I must admit I'm feeling a little down about the direction the two virtual worlds I inhabit are taking - Second Life and Inworldz.

Some of that has to do with the late summer "slump", where club attendance is down, and so are many sales.

The thing that is really getting me down the most, however, is what I see of people abandoning all appearance of common courtesy.

Today, on SL, I had to ban some guy from our private parcel. He wasn't on the ground - that's an easy mistake to make. No, he found his way to our skybox which is thousands of meters in the air. WTF was he doing up there in our home? What ever possessed him to enter it in the first place?

WTF possesses anyone to invade someone's home, whether it be on the ground or way up in the air? Would they do that in real life? What makes them think it's ok in virtual life?

Even when I'm on a sim where I've been told that "everything on the ground is free to explore", I won't go into a person's home. If I stray into a building that doesn't appear to be a home, and I find it is, I leave quickly. If I follow a landmark expecting a store, and I turn up on someone's residence, I leave quickly.

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A lot of people scream and holler about protection of their IP rights - and just how many of them are trampling the copyrights of others? Not very long ago I kicked and banned a merchant from one of my Inworldz rental sims because he was flagrantly and blatantly selling copyrighted art images and items containing trademarked names and logos. Now just how much thought does it take to realize that it's just as wrong for them to be using that stuff as it would be for another virtual world merchant to use theirs without permission? Why are some people so determined to make money in virtual worlds that they'll deliberately trample all over the established copyrights of well-known brands and names to do it? Quite frankly, the practice makes my stomach turn, especially after having skewed visions of what IP rights really ARE shoved down my throat all these years.

It's very rude and very inconsiderate, and I'm sorry, but when I see someone doing that, I can't help but think they're being more than a little greedy, trying to capitalize on someone else's fame and fortune.

Misuse of copyrighted items from the Internet is no different than if you tried to do it with a fellow merchant's materials inworld.

I eschew the purchase of textures from most texture merchants, simply because I've cruised web images enough to know that a goodly share of them are stealing images right off the Internet without any regard for the copyright protecting them. They either don't realize - or just don't care - that an edited version of a copyrighted work is still copyrighted by the first creator. Just because you changed a pixel here and there does not make it your own.

I've seen "famous" texture artists from SL do what I just described - snagging images off the Internet, changing them, then selling them as their own. One site in particular is a BIG victim of this despite it saying in its Terms of Service that the photos are NOT to be sold as textures, original OR edited. Now, if these texture artists have gotten some notoriety, you would think they would be up on the latest and greatest about copyrights - and some of them claim they are, and yet, they think nothing of trampling the copyright of another artist just to make some funny money.

How sick is that? What makes it worse is when they try to restrict how their purloined textures are used - when they really don't own them. What makes it incredibly sad is that they are charging for them at all, and in some cases, healthy amounts.

My better half claims that by writing posts like these and speaking out for the respect of IP rights everywhere, that I'm alienating people. I'm not the only one speaking up and I know plenty of you 'out there' feel the same way I do. Keep speaking up, because the discussion on virtual IP rights is far from over.

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The Nym Wars and the inconsiderate treatment of whole classes of people who either choose, or need to, use a pseudonym on social networking sites.

Call tinfoil-hattery on me, but I'm beginning to believe that the whole reason Google is insisting on wallet names has to do more with where this country is headed than it is any sort of advertising profit. There's a bill in Congress (no idea if it passed or failed yet) that wants to force people to self-identify. Some of the Google schmucks have made statements like "there are so many asynchronous threats out there that they will HAVE to know who everyone is" (loosely paraphrased). The NSA has been tracking people online for a long, long time, and I think Google just exposed the NSA's latest secret project: A complete, online database of everyone's RL identity. It sure as hell looks like Google is angling for the job.

More tinfoil-hattery: Maybe they're not "just another company" after all...

You will notice that I have changed my icon from a solid purple to a rainbow. This is because I wish to make a statement on this #nymday: I celebrate diversity in all its forms, including a person's right to represent themselves with any nym they please.

When I began sampling the Internet in the 90s, I started with PINE, TIN, and bulletin board systems. Back then, I opted for the nym insomniac, which represented that my biorhythms caused me to be awake when most of the so-called "normal" world was asleep. This nym lasted as the Internet continued to grow, and branched into Usenet newsgroups and IRC.

Later on, as my religious views shifted into the general area of where they are today, I changed my nym to shadowdancer, to reflect this - and also because there were just too many insomniacs out there. This nym persisted for a goodly long while.

Getting onto LiveJournal caused another nym-shift. I can't rightly recall my first LJ name, but my second persists to today, and names my personal journal. Magyarok_saman is actually a mis-spelling of a Hungarian reference to "Hungarian Shaman", which is one of the religious roles I fill. Later, I got into Second Life, and my nym there became Marie Resch. I had a limited selection of last names, so Resch it was. It turns out that there are only roughly 48 of us with that last name. Should we start a club? :P

Entry into Inworldz afforded me a choice of any name I wanted. By this time, I was partnered to Willy Wonka (his chosen name, not the name that his account reflected) so I opted for Marie Wonka. A bad, but thankfully temporary breakup caused me to change my name to Marie Ravencrow, and I like it for a general nym. I've used it several places, and were I to sign up for Google+, it would be the name I use. It is a combination of my "common name" middle name and the last part of my magickal name. In other words, it says a lot about me, as a person.

I refuse to sign up for Google+. I hate how they have treated my friends, who likewise wished to use their very meaningful nyms as the name on the account. I am also of the mind that I don't like to be counted, quantified, analyzed - and signing up for such a service subjects me to all those things, and more.

I had a Facebook page. It had my RL name on it, and the more I read about Facebook, Google+, and other sites like it, the less secure I felt about using that page. With the rise of the nym wars and yet more bad news about the insecurity of such sites, I elected to deactivate it and I will let it die.

As I said in the previous post, I have indeed suffered at the hands of malicious people thanks to the bits and pieces of information about me already on the Internet. By taking down that page, I am eliminating yet another bit that could be used against me.

Second Life itself began quite the controversy when they elected to turn our avatar profiles into a "facebook-like" interface on the web, complete with comment wall. While there are settings which can prevent most information from being displayed to just anyone, the general profile remains on the web and available to the greater Internet. This has caused a lot of people consternation, as they wished for their profile to be entirely contained within the platform and NOT available to the Internet in general. Personally I was happy with my profile staying confined to the internals of the platform, and I don't intend to use the interactive bits of my web profile much, if at all.

Let's face it folks: Anything a corporation is going to offer for free on the Internet actually comes with some form of hidden price. Google's insistence on RL names gave away their intentions of aggregating our data and selling it to others. Facebook has allowed the installation of facial recognition software which can be used to scan your profile and other photos for matches in criminal databases. Who is to stop them from allowing this technology to be used - or goddess forbid, hacked - by others? The question has already been asked: Will there be laws and regulations governing the use of our private data? You can't say it's being used without your permission; the fine print of the User Agreement says they can do whatever they damned well please with it.

I don't mind targeted ads because I can ignore them. I do mind my information being aggregated, cross-referenced, and sold to some faceless entity for use in whatever way they see fit. I have already been a victim of such practices, and if you think it's easy to get your personal information taken out of the database of such corporations, think again. Most 411 sites make it very tedious to get your information removed. Even if you succeed, your information is still stored elsewhere, and can be had, for a price.

Marie Ravencrow is now my public nym, and it's all you get. If that's not good enough for you, then you can take a long walk off a short pier into shark-infested waters.



x-posted to my roleplay blog.

AT&T Puts Broadband Users on Monthly Allowance

Dear AT&T,

I am one of those people who live in the rural neighborhoods of the Southern California high desert above Los Angeles. You are the only available internet provider, outside of satellite (which sucks).

You have no competition here, and there are many other such places where you're the sole internet service provider.

I think it is both preposterous and greedy of you to suddenly decide to cap our internet usage, especially (as you'll see in the article) since you don't have a congestion problem justifying it.

Your price for bandwidth continues to fall, and yet, you want to squeeze the last friggin penny out of folks like my roommate and I - two disabled people who spend a lot of time on the internet.

We don't have "traditional" TV. We get our news and entertainment via the internet, via websites and streaming sources. We are low-income so we cannot afford to "go out on the town" if at all. What we find on the internet is our entertainment.

I am an artist, and my pallets are virtual worlds. I regularly spend countless hours logged into one of two 3d Virtual World grids, creating items that I consider to be an expression of art. I also use these venues for much-needed social interaction, and last but not least, I conduct a long-distance relationship via these venues.

Are you going to tell either of us that we'll have to cut off what has become a lifeline to us, just because you want to be greedy?

It also might be an outright contract violation. When I signed up, I signed up for unrestricted internet use. I was not warned, nor given any information, that you planned to install caps. Considering that there is no comparable competition in my area, you may be skirting the law doing so to begin with. We are trapped into using your service because of where we live. That, my dear Corporation, is called entrapment of the worst kind. We have a choice - consider limiting our enjoyment of a service we use extensively, or pay extra we cannot afford.

Since when do you get to determine that for us?

We gave up TV because we can do a better job of picking and choosing our news and entertainment sources via the internet.

I use my time as a creative outlet but it requires I be logged into a service for several hours a day, sometimes up to 16 or more, to create my work. I also run small businesses on these systems that help finance my continuing creativity.

When do YOU get to decide if I can watch a program on Hulu, Netflix, Blockbuster, YouTube many of the other streaming services out there? Why do I have to stop streaming music? What makes YOU think YOU can have that kind of control?

We're already paying a premium to have the highest level of internet you offer, and I'll repeat again, there IS no competition we can alternatively choose from. We don't ABUSE your service, and people like us do NOT cause any sort of internet traffic congestion.

So where the hell do YOU get off? Expect a fight from us little people. After all, we're paying your salaries.