Kategorie: Personal

Personal

About virtual rape

Wired.com asks: "Virtual Rape is traumatic, but is it a a crime?" Well, it is written behind the background of such a thing happening in Second Life and the Belgian police investigating it right now. The author of the article disagress that it is a crime, to quote her:

Rape is the ultimate perversion of sexual intimacy. Like sex, rape has
mental and emotional elements that go beyond the body and the damage to
the mind and spirit generally takes much longer to heal than the body.

But that doesn’t make the psychological upheaval of virtual
rape anywhere near the trauma of real rape. And I can’t see us making
virtual rape a matter for the real-life police.

It’s a shitty thing to do to someone. But it’s not a crime.

What myself always strikes is, of course: why the heck don’t the people just logout or turn their computer off? But ok, just a thought, either way, it’s not happening in real, it is still affecting the psyche of the raped person strongly.

Well, the first documented virtual rape ever happened back then in 1993 in a MUD (multi user dungeon), a text based form of online games, very popular back then and still available today. They were considered hightech back then and hip, today they are lowtech but still have their fanbase.

Here is a paper from about the implications of such things by Richard MacKinnon.

Personal

A feature I’d like to see: +V

I’ve attended last week a panel discussion with some politicians and around 60 attendees. A feature I’d really like to see for such kind of events in Second Life to handle such events better is available in IRC for over a decade and more already: +V, meaning giving voice.

What’s "voice" meaning in IRC? Simple. IRC is a channel based way of online text communication. Some channels tend to be rather large and for many open source projects e.g. it’s still a very important way to discuss stuff and things. The channel could be compared to open chat in Second Life.

All men are created equal, but not all are equal in IRC. Every channel has its owner. The owner can per default put all other channel members on mute. This means, they can type what they want, but it’s not going to show up in the channel at all. This does not hinder them from sending private messages to others, but the channel is muted first.

If someone should be allowed to speak to the channel, the owner sets the voice flag, +V. This allows then the voiced member to speak to the channel.

That’s a feature I’d really like to see in Second Life, parcel based, of course. It would make discussion events much easier to handle. How? Well…

The moderator of the discussion has voice. The discussion members on the panel have voice. The audience after the event started? Has no voice. So they need to direct their questions to the moderator in the room. He decides then, which questions should be asked and either asks them on behalf of the avatar or gives the avatar voice for the time to ask. If then it gets to open discussion the moderator could either give voice to all (bad idea) or make a list of speakers and give them voice one after the other.

This sounds perhaps a little bit on the harsh side, but would really help to handle open discussion events, where not all people are on the civilised side, quite more efficiently and squashes spamming in open chat very well.

Personal

My experiences with the voice beta

There was yesterday the announcement about the public availibility of the voice beta version of Second Life. Since I had spare time and a new, shiney headset, I downloaded the special beta client and gave it a try.

The first thing you’re going to notice is that you are not seeing much difference to the normal beta clients at all. Voice capability is disabled by default, so you have to enable it by yourself in the preferences. The second thing I experienced is – it’s much better to enable voice in the so called push-to-talk mode – meaning, that you’re only transmitting audio into the game world when you’re pressing down some key. Otherwise all people around you can be hearning echos if your soundcard is not configured correctly, many computers tend to transmit much noise, well, let’s just say it’s a waste of bandwidth and computing power.

I know how voice is being handled by services like Skype. Skype automatically adjusts the microfon volume while you speak, so that the microfon level is always nice mannered and not too loud. In the Second Life beta you’ve got to adjust the microfon volume on your own, so you should better now how to setup the volume mixer under Windows or Macintosh. Yup, there’s no beta for this available at the moment under Linux.

Well, if you’ve got your settings then right you can enjoy the voice capabilites of the beta – or not. First you need to get to a region, though, that is voice enabled in the beta grid. There are not many available and you can see a list of enabled regions in the release notes of the beta client. According to Lindenlabs there are these voice enabled regions at the moment on the beta grid: Abbotts, Lusk, Pulveria, Spaceport Alpha, Morris, Da Boom, Tehama and Balance. BTW, it’s not advisable under Windows to use the Shift-Key for enable the push-to-talk mode, since this is per default enabled by Windows to enable some advanced features for people with disabilities after pressing it fives times. Better use another key or turn those features of in the system settings of Windows.

(mehr …)

Personal

Fun with crashes

It’s nowadays not funny anymore to do business or events in Second Life. The rule of the thumb is: the more people are online the same time, the more instable and slower the grid becomes. We had an event yesterday in the garden, the sim is able to hold 40-42 people at the same time. The owner even requested a reset of the sim one hour before the whole thing started.

And what happened: About 30 minutes after the event started, the sim was full, the whole sim crashed. We were lucky it crashed only one time, though, other sims have been reported to crash several times on Saturday while being full, e.g. for a wedding.

So, what are the consequences you should make? Well, it’s obvious, though SL is an excellent platform, that it has got major scaling problems at the moment. So, if you really want to do events in it or make serious business or teaching, better find dates where not so much people are online, to get a better experience of the grid. It’s probable that when there are many people online that the grid is going to behave strange and has hiccups, again, and this is getting worse day by day at the moment.

Personal

I wonder…

…since Plastic Duck’s real life identity seems to be revealed by himself, if now Prokofy Neva is going to sue him for stalking. Well, we’re going to see…