Second Thoughts

Punish Traffic Fraud By Removal from Search

I think I've got a winner with this feature proposal: make traffic fraud a TOS violation, accept abuse reports on it, and punish it by removing offenders from visibility in SEARCH.

I think a week of enforcement, and the landscape will be changed dramatically. If the Lindens can put in administrative enforcement of ad farms/extortion, they can do this -- it is far less labour intensive, and with a very effective punishment, far more effective than merely banning this or that alt of an ad farmer.

The usual suspects on the JIRA have shown up to pick on the proposal, harrying it to death with non-essentials, like its category, or pretending to support it while devilishly introducing an unrelated concept (the ability to filter traffic results, from Gordon Wendt, who speciously claims this is like i-tunes).

I've proposed labelling and restricting bots -- I think that's worth following up on as well. Others have proposed all kinds of ways of dealing with traffic fraud, usually by removing this metric completely. As is known, I vehemently oppose the removal of traffic metrics. In a free and open society, you never remove information that helps inform consumers. The gaming of this information display doesn't obviate that social need. The gaming of it is exaggerated, and there are ways to address the gaming without killing the system. The system isn't "old-fashioned" or "a game itself" because unlike the impersonal Internet, where you can't see the nature of what comes on your page and bots and click-farms abound, in 3-D interactive Second Life, most of the avatars are still people, and their choices to travel from one "page" or lot are still more visible and meaningful.

M, Pay Attention

I sent M Linden a letter -- I've only sent 2-3 of them so far, I think the others have been more open blogs simply addressed to him. One was to answer his initial blog. I think I've always pretty much said the same thing -- pay attention to inworld business, it's where your bread is buttered.

I use to write to Philip Linden all the time. I would get an answer perhaps one out of 20 times, sometimes very unexpectedly. I'll never forget that startling time I fired off an IM, when they messed with the sun prior to putting in that awful Windlight, and said in angry dismay,

"What the hell did you do to the sun? Put it back!"

And *instantly*, via Blackberry, got an answer, "Why, what's wrong with it?"

Scary, eh? Hehe.

It's like that town hall some years ago where I said I didn't believe Governor Linden existed, and suddenly, there she was in the chat, saying "Why do you doubt Me, Prokofy?" Wild!

No, those days are gone. Nowadays, M is like any other marketing puke. He will be very, very cautious to get involved in blogs, written statements, debates, controversies, etc. He is schooled to be always positive and always spinning. He knows just the right time to swoop down, deus ex machina, into Prad's blog, and say just the right thing, and which sims to grace.

So what he did with me -- he didn't answer. And he sent me a bear. ROFL. I asked for a bear just as a kind of check (so often you see Lindens seemingly logging in and getting your notecard inventory, but they never respond). And by doing so, of course, he's dissing me. He's saying two things:

o I'm afraid to answer you, as it is polemical and controversial
o I will not bother to answer you because that would validate you, and I'm definitely not going to make the mistake of my predeccesor and do *that* -- because people like you need to get gone from my service.

Anonymous, Unaccountable Avatars

An interesting debate cropped up today, but in a maddening way, spanned Facebook, various blogs, and of course the inevitable Plurks and Twitters and inworld IMs so you can't see it all properly. What it boils down to is this:

o Harper Beresford launched a blast on her blog against unnamed charities that she felt were duplicitous and stealing money in SL, but without naming names, so who the hell knows what she is talking about. It was one of those classic provincial, narrow-minded, insinuating catty posts that you see emanating from the Plurkers, and it made no sense unless you were, oh, Dale Innis or something.

o Alanagh Recreant, who runs a social entrepreneurship for charity in South Africa, and is reputable as far as we all know, somehow felt the "shoe fits" after she read Harper's screed, or felt that she had to reply to this barrage from Harper, and put up a long self-justifying post, that only dug her in deep on some points, because she is still open to criticism for a) not sufficiently linking her avatar given her money-taking functions and b) demanding that Linden Lab or "America" or "The North" somehow credential her African charity, help it fund-raise, and certify that it is a Good Thing.

o I took both of them on, especially on Facebook, and said Harper is one to talk, as her avatar isn't anywhere linked with anything. She facetiously, astoundingly, proceeded to claim that her avatar had accountability becaues once there was this article mentioning her in a) an obscure Italian magazine and b) Mitch Wagner's column for the computer industry publication Information Week. I blasted that to bits, as someone who knows what it *really* means to have RL and SL names linked.

o I told Alanagh that she has to expect to adapt to real-life regulations ultimately because we can't have Extropian silly notions about global governance structures being built out of handfuls of arrogant and anonymous avatars online and mediated by private software firms in San Francisco.

o Then a kid named Dave who graduated from college recently cockily claimed that online communities and the gut sense of the gruop online of what they can trust does trump real life, and that I'm evil for not giving innovative ideas a chance and wishing to regulate them before they got going.

o Sigh. Whereupon I told him that real life already regulates virtuality, without me saying or doing a thing -- can you spell VAT, casinos, ageplay, banks? 

o Then some anonymous avatar with 3 alts threatened to sue me in Australia -- ROLF -- because I committed the avatar sin of the year: I said I simply don't believe Eshi Osharawa's story completely. If you'd like to get my entire chapter and verse on this, IM me. Harper was the one who flogged her cause to get a green card; Hamlet joined in; all the FIC were pumping it big time. I remained uninvolved...because I was unconvinced -- and remain so. I don't care if this brings me a big SHUN as an unbeliever -- it has to be said. And it's a good example of how causes promoted by little cliques aren't believable on their own.

Sorry, but here's what it's about: I will claw and fight to the death, and be as rude as I need to be about opposing any attempts to arrogate a handful of anonymous avatars to some global power seat online that gets to decide what is valid and what isn't -- the Wikipedification of all life! Over my dead body. It's just that simple. And I represent not some "old media" or "old way of thinking" but in fact the new, but in fact the actual progressive and innovactive, because I don't wish to have us all thrown back into the Dark Ages, where tribes and roving bands decide who lives and who dies, or where lords and ladies of the castle decide what is valid, and where "our votes don't count, but our count votes".

Linden Lab Corrects Post in LCO Libel Allegation Drama

Linden Lab has fixed the post incorrectly linking to my blog account of Simone's lock-out from Legend City Online.

If you follow the link to Briana Dawson's post which  misstated my post, you will see it has been edited simply -- and without excess explanation -- by Katt Linden as follows:

Last edited by Katt Linden : Yesterday at 08:40 PM. Reason: Title of post linked to is "SL Legend....Locked out of"

Note that LL didn't remove or "sequester" the post as they might have done in yesteryear when the forums were run by amateur Lindens -- residents with a heavy bias toward posters they didn't like -- Lindens who had five minutes before had themselves been residents with ties inworld. Of course, it's always possible that Linden made this rather surgical intervention, atypical of some of their past blunt-axe actions, because they don't mind seeing criticism of opensim worlds.

So, the post remains. The link to my article remains. All this is interesting, and since I filed an abuse report on Briana Dawson under the heading "harassment -- libel" -- it's interesting that such an AR works -- even taking 2 days -- and works with precision, i.e. not removing the entire post, or locking the post -- Katt merely reappears down the line to say "Don't fight in the SL forums" (it may get locked yet -- stay tuned) -- but just fixing one tiny part of the misleading headline, that used to say "Content Stolen".

The Sluniverse.com rabid junkyard dogs, of course, are speaking of me "selling Briana Dawson down the river". Nonsense. I contacted Briana inworld, and had a friendly conversation with her some days ago, explaining to her long before this lawyer's letter was filed on me that she had incorrectly referred to my post, and fanned the hated and allegations springing up everywhere about me. She conceded this in chat as follows:

SL Economy Takes a Lickin' and Keeps on Tickin'

The Lindens have come out with some economic statistics again -- and they're incomplete. They've opted to, er, "hold back" the information about just how many islands they lost.

While they were willing to declare their world experienced incredible growth when people converted islands to open spaces when the full-prim island prices crashed last year, when people converted *back* to full-prim islands with the sticker shock of the openspace price increase, the Lindens began to mumble. They have a contorted footnote explaining that the numbers are "misleading" and could be under- or over-counted. Well, wait. If you were happy to "overcount" them  when they burgeoned ridiculously as every one sim became 4 in the OS frenzy, why not simply be honest and say, look, the world dropped from 32,000 to 22,000 and we goofed?

Island numbers are important to gage the world economy, but at the end of the day, let's be frank, they are a better gage of the *Lindens' economy* -- not ours, as inworld businesses. Joined as we are at the hip and heart and not separated at birth because we both would have died in the operation, we still have different interests and our weights are measured differently.And what's good for Linden isn't always good for us, and visa versa. It leads to insect politics.

Legend City Online Attorney Threatens Me With Libel Lawsuit

January 2, 2008
Catherine Fitzpatrick
AKA Prokofy Neva
dyerbrookme@juno.com

Cahill, von Hellens & Glazer, P.L.C.
Attorneys at Law

155 Park One
2141 E. Highland Avenue
Phoenix, Arizona 85016-4762
Telephone: (602)-956-7000 ext. 105

Matthew L. Bycer
Direct Fax: (602)-956-4298
e-mail: mbycer@cvglaw.com

Re: Second Thoughts blog posting: December 28, 2008
o http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts
o http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2008/12/sl-legend-simone-locked-out-of-legend-city-online.html

Dear Prokofy Neva

Our firm has been retained by Legend City Online (TM) for copyright, DMCA compliance, intellectual property and trade libel matters. It has come to  our attention that your blog, entitled: "Second Thoughts", recently contatined posted items of a defamatory and libelous nature. In these statements, particularly those published on December 28, 2008, you misrepresent the business relationship of Legend City Online (TM), and its managing officer, AKA LaLa Xevious with Stephen Sanner of Simone! Designs, Inc., AKA Simone Stern, AKA Simone.

To the contrary of your misstatements Leged City Online (TM) has committed no acts of theft, content theft, or otherwise usurped the rights or privileges of its users in any manner inconsistent with its standard Terms of Use. Furthermore, Legend City Online (TM) has conducted itself in good faith and in a manner wholly consistent with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

As such, your blog contains false libel which has caused damage to our client. The statements and accusations contained on your blog, "Second Thoughts", have no support in fact. Your failure to correct, retract, and/or otherwise mitigate the damage you have caused, continues to harm our client.

Therefore, we demand a retraction from your blog of all libelous material related to Legend City Online (TM), its management and staff. Furthermore, we kindly request that you provide an update that will clarify the inculpability of our client to your subscribing readers.

Legend City Online (TM) continues to provide a safe home for the online community and prides itself on its continued growth, improvements, and quality service to all residents of its grid.

Please take the proper actions to alleviate the damage being caused to our client as soon as possible. Please direct all communications to our offices identified above.

Matthew L. Bycer

Cc: LaLa Xevious

The History of Group Tool Reform

Finally, in mid 2006, we got the right to make slices of pizza and hand them out without also having to give away the store. Schwanson Schlegel made this photomontage originally to describe something about how simulators put on servers worked.

Those who don't study history are doomed to repeat it, and that's why we're repeating the history of Group Tools reform and the bugs that have plagued it. My hypothesis is that it is not about bugs, but about a flaw in design that keeps being reverted due to a political conception; not every bug is a technical screw-up, but is sometimes the embodiment of wrong thinking set to work mechanically with bad results.

I don't view Sean Williams as an honest broker of this issue, nor as a worthy interlocutor, and normally I don't reply to him. But this, my 1,000 post in the history of this blog, has to be explained fully, and argued, for the sake of those uninformed, or still not getting it about the difference between capitalism and communism, and how the former can enable the latter, but the latter cannot enable the former, and therefore when you go about making group tools, you have to ensure diversity of social and economic systems to enable either capitalism or communism, but not switch on only communism.

Back in 2005-2006, a long war was waged to change the group tools. I and a few others led this struggle. We led this struggle because we came into SL in 2004 on the strength of the call from Philip Rosedale that he was ready for business, over beta, and over the sort of opensource hippie technocollectivism that his initial polices and practices and tools promoted. He put in a land auction and parcels. He authorized the conversion of currency. He *encouraged* real estate business in his town hall. He encouraged business of all sorts, despite the howling of some of the old early adopters on the forums. But his group tools didn't catch up with these pledges right away. Under the old regime, there were only two states: officer or member. Either you made everybody everything or you made some one or some the other, but there were devastating consequences. The tools made it possible for anyone who was an officer to take and sell land or deeded objects out from under you, or to trigger an "officers' recall" vote on you, regardless if you had paid for the land and held the tier.

At the time, I wrote this seminal and classic piece, "Imagine if the Pizza Guy Stole LL?" which Cory Linden admitted later did focus his mind on this subject. There was a year of warring on this -- the Lindens convened something like 4 or 6 group meetings, heard all the constituencies, but kept playing to one imaginary one: the purported enthusiastic utopian group that wished to share all proceeds and objects equally. They kept hearing from the furries at Luskwood and the socialists at Neualtenberg that this was vital, and the voices of thousands of other groups that disagreed and wanted management tools and granularity weren't penetrating. Michi Lumin kept demanding the ability to simultaneously make all members owners with never some initial owner -- really brutal and classic communism in the abstract sense which wasn't necessary even to put in the socialist they desired. (BTW, I think in the end, the Lindens accommodated them in another fashion, giving them estate tools on a mainland sim, as if on a private island, or at least, that's what Gwyn says.) One of the hippies driving the communist take on the group tool problems was Daniel Linden, but others were also a problem.

During the beta process of these tools, granulation to enable management of classes of people with hierarchies of privileges was in fact developed. But despite the way the boxes and checkoffs were drawn, certain functions kept bugging up. I tested them rigorously -- although my alt in a group wasn't granted the power to return group-set prims or move group-deeded objects, he could anyway. I kept assiduously reporting this as a flaw and a bug, and *it was fixed*. When the tools launched, this problem ceased. And just as the boxes stated, it worked like this:

The Evils of Wikipedia and the Hope of Second Life

I was trying to think today what "killer apps in social media" means, and it's hard to think of any for Second Life. I guess my own feeling is that it is a killer app all on its own, but one still getting developed and spread. Not everything follows the Gartner hype-cycle charts like lock-step. Why should it? Human affairs aren't "laws of nature" that you can always reliably analyze and chart like science.

One thing that is truly evil, unquestionably, is Wikipedia. It's evil in its reach and scope, and its danger to knowledge and wisdom. I was just reading George Orwell's 1984 again, and I realized that it's here already. Usually, when you read 1984, you think of the issue of "Big Brother Watching You," or you think of how these spies are posing as dissidents but then betray Winston, but you don't focus so much on his job. Sure, you remember the "memory hole" that he pushes factual news down every day as he rewrites it, but his act of constant revising and rewriting and lying used to feel like it was abstract and in the future.

Now it doesn't.

I realized this comparing my impressions from reading this book 35 years ago, 30 years ago, 20 years ago, and now. Winston's job -- rewriting history to fit with new Party directives spinning the facts and history as he know he personally witnessed it -- is a lot like the function of a blogger or Wikipedia or anyone on the Internet who can just rewrite a page and republish it, sometimes without showing that it was edited. Things get cut, erased, and don't even show up in Google anymore, and you have to look for them on the Way Back Machine.

But nowhere is knowledge pulled and tugged and manipulated more than on Wikipedia. It's like what some critics say of it: it's a cult, and back of it is one Big Lie that you are supposed to swallow as religious truth -- that it is "open to anybody" and "everybody corrects it" and mistakes and bias become opaque to thousands of citizens of good will. Baloney. Anyone who spends any time studying Wikipedia, if they are in good faith with the concerns of an open society, becoming slowly appalled, then chilled. The Byzantine system of editing orthodoxies and myriad bizarre rulings and conventions make the Catholic Church or the Kremlin look like school kids with an ABC book. It's awful. I stumbled on all those weird sets of pages describing all their editing orthodoxies and I just...boggled. Special terms. Sordid little wars. Executions at dawn...

A fascinating page shows the pictures and RL locations of some of the anonymous manipulators behind Wikipedia on one controversial subject. Largely male, largely geeky, largely in their 30s-40s. No doubt this guy's criticism page is biased, too -- I have no idea what all the politics are -- but just seeing all the *types* there I marvel at how much it's like the Second Life JIRA and the AWG.

I never knew until recently that there is a creepy function that certain Wikinistas up in the stratosphere of the Wiki FIC take on, called Checkusers. Checkusers, well, check users, they monitor their IP, their statements, they assess whether they are "sock puppets" or "trolls" blah blah blah. The more you read about all this, the more you think that Winston Smith's office should be renamed Wikipedia, not Ministry of Truth. That sub-committee of a sub-commission that he was dumped on towards the end working on Newspeak was the obvious result...

But the scary thought came when I tried to think what would happen if you made Wikipedia be the killer app to Second Life -- or visa versa.

FIC '09: M, Save Our Sims!

Wow, I never saw the Lindens make a FIC list before. It's something I've done, of course, based on their actions, but they've always denied it.

M Linden, of course, instantly grasped where he had to go with this, which was to embrace it. Well, I've always said, I'm not opposed to the FIC per se -- all of life has FIC, everywhere, since high school, you get the cool kids. Just make sure they're *good* FIC!

Are they?

Well, judge for yourself. Although he mentioned it near last, I'm glad M included Racer Gullwing's Snail Races. They are the longest running act in SL. Like clockwork on Saturdays, and so creative. I got such an innovative Christmas card from Racer. I've never seen the Lindens acknowledge him before, so that's good. Progress. I'm also glad Crap Mariner was recognized for all his hard work making the i-Tunes thing. Dusan Writer is mentioned as basically "best blogger of the year" -- and that's good, because he's not such a shill and a tool like Hamlet and other paid-for blogs, or the Herald, paid-for in a different direction, and is occasionally critical. Of course, I'm not happy he is recognized for that browser contest, which I thought was both a ridiculous waste of money on his part, and simply producing elitist browsers of little use to the public.

Then I'm glad M recognized the Kristallnacht exhibit, a hard thing to do when all the PC leftoid gang are behaving atrociously and inciting with the *wrong* "holocaust museum" run by the Friends of the Palestinian Suicide Bombers. And a first-class Japanese sim, with my most recent and favourite Japanese find, Giorno Brando, who I put in my International Bazaar list -- he has some of the greatest stuff. I'm glad he has another store, because the store I went to was hard to get to and figure out, up in the sky. I'm glad M also mentioned Coming of Age in Second Life. A serious book.

But, other than these few obviously merited picks, the rest is like the 3-D internactive NPR on steriods that the Lindens have always wanted Second Life to become - and that's boring, and won't attract users.Worse, he tops it off with Torley (blecth) and makes a completely tokenist and insulting "nod" to everyone else, like this, "The many, many great clothing, hair, skin and furniture merchants in Second Life".

Well, I'll Be Damned

Take a look-see at this. Incredible.

Another time I'm vindicated on the JIRA, after being harassed, brow-beaten, bullied, and resisted by the "regulars" there on that "science project" at the "Lab".

And resisted even by Lindens, who told me my bug was "expected behaviour"and who told me the bug should be "campaigned for in public triage" to be recognized as a feature. Sigh.

In a nutshell, what happened is that group roles and their powers stop being respected when this bug occurred. It's the sort of thing likely only a large rentals group or big community project trying to share things but keep them from being griefed might notice - private islands that are locked down like Leavenworth might not notice it as quickly. While the group roles enabled you to decide who in your group should be able to return a prim set to the group, and who couldn't, the system -- vital for rentals, clubs, group projects, etc. -- became overridden by the bug. Havoc ensued, as people who shouldn't have been allowed to return entire builds got to return them, and as people joined the open group and used the ill-gotten powers to grief. A crazy neighbour joined my open group and returned a house with just one piece accidently in "share" out of spite; newbies accidently got grief scripts because they didn't get the difference between "share" and "set" to group. That was all unnecessary.

I  just couldn't get the Lindens to grasp this, and of course, amidst the din of all the asshole regulars, like Harleen Gretzky and McCabe Maxsted, both of whom fisked and literalized and bullied me for 10 months, it was hard to get the case heard. It shouldn't have been; that it is, is a disgrace.