Barney Boomslang

So we again had our crazy avatar chess game - again in Kula 4. This one was special: nothing catastrophic went wrong and nobody called for my head afterwards. And it was a fascinating game, too - white won with check mate.

From Avatar Chess

And as allways, it was great fun. It's still one of the craziest things you can do in SL - and one of the laggiest.

There is an open letter put togethe to post to as many places as possible. This is about making a point on stability and problems in SL - they are taking on very weird forms inworld. Yes, I am aware that Lindenlab is aware of the problems - they would be stupid to not notice them. But well - lots of problems stick around for release after release and make event organization and building harder and harder. On the one hand they do cool stuff - but on the other hand, some of the weirder problems should get some love, too.

So if you agree with the content of project open letter, go there and sign it. Or post links to it and add those links to the page, too. Because in the end, SL is about the user created content and the user enjoying the world - and that's hard to do when your events are regularily crashed or made much harder than necessary due to lingering bugs and problems.

So - how am I directly affected? Well, one thing are the regular friday blues events at Lummerland. For several weeks in a row there where asset server problems during events, problems of rezzing, crashing clients and stuff like that. And no, it's not the sim - it keeps up fine, even with 60 people packed into it.

Another event that is heavily burdened by the grid problems is the show and tell event I co-host with Flo each Sunday in Yongnam - for quite a long time, going into the months, we have regular rezzing problems, asset server lag, packet loss and other related problems there. Luckily both presenters and audience are willing to go through the problems with us, but really, it's getting on your nerves.

Something fun and new for a change: sculpted prims are coming. The stuff looks really cool - but I guess it will be a bit hard to do those sculpting textures. It's another hurdle of entry, like animations where before avimator (and later qavimator) was done. But the wiki page talks about a blender version, so at least when that is done people won't have to shell out the money for Maya - as that is quite a bit expensive.

The description of the textures sound like you could even create them via programs yourself, from algorithms. Guess I have to wait for the feature to actually materialize and play with it. For avatar builders, this could be a heavens sent - as it might be for sculpters. Because it could help to drastically reduce the prim usage in your builds. And well, physical vehicles will be able to gain more detail while still coping with the 31 prim limit. Great news!

Well, and of course the obvious usage: like with flexi, I guess the first things people will create are life-like one-prim genitals.

Flickr has a new feature (ok, it's not that new, but I stumbled over it just recently) that allows you to set the content type. It can be photo, screenshot or other, where other is art, CGI (computer generated imagery) and whatever doesn't fall under photo and screenshot. I retagged all my flickr pictures as other - because they are not real life photos but computer generated imagery. I didn't chose screenshots, because that's more technical screenshots. It seems that many other users had the same problems with finding the right content type - flickr pics from second life are tagged as all three content types all over the place, some people even use different taggings (like pathfinder).

Anyway, the downside of this: the default search filter is set to photos only. So if you use flickr and search there, you might want to change your search settings, so you find all that other stuff, too. It's a bit unfortunate that flickr chose only photos as the default, because that excludes anyone who correctly tags the content of his or her stuff from showing up in standard user searches.

I know that if you see SL as your second life, you could argue that you don't produce imagery, but produce real photos - just from an unreal world. But it would be a bit weird to impose those ideas on flickr users, too. This is especially important if you are in flickr groups other than the SL group and want to crosspost your photos into those groups, too - non-SL users of flickr will expect photos of the real world ...

Moo Money lost all of her inventory - and apparently without any way to get it back. It was lost due to SL hickups - but apparently LL doesn't do per-user backups of inventory, so they can't get the inventory back. Please what? This is inacceptable. Even shitty stuff like Microsoft Exchange Server allows single-inbox restores.

It is high time that Lindenlab gives us tools to care about backups ourselves. Even if the backed up data has still to be on LL servers - at least give us ways to export stuff to some place different from the asset and inventory servers, so that we can be sure things will survive. The current situation is just plain not acceptable - people put lots of time and money into their invenories, builders have big investments in their stuff, and when there is a hickup, it's all gone?

Chris Juergensen is another musician featured on my Radio Boomslang from time to time and a regular in my DJ sets. His first album Prospects is a nice jazz album. Very relaxing music, very groovy. Some of it with tendency to Blues sounds - for example his song Papa Legba. But the real killer for me is his second album, Big Bad Sun - a very great collection of fantastic blues songs that form one of the backbones of my blues DJ sets. And really, if you want to trigger weak and wobbly knees, his title song Big Bad Sun is a quite good way to get it - allmost White Stripes or Black Keys level of wobbly knees.

All music is available at Magnatune - you decide how much you pay for the music and even can share your bought music with friends. And the music is even available under a CC license.

Another great blues friday at Lummerland (Image on my Flickr page):

Blue4u Nowicka played a selection of really great blues songs. A very good blues singer. This week we "only" got up to 53 avatars in the sim, but still a very good crowd. And it's a weekly event, so come over next friday for your blues fix!

Well, most if it is bullshitting and handwaving - marketing speak I just will ignore. But one paragraph in the reply stands out, because it is symptomatic of the problem at hand:

What we have done is fundamentally no different from someone exploring SL and writing up their discoveries on a blog, except we have done it on a much bigger and more efficient scale. There are definite privacy issues at stake here, and we want to be extremely sensitive to those. Purely opt-in systems, to be frank, die at birth. They simply cannot get off the ground. Purely opt-out systems are too invasive.

Well, saying that they did only what an exploring avatar can do, too, but on a larger scale is like saying that surveillance cameras in the city with 24/7 prying eyes behind them is the same as a tourist wandering the streets can do, too. This is what I call bullshitting and handwaving.

But the second part is interesting. "Purely opt-in systems, to be frank, die at birth". This is the culprit in the game. This is the real misunderstanding of those techheads - and it's at the core of tons of the problems in the so called web 2.0 game, too.

To put it blunt: I couldn't care less whether some shitty project of some stupid company takes off ground or not. Was that clear enough? I don't care for any of ESC succeed or fail. But they do, obviously. So they decide that they want to make people jump through their hoops - to ensure their project takes off.

The solution they found is not a middle ground. It is a purely opt-out system. It isn't even an opt-out system with warning ahead of time - where they spider content and tell a new found resident "we spidered your content and if you don't object within 7 days, we will enter it in the database. Complain here". It's a pure opt-out system in the worst sense: you aren't told about it, you aren't made aware of it, you aren't asked ahead of spidering whether you want it.

Yes, it's a pain to get a purely opt-in system off the ground - you need to actually convince people that it is worth participating. You have to give them arguments of why it is good, you have to discuss it and you have to actually care for what they say. So techheads go the other way - they just decide that you have to jump through their own hoops to get out. They don't argue, they don't discuss - sure, they post blogs and mimick discussion, but the core point still is: they decide for you what you have to do. It's defined as being their own game, not yours - despite the fact that their whole project is based on your content.

"Purely opt-out systems are too invasive" - and they created one. And they throw in handwaving and non-arguments of why they think they can pretend it isn't one. Because otherwise, their shiny new project might "die at birth". Well, to me a project like this run by people like the ESC - it deserves to die at birth. Not because of the project, but because of the attitude of it's developers.

To put it in perspective: my web pages are hit by bots in the two-digit range. Each and every bot written by pricks with the same arguments: their shiny new project wouldn't work with opt-in. Scraping for copyright violations, scraping for content to put in searchable indexes, scraping for content to look for plagiarism, scraping for content to use for spamming, searching for comment forms to spam to - whatever someone else comes up with. Most of them ignore the robots.txt protocol - so you can only get rid by IP exclusion. Some of them run from different IPs using bot networks. And all of them have the same excuse - that it wouldn't work with opt-in. Gigabytes of traffic.

Turn this into SL context: hundreds of bot avatars dropping in daily to update their database of content for whatever idea the programmer has. A bot - or as Ordinal puts it, a Homunculus - can do what any avatar can do. Some senses are blinded, but others are sharpened over the ones any avatar has - like the ability to scan the content of a whole sim. Would take hours for a human avatar and a lot would be missed. Humunculi won't miss (unless coded by the ESC - they didn't even get it working right).

Each and every owner of that bot will give you the same answer: opt-in won't work, his shiny new project would die at birth. So you can head over to place so-and-so and opt-out of his database. And the next one. And the next one. And so forth. We all jump through hoops like trained monkeys - to the enjoyment of some coders that are too lazy to do the required work of getting an opt-in system off-ground.

Update: a friend just pointed me to the little gem in their terms of use, where they don't permit scraping their own service automatically. Isn't it funny that someone who scrapes everybodies land has problems with others scraping their database that only consists of other peoples content?

Additional thought: the "opt-in dies at birth" from the company running one of the two top Sl sales websites, that is purely opt-in, is laughable at best.

You know, I am quite "hip" on tech stuff normally. And I am one of those weirdos who in RL actually code some of the stuff others use over the net. And I am all for cool tech and great applications and use quite a lot of them. Yes, I even twitter on my SL account. But really, what is it that those Web 2.0 mashup talkers allways throw out their brain when coding one of their applications?

Take the newest one - the search engine of the electric sheep. So lets see what they get wrong:

• they never announced what they plan before doing it. When doing something that invades right into the content of a living world, you would expect them to have the decency to tell people up front what they plan?
• what they do includes a bot that roams the grid. They don't tell people what that bot is - sim owners can only now refuse the bot because others wrote what the bot is named (it's the avatar Grid Shepherd). But who knows whether they have more of them?
• they take every objects whichs properties show "for sale". There are quite interesting bugs with that flag, though. I had objects listed for sale that wheren't buyable actually (yes, it's a server-side bug). And people might have stuff up for sale in temp spaces or in group spaces (with access restrictions on the parcel). Yes, that is a fault of those people, but still now the before private stuff is made public.
• they only take for-sale objects. But most stuff is sold in vendors using the money event. They don't get most of the content available anyway. For me there was only the harpsichord in caledon listed as for sale - but that one wasn't actually for sale (due to that named bug). All stuff I do have for sale there wasn't listed at all. Even though some of it was checked as for-sale and only parts of it are in vendors.
• they list object owner and creator. But the creator on objects can be faked - just make the root prim be one of the prims someone else created and the whole object will list that creator. Smear campagne, anyone? Search for problematic content like child porn and find some creator-to-be who didn't actually create anything like that, but was faked by someone else?
• absolute the most stupid way to list stuff. Put plywood boxes out with fake descriptions and names, set them for-sale and the people who show up will land in your casino - great way to game this broken search machine.
• Who actually gave them the permission to blatantly exepect all content on public sims to be there for a grab for them? Electric Sheep is a company. A company has a business plan. My content isn't there to help their business plan, just because my sim happens to be public. And don't give me the shit about "providing a service for public good" - that doesn't change a thing about the fact that they put it up in a way that requires sim owners or residents to act after the fact, instead of doing it right: with a default set so people have to opt-in for their content.

No, I am not happy with the search engine that LL provides inworld. But all aspects of the search engine properly follow the rule of voluntary listing. And no, trampling over the privacy of people in SL isn't the right way to "fix" the search problem.

The argument that they only provide something like Google provides is bullshit, too. Google only searches public websites. They don't go behind password secured pages (like banlines in SL are). They don't say "the site is public, so all content is public and we ignore rules". They have a proper bot exclusion protocol (the robots.txt - but ESC didn't offer the names of their bot(s?) themselves, so sim owners could take actions as they chose to). And I don't have to go to some special place in Google to unlist my content - I just have to provide the proper robots exclusion right at my place where my content is.

And hey, who tells us that the sheep bot doesn't collect other interesting data for future projects, too? Google can't collect more than the available content. I can direct google, and have to trust that they follow the guides (like the rel="nofollow" attribute or the robots.txt). I have a way to check that they do by looking at my access log. I have no way to check on the ESC bot(s?). There is no real exclusion protocol - I might not even be aware of them indexing me, since there is no real control to it - the bot might come into a sim in some different parcel than mine. And where google can't collect data of dynamic visitors, the sheep bots can - they could take a snap of traffic data, or of visitors names or whatever when visiting a sim.

Yes, I am aware that every avatar can collect all that data, too. But that is something someone does on purpose. This sheep search bot on the other hand is a broad mechanical device that can do all that automatically. This is exactly why I oppose data retention and extraction for government use, too - it is automatic, broad and not controlled by anyone in any useful purpose. And in this case, the data is made public directly without my knowledge and without my agreement.

And because I read that rather stupid comment on one blog that someone selling stuff has to make his stuff reachable - there is a good reason why none of the many low-price search sites scrape company sites and catalogs for data and present them in their system, but instead go the way for companies to actively list their products by sending in data files of their products. Yes, you must be present with your stuff to sell - but usually you yourself want to decide what is visible and what is advertised, and don't hand out all your inventory listings to some scumbag on the web. Why should SL be different? Why should I be happy that someone scraps off my content and decides what should be listed? Maybe I have things up for sale but don't want to actively promote it? There might be reasoning behind my decisions. Don't make my decisions for me.

Anshe Chung took a first step towards the search bot by banning it from Dreamland. I guess I will put that ban up at Lummerland, too. But I can't do the same at Yongnam - it's a mainland sim, and all mainland sims are fair game for ESC with their current way to do it. And I can't do it in the Caledon Highlands, as it is Desmond Shang who owns those sims and it's his decision.

This search engine project is flawed in so many aspects, it really hurts. It is a dumb way to do it and completely ignores other peoples interests. It's a typical case of "we do it because we can, fuck your privacy, it's so unimportant, we don't even think about it" attitude. And sadly, it's the default attitude of all those "cool kids" in the web 2.0 mashup scene.

Update: a very balanced report and commentary on this is available from Ordinal Malaprop, inventrice of Caledon fame.

Update 2: the first case of misuse of the sheep search to take advantage of someone else happened allready. Seems with all the tech, the common sense and sense of decency are left dead in the tracks.

Friday night after a weird day of packet loss and strangeness, we closed down with Komuso playing the Boogie at Lummerland Beach:

From Second Life S...

Lots of fun, great music, and a nice crowd at the event - and with constantly over 50 people in the sim and on the stream, it was quite a success.

From Second Life S...

Adding that we had very a very good event earlier with Blue4u Nowicka (after some grid problems due to bad packet loss), I think there will be more live events at Lummerland. The sim keeps up fine with so many avatars and the place is just looking great when packed with peoples.

Who at LL had the uber-stupid idea to put insulting messages into the teleport screen? In times where teleports fail regularily, I am really sure that residents will appreciate messages along the lines of "wonder if you still will wear clothes on the other side" or "I won't TP you if you don't drop that hideous outfit". Really funny, Lindenlab. It would have been much more funny if your grid would have worked fine or if you would have shown at least a minimum of support during the weekend woes ...

On more serious sides: I hope [the banning of Prok from SLCC] is a bad Aprils Fools day joke, too. If not, some people went to new and untold lows. If you can't handle disagreement and have to write such snotty comments on someone else, I think you should recalibrate your attitude.

Yes, Proks discussion style is a pain in the ass sometimes. Get over it. If you want a cozy "we are all friends, now hold hands and applaud" event, please don't call it SLCC, because it won't represent anything that the community is made of. Like it or not, Prok is part of the community and in several situations showed that her digging-the-dirt capabilities are more useful than your fanboydom.