One of my pet peeves in Second Life is TPing into a sim and being absolutely assaulted with greeters, LMs, pop-up messages, notecards, group invites and the like.
I had to chuckle at one sim today though, which did all these and the notecard and pop-up said that they did not allow spamming, group invites or griefing.
The irony of this was not lost on me. But seemed to be lost on them. 🙂
There has always been a blur between Second Life (SL) and real life (RL), with residents choosing how separate they want to keep the two.
However, it seems to me that Linden Lab (LL) are losing sight of what SL is meant to be. Or, if you prefer to rephrase that, they are moving SL in directions that are different from how they started out. And, increasingly, those changes are removing some of the choice residents have as to how separate the two remain.
For me, the clue is in the name “Second Life” – an alternative life, secondary and separate from your real one. But it seems that is becoming less and less the focus of SL, with residents being encouraged (and in some cases forced) to involve their RL more and more in their SL.
So when did this rot start to set in?
Some might say it started with Age Verification where you were required to provide some form of RL identification. This was probably the first time you were required to disclose your RL identity. Up until then, provided you didn’t have payment information on file and were using a free email address like Hotmail, Yahoo, etc., there was no link between your RL identity and your SL one.
Others might say it started when LL stopped the idea of a firstname & lastname and instead moved to having just a username and an optional Display Name. In many ways this weakened the separation between SL and RL – a username is just a login for a website or service. You were no longer creating an identity or character; you were just creating an account. Perhaps the distinction is subtle, but I think it is relevant and significant.
Others might say that it was the introduction of Viewer 2.0 and the different way in which it presented profiles, no longer calling the tabs “2nd Life” and “1st Life” but “Avatar” and “More Info”.
Or perhaps Viewer 2.0’s emphasis on voice chat, with text-based interaction being de-emphasised and harder to find in the User Interface.
But, for me, what really highlights the fundamental shift in attitude are the profiles at http://my.secondlife.com
One of the sections of your profile is called “Social Identities” where you are able to link with your Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn, Plurk, Twitter and YouTube accounts.
Now I happen to know that Facebook and LinkedIn are adamant that you must use your real name and real identity to have an account with them. Yes, many SL residents do have a Facebook account for their Avatar but you are on borrowed time there – when Facebook get round to noticing they *will* delete that account.
So Linden Lab are encouraging you to link your SL account with RL services that only have relevance to your RL.
Of course, you could argue that just because LL allow you to do this it doesn’t mean you have to – and you would obviously be right. But I think it highlights a push by LL to make Second Life just another social media / social networking tool; a glorified 3D chatroom and messaging facility for the casual user, with the immersion and roleplay that many of us enjoy being of secondary importance. There is even talk of a reduced functionality internet browser-based Viewer to make SL “more accessible” to more people. And if that doesn’t sound foreboding to you, then it probably should do.
So one has to beg the question at what point Linden Lab should rename “Second Life” to “Augmented Life”?
Here are some links to the issue of Facebook deleting accounts of SL avatars
http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Forums-Blogs-Answers-and/Facebook-deleting-Secondlife-Avatars/td-p/887663
http://community.secondlife.com/t5/General-Discussion-Forum/Deletion-Of-Hundreds-Of-Second-Life-Facebook-Accounts-Being/td-p/884697
http://virtualoutworlding.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/your-avatar-identity-in-facebook-issues.html
Slink Mesh Boots!!, originally uploaded by Nana Minuet.
I have to say I was getting very excited by Mesh, especially with the recent announcement that Phoenix is going to be supporting it (thanks to some dedicated work by Henri Beauchamp of the Cool Viewer).
These boots are a great case in point – imagine how wrong the knees would look in that pose if those were sculpt boots!
However, all is not as good as it seems; I’ve learned that the current implementation of Mesh is worse than useless, for clothes at least. It would seem that a mesh object attaches to your skeleton, not your “flesh”, and cannot be resized in-world. That means that if you are slim like the model in the above pics, those boots would look great. However, if you are any other size than her they won’t fit. Oh, sure, an alpha layer will mask out the bits of you that the boots cover but if you have bigger thighs than her you’re fresh out of luck.
One of the biggest benefits of Second Life is you can be who you want to be. You (or, rather, your avatar) can be exactly as you want it – it’s the overriding expression of your individuality and what makes Second Life so wonderful. But if Mesh clothing is going to force us all to resize our avatar to the clothing, rather than the clothing to the avatar, then this is a bad thing.
There is a JIRA running on this. It’s rather technical but the gist of it is “change Mesh to resize to your flesh not be fixed size and attached to your skeleton”.
See https://jira.secondlife.com/si/jira.issueviews:issue-html/SH-2374/SH-2374.html
I like Imprudence. I’ve been using it for 3 months now and I feel very attached to it. But I think the time is approaching when I’m going to have to look to other Viewers, with Phoenix as a prime candidate.
Why is this? Well, one reason is that there is a show-stopper of a bug in v1.3.0 which is forcing me to continue to use an earlier Release Candidate (RC3) as it directly affects my photography.
Imprudence v1.3.0 was released in early October (ie. 2 months ago) and around a month ago this bug was fixed, along with Jacek commenting that it should provoke an immediate v1.3.1 due to the severity of it. However, this has not happened and I’m unwilling to adopt a beta release to get this fixed.
However, for me, the writing is on the wall for two very significant reasons. One is that there have been no releases at all for several weeks, not even Experimental releases, suggesting that the development team are spending all their time on Kokua (the new Viewer based on SL 2.x) at the expense of Imprudence. And the other is the thorny issue of Multiple Attachments.
The developers of Imprudence have always been quite bullish about multiple attachments, stating that they would not support Emerald’s “hacky” multiple attach point code, not even to properly render avatars being run by people using Phoenix (despite it being easily added to Imprudence by simply updating a single XML file as it turns out) because they were going to support the “proper” Multiple Attachments of SL 2.x by back-porting it.
Well, a couple of days ago a new version of Phoenix was released that supports just that, whilst Imprudence still does not.
This, to me, says that Phoenix is still actively being developed and supported and Imprudence is withering on the vine and is not. It also feels as rather an egg-on-face moment for Imprudence (in my humble opinion).
As I said, I really like Imprudence, but I feel like it is being left further and further behind by Phoenix and eventually I’m going to have to jump ship.
Sorry, Imprudence. It’s been nice knowing you.
Linden Lab published a revised Terms of Service today.
I started reading through it then stopped, because really the only choices open to me were to accept it or to not use Second Life any more. It occurs to me that the “I accept” checkbox should really have been labelled “I accept. Like I have a choice” and been checked by default.
I’m sure other commentators will be along to tell us just how bad it really is. 🙂
There’s a lot of buzz about the new Display Names feature that will allow you to appear to change your avatar’s name.
I’ve heard a lot of people remark that this sounds wonderful, because they’ll be able to call themselves “Sensible Name” rather than “SomeStupidNameBigBoobies69 Sillyname” (which was funny right up until the point they realised they couldn’t change it).
Well, yes. But unfortunately they’ll also be able to call themselves “Jackie Graves”, “Stiletto Moody” or “Truth Hawks”. But not “Torley Linden”.
Why not “Torley Linden”? Because the Lindens recognise that could lead to confusion. That’s right, they are not going to put any safeguard in to prevent impersonation, Phishing, character assassination, smear campaigns or trashing someone’s reputation unless it’s one of them.
This just seems totally insane to me. If there is no issue with impersonation, as the Lindens want us to believe, then why stop people using the name “Linden” in a Display Name? Or, if is more obviously the case, there *is* an issue then why are they not taking steps to protect *our* identities as well as their own?
The response Linden Lab are making is that these are only Display Names and people can drill down into the profile to see the username. That’s all well and good, but in the Real World we know that email-based Phishing attacks are successful. Do ordinary users look at email headers to see what the actual email account is when the display name is “PayPal” or “Amazon” or <insert the name of your bank here>
Of course they don’t. Nor do they check the actual URL on a link that looks like www.paypal.com but which actually points to www.somedodgyphishingsite.com
So why on earth do the Lindens think users will be any different in Second Life? They’ll just file an Abuse Report against the person that they *think* is griefing them. Or buy dodgy counterfeit or malicious objects from someone they *think* is a legitimate seller.
There are several JIRA entries open on this subject, and as usual a lot of well thought out and well-explained comments and suggestions made by SL residents on them that will almost certainly be ignored by LL and ridden roughshod over.
http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-6194
http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-21053
(you may need to log in with your SL username and password to view those. It’s part of the Second Life website so safe to do so)
Likewise, there are a load of intelligent comments, suggestions and concerns in the feedback on the recent Second Life blog announcement on Display Names:
http://blogs.secondlife.com/community/features/blog/2010/08/31/display-names-project-viewer-now-available…
Personally I think the down sides of Display Names in their current form massively outnumber the up sides. However, I am depressively resigned to the fact that all reasonable debate will be ignored by the Lindens and they will press on regardless.
[First posted 09-Mar-2010 here]
If you care about your privacy and identity then be sure to read and vote on this JIRA issue
In short, any Shared Media prim has the potential to get all sorts of information about you – IP Address, Operating System & version, language (gives a good idea of country), Client & version, all sorts.
Possible exploits are linking alts to mains, griefing, stalking, RL harassment, phishing, malware and viruses.
The JIRA entry and the subsequent comments have a lot more information. And this blog is also worth reading.
I’m kind of surprised how few people seem bothered by this.
Update: This blog comment highlights a very scarily plausible scenario for how a phishing attack could successfully compromise your SL account.
[Disclaimer: This blog entry is personal opinion based on a personal understanding of current events. Should you feel any facts are materially wrong then please contact me, citing sources, and I will be happy to make corrections or retractions as appropriate]
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I try to keep my RL separate from my SL, but I guess it’s not giving too much away to say that I work in the IT Industry and have direct experience with software development. So the self-destruction of Emerald has been very interesting for me.
So, where did it all go wrong? I think to answer that you need to look at how a proper Open Source Project is run.
Generally you have a version control system which is able to be read (but not written to) by anyone who cares to do so. Obviously members of the development team can write as well.
This open access ensures transparency, because anyone with the technical ability can examine and review the source code to make sure there is nothing nefarious in it. They are also able to download the entire codebase and compile their own version of the application rather than trusting that the pre-built binaries available for download were actually made from the source code.
Furthermore, the version control system has an audit trail of every check-in, showing what changes were made, by whom, and when. This makes it more difficult to introduce malicious code although there are ways round it, of course. However, even if the developer subverts the process to avoid the audit trail (if they have direct access to the actual files on the server hosting the repository), the code is still available for inspection and anyone can compare a previous snapshot of the code with the current one using an automated difference tool. So there is still transparency.
The trouble with Emerald is that the version control system was not open and there was no transparency. Yes, the source code was published periodically but in a snapshot form. You were expected to trust that this source code was the real deal and not some sanitised version. And that trust was betrayed.
Because there was no transparency, certain members of the Emerald team were able to inject undesirable code (which is well documented elsewhere so I won’t bother going into it here).
Worse still, Emerald also used some Closed Source software which meant that only the developer(s) of that code knew what was in it and the members of the Emerald team were expected to trust that it was non-malicious. Again, that trust was betrayed.
It also appears to me that the team weren’t really following good Software Engineering process. This isn’t too surprising as, as far as I understand, they were all programming for fun and were all fairly young. So there were few controls in place to audit what was going on. I genuinely believe that the more respectable members of the team (and I’ll leave it for you to decide who they are) didn’t know what was being put in by the less respectable members. This is why we have processes, checks and safeguards in professional Software Development and I simply don’t think they were in place for Emerald.
And I’m not even going to comment on the clash of personalities, egos, hidden agenda and motivations of the actual developers of Emerald. That’s not something I want to explore as this piece is really more about the technical side of things.
In many ways, the Emerald project was a nuclear reactor being run without control rods or safety systems, and it went critical and suffered a meltdown.
So, where does this leave Third Party Viewer Development? Are we doomed to use Linden Lab’s awful Viewer 2.0? The short answer is no!
Emerald was not the only Third Party Viewer and some of the others are being run properly. Imprudence, for example, is fully transparent and Open Source. They are by no means the only one, of course, but it’s the one that springs most readily to mind.
Finally, I just want to say that this blog entry may seem very negative about Emerald. However, I don’t mean it to be because I do genuinely believe that Emerald was truly innovative and really moved the Second Life Viewer game onwards. The developers added some very good features (the nefarious ones notwithstanding) and they should be praised for it; they’re clearly very talented. However, as I’ve said, I think the project was very badly run and was very open to abuse. And that abuse was made.
[Originally posted 26-Aug-2010 here]
Oh dear. Just when we thought Emerald was ok, it turns out that it (or possibly just one developer) had nefarious intentions after all.
http://alphavilleherald.com/2010/08/emerald-viewer-login-screen-sneak-ddos-attack.html
http://alphavilleherald.com/2010/08/emerald-viewer-mutiny-fractured-crystal-thrown-to-sharks.html
http://blogs.secondlife.com/message/369842
I love Emerald and it has some fantastic features, but this is very concerning. I think that it’s laudable that the remaining members of the Emerald team are making very positive noises about restoring confidence in the viewer, but I think perhaps it is time to investigate other viewers. Not least because of questions on whether Fractured Crystal was working alone or in collusion with developers who are still on the Emerald team.
Talk on the blogs and stuff is that the Imprudence Viewer is worth a look as it has a lot of the features Emerald has, including a client-side radar, RLVa, temporary texture uploads, Disable Login/Logout/Teleport Screens, See object’s Last (previous) Owner, IM autoresponder, and Breast Physics. Yes, we all claim that Breast Physics is no big deal but we all know it is. LOL.
So I’m going to have a play with it tonight. Imprudence, I mean. Not my breasts.
Have fun
Becca
