them a long time ago, because they always lead me to metaphysical troubles. (Meeting god can be fun, but in the long run I've been just too much of a critic to enjoy meetings like that, so we parted in mutual agreement to settle some serious issues and differences till later. With eternity at our hands, there's no need to hurry, after all) :D
LSD, on the other hand, is much too synthetic and artificial. Fun without a real deep and direct access to the core of what's called life is simply too shallow for my taste. ;)
Posted by: Millennium Sands | February 24, 2011 at 08:22 PM
What does it matter. Rod Humble said privacy of alts is important. Meanwhile he stabbed SL in the back and officially gave a porn website scammer carte blanche to continue invading privacy at will.
Nice job Rod Humble.
Posted by: Ann Otoole InSL | February 24, 2011 at 10:13 PM
Nelson Jenkins on no2redzone raises an interesting point with regard to the announced changes to Redrone. zFire has announced that permission must be sought to learn the names of the alts of anyone scanned. However, he also has said this:
"Alts are still banable if they are related to a new user you do not want on your land.
Alts of people you banned are still banned, alts of copybots are still banned, alts of anyone you have banned are still going to be banned, just not named."
This seems to suggest that banning someone using the system will automatically also ban their associated "alts," meaning that one need merely look at the changes to a parcel's ban list to see the names of those alts.
If so, this is hardly much of a victory for the anti-Redzone faction.
And yes, the data mining will still continue unabated.
Posted by: Scylla Rhiadra | February 24, 2011 at 10:25 PM
Well, if it works like Ban-Link, it has lists of bans that aren't showing inside the ban list.You can only fit, what, 100 names on those lists? So they couldn't possible stuff all the alts of all the people in that list, they'd use it up. These scripts are configured to block without putting names in the ban list AFAIK.
Well, Ann, not to carry any water for Mr. Humble. But you know, when he talks about protecting people's privacy, he means REAL LIFE privacy. He means like a casino operator doesn't allow his patrons to be photographed inside the establishment so as not to embarrass them in real life.
But what he doesn't mean is what happens inside the casino if they use fake ID or whatever.
He is NOT available to protect people's SL privacy.
So he's covered his ass there, and very amply, and I can't fault him.
Facebook privacy concerns? Sure. He will not out your RL name on Facebook.
SL alt concerns? Well, yeah, it's in the TOS that you can't out alts. It's called "disclosure".
Did RedZone engage in disclosure?
Well, no. Datamining without publication is not disclosure. One could try a somewhat gimmicky argument: that the fact that every prim-a-donna who can read alt lists inside the device after they buy it from him are now seeing a "publication of alts" that is "inworld disclosure" means there is an AR available.
But.
That would take one of those prim-a-donnas turning against RedZone and abuse reporting him for reporting alts to them. Not going to happen.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | February 25, 2011 at 12:17 AM
Prok, do you even read what Humble says? He stated explicitly that privacy of alts is important.
As for redzone and disclosure? That is what it is sold to do. Disclose alts. The copybot detection crap is bs because everyone knows it can't do that.
I don't know why you defend this guy's operation. I don't know why you have not bothered to read the tons of information on how it works.
But have no fear. The TPVs will soon have a blocking system that renders redzone useless. And the exodus from LL's viewers back to TPVs will once again manifest.
LL obviously wants a civil war. Otherwise they would have properly dealt with this issue.
Posted by: Ann Otoole InSL | February 25, 2011 at 12:47 PM
Ann,
Do you read what he says? Right back at you.
He is talking about *the privacy of alts in relationship to their real-life connection -- the possibility that an avatar connecting to a RL account in FB -- which is what you are supposed to have on FB -- would be outed.
You're smart, surely you can see how cleverly this is all done.
He's NOT NOT NOT talking about *outing one SL alt to another*.
Can't you grasp that???
The Red Zone collects SL names. It doesn't collect the RL info that the Lindens have on file obviously.
It colles *fake names of your SL avatar*. It matches that fake name of your SL avatar to ANOTHER fake name of your OTHER avatar -- and does this by grabbing your IP address.
Linden acknowledges that grabbing IP addresses is fine -- it has to do it itself to make the system work, they say (Ryan Linden's famous explanation on the forums years ago which I often cited).
So other people have to grab your IP, just like this blog grabs it and stores it, and if I had the inclination, I could go look at it, and if I had further world enough and time, I could see if the automatic search system would find a match, or work other matches to try to "turn up something".
Just like this blog, Red Zone grabs IPs, matches them, and show you the matches, *when you look*. It's slightly more easy to do, but *you have to look*.
It does not publish them.
AND furthermore, 4.3 *enables this to happen*. I can't keep shouting myself blue in the face and urging you people to read 4.3. Go and read it. It exonerates third parties of any wrongdoing gathering data in SL. It exonerates LL of any liability for that.
All you have is the TOS offense, "disclosure". So see if you can make an argument that somebody who stores and matches IP addresses is in fact also *disclosing* them.
That's the part you simply refuse to hear. You don't grasp that 8.3 refers to real-life privacy; 4.3 refers to internal SL data -- and there's not a thing you can do about somebody grabbing inworld data.
As long as they don't match it to real life, Rod Humble's lovely quotation is intact.
As long as they don't disclose it in SL, Rod Humble's lovely quotation is intact. He knows it, and his lawyers know it.
Invoke it all you want for its shame value, but he's got his ass covered on this one.
Privacy of alts is important REGARDING REAL LIFE. He also cares enough about privacy OF ONE ALT TO ANOTHER ALT if it is outed per the TOS on "disclosure".
Redzone does not disclose, Ann. It gathers and show the info *to you, the user*. The way Hippo Rentals or any other device shows me the UUID of an avatar and stores all kinds of things on a third-party website like his location, payments, etc.
But if the guy doesn't publish that, he's not disclosing.
The only argument you *might* make is that in a setting where zFire has sold so many copies of this thing, and it has been purchased not only by "responsible" store owners concerned about copybotting and griefing but just anybody with a prurient interest in flying around and trying to out alts, that *maybe* you can gin that up to a construction that it is deliberate disclosure.
But it isn't. Because revealing it to any one customer inside the product is not revealing it on a public website. Like the SL Wristwatch guy did, and that was what made him get taken down in the end.
It doesn't matter if the TPVs have a blocking system. LL might, if it gets upset enough, then eliminate the TPV program completely, if it interferes with the ability of the platform to offer the datamining service that every single platform in Silicon Valley offers its greedy clients.
It isn't LL that wants the civil war. It's people like you. And I'm all for fighting it. Fight away! There is a war in cyberspace and we need to fight it!
However, fight it smart. Realize what they are doing here. And devise ways to make the case.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | February 25, 2011 at 01:24 PM
Go read the updated community standards Prok. LL changed it yesterday. Exposing alts without consent is now a violation as of yesterday. Please explain why LL changed the TOS/CS over this issue if it was not about exposing alts in SL?
Posted by: Ann Otoole InSL | February 25, 2011 at 08:59 PM
Ann, I appreciate that you're more immersed in this than I am, and have a real need to tell me "I told you so".
But it's still not addressing the issue I keep explaining: the sense of nobless oblige and eminent domain that Linden Lab has that they can scrape data about avatars and allow third parties to do so without any consent, just as long as they don't link to real life identities.
The deadly paragraph that claws back rights you think are implied elsewhere reminds unchanged in 4.3:
The Service may contain links to or otherwise allow connections to third-party websites, servers, and online services or environments that are not owned or controlled by Linden Lab. You agree that Linden Lab is not responsible or liable for the Content, policies, or practices of any third-party websites, servers, or online services or environments. Please consult any applicable terms of use and privacy policies provided by the third party for such websites, servers, or online services or environments.
As far as I can see, there isn't any new policy for third parties that data mine *in the TOS* which is like the Constitution and the main body of law. No special new "data mining policy" the way we have gotten "third party viewer" policies.
Instead, something has been changed in the Community Standards, which is far weaker. CS are just policies tacked on to law that help interpret it but aren't as solid.
CS 4 always said you can't disclose alts and it still says that.
I don't see what you're finding to be "updated".
I think all that happened is that Red Zone made a popup -- which was indeed Sling's solution offered to the Lindens, although not one as robust as he wanted.
Another thing I heard that zFire did was end the distribution of the entire dbase to everyone so only he has it, and the Herald says that -- but who knows. Let us hope so.
There's actually a surprisingly good piece on the Herald about this, but SLuniverse.com has a lot as well.
Or maybe there is
What I've just read about this is that zFire himself has put a change into the product that asks for consent to be scanned.
Not consent for their alts to be outed. But consent to be scanned -- it will be like the request to give consent to be bitten in the Vampire biting game.
How many people do you think won't click "yes" while they are shopping?
So, point to me some absolutely new redaction that I'm not seeing or some new philosophy about tolerance of datamining -- I'm not seeing it.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | February 25, 2011 at 09:50 PM
The CS was just changed and the language about alts was added the day before yesterday. It was not there before. If you had jira access you would have seen Soft's comment that confirms it.
Posted by: Ann Otoole InSL | February 25, 2011 at 10:14 PM
How to "douse" the redzone fire:
Feature Request for Do Not Track registry to resolve privacy issue: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-6793
Posted by: Ann Otoole InSL | February 25, 2011 at 10:31 PM
Ann, no, there has always been an injunction against exposing alts. That's "disclosure". That's always been there. It's been used on people many, many times to ban them.
What's new is that they are interpreting this now *with regard to Red Zone*.
But it has always been against the TOS to out alts, always.
Just because Soft Lindens claims something on the JIRA doesn't make it true. Go and look at the company website. It has not been updated since December. And it is not changed that I can see, it always had that language.
Surely you can realize Ann that outing alts has always been an offense in SL. I don't see how you can imagine it wasn't.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | February 25, 2011 at 11:31 PM
I'm trying to track this now.
Outing alts has always been an offense in SL. Lindens themselves went through this fiction of treating separate accounts as separate, and calling you "Random" even if they knew that "Random" was Prokofy.
But where is this written?
The Wayback Machine doesn't show it in the CS for privacy in 2007:
http://web.archive.org/web/20070407163139/secondlife.com/corporate/cs.php
It's not there in 2008:
http://web.archive.org/web/20080423033315/secondlife.com/corporate/cs.php
And yet we know that "disclosure' has always been an offense, and outing alts has been part of that offense. So was this an unwritten policy?
The Google cache also contains nothing:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:f8mGh3oBqtMJ:secondlife.com/corporate/cs.php+Community+Standards+disclosure+secondlife.com&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&source=www.google.com
So you're right, now they've inserted it (even though there isn't an update date):
http://secondlife.com/corporate/cs.php
#
Disclosure
Residents are entitled to a reasonable level of privacy with regard to their Second Life experience. Sharing personal information about your fellow Residents without their consent -- including gender, religion, age, marital status, race, sexual preference, alternate account names, and real-world location beyond what is provided by them in their Resident profile -- is not allowed. Remotely monitoring conversations in Second Life, posting conversation logs, or sharing conversation logs without the participants' consent are all prohibited.
The Lindens did have some regulation about this somewhere, as it was something they acted on:
The police blotter shows it:
http://www.gridsurvey.com/blotter.php
Use the term "disclosure" and search -- Tyche Shepherd has the old police blotter here.
You'll see some offenses are "Disclosure: First Life" and interestingly, "Disclosure: Second Life" is also there.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | February 25, 2011 at 11:41 PM
"Do not track"
https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-6793
Is brilliant, because it ties it to the "Do not Track" issues of RL that even have RL legislation pending or law in the EU -- it's something that takes the whole thing out of the realm of the hacker heckling of SL and the magic woo-woo of virtuality and puts it squarely where it belongs, real life privacy.
This is great.
The problem remains 4.3. 4.3 did not go away. 4.3 still gives third parties the right to scrape data.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | February 25, 2011 at 11:48 PM
Sure they can scrape away. However with a do not track system they could not take data pertaining to avatars that have opted out. They could continue to do what Tyche does regarding land, etc. They could scrape all the data they want on avatars that have not opted out.
Posted by: Ann Otoole InSL | February 26, 2011 at 02:39 AM
4.3 did not go away.
Do not track only has 8 votes in a system where vote is going to be shut down.
Good luck.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | February 26, 2011 at 02:42 AM
I just created it 5 hours ago and it already has 25 votes and 23 watchers. watchers = Oz's "indication of interest".
It is a low cost easy solution to a growing problem for LL. Let's wait and see what happens.
Posted by: Ann Otoole InSL | February 26, 2011 at 02:59 AM