all the cameras watch the accidents and stars you hate, they only care if you can bleed

Tossed up two new links on the sidebar. There are scores of people asking for donations in world for Japan relief, and I'm not trying to compete with that--but if you're here, and you feel the urge to flip a few bucks their way, Direct Relief International comes highly trusted for Japan. And above that, Haiti Relief is still on the ground in Haiti, helping the country rebuild. (With all major buildings still under construction, a recent virulent outbreak of cholera, and more than 300,000 dead...yeah, it's going to take a while.)

As long as we're talking virtual donations, Gaia Online apparently forced the fundraising cap up on the site's donation efforts. They had originally pegged a high mark of $10,000--that's US dollars--but the donations came in so fast in such numbers that they hit $50,000 before they knew it. Sales of special fundraising items are still ongoing.

Meanwhile, AltDetector Resident--one of the minds behind QuickWare's AltDetector Pro--has been summarily banned from SL along with the objects, scripts, and the like--which are probably also going to be globally stripped from the asset server, along with any remaining RedZone bits.

Anyone else? I think, based on Soft Linden's actions, alt detection is No Longer Cool. (Not that it ever was.)

So, now that it absolutely doesn't matter in the least, where were we in the RedZone Thread of Doooom?

Boy Lane:

"Sorry Zidonuke Ghost, you overstepped a number of times.

"You close relevant issues that are not in your responsibility.
"You call people you don't like names.
"You pretend/hack into, to be a Linden who can assign roles to Jira tickets (Soft Linden) and you try to scare people in taking appropriate action "If you reopen this here, your Jira privileges will be revoked."

"Unless you are a Linden hiding behind some fake account, this is a slap into the face of everyone concerned here, including Linden Lab and Oz."

I quoted pretty much the whole of this comment because it's so apt. And following that was this bombshell:

Psyke Phaeton:

You can learn all about Zidonuke here:
https://twitter.com/#!/Zidonuke
including things like:
"@ZaphaelXaron I operate in a very narrow grey area that appears to keep getting me in trouble. But I will not stop my security research."
"All 200 Alts just got banned."
"Filed 75 Support Tickets for my most important alt accounts. Filing another 50 tickets for the vaporeanbots."

And this was another entire passage from the comment. I mention that because I'm reading through his stream now. How about trying some of these comments on for size:

@Zidonuke:
I'm going back into security exploit finding in SL. I just learned of some amazing things from people. Also the fact that I earned money.

@Zidonuke:
I have discovered a new way on how to trap copybotters based on a pretty neat method. Visiting a copybot related website = ban on my system.

@Zidonuke:
SL Bigbrother is coming once again. Deploying zidobots across the grid to track and record agent keys, region location, and local position.

@Zidonuke:
And so, Linden Lab shall burn. Goodbye Joe Miller. Now... Only if @soft will quit LL. If he leaves, I lose all faith in that company.

Yeah. Sounds like a definite asset to keep around in SL... :/

There was a lot more back-and-forth bickering at that point, but then guess who showed up again?

Soft Linden:

"Zidonuke, stop monkeying with this issue.

"'No one at LL can remove RedZone because the policy to make it illegal doesn't exist in their eyes.'

"While it's true that it relates to policy and that this often makes response slower, nobody at LL has said anything like the above. You asked and I gave you the same answer I've given anyone else who wrote a security ticket: I've made sure several key people understand how it works and what privacy issues are involved. Until they have approved a response, no Linden could or would make any statement about the company's position."

Way to step up and tell Zidonuke he's wrong. Woot!

And I may or may not return to this, but this feels like a great place to stop:

Argent Stonecutter:

"Regardless of whether it's legal or not, it's creepy as hell, and it's far more of an invasion of privacy than cameras in malls since those don't tie into a government issued RFID tag shared by friends and family. It utterly astounds me that anyone can defend it."

Pretty damned much.

We live in a universe where companies sell our ages, our habits, our locations, our dating profiles, our surfing history, what we buy and what stores we buy in, where we choose to eat, our insurance information, our medical information, and our credit scores. All of this is up for grabs to the highest bidder. For the most part, we know about it--or at least we should.

But in Second Life? Maybe it's part and parcel of an entire population that has no clue, but people just don't expect to be hacked inside a game. And it scares a lot of us when we find out we have been. We feel a distinct loss of control, and we suffer a definite loss of faith in the people who run the game.

Frankly, the Labs don't have that much ground left to lose before there's nothing underneath them but air. Here's to Soft Linden changing that perception, in a big way. He's already made a great start.

give me space so you can drown in this with me

Paradise lost...and regained. It's really easy to get lost in SL; I know, I've done it. But generally speaking, she's right; you can't lose yourself in something unless you're already lost to begin with.

Have a fetish for eighties music? Try it with a side of eighties cartoons.

TF2 the MMO? Gad, I hope not, but the pics are fun.

Back to SL matters. There's something else a bit unnerving about Sin-Labs.

Because I hadn't found the hunt prize yet, when I rezzed into world, I was back in Sin-Labs. This? Was 'overheard' on the main chat:

[08:44 PM] S-L Doll Stand: Hello Emilly Orr, welcome to Sin-Labs
Our dolls are here to assist (when not restrained)

Great....I wandered for a bit, not finding anything in the warren of internal stores, so returned to the main warp hub and stood in thought.

[08:47 PM] IM: you think: The encaser looks interesting, maybe you should try it
[08:48 PM] IM: you think: The bikegirls look great, maybe you should try them out
[08:49 PM] IM: you think: An hour on a stand, just isn't enough
[08:50 PM] IM: you think: Statues are not people, they're just decoration
[08:51 PM] IM: you think: An hour on a stand, just isn't enough
[08:52 PM] IM: you think: That can't have been a muffled sound from that statue, can it?
[08:53 PM] IM: you think: Maybe you should have a drink, a special drink
[08:54 PM] IM: you think: Tight is good, shiny is good
[08:55 PM] IM: you think: This is a good place to stay

At 8:55 pm, I found the box, and got the hell out. Sin-Labs is seriously unnerving on a lot of levels.

TigroSpottyStripes Katsu wonders "why do you guys insist on not accepting input from users before deciding to make important changes permanent?"

A damned good question, that.

I want to do a bit more Emerald dissection.

I started off here, and I tried to follow the logic out.

2006: The first rumors of Copybot hit an already embattled grid. Stunned by several recent economic downturns, the big hysteria became--ANYONE could copy ANYTHING on SL and NO ONE CAN STOP THEM! Whether this was true or not, it caused a grid-wide spasm of doubt and hysteria that in some cases, persists to this day.

2007: Linden Labs releases the source code so people can finally play openly (as opposed to hacking the code out) with the source coding. This does not assuage fears that an army of Copybot clients are going to march over the grid and lift everything in sight. It does, however, lead to some innovative browsers, including Nicholaz, CoolSL (developed in cooperation with CSI:SL), Kirsten's, and the then-named Greenlife. Generally, residents are more confused by the process, than supportive or deriding.

2009: Restrained Life hits the grid. Many people are creeped out by it. Many more immediately adopt it. The age of point-and-click domination arrives.

(July 2009: It's totally non-relevant, but I admit to being amused as hell at the whole Sion chicken drama--it's just insane, the lengths to which people went to justify chicken addiction. But it's not germane to much, save Neva had this freakish theory about the Woodbury group developing Emerald on the one hand and mass-slaying her chickens on the other. We move on.)

October 2009: Greenlife, having renamed itself Emerald some time back--so as not to conflict with the new 'no touchy!' policy of Second Life branding--comes out with breast physics. Now, breast physics are nothing new--they're old hat in Japanese anime games, there's breast physics in Runes of Magic (wait until the close-up, about 0:52, you'll see what I mean), even Silent Hill 5 threw some physics on their nurses (fast forward to 0:49, or 0:52 if you're curious)...but all of a sudden, Second Life had jiggle. People nearly mass-converted to Emerald just to check it out. Certain womens' groups lost their minds over the concept. Most of the rest of us were thinking, what's the big deal? So someone else sees breast movement, how is this a tragedy? But the controversy raged for months.

2009-present: Prokovy Neva rants about the Emerald developers (Actually, Neva rants more than that, because it's been, like, every other post for over a year, now.) Honestly, I can't even address this, because she's completely monochromatic--you're either a loyal friend or you're a lying Communist spying on her, there's no in-between. (Trust me; I know monochromatic thinking, I do a fair bit of it myself, I won't lie--but I have shades, damn it. Neva? It's all or nothing, always, and once she fastens on a concept she does not let go, even in the face of further evidence. Once you're evil--you're evil, according to her.)

February 2010: Linden Labs releases two things at once: Viewer 2, and a new 'targeted' ad campaign for new users. Both cause an inordinate amount of frustration, stress and outrage on the part of SL's resident population.

The Viewer 2 headache is easy to figure out: the Labs talked to focus groups, merchants, citizens specifically invited to 'brown-bag' in-person events, pored over the JIRA and held development workshops at the Labs...and then did nothing on those lists. Instead, they turned out a bloated, feature-laden mess that overly inflated inventory, shuffled everything around to new places with no inherent logic, substantially changed the basic structure of chat, inventory, and in-world notifications, and--as if that weren't enough--made it impossible in the new viewer to build, change profiles, or easily change music/media streams out of the box. (All that came later.)

The marketing headache was something else entirely--the new promos, pulled snappily together by Ill Clan, featured a brightly-colored world just packed with young, urban, nearly exclusively human professionals, moving streamlessly through shopping (in which clothes changing becomes something as magical as a Sailor Moon transformation), greeting a new project head at the office (implying that walking up to another avatar, setting down a briefcase, and shaking the other avatar's hand are all seamlessly integrated animations in SL), and enjoying romantic vacations (nearly entirely featuring two oppositely-gendered humans on beachfronts alone). And a great deal of it was presented as being voice chat, not text chat.

This was a world without non-humans; without furs; without constructs, robots, Tinies, mermaids; without darker subcultures, vampires, Goreans or roleplayers of any stripe; without non-beach territories; without those who choose not to, or cannot voice; and almost entirely populated by straight white people. People--from non-white to non-human people--were understandably upset.

The world that Ill Clan presented--which, many of us understood viscerally was the world the Labs wanted to own--was a world where people used Second Life to work; where all disposable income was then spent back in the world; where it was just as much fun if not more fun to spend spare time in, after, of course, working in Second Life in the first place. Talk about giving a large segment of your userbase the cold shoulder; this went right over that edge into active snarling insult, in a pretty video package.

Between the new ad campaign and the new viewer, people again nearly mass-converted to using Emerald. For most of us, no matter which browser we were using, if we were in a browser that identified other browsers, for several months we've seen three out of every five people in world at all using Emerald. It's been a nearly unbroken sea of green out there, in most areas of the grid.

Here's where things get odd for me, though. From 2006 to Aprille 2010 is pretty much a straight line; my experiences match more or less the blog entry's, I can line things up in my head. Then...this:

April 2010: Apparently the Wrong Hands group engineer a takedown of the Justice League Unlimited griefer-prevention group, a group largely staffed and supported by the Wulfenbach Consulate. (**This has proven not to be true; see note at bottom.) They do this even though the Wrong Hands group is largely a sub-grouping of Woodbury University. So...the bad guys...infiltrated the good guys...proving they were the bad guys...but because the Lindens were helping the JLU, the Woodburys--along with their sims--got banned en masse?

That seems overly simplistic. Plus, it's just weird--since when were griefers ever interested in doing the right thing? That's kind of the definition of griefer--some overly bored idiot who does stupid things because he or she--though generally he--thinks it's funny.

I don't share their sense of humor. I find myself in the midst of griefers, I generally choose not to interact, bounce if I have the power, or leave if I don't have other options. Arguing with them generally serves no purpose but to upset me, and there's no point in that.

Plus, the whole thing just gets weirder from here. Like this video, which supposedly is "proof" somehow of the Wrong Hands group "interrogating" Fractured Crystal, the main programmer behind Emerald, or at least Modular Systems--save for, first, unless I'm wrong on who's speaking to whom (the video is terrifyingly fuzzy), that's Fractured saying he doesn't know a single thing about coding or programming, he 'leaves that to other people'. Huh?

And that brings us to the second point, which is LordGregGreg Beck being on the ground at that meeting, so--was/is Beck a member of the Wrong Hands group? Which means he's in the bad guy section too, right? Save he left Emerald because of Emerald's shady data mining practices, so again we have a hacker who's having an ethics crisis.

That just makes my head hurt. I'm not saying hackers don't have ethics; I am saying generally, if they have ethics, they don't stay involved with questionable groups.

But maybe I'm wrong; maybe where SL is concerned, they do.

April 15, 2010: The news on Emerald's data mining finally surfaces for most of the grid. Those of us paying attention--id est, watching the forums, staying involved, reading blog and news posts--had been putting two and two together and getting five for some time. But suddenly, the Alphaville Herald broke the story and it was the Most Terrifying Thing EVER for a lot of people. At least half of all SL groups, practically, had at least one person who would go off on the topic nigh-hourly, trying to "warn everyone". Yeah. We're warned, already. Enough.

April 16, 2010: Hazim Gazov, apparently part and parcel of the Woodbury Group, contacted Joe Linden about possible violations on the part of Emerald. The ball starts rolling downhill.

August 22, 2010: Bloggers--some of them well known, and not a few actual news services--start to ask pointed questions about the implosion of Emerald from Aprille to August, wondering what on earth's going on. It's a good question. It's not one that's been adequately answered.

August 24, 2010: Nelson Jenkins releases this to the Alphaville Herald. I have several questions on this, and likely zero answers forthcoming, ever, but here goes:

1. Collection of IP addresses. I'm fairly sure this happened, but do we actually have any real information that actual SL avatars-to-RL-names correlation has been done? All I've heard are that "some" main accounts, leading to identification of "some" alts, have been released to the public; but does anyone know any more than that?

2. The 'third party' uncovering the data mining. Was this Hazim Gazov? And again, if he's with the Woodbury twinks, why is he upset over Emerald data-mining? It's just as unethical to scam personal data out of people as it is to crash their sim repeatedly, in my book. Sure, the second example is "just a sim", but think about it--someone spends several days out of a month deliberately crashing the sim you pay tier on, those are days of rent you're still expected to pay, when you've been deprived of actual performance hours. I know this game; I lived it in Rivula in 2007 and 2008. Gods know what any of us did to piss people off, but Rivula was constantly being attacked, griefed, crashed out, lagged to death...Some of it was honest server overstress, but in most cases, it was self-replicating griefing objects or grey goo.

3. The accusations against Fractured Crystal and Phox ModularSystems--how valid are they?

4. Can the Quicktime exploit that Gemini/CDS systems use to operate through be closed?

5. Did Arabella Steadham actually leave the Emerald development team? Did she come back? Or was it all just fluff and thunder distraction from the real problems at the time?

6. Whether it was a 'practical joke' gone wrong (as Arabella says) or an actual DDoS attack on another site, the facts are it happened, and thousands of Emerald users are now passive participants in a criminal activity. It's one thing playing the bad guy on their own; it's an entirely separate issue to con thousands of residents of Second Life into helping them pull off the bad act. A simple 'gosh, oops' isn't the apology these people are looking for. What are the developers of Emerald willing to do now to gain back the trust of everyone whose ethics were violated during that 'joke' session?

7. Is it really only 20% of users who've chosen Emerald to access the grid? I think that number's much higher.

8. Doesn't Arabella realize that deleting 'negative' comments on the blog entries proposing transparency in future Emerald actions are just playing right into the lack of trust the public has for Emerald right now? If we can't even trust her to post what she gets, and answer it honestly, how are we supposed to trust her, and the entire Emerald team, with our passwords, our IP addresses, and our browsing histories again?

9. Is Arabella really that clueless, or that smug, to think that this should be something swept under the carpet because it's not a "life and death" situation?

10. Can someone confirm for me--because I heard the same thing--on Emerald's removal from the TPV directory Linden Labs maintains before the change from Fractured to Arabella took place? If that's true, then the entire story Arabella's been pimping on the removal being solely an issue of the company changing CEOs is false, and misleading.

Now, to tie all this wandering speculation up: I'm not trying to extend drama. And I've had my fifteen minutes of fame, back in 2007; I don't need more. I just want to know how it all ties together, is the thing.

Emerald; Modular Systems; Woodbury University; Justice League Unlimited; Linden Labs; the Wulfenbach Consulate. And yes, I know some of the principals involved, and likely I will be asking, but it's just so strange to me, you know? It's like an interlocking set of rotating rings, and some of the rings are toxic, and others have my friends on them, and they're all interwoven.

We need a magician to take them apart. Better yet, we need someone to sit down and actually explain things, as simply as possible. What is really going on here?

(**That note. While there are Wulfenbach Consulate members in JLU, the JLU existed long before the Europan arrival on the grid. [This I did not know previously.] Also, the Wrong Hands group didn't take down the JLU; they sent in a covert operative who was granted access to a group-only database, who then snapped pics and threw it up somewhere else--one suspects one of the Woodbury sites. The JLU then closed ranks, reinforced their security, and went on with their lives. So much for that.)

go, go, get away now; go, go, run away now--

So, some general thread discussion today, mostly from SLUniverse.

From Joshua Nightshade, outlining the general problem of CDS:

"It's a security system that works similarly to Banlink. Through some mechanism that only the CDS devs know, it purports to 'detect' avatars who are logged in to viewers with copybot functionality, adding them to a centralised database that people who use CDS access through security devices. When an avatar on this list comes into range, they're booted/banned from the sim.

"Except that it doesn't really work, and by this point all the detection mechanisms that could have worked in the past have been obfuscated by people still making copybot viewers.

"It's about as effective as those !quit copybot protection things. That hasn't worked since the very first version of copybot YEARS ago, but people still put them out and ignore comments saying that they don't do anything.

"Similarly, CDS' devs are quick to accuse people who point out the fact that their system is worthless are probably just copybotters in the first place. Because, obviously, that's the only reason why they would criticise such a perfect and fool-proof security system."

That's what it boils down to in essence. Basically, if you've ever logged in on a 'suspect' viewer--even once--and you were within range of a CDS scanner--which were silently propagated across the grid for at least eight months prior to release, and possibly up to a full year--then you might well be banned from stores using CDS. You usually won't know until you go to a store whether or not you're in their database. And the stores generally don't tell you they're using CDS.

From Lil Hapmouche:

"CDS is claimed to be a 100% accurate way of detecting rippers entering the scan range. It's based on a gridwide network sharing scan results. Those results are based on data collections done within an unknown timeframe, checking for the [legality] of the viewer you were detected to be using. Whether or not it is capable of linking alt accounts is a different question.

"What exactly is scanned for has not been confirmed and is up to speculation. Rumours about cooperation with other facilities do apply. Merchants running a CDS can set various options including local unbanning, but hardly anyone lets their customers know that they are targeted by the tool upon their visit.

"To prevent the system from scanning you, turn off any settings that are likely to trasmit data like your IP address to anyone. Media is the main target."

And that's become the big buzzword over the grid--that "somehow", "some people" can gank your IP info from mis-set Preference settings, including media. Is it true? Not sure yet. But that's what people are saying.

So here we go, a little back-and-forth:

From Joshua again:

"I don't think that illusory protection is worth anything. If you want illusory protection, make a prim scarecrow and put it in the front of your store. Why pay someone to use a system that is ripping you off?

"It's not about information that you give out when you go online. It's not just the IP address they snag. They snag a number of details about your avatar as well and in conjunction with things like IP addresses, this can be added up to a seriously dangerous level of detail. It's terrifying enough when it's LL or Facebook, but those are companies with reputations at stake and legal jurisdictions to adhere to. The CDS/Emerald devs don't give a shit. They've had breeches of security not just by script kiddies who are pissed off, but former developers who have left and went the scorched earth approach along the way. There's no safeguards in place to protect this sensitive information, nor is there any interest by CDS/Emerald devs to even acknowledge what they're scraping and why they're scraping it."

That's pretty much my feeling, yes. Though I should state, as Miss Star Fairymeadow brought this up yesterday, that apparently, there is no direct connection to Emerald from Gemini CDS--save for Skill Hax working as a developer on the project. I had thought Emerald was behind CDS, as well--along with a section of the grid--but apparently we are wrong in this.

Humps then said:

"It matters not one jot what I think or any of you think. People will do what people will do. Merchants will continue to try anything they can to protect themselves, customers will still feel like they are being targetted unfairly. Data Mining folks will continue to mine data. Rippers will continue to rip."

And, ultimately, that's where it ends--it doesn't matter what we do to stop people--criminals will commit crime, that's what they do. Honorable people will remain honorable because that's what they do.

The rest of us--as ever--lie somewhere in between. And we struggle accordingly.

Dusan Writer explains it all. Tell me, gentle readers, when your brain falls out from an overdose of impossible irony. I think for me it was about five sentences in.

Overheard in passing:

[18:32] Lysana McMillan: Yeah, it's SL. If they can't hack the weird, they need to surrender the space.
[18:33] Emilly Orr: Definitely.

Apropos of nothing in particular, Fawkes and I are watching Top Chef on Hulu. The episode we're up to dealt with one of the shining lights of molecular gastronomy. I have to admit, I'm fascinated with the concept, but on the other hand, I am not in the right tax bracket to go out and try it.

So I might have to dig up some recipes, see if they're capable of converting to home versions, maybe. Like some of these. Who knows?

On to very silly things. Out of the blue last night, I got this:

[13:31] Alamunara Darkfire: hello

Being me, I a) saw it forty-five minutes after it was posted, and b) sent this back:

Hello. And you would be?

Because I didn't know her from Ruth, frankly. And she never answered, anyway.

Several hours later, I drift into world, and her name pops up on the IM screen. Right, I think. Maybe she'll answer now. It was profoundly to be hoped, anyway:

[2010/08/19 17:19] Alamunara Darkfire: (Saved Thu Aug 19 13:31:16 2010) hello
[2010/08/19 17:20] Emilly Orr: So, now in world. Hello?
[2010/08/19 17:20] Second Life: User not online - message will be stored and delivered later.

Ah. So she's not in world, fine, I'll go about my day.

Several patches of in world and out of world occur as I go about designing things, checking them, coming into world, doing more store work--you know, the usual. Then I get an IM again:

[19:01] Alamunara Darkfire: hi
[19:01] Emilly Orr: Okay. So hi followed by what? What's your question?
[19:03] Alamunara Darkfire: notin i just wanted 2 SAY HI

Now, I'm fairly sure she hit the capslock by mistake, but still, it irked me, after several hours of wondering what she wanted. I got snippy:

[19:05] Emilly Orr: WHO THE HELL ARE YOU?
[19:05] Emilly Orr: I mean seriously
[19:06] Emilly Orr: Did I meet you somewhere? Did you come by the shop? What?
[19:06] Alamunara Darkfire: what r u talkin bout
[19:06] Emilly Orr: That's my question
[19:07] Alamunara Darkfire: well i g2g bye i guess
[19:07] Emilly Orr: You confuse me deeply

And off she went--or, at the least, I didn't hear anything from her again.

So I pulled her profile. This is her bio:

i am a t vampire ruledd by the king and queen of vampires in my clan

Oh, for the love of all gods...She's BLOODLINES. Of COURSE she's stupid. I am trying to give her some credit, but damn...

She's got three groups: "Eternal Isle" (run by the Bloodlines clan "Eternal Flames"); "GOOD FELLAS FOREVER" (it's a dance club, owned by the same av who owns the "Eternal Isle" group); and "Lords of Gahenna" (yep, that's how they spelled it). Her first life section?

death is nothing more than a heart that dosent beat

Yeah...Typos, lowercase and all. That's all she's got on her profile.

I figure, I'm moving on with my life, she's been my Freak of the Week, we can go back to the status quo, now. Right? But that's not where this ends. She also IMed a friend of mine--the friend, in fact, who has the castle next to my shop in Twilight Tears, the friend who's currently donating the shop space from which Lady Disdain operates:

[13:36] Alamunara Darkfire: hello
[13:37] Alamunara Darkfire: im ssoooo sry but i need a place to stay and this is the only house i could find and u have tuns of rooms if want me out i will do so

The. HELL. The only house she could find? Where the hell was she LOOKING?!?

She followed that staggering bit of brain-death with offering to friend said land donor:

Alamunara Darkfire has offered to become your friend in Second Life.

Would you be my friend?

Log in to accept or decline the offer.

My friend has every intention of banning her neophyte ass from every parcel she owns. I'm going to ponder whether I want her not specifically banned from my shop; if so, that's the only parcel my gracious landlady will lift the ban from. And my friend doesn't irk easily, but squatters? That's one of the things that cause instant annoyance.

"Good thing I don't have a sex bed in the castle," she told me. Yeah, no lie.

I'll have to check how old this twidgit is when I next get in world. Because seriously...the only house she could find? And she thought I was my friend? So she can't even distinguish between avatars?!?

Friends and neighbors, I had my moments in the early days, including undressing on open balconies in small Western towns, but I was never that stupid.