there was a wave over the house, there was fear choked in my mouth

Another day, another spam offer, but the one sent originally to this entry made an offer of "Gratis video nedladdning".

And that's when my brain fell out. What, pray tell, is "nedladdning"? Wikipedia to the rescue: "Nedladdning" is Swedish for "downloading". So...services that offer free video downloads? Um, yay?

Except I don't recognize any of the services mentioned, I don't trust them, and I'm not going to help a spammer spam people on my blog. Pfffft.

Another came in tagged to this entry (which, weirdly, has received more spam comments over the course of its existence than any other single entry, hands down) in Dutch:

Yahoo achieved without time and currently the entire "cost is still very perfect inevitably accompanies the proxy fight," the exact company said. Yet each of our board determined that the majority of other nominees were more qualified than Mr. Loeb on a huge director, Yahoo said. [Knockoff Belgian Louis Vuitton url redacted]

EU Economic and Monetary Affairs Commissioner Olli Rehn said he was confident the ministers to resolve their disputes on delivering more bailout funding. Speaking yesterday and appear in Saariselkae, Finland, Rehn said officials "will be used for this specific firewalls" [Knockoff Louis Vuitton scarf url redacted]

If they also earthquake tsunami that nuclear power plant accident, the occupants by using their homes as the danger to exist aeaeae (so so you have to leave the greatest places these products used to live). The use of on the market to live safely, we have clean and handle the key behind radioactive contamination, which is probably almost certainly a formidable task well. [Knockoff Belgian Louis Vuitton url redacted]

My.

So, if I'm parsing this one out correctly:

• Yahoo recently had a proxy fight on its hands, but won the right to continue operating under the company name, with the current management/ownership intact.
• It was determined by the ruling board, however, that there were several other candidates who were more capable than Dan Loeb to pile onto a huge director. (The huge director apparently is unnamed.)
• Buy our knockoff Vuitton stuph.
• Olli Rehn seems fairly convinced that more bailout funds for the European Union are forthcoming. This will help him in his bid to stack sub-ministers into a massive shield wall around Finland.
• Buy our knockoff Vuitton stuph.
• Japanese homes are dangerous after tsunamis, earthquakes, and nuclear plant meltdowns. (Yeah, that's a given.)
• To continue keeping the market open requires radioactive keys.
• Unfortunately, even after being cleaned, radioactive keys become a time sink.
• Buy our knockoff Vuitton stuph.

Did I get it right? Translation is always tricky.

Back to the Marketplace JIRA. This from Josh Susanto again:

Since I know I'm going to get banned anyway (as if the Lindens have nothing better to do right now than go around banning people) I might as well just post my own explanation here and you can decide for yourselves.

If you would all just start standing up and demanding decisive action instead of cowering in fear of bannings and suspensions while the Lindens continue to shuck and jive you out of countless sums of hard-earned money, they would have to do something to straighten out their own contractual end of things. YOU are their bread and butter, and it's time that they started acting like they know it.

While he's not necessarily wrong, I was more interested in the Tribes link. I went and looked. It's essentially an expansion of his "BORKED ITEM" Marketplace listing, but there's a few other cogent points. In his own words:

1. System failures appearing to be magic box problems immediately following the deployment of mesh to the main grid at the beginning of August 2011 were timed to disrupt a rush in sales of mesh items. Linden maintains that the problem was not related to mesh code, but has been less clear about the timing being mere coincidence. That the magic boxes continued to work just fine when attached to an avatar standing on Linden land suggests no code problem with the magic boxes themselves.
2. Further experimentation revealed that the problem was also not lag, as boxes also worked well in various heavily lagged sims, when worn as an avatar attachment. The prevailing pattern of observable information was that sims where boxes were advertised as rezzed all seems to have been borked, specifically.
3. After considering what this incident has in common with the incidents that followed, my current understanding is that an escalation of apparent box malfunction was manufactured in order to produce support for the Direct Delivery program; the next thing on the list after mesh deployment; thus the weird "coincidental" immediacy of apparent box malfunction after mesh deployment.
4. The idea that these malfunctions can be explained by an increase in sales after the mesh release is not supported by sales figures. In fact there was no increase in sales due to the mesh release; there was a decrease in sales due to the malfunction.
5. The attempted sneak deployment, I've already mentioned was not only unannounced, but merchants had been deliberately led not to expect it as I have already shown here. The rest of the DD deployments were announced as not to follow as originally planned, but gift orders for the annual birthday peak on 16 September were nonetheless disrupted, and there was some continued impact on merchant utility of listing enhancements, on merchant confidence in listing enhancements, and on the market more generally.
6. Subsequent code deployments also appear to be calculated to produce the maximum loss of merchant utility per merchant dollar invested by essentially the same means as the chronology targeting of the 14xxxxx borked cluster.
7. The Next Big Toy that Rodvik and Brooke will announce will be something to facilitate in-world commerce, and it will work flawlessly from Day 1.

So...Rodvik, of course, we all know, but who's Brooke Linden? Casual surfing before parting for egg dyeing (it's Ostara soon, of course we do that) revealed she's currently managing, or co-managing, the Marketplace as a whole...at least, I think. So hard to tell.

But point by point from the above:

1. If it's accurate that there's no coding problem specifically with the Magic Boxes themselves, can there be a code correlation between the implementation of mesh code on the grid and early Direct Delivery testing? I don't want to go too far into tin-foil hat territory, here, but could the code from one project negatively impact the code from another project on the live grid?
2. Was the Magic Box system always designed to be used as a specific avatar attachment? If so, what would happen when that avatar wasn't logged into the grid? Were all merchants who reported failures merchants who rezzed their boxes on their land, not wore them as attachments on their person? (Personally, that one can't be true, it just can't. It's ludicrous to believe the Lindens would design a system where the code only worked if worn on the avatar directly.)
3. The accusation that the Lindens manufactured this problem directly, with intent, is also on the ludicrous side; I'm no fan of Linden management, but even I think that's hardly possible.
4. Are there any statistics that have been released on actual sales figures, pre- and post-mesh introduction?
5. Why is there such a focus on September 16th, 2011? Am I missing something? Was there a release of sales figures for that specific day of which I'm unaware?
6. Where does he get this information from? How can any code be designed to produce the maximum possible loss of income, per merchant, when not all merchants have items in the affected 14xxxx cluster?
7. In the end, what Susanto seems to be expecting is for the Lindens--specifically in the form of Brooke Linden or Rodvik Linden--to announce that the Marketplace was a failed concept, and they're abandoning it. Concurrently, he also believes that Brooke and Rodvik Linden are working on a super-secret tool that will make in-world sales richer, deeper, and more profitable than Marketplace sales. Supposedly this will also cause a land rush and put more tier fees in Linden pockets.

Personally, I don't think any of these are accurate, in the least, and a lot of them rely on information I just can't find. But we'll see what happens.