A public service announcement

For the record, I'm Tateru Nino. I'm a professional writer and I write about all sorts of stuff, including Second Life and Linden Lab.

Now, here's the important bit: No, I don't run Second Life. No, I don't run Linden Lab either. Nor do I work for them. No, I am not the right person to talk to insofar as demanding that I change a Second Life policy, or fixing a Second Life bug.

No, I can't unban your account. No, I can't ban someone else's account for you, even -- and I want to make this absolutely clear -- even if he touched your dolly.

Astonishingly, I also can't fix any billing issues you have or cancel your account or open a new one for you, or sell you an island ... so please stop sending me your names, addresses, credit-card information, and Second Life user names and passwords.

Seriously, people. Don't send me that stuff. Please stop sending me that stuff. The only thing I can do with that would be to steal your identity and run up your credit-card bill -- and I'm not going to do that. (Actually, come to think of it, that would be plenty of info to report your card as stolen, but I'm not going to do that either)

The people you want to talk to are called Linden Lab, and you can contact them via their support page (there's telephone numbers there too).

That this post even becomes necessary gives you some idea how far out of hand it has been.

Second Life data update

Good news:

Second Life total signups is back on the air. The feed lit up again on 4 May. The weekly signup chart will come back online as soon as there's enough data. The figure presently reads 15,348,641. Pre-purge that was 16,753,668. How many accounts were purged is unknown, but shouldn't be hard to estimate with some reasonable accuracy.

Not so good news:

Linden Lab is only providing updated concurrency data twice per hour. Once at 5 minutes past the hour, and again five minutes after that (ten minutes past the hour). Then nothing for another 45 minutes. That means the 30-minute deltas are pretty useless. There's not enough data to chew on.

Technology is awesome.

Anyway, right now you'll see a lot fewer red sections in the charts. There have been a few internal structural changes as well, but they likely won't affect chart viewers in any significant way (except to save you a little bandwidth).

Impressions: Frenzoo

I've done many things in my time. No, I'm not ancient (it just seems that way). I've just packed a lot of things in in the time I've had. I've been to school, I've had jobs, and I've had hobbies. It's kept me pretty busy.

There's one hobby that I've never made enough time for: fashion design. Do you draw little sketches of ideas, and occasionally develop those into full-colour plates and flats? Make your own patterns? Sit down at an actual sewing machine and construct a garment? Peruse magazines, books, and Web-sites, and any other fashion-related material you can lay your hands on?

There's a new way to share and to indulge that passion, regardless of your skill level: Frenzoo!

Don't wander off quite yet, if you're a Second Life user, because there's a chunk of awesome coming.

Frenzoo is a fantastic place to meet like-minded people, girls and guys, who love fashion, whether they be spectators, shoppers, designers, or all of those at once. Located at http://www.frenzoo.com/, the site constitutes a virtual (by which I mean, it exists digitally) world of fashion, incorporating shopping, design tools, forums, clubs and fashion shows.

Still in beta, Frenzoo is already a fine establishment, and steaming along at speed:

The web site is easily useable and navigable, with a minimalist look and feel that is pleasant to the eye.

The design tools for clothing creation are already superlative. The tool interface is simple and intuitive, while allow quite sophisticated designs to be put together. As a user with a free account, I have not yet had access to the Advanced features of the design tools; access is currently restricted to VIPs and people on the Frenzoo team. Nonetheless, the quality of the available tools leads me to expect more of the same from currently unavailable tools.

Now that design tool would be absolutely amazing in Second Life. Seriously. Imagine being able to design clothing for an avatar without reaching for The GIMP or Photoshop. It's all kinds of clever, and it's the sort of thing that Second Life is clearly missing. It's accessible, live and immediate.

Frenzoo is only to be used by those persons 13 years and older; those persons under 18 must have the permission of their legal guardian. Thus, considering that the age of many users will lie between 13 and the low 20s, the users for the most part show great maturity, and respect for each other, in all form of contact (forums, comment walls, clubs). I hope that this community spirit will continue to pervade Frenzoo well into the future, and that these users will, by their actions, encourage more people to join who will act the same ways.

Having noted that many users treat each other well, it's also worth mentioning that moderation across the site is excellent -- swift, transparent, and thoughtful, the moderators let users know where the limits are, and then stick by that fairly. I hope that they are able to maintain this standard as the number of users grows and the feature list is expanded.

Frenzoo, right now, consists of tools and stores without too much context. There's no worlds or rooms, just profiles and social networking and forums and walls to write on. It's a Facebook of fashion-designing, but the people behind it are steadily evolving it through the beta, and the distance they've come so far leads me to expect more to come.

Protecting your work

Let's start by talking copyright for a few minutes. From your blog to your virtual-environment creations you, the creator, have rights. You have the right to profit from your work (or the right to choose not to profit from it, if you like). Those rights are nothing without protection.

In almost every part of the world, while copyright laws disagree on some of the details, copyright is automatic when you create your work. The USA will require you to register your copyright before filing any infringement lawsuit, but short of a lawsuit you get some protections up-front.

Something to note, however, copyright does not apply to names, titles, ideas, slogans or short phrases. You should look into trademarks and patents for that. It also doesn't apply to Internet domain names, and you should refer to ICANN for those. From 1990, you're able to also copyright architecture, however, which is nice.

To defend your copyright, you should ensure there's a verifiable record of the date. Blogs mostly do that automatically, Second Life's content upload systems track the date as well, and publishers always include print and copyright dates.

Publication of a work isn't necessary to gain protection. Copyright vests in you the moment you create it, even if you never show it to anyone.

If there doesn't seem to be any other clear means, you can always try the "Poor Man's Proof" system, and send a copy to yourself by registered mail, then leave it unopened in your files in case you should ever need to prove the creation date. Registering your work through your national copyright organization is generally preferable to that, but isn't available in every country.

Most of us will never actually need to present that sort of proof in our lifetimes, thankfully.

Copyright basically grants the creator the sole rights to copy the work, or create derived works, or to grant others permission to do so, but for a limited amount of time only. Copyright can be bought and sold, licensed, given freely or inherited. As a creator you can choose to profit from your work, or to allow others to do so, to give out your work freely, or allow others to distribute or use your work under any lawful conditions you wish. When your copyright eventually expires, the work becomes 'public domain', and may be used by anyone, at any time, for any lawful purpose.

'Fair use' (or 'fair dealing') constitute a set of exemptions where people can have limited rights to your work without requiring your permission or license. Exactly what those exemptions are varies from country to country, and they're a bit involved to go into here, but you should be aware of them.

In Second Life, you should always pay particular attention to Next Owner Permissions, and you should take especial care to set them appropriately.

The three provided permissions are Modify, Copy and Transfer.

When an item is given or sold to any other person, those permissions will be in effect.

Modify allows the new owner to alter the item.

Copy allows the user to make as many copies of the item as they please.

Transfer allows the item to be given away or resold, at their option.

The system isn't perfect, and you should consider carefully what permissions you should set on an item.

Some combinations are useless for some kinds of items. A notecard, for example, cannot be read if it has neither Modify nor Copy permissions. A texture with Modify+Copy+Transfer permissions can be downloaded to your hard-drive.

Having Modify, Copy and Transfer permissions all set (known as 'full perms') is essentially the technical equivalent of making your Second Life creation public domain. Functionally you're surrendering all control over it once you've given a copy to someone else -- unless you have arranged some licensing or other contractual arrangement with them. This sort of thing needs to be watched very carefully, because the genie is damn hard to put back into the bottle.

Likewise you should watch out with Copy+Transfer -- people may not be able to modify the object, but a popular item can be in half of the user inventories in Second Life before the week is out.

Unfortunately, certain businesses (texture wholesalers, for example) need to use both these permissions at times as a part of the content that they sell. That's why they always sell them with conditions, and a license describing the usage they are allowing. As a responsible user, you should always pay attention to those usage licenses -- almost everyone will freely disclose the terms before they sell so you know what you're getting, and what your limitations will be. If someone breaks a license though, a seller can lose all their business. Genies and bottles.

Mixing assets with different permissions into a single item can generate confusing circumstances. Creators need to watch out that everything is set as it should be. Boy Lane's Cool Viewer has a bulk permissions editor (which is being folded into the official Second Life viewer as of 1.23), which helps simplify things a lot. However, due to the nature of communications between Second Life viewers and Second Life servers, it is possible that it may not work perfectly at times (just like when you texture an object and sometimes not every face gets updated with the new texture).

A proposed feature, VWR-8049, is intended to allow advanced content creators to set permissions-masks (as is done with files on computers) to set the permissions the creator wants to have at the time the asset is created, reducing some of the fiddly workload involved. Assuming it is properly and thoughtfully implemented and tested.

Know your rights, exercise them with care and judgement, and respect the rights of others. Those are the keys to protecting your works, online and offline. The system works best when the majority participate willingly, whether they are creators or consumers.

Poll: Adult content - Both sides of the question

Alright, as you're probably aware, there's a JIRA issue (MISC-2727) asking Linden Lab to halt all of the plans, policies and changes coming for Adult Content in the coming months. That's gotten a whole lot of votes.

What I'm more interested in though is the spread of reactions from as many Second Life users as possible. Not just against the policy, but also for it and those who are simply uncaring. Doesn't it make a whole lot more sense that we try to have as much data as possible, rather than just clustering together with those that agree with our position?

To that end, I've put together a poll.

Online Surveys & Market Research

Tell your friends (heck, tell your enemies, even - assuming you have any) and spread it around (but please don't spam, because that's plain inconsiderate). It would be nice to get some representative figures from both sides of the argument -- and so far, only Linden Lab has anything like those numbers. Do you like the scheme? Do you hate it? Are you somewhere in between and see problems with it?

The poll (courtesy of Vizu) is anonymous, and frankly I don't care which individuals think what about the policy (so if you really don't want to leave a comment, that's okay). This is more about aggregate numbers and percentages anyway. But it won't be representative without your support. The poll closes May 12, 2009 12:00 am PT. Then we can look at the results and decide what it all might mean.

Worse.... or better?

Online Surveys & Market Research

I'm working on a far more interesting poll, but it occured to me to wonder how Second Life is for you this year so far, as opposed to last year. I've tried to include an option to cover everyone, so we'll see how that goes.

Concurrency feeds running again

Second Life concurrency data has just flickered back to life. Looks like it was a bug after all. The Lab apparently set to fixing the problem just as soon as the issue was discovered. The charts should start updating within the next quarter hour or so.

Can an avatar sign a contract?

Short version: no. Slightly longer version: Don't be silly, of course not.

Let's start with what signing a contract actually means. Signing a contract means that you, in your capacity as a legal entity, are capable of understanding the contract, are making an intentional choice and have agreed to abide by the terms of the contract and any obligations or protections that it specifies.

In Second Life an avatar is actually only a placeholder representation of two rather more subtle concepts. All in all, there's an account, an agent, and an avatar. The avatar is the bit that you actually see. The agent is the bit that moves, talks and takes actions. The account mediates permissions.

You log into your account, your agent is placed at a location in-world, and your avatar is drawn in the vicinity of your agent. Usually the agent is an invisible point near your avatar's crotch, but the avatar can be drawn up to ten metres away from the agent.

When you choose to take an action the account is tested to see if the action is permissible, the action is then performed through the agent, and lastly there may be some side-effects on the avatar to represent visually what action is taking place.

None of these three items is a legal entity. None of them are capable of understanding the contract. None of them are able to make an intentional choice.

Anne Loucks made a device so that her cat could make the necessary key-press to click through EULAs (End User License Agreements). Did the cat agree? No. Did Ms Loucks agree? Yes.

Let's compare this with a more practical example away from the keyboard. I am handed a contract. I pull out my pen and sign it. Did my pen agree to the contract, leaving me free of obligation? No. The pen is an instrument (a proxy, if you will) with which I am causing agreement to be signified. The pen can't agree to a contract, so I must have to have done so.

I can't reasonably claim the pen is a party to the contract. Ms Loucks cannot reasonably claim that the cat is either, as she engineered the means by which agreement was given. Likewise, an avatar can't be a party to a contract any more than a pen, a cat, a sock-puppet or a houseplant.

Any reasonable court would immediately identify me, Ms Loucks or the user of an avatar as the responsible party -- because there is no other party that could be.

Now I'm going to say something just a little shocking. You aren't your avatar. Let's pause a moment for the obligatory, involuntary gasp of horror and perplexity.

Your avatar is a digital creation that shadows your actions within a virtual environment and visually represents them. Those visual representations aren't even entirely under your control. Assorted bits of software cause the avatar to do some things that are independent of your actions too.

Your avatar can't agree with anything. Walk away from the keyboard and come back when your avatar agrees with something. Better yet, read the rest of this blog, or maybe the comics. Because you'll have a whole lot of time to kill. Your avatar can't think or act or understand or agree. You are the one who does all of that.

Now, does that mean that Tateru Nino can't agree to a contract? No. Because that's me, and I'm a legal entity and all that. Tateru Nino is a nom de plume which is also attached to my account, agent and avatar. I can (and do) sign contracts with that name. It goes on my tax forms. Did Reginald Dwight sign his contracts as Elton John or as Reginald Dwight? (Answer: as Elton John).

It is legal to do in most jurisdictions, so long as you demonstrably have "no intent to deceive". If you're using an alternative name to avoid your obligations, then that's pretty much going to add fraud to any penalties for breach-of-contract.

How is it that Tateru Nino can agree to a contract (in Second Life or not), but the Tateru Nino avatar cannot? Because I'm not my avatar either. It's my faithful, and tastefully-dressed servant. My sock-puppet of digital pixels.

And sock-puppets can't agree to contracts either.

Concurrency stats offline

The live data feed for Second Life concurrency is off the air. It went dark on the afternoon of Thursday, 30 April, and hasn't been updated since.

Normally, I'd think of this as just another glitch in the statistical feeds. Heaven knows, there have been plenty of those -- having some missing data is not uncommon.

The timing got me thinking, though.

You see, Linden Lab purged a whole bunch of inactive, never-logged-on accounts (somewhere around the 800,000) mark. And just prior to doing so, the feed for the total number of accounts went dark - and has remained that way ever since.

30 April, coincidentally marked the day that the Lab was going to start taking action against traffic bots. Everyone, of course, was expecting to see concurrency take a bit of a hit, though it wasn't clear how much of a hit. Hard to tell, though, because the concurrency stats went dark that very day.

I'd love to think this was a coincidence, but the available history makes that an unreasonable conclusion.

The fascination of decay

What's the fascination with decay, crumbling dystopias and abandoned or ruined urban landscapes?

The answer, dear readers, is mystery.

"Unspoiled" nature and everyday-use urban settings are what they are. Something abandoned or in ruins, however was something, and it may not be immediately apparent as to quite what.

What is this place? What was it? Why was it left? How did it get to be in that state? (It's called Université de Dubois, though that is a pseudonym. One of the lecture halls)

As we look at the world, the mind forms stories around the mysteries it sees to try to answer the questions. And there's no better source of those stories and that intrigue than the familiar fallen into disuse and ruin.

As a species, we love this sort of thing. So much so that we create new ruins in virtual environments like Second Life, from dilapidated buildings to crumbling cities and abandoned subways. These settings are a treat for the imagination, and a delicious dessert for our logical and speculative faculties.

Check out Opacity, Action Squad,  or Forbidden Places for a taste of more.

(Thanks to Bill Harris for publicizing this shot)

New comic: Age-verification

A new comic is live for your enjoyment. This time, the topic is age-verification.

Security vs everyone

Security and ease-of-use tend to be mutually exclusive, it's said. Security is stuck in a two-front war, not only are there Bad Guys to keep out, but the authorized users will usually do almost everything possible to defeat the security measures that are intended to keep the Bad Guys out. In a sense, IT-security is generally fighting bigger battles with its customers than they are with the bad guys.

Corporate users write their login credentials down, use easy-to-guess passwords or passwords that can be cracked in fractions of a second, use the same password for everything, want unrestricted access from anywhere without any of that complicated password nonsense, install software that compromises their systems, write down login names and passwords and stick them to their laptops, leave those laptops unattended, plug in wireless access points or random modems on the network, or even just give away their passwords in the street for the asking. Seriously.

Most corporate computer users treat the IT or IT-security team as "the enemy". That's actually the word that is most commonly used when referring to them. The IT people are in a bit of a deadly bind here. The rest of the company is generally working so hard to compromise the security of the network and their desktop systems, that it can be an almost impossible chore to actually keep the bad guys out of the network. Then data gets stolen, or systems compromised anyway.

At one corporation I worked for, a company executive brought in a piece of software that wasn't licensed, and installed it on a desktop system in the warehouse. The software was made by a competitor across the street. Over the next few months, the unlicensed software (which was used for booking, labeling and invoicing deliveries and pickups of shipments) sent all of the information it handled across the street to servers at the rival company in periodic batches.

Armed with information about customers, shipments, rates and so on, the rival could offer sweeter deals and steal business away. And they did.

Business plummeted. Hundreds of thousands of dollars in regular business was lost. Of course the rogue software got removed, once it was discovered, right?

No.

The executive refused to uninstall or replace the software, because it would cost around $3,000 to replace. Also he refused to allow the firewall to be configured to prevent the data-transmissions, because that would interfere with certain conveniences demanded by the sales staff.

A solution was eventually found, but only at the cost of nearly all of the company's warehousing business. Why didn't the CTO or the IT department override him, being that it was a technology/security matter? Because he was the director in charge of them. Besides, they had their hands full, because a branch manager in another state had given another competitor dialup access to the local network and share-drives, because he "couldn't be bothered with all those email attachments."

Oh, there was far, far worse.

The thing is that when it comes to computers people want instant, they want convenient, and they want locks without keys (and ideally doors without locks - and perhaps without doors). Computers allow us to get so much done, so much faster that we want everything to be fast. Every moment typing or remembering a passphrase is an impediment - a barrier to getting the job done, or to getting out of the office at 5.

That sort of poor computer hygiene doesn't just live in the office. People's home computers, well they manage their own security for that. It's hard to find a home computer that isn't infected with something, and frequently with many somethings.

Nobody cares until they lose all their data, or their World of Warcraft gold and equipment, or their Second Life account -- and then they want to blame someone else for it. You didn't do enough to protect them.

The bad guys win more often than they lose - because we, as users, make it easy for them to win. We insist that others do all the work for us, and then we don't let them do their jobs. You don't have to become an expert in either computers or security, but if you learn just a little about how to take care of yourself, your computer and your passwords, your whole IT department can relax a little and actually allow some of the things that they're presently forced to block or prevent.

You can make things easier for you. For everyone.

Mixed interests - balancing acts in Second Life coverage

One of the tricky things about reporting on Second Life is the issue of what stuff to cover. Hey, how tricky can it be? You just write about what people are interested in, right?

Yeah, you'd think so.

What people are interested in, though, isn't necessarily what you might think people are interested in.

If a user or organization is doing something super-awesome in-world, the odds are that the Second Life readers will mostly pass it over. Human interest stories and similar all get minimal attention. Okay, except for the occasional 'Why the hell are you even covering this stuff anyway?'

Hirings/departures at Linden Lab? Now that generates some interest. Other Linden Lab doings and policy changes even more so, and speculations about which way the Lab is going to jump next are right up there.

Top of the heap - the really grabby stuff? New release candidates.

...

I know, right?

My essential hypothesis sort of works like this... Viewers and stuff about Linden Lab and their staff-lineup and policies affects everyone in Second Life, directly or indirectly. Stuff that people are doing in-world though will axiomatically only have appeal to a subset of people.

Live music, and audio/voice events for example - that only appeals to a portion of the people I know. Likewise not everyone I know is a gamer, or necessarily interested in recreational activities. Not everyone is keen on shopping or networking.

Different interests, different foci, and that subdivides the community right there.

But if you stand anywhere in Second Life long enough, a discussion will start up about the Lab, or some particular Linden, or about some new policy or some enforcement action in-world (gone right or wrong). Talking about Linden Lab seems to be the favourite pastime of the majority of Second Life users, and there's an astonishing amount of misinformation going around.

Just yesterday I walked into an argument where a bunch of people believed that all non-G-rated content was being banished from the grid next week. Earlier that morning, someone was telling me how Linden Lab was merging Teen Second Life with adult Second Life today. Simple misunderstandings and misinterpretations run through communities like wildfire and feed on themselves. Sometimes people just spread tales to laugh at how far they will go.

Still, the Lab and its doings remain among the most popular talking points with users in-world, and that's something that's hard to ignore.

Bordering on an obsession

I'm wondering what it says about a lot of writers that they can't seem to venture near a social or non-game virtual environment without spending paragraphs talking about genitalia and sex, and trying to figure out how avatars have sex, even in virtual environments that are, essentially, G-rated and technically have none.

Oh, sure. A lot of folks are interested in that sort of thing, but the propensity with which I've seen it crop up in newspaper columns and in particular in some games-writers columns, it seems to be bordering on the obsessive.

A whole host of games-writers, particularly, don't seem to be able to look at a non-human (alien, robot or anthropomorphic) avatar without immediately focusing on sex. A few writers seem to suffer some severe cognitive disconnect, where non-human avatars and a non-sexual environment are somehow completely inconceivable and nonsensical -- a combination that they can neither grasp nor comprehend.

Some newspaper columns outline the writer's visit to strip clubs in Second Life, within minutes of registration, and give no sign that the writer went anywhere other than locations focusing on sex.

Sadly, at the end, they generally conclude about the virtual environment, "I don't get it."

Maybe what they really meant was "I didn't get any",  because based on their descriptions and reported conversations, that outcome seems a whole lot more likely.

Live feeds/dead feeds

No word about the broken statistical feeds. On the JIRA side, Coco Linden reopened an old JIRA ticket about it. On the PR side, still waiting for a response.

The end of April is coming along, so I'm going to assume that the feeds are shut down as a matter of policy (rather than say incompetence). They're not getting fixed, and they're not getting talked about, even though statistics are quite the PR focus at the moment. Even if they were a lower priority than the slightly balky wheel on Harmony's chair, you'd have at least expected to hear about that by now.

What's left, but to assume that the change is intentional? (Or that the breakage wasn't, but leaving it broken is?)

I've updated the charts page, moved live charts towards the top, and marked the defunct information more clearly.

CORRECTION: The Last-60-days active user data sputtered erratically back to life a few days ago, and is reporting again. My scripts, alas, ignored it because the signup data itself had ceased. That graph is working again - though the feed has been silent for almost all of Q1 2009.

Grab some Seshat

Are you following Seshat Czeret's blog? If you're interested in texturing, making clothing or her products, then you probably should be!

Smart, witty, cogent and educational! Grab an eyeful.

Breaking a habit: No more RL for me

I've been thinking about it for years. The whole RL (Real Life) thing is blitheringly daft. Your life is your life whether your computer is switched on or not. You don't suddenly tell someone that you're on the phone with ("Telephone Life"? No way!) that you've got to go do something in Real Life. Well, except by force of habit.

Well, this is a habit I'm going to try to break. Being online is my job, and a large part of my play. It's where I earn my living. I pay my bills online. I prepare and pay my taxes online.

No more RL for me. Just AFK. AFK is the part of my life when I'm not at the keyboard (and coincidentally, not actually earning money or working at my jobs), but AFK makes more sense overall.

New comic - Dissonance

You'll find a new comic in the archive, though perhaps it is more of an observation. Dissonance. I find it amusing anyway, insofar as dichotomies tickle my fancy.

It goes with my column on The Metaverse Journal this week.

Illnesses, work and projects

Fighting off a bout of the sick, so feeling generally woeful. Still, the launch of the comic archive seems to have been very successful judging by the figures. Perhaps I can patch some per-strip commentaries into that as well.

Let me know what you think, and what you might like to see. There's a rather larger project in the works that I'm not going to talk about until it is finished or very close to. Quite a lot to do, both in and out of Second Life. A whole chunk of it involves writing, of course, and hopefully some of it has a few delicious surprises.

If you've been paying attention you'll see a roughly weekly column over at The Metaverse Journal, plus still doing the regular thing with Massively. That's all definitely helping keep the wolves from the door (though sometimes I wonder if wolves are tasty, or can be readily converted into biofuel).

As a part of ongoing plans, I've refit the advertising and analytics here, as a part of getting the comic archive site up and running, along with another one from the unannounced project. The site seems to be performing quite well despite a fair bit of neglect. As a result you'll likely see a lot more here.

Land of the weak, home of the broken

Ari Blackthorne carries a post by a commentator called Charles, titled Second Life: Land of the WEAK home of the BROKEN. Now, Ari doesn't necessarily agree with all of it, and I must admit that there's very little in it that resembles anything that I experience in Second Life myself.

For those of you who also spend substantial lengths of time in SL, does any of it ring true for you?