Second-Life

The Second Life Herald is running an article named “Blame Europe” about the “virtual child pornography” by Carl Metropolitan (who dislikes it clearly) reported by German reporters.

The main thesis is this:

Sexual “ageplay” in Second Life–as repulsive as it is–would almost certainly be legal under current US law. In the United States, only virtual child pornography that is “indistinguishable from” real child pornography is illegal. [1] However, many European jurisdictions are far more restrictive. In Germany–source of the recent ARD “Report Mainz” news reports–laws against “virtual child pornography” are even stricter, [2] making little distinction between real and virtual child pornography.

[…]

The First Amendment has led to United States having some of the least restrictive laws on freedom of speech in the world. But as Second Life’s real life users become less and less American, and its servers cease to be wholly US-based, Linden Lab will inevitably be forced into more limits on what it can and cannot allow its users to do.

[Mehr]

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.

We all are members of more or less big groups, some are really spammy in the time being. I’d like to be able to mute all or certain groups e.g. during a meeting, so that I am not disturbed by them at all. When the meeting is over, I want to be able to unmute them, so that I can hear again, what’s happening on it and attend them, too. So, deal?

If you ever wanted to use the bugtracking system JIRA, but were afraid or confused about it, then fear no more, here is a nice introductional tutorial about how to use it.

A few things to come in the future in my opinion, sooner or later:

• income tax paid to your national government on virtual earned revenues,
• more CAD tools like now this exporter named Henshin (AutoCAD to SL),
• strict enforcing of this adult flag,
• a 3rd party API to extend the client with plugins like importers, adding client side scripts etc.,
• saving contents with LSL to notecards,
• some sort of external backup,
• regulation of the Linden Dollars, perhaps by the Fed, if it becomes popular enough,
• some kind of interests on credits, defined by whomever,
• more law rushing into SL (it has never been out of SL),
• some kind of external grid/corporate grid, well new grids anyway,
• the sale or IPO of Lindenlabs,
• some bridge to existing instant messaging networks like ICQ, MSN or Jabber.

When you take a closer look at the key metrics of April or make diagrams out of them like here by Tateru Nine, who has been interviewed here about the growth, you can only come to one conclusion: growth is still there, but it has stalled.

What are the reasons? There could be many. Perhaps the bad performance - but that’s something you experience after you’ve created an avatar, so perhaps not really. I personally think that the times of the big hype as Second Life as Web 3.0 are gone now - the time for bashing Second Life starts now, meaning usage and new account creations are going down and after that somewhat up again.

The question is: is this a good thing for a while? Yes. It gives Lindenlabs more time to work on their next generation architecture and some air to solve out some big issues. It is bad still in business terms since land sales should go down a little now, so I wonder how this affects the income of LL at all.

About one week ago there has been a report that aired on German television about the depiction of child pornography in Second Life. It sent out massive waves through the whole community, the Lindens even wrote an article about the whole case on their own blog.

The whole case broke down into this parts:

1. the depiction of child pornography in Second Life, meaning: an avatar in child form having sex in world with an adult avatar and
2. the exchange of real life pictures of teens and preteens in questionable poses (nude and more heavy stuff, it seems) as textures in world between some avatars.

The first case is not illegal in all countries; for example in the USA some could just say “heck, those are virtual things and just adults playing behind the whole scene, no real child has been harmed at all while doing this, and it is not illegal, either, so what’s the ruckus?” The final decision on it has to be made by a judge.

The next big thing in the community hasn’t been the upcoming voice features or the introduction of sculpted prims (which are going to have only somewhat limited use), but the introduction of age verification to the platform. I’ve also written an entry about it, too.

Now we know the company which is going to do it. Well, they had to choose one, anyway, and there are not so much companies in that field.

Many people have disgruntled by the fact they need to verify their age if they want to enjoy mature content. The whole verification is a paradigm shift of Lindenlabs, meaning they are using the community to keep the platform cleaner. Now that the battle has calmed down, we all can take a somewhat clearer and better look at it.

Most of the people, who already have got credit card infos on their file, don’t see the usage of it, since other sites take you as verified just by entering your credit card number. But this is not even sufficient and enough in the USA, so you need to provide other data.

Ok, here are now two useful tips to use the client a little bit better:

• Tired of sorting out your inventory? Wish, there would be more windows open than only one at the same time? This is possible, but well hidden in the client. Just open the first Inventory window, go in the File menu there and select “New Window”. That’s it. You can have as many windows open as you like.
• Offering teleports is broken again, you cannot give it to friends (yes, still happens sometimes to me)? Just press Ctrl+Alt+V, then you can offer it to anybody, don’t worry about the other options, they are not going to work at all.

The Second Life Herald has a very interesting, but also opiniated, piece about the last town hall meeting earlier this week with Cory Linden. To put it simple: the writer was not impressed at all and thinks that the Lindens are working on the wrong priorities right now.

One thing I agree is, that we still need to see how this often referred next generation architecture is going to work. One of the main problems of SL is load, big, heavy user load. This is something you cannot get on the beta grid, where perhaps maximum 100 avatars are online at the same time. This is something you get either with automated test clients - lots of them on the beta grid, or on the main grid. Since automated test clients don’t behave like humas do, the real beta grid is the main grid. The beta grid is just there to iron out the real big problems you can already see there, but the rest is only going to be visible on the main grid under heavy user load. It’s that simple.