Proposed ISP filtering allows surveillance of journalists, citizens, politicians
June 29, 2009
Should Senator Conroy’s proposed ISP filtering come to fruition, it concentrates extraordinary powers on whoever is to actually run it. It allows the surveillance of the Internet activities of Kevin Rudd’s children, the journalists at News Limited, or the government’s perceived political opponents (or its own members), or of anyone.
At will. Without cause. Without warrant. Without oversight.
Whether or not you agree with the filtering plan’s goals, this one thing should give you pause: your web-browsing history, and the web-browsing history of every Australian is available to some as-yet-unknown party, from the moment mandatory ISP filtering is switched on.
Sure, the contractor who provides the filtering service, and who maintains the systems will doubtless have all sorts of NDAs. But if someone in Rudd’s family browses porn from The Lodge, for example, then there’s considerable potential for leverage and extortion, because the contractor could obtain that data at will, even if government officials themselves could not, by law, obtain it.
Because filtering systems are logged. Filtering providers are, in fact, very keen on logging. Whether a request is blocked or allowed, the fact of it is recorded. Filtering providers use it to assess how well the system is performing. Individual user addresses are at times monitored from the logs, and some of that data is processed by humans to identify new things that should be blocked, or to see how people are attempting to defeat the filtering.
Whoever is providing and controlling the filtering gains unprecedented political power. Want to know what the journalists at a particular newspaper are up to? Scan the logs for their network addresses and check out what they’re reading on the Web. Ditto for other politicians. Or for anyone of interest, from parliamentarians to cleaners.
The potential for abuse here is absolutely appalling.
All you have is the word of people that these secrets won’t leak or be abused. Won’t they? The preliminary filter lists have already leaked, and contain quite a number of things that are far beyond what we’ve been told would be there. Our trust has already been violated even during the trial phase.
It’s only a matter of time before someone uses this data for their personal or political advantage.
And we, as a nation, are making it all too easy for that to happen.
Popularity: 1% [?]
Net filtering and virtual worlds: reactions
June 27, 2009
After last night’s story on the Australian Government’s internet content filtering legislation and its potential impact on virtual worlds, the response has been astounding. Today has seen the largest ever traffic on The Metaverse Journal. Like any issue, there are a few camps of thought:
1. Those who have significant concerns that environments like Second Life will end up being banned.
2. Those who have significant concerns, but cannot believe the Australian government would be so misguided as to oversee such a ban.
3. Those who believe the whole idea is hype and/or scaremongering and that the Federal Government will not take such a scattergun approach.
4. Those who support the proposed legislation.
I tend to fall in the second camp, because there are innumerable examples of governments making policy that has unintended consequences for individuals not intended to be targeted by a new law. In fact, most legislation does that, it’s just that this proposition particularly stands out for its gaps in logic and potential to harm some really good work going on within Australia.
There’s certainly a chance that the final legislation, if passed at all, will have taken into account the intricacies of virtual worlds. I’m not holding my breath on that though, unless there’s some concerted efforts by Australians on the issue. Telstra and the ABC have plenty to lose and it’s both those organisations that could make a difference in sanity checking the final legislation. The hundreds of thousands of virtual environment consumers in Australia also have a large voice, if there’s a timely response in the event a ban does seem embedded in the legislation.
There’s plenty of time for these issues to be teased out – determining the Minister’s willingness to do so is the biggest unknown. We’ve contacted Senator Conroy’s office but unsurprisingly there’s been no response. What are your thought? Is it all a storm in a teacup, a call to action or a big yawn?
Popularity: 1% [?]
An open letter on virtual worlds for Senator Conroy
June 25, 2009
Today’s coverage by Asher Moses in Fairfax newspapers on the latest saga with content filtering in Australia, alludes to virtual environments such as Second Life being added to the list of content not suitable for viewing in Australia. Essentially, the issue is that online ‘games’ like World of Warcraft and Second Life have not received an Classification rating and therefore under the proposed content filtering would be blocked.
It’s difficult to know where to begin to pick the flaws in the logic of the approach, but I thought it may be worth writing an open letter / tutorial to the obviously misinformed Minister in question, Senator Conroy:
1. Virtual worlds do indeed contain adult content such as sex of pretty much any type, simulated drug use and plenty of violence. That said, just like going to the R-rated shop located in most suburbs, in environments like Second Life you can’t partake of the goods unless you’ve provided proof of age. So Senator, are you going to mandate the Australian Federal Police to ensure every ‘bricks and mortar’ adult store customer has to go through a government check before entering? Will you also be closing down other social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, as they too are not rated and also contain graphic content?
2. Second Life, OpenSim grids and gaming worlds like World of Warcraft are three examples of environments that have highly valuable and empirically demonstrable educational benefits. Just talk to the dozens of Australian educators who have undertaken postgraduate research in the area. Can you explain what alternative means of immediate support the Rudd government will be providing to those people who utilise such environments for immediate health support around issues as diverse as mental health, physical disabilities and chronic disease support?
3. Given a range of virtual environments are used for the purposes of expressing free speech or engaging in activism in a much more visual way, does the Australian Labor party commit to not using emergent technologies for political purposes? Why should Gaza protesters not be able to get their message out via Second Life to Australians whilst the ALP spams YouTube with Kevin Rudd informercials?
4.On the child protection thing. Any normal person doesn’t want their kids exposed to undesirable influences – it’s called parenting. If parents cannot be trusted to screen virtual world content, then is the government also committing to a full ban on R-rated magazines in newsagents, a blanket ban on all legal drug consumption in public and zero tolerance on swearing or violence. And if so, how will this be funded and implemented?
5. Can the Rudd government outline how Australians will maintain their competitive advantage in a global economy where virtual worlds are increasingly adopted as a means of communication? Will books be distributed with vetted pictures of said technologies and will this be enough to make our children competitive?
6. This to me is the most important question of all: have you, Senator Conroy, received any substantive briefing on the opportunities virtual worlds provide for educators, health professionals and businesses? I don’t mean Steve Fielding showing you a picture of two avatars going at it in Second Life. I mean a real briefing covering demographics, trends, research and evidence-based success stories. I can point you in the direction of half a dozen great people locally off the top of my head. Hell, I’ll come too to report on your newfound open-mindedness. I promise I’ll behave.
Of course, Senator Conroy is no more likely to read the above open letter than he is to request the substantive briefing mentioned. To be fair, no definitive statement has been made by the government on virtual worlds but the signs certainly aren’t encouraging. Like the wider issues with content filtering, the baby looks like being thrown out with the bathwater, and we won’t know it until it’s too late. If this does come to pass, Australia will be up there with North Korea in developing its population to be tech-savvy competitors in a global economy. Now THAT’s an education revolution.
Postscript: this afternoon I spent some time discussing the issue with Tateru Nino (who’s written on the issue here and here) and she made a really good point: by creating its adult-only continent in Second life, has Linden Lab forced the hand of ACMA to provide a rating on Second Life’s content. Having everything conglomerated in one place makes a rating easier. The trouble is, under the proposed regime it could also spell the end of Second Life access for Australians, or at least some significantly pared down access to PG-areas only.
Popularity: 2% [?]
Metaplace impressions
May 28, 2009
At The Metaverse Journal, we’ve followed Metaplace closely and covered its beta phase previously. Senior contributor Tateru Nino was asked to put Metaplace through its paces to ensure we haven’t been too starry-eyed about its potential – Editor.
Still in beta, Metaplace still has some rough edges and glitches, but it is certainly coming along very nicely. The look and feel of Metaplace mostly calls to mind the isometric 2D games of the mid 1990s. That’s very much the look and feel of much of it, though it is in a considerably higher resolution than the game titles of yesteryear.
You could be forgiven for thinking its areas as strikingly similar in some ways to the tactical maps of the old X-Com game series. It runs conveniently in a browser, and is entirely Flash-based, downloading what it needs, when it needs it.
Metaplace is divided into worlds. Each world being more or less a variably-sized map, viewed in a variety of ways and interconnected into a larger, multidimensional abstract geometry. There’s no broader landscape, and no particularly enormous spaces. Like – say – Richard Garriott’s Ultima VII, there’s an internal sense of the three-dimensionality of objects, but it is primarily a two-dimensional experience. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Metaplace’s strengths appear to be largely organized around social and gaming. Metaplace strongly supports the creation of spaces, particularly gaming spaces. Objects are almost trivially easy to create within metaplace, and the system actively supports a variety of relatively painless ways to get content into the system.
If you want, for example, a boat, the system will offer to take your search to Google 3D Warehouse, where you can simply select one of the available models, and Metaplace will do all the heavy lifting to import it for you. A useful variety of behaviours can be added to objects with just a few clicks, and no-scripting, and there’s support for more intricate systems as well.
Views of spaces can be customized, UI widgets can be added. There’s a great deal of support for building game-spaces, and if I were able to spare the time for making a game, Metaplace is definitely where I’d want to be doing it.
Metaplace tracks experience (‘metacred’, actually) and assigns levels, keeping track of the basic types of activities you indulge in. People can tell at a glance if you’re a socializer, explorer or builder by nature – though hardly anyone actually seems to pay attention to that. You gain metacred and presently also coins (for the economy prototype) by, well, socializing, exploring and building, basically.
Some issues still present themselves, of course.
The economy and monetisation of the platform is still in the early stages. It’s “soft-launched”, if you like, and users are still in the early days of getting to grips with the potential of the platform. Much of the content you’ll see is still under construction.
The urge to right-click – for context menus and the like – is almost overwhelming, but of course that just brings up the options for Adobe’s Flash Player. Some of your basic tools can be a little erratic. Sometimes your mouse scroll-wheel will function to zoom in or out of a scene, and sometimes – well – it just won’t. Even left-clicking on things can be somewhat erratic.
Likewise, we’ve had a few issues with setting properties on objects and getting those to actually stick. The further you are from Metaplace in network terms, the more erratically it seems to behave.
That said, Metaplace is still early in the beta stage, and we’ve got every confidence that its various teething problems will continue to sort themselves out. We’re definitely looking forward to seeing how the platform, the economy and the user-generated content all develop.
Popularity: 4% [?]
The first landmark in Second Life
May 26, 2009
In Second Life, I’m a bit of a landmark hoarder, and I noticed that I had kept the very first landmark I saved when I became a Second Life resident in 2006. As was common for new residents, I’d saved the location of the casino whose chairs I used to sit in to gain Linden dollars. Those were the days. So, I then decided to visit the landmark itself and found that the University of North Carolina at Pembroke has replaced the casino of my Second Life youth:
It’s hard to avoid the juxtaposition of Second Life’s evolution since 2006 and my landmark experience: gambling, along with unregulated banking and activities like ageplay are no longer, with educators a stalwart community. There’s both upsides and downsides to those changes, but what hasn’t changed is the uncertainty over where Second Life will go next.
So now it’s over to you: do you remember your first saved landmark, and if so, what was it and does it still exist? Or has something else taken its place?
Popularity: 4% [?]
Second Life user retrospectives
May 19, 2009
This may be the future, but I'm looking at the past.
The Second Life sixth birthday is looming. What, I wondered, were the changes, for good or for ill, that made the biggest impacts upon the community of users, since the last birthday? While pondering this, I had the following thoughts:
“Don’t worry, users can barely remember what happened last week. 12 months down the track, they’ll have forgotten the whole thing.”
We’ve all had this thought at one time or another: we’ve held the expectation that the majority of users will not only not notice the impact of the Second Life event that causes us so much elation, or grief, or confusion, but will surely not remember it in times to come. Perhaps the majority of users have not even held an account for that long.
Maybe that’s true.
But stop to consider this: a minority of users are deeply invested in Second Life. If a minority of users both notice and recall events that occurred with respect to Second Life, perhaps that’s ok. If the minority of users are the people who use Second Life more of the time, then the impact of their memories could be weighty indeed.
Let’s take that as read.
Now combine this with the fact that memories are elastic in time. Things that you felt very strongly about at the time will tend to linger in the memory, and can seem to be more recent than other, less charged, memories.
So, we have a minority of users who, with their investment in Second Life, are more likely not only to have long and sustained memories of things that affected them, but also to continue to talk about those things, and to pursue restitution where things have gone badly. Their effect upon Second Life and upon the community is greater than you might otherwise expect, in this specific fashion.
During the week, I asked readers of Tateru Nino’s Dwell On It blog, and others, to leave a comment containing their memories of Second Life, highlights and low lights, over the past 12 months. I also asked them not to do any research, but to work from their own memories alone. I felt that it was important to ask users who have enough investment in Second Life to read blogs about it, and to respond.
As you might expect, respondents remembered quite a number of things that had happened previous to that time as actually occurring in that year.
The other thing that struck me was the overall number of events that were recalled by each user; i.e. many, many more than I had expected, or could remember myself.
So, with those thoughts, I present to you the list I compiled from the responses I received, in date order, with links to interesting and pertinent information.
Age verification: announcement to implementation.
4 May 2007 Age and Identity Verification in Second Life
5 December 2007 Age verification arrives on the Second Life grid (updated)
Ageplay: in the media, getting banned.
10 May 2007 Child Porn Panic Hits ‘Second Life’
30 October 2007 Virtual Ageplay Still Too Real
The gambling ban.
25 July 2007 Wagering In Second Life: New Policy
The banking ban.
5 January 2008 Virtual Banking – Linden Lab intervenes
Bay City announced.
22 February 2008 http://secondlife.wikia.com/wiki/Bay_City
Trademark issues.
25 March 2008 Linden Lab asserts control of names and images
Havok4 released on the main grid.
31 March 2008 Cry “havoc” and let slip the squirrels of war!
Mark Kingdon, new CEO.
22 April 2008 Announcing our New CEO!
Second Life fifth birthday: who and what is not welcome?
21 May 2008 Calling All Cultures to the Second Life 5th Birthday Celebration
30 May 2008 Calling all cultures? Not any more.
30 May 2008 Shape-Based Exclusion [Updated]
5 June 2008 M-rated avatars disinvited, then re-invited, to Linden’s birthday bash
16 June 2008 LL Hopes For Nipple Free 5th Birthday Celebration
SL5B.
“M Linden’s speech at SL5B viewed by many as a slap in the face of early adopters.” Marianne McCann
“The Linden Prize was also at SL5B. I remember how everyone was anticipating the “big news from Mitch Kapor”, and then scratching their heads at what it turned out to be.” Jacek Antonelli
Mono.
21 August 2008 Mono Launch
Burning Life 2008.
Ran from 25 September to 5 October 2008 http://burninglife.secondlife.com/
New City Sims.
20 October 2008 New City Area Discovered
Immersive Workspaces.
20 October 2008 Linden Lab and Rivers Run Red launch Immersive Workspaces 2.0
Openspace controversy.
28 October 2008 Openspace Pricing and Policy Changes
28 October 2008 Lost in the void
Big Spaceship.
3 November 2008 Transforming the Second Life Experience
Winterfaire.
28 November 2008 Winterfaire! Coming December 19 – January 5
13 December Win a Space in the Second Life Holiday Marketplace! (The Holiday Marketplace got underway shortly before the holiday period was over).
Xstreet and OnRez.
20 January 2009 XStreet SL and OnRez to Join Linden Lab!
Maps.
22 January 2009 Improvements to mapping and upgrade to SLurl.com
Linden Blog.
18 February 2009 After much ado with half-measures, the new Linden Blog is released.
Content Ratings.
12 March 2009 Upcoming Changes for Adult Content
21 April 2009 Update – Upcoming Changes for Adult Content
27 April 2009 What do Second Life’s new content ratings actually mean?
Second Life and Open Source.
30 March 2009 Intensifying Open Source Efforts
Finally, I noted that we noticed several Lindens leaving (Robin, Zee, Ginsu, Katt), but barely noticed those who came to take their place.
See this, Linden Lab? Users matter, and they have long memories.
Popularity: 3% [?]
A Second Life success story: NCI
May 13, 2009
It has been in Second Life for four years (having just celebrated its fourth anniversary), has over 150 staff, costs about US$13,000 each year to operate, holds 46,592 square metres of Second Life land (and rents quite a bit more), and is among the virtual environment’s most well-trafficked organizations.
It isn’t one of those corporate sites you read about, though. It’s a non-profit group, with little existence outside of Second Life. It’s NCI, a volunteer organisation that ranks among the most successful groups in Linden Lab’s virtual world.
NCI’s basic mission is to assist and support newcomers to Second Life. Originally founded by Brace Coral in April 2005, Coral named the organisation New Citizens Incorporated (though the ‘incorporated’ part was merely in jest), and founded it on the principle that everyone in Second Life was able to contribute to the orientation and support of new users. Even those with only a few days of experience would have answers and information that newer users lacked.
Originally a self-help facility with social events and a building sandbox, the scope of NCI was already expanding by the time Carl Metropolitan took over as executive director in a popular vote in September 2005, when Brace Coral scaled back her Second Life activities.
With Metropolitan at the helm of the organization, NCI expanded significantly both in land and personnel, offering large numbers of classes and events, funded by advertising and donations, and standalone ‘aid stations’ called Infonodes scattered all over Second Life near areas where new users are likely to be found. NCI’s financial picture isn’t always a rosy one, however.
Advertising and donations don’t quite meet the operational bills each year, usually falling about US$1,500 short, which necessitates periodic fundraising activities to make up the shortfall, often in the form of charity auctions. NCI’s charity fundraisers are supported by quite a number of Second Life creators, as well as some corporations, such as Microsoft who donated software to the last big fundraising auction.
In an environment where users only have a limited number of group memberships available, NCI’s free-to-join group sports nearly 9000 members at present, and provides round-the-clock live-help for new users with questions and queries.
The NCI’s watch-words are civility, respect and courtesy, but maintaining a safe space for new users, protected from those who would exploit them or intentionally disrupt or harass them isn’t easy. NCI maintains strict rules of conduct, and enforces them swiftly when staff feel that new users may become upset or disturbed by the actions of a disruptive or abusive visitor. Indeed, one of the main pillars of NCI’s popularity is swift and strong enforcement of local conduct rules.
Keeping an organization like NCI running isn’t an easy job either. While class instructors and event hosts recieve payments from the organisation for their duties, nobody is getting a wage from the process. Senior staff can be under tremendous amounts of pressure. In the wake of NCI’s 4th anniversary celebration on 18 April, executive director, Carl Metropolitan decided that he needed a sabbatical, partly from the daily pressure of work, and partly due to unavoidable circumstances related to the USA’s economic downturn.
Presently, a new interim management team are settling in, with Afon Shepherd and Gramma Fiddlesticks cooperatively managing the organisation until Metropolitan’s return to duty. That NCI works at all is something of a surprise, being an expensive operation, with so many people from all walks of life, from most of the countries in the world, bonded primarily only by the willingness to help others and to donate their spare time.
NCI does work, however, and it works well. If you’re new to Second Life, it’s one of those must-visit places.
NCI Major Locations
- Original site at Kuula
- NCI South (Hamnida)
- NCI Beach (Fishermans Cove)
- NCI Caledon (Caledon Oxbridge Village)
Popularity: 6% [?]
