Virtual Worlds – Page 110

November 20, 2014November 20, 2014

Automattic Exemplify A Sensible And Transparent Approach To DMCA Requests

Nalates Urriah has posted a very interesting blog post about about DMCA Abuse. The post highlights that Automattic, the people behind WordPress and other ventures have been Striking Back Against Censorship. The post is almost a year old so I’m a bit surprised we haven’t heard more about this in Second Life circles. Where this should be of interest to Second Life and other users is that this is about abuse of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. The DMCA process is something that frustrates many Second Life content creators.

The issue for Automattic is what they view as abuse of the DMCA process to censor opinion. On their blog post Automattic write :

The DMCA system gives copyright holders a powerful and easy-to-use weapon: the unilateral right to issue a takedown notice that a website operator (like Automattic) must honor or risk legal liability. The system works so long as copyright owners use this power in good faith. But too often they don’t, and there should be clear legal consequences for those who choose to abuse the system.

However whereas this is all very good and well when the DMCA process is used in good faith, Automattic were seeing an increase in the number of cases where good faith does not seem to be being applied, they also highlight one of the issues with the DMCA process that makes people uncomfortable, having to provide your details to the person making the complaint :

We receive hundreds of DMCA notices and try our best to review, identify, and push back on those we see as abusive. Our users have the right to challenge a DMCA complaint too, but doing so requires them to identify themselves and fill out a legally required form saying that they submit to being sued for copyright infringement in a place that may be far away. If they don’t, their content is taken down and could stay down forever. This tradeoff doesn’t work for the many anonymous bloggers that we host on WordPress.com, who speak out on sensitive issues like corporate or government corruption.

So we’re talking blogging and sensitive issues here, not whether someone really created a texture. However the issues raised are similar to those that confront Second Life users in terms of the process and the abuse of the process. One of the big issues that people in Second Life complain about is that it’s too easy to abuse the DMCA procedure.

Automattic assist their users when they see what they feel are abusive uses of the DMCA procedure, they even have a Hall Of Shame where they highlight some examples of what they feel were improper takedown notices.

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November 19, 2014

Philip Rosedale At Gigaom Roadmap – Sci-Fi, Virtual Worlds And Beards

Philip Rosedale was interviewed by Signe Brewster at Gigaom Roadmap 2014 yesterday and Gigaom have posted the interview in an article entitled : The gap between virtual reality and sci-fi is shortening. Philip talks about virtual worlds, including Second Life and not surprisingly, High Fidelity.

The video is interesting because Philip talks about the past and future of virtual worlds as well as discussing how science fiction is a good influence for him. The interview runs for about half an hour and that includes a Q&A session.

There’s a really interesting part of this interview where Philip talks about body language. New devices allow virtual worlds to capture the body language of the person behind an avatar and reproduce that body language inside a virtual world. High Fidelity staff conducted an experiment where they were each interviewed in High Fidelity using the same avatar and then those videos were later played back to all of the staff without sound. The staff members quickly realised that they could recognise who was who based on the face gestures and body movements of each avatar.

When asked about what he has learnt from Second Life Philip talks about economies, virtual communities and how people will self organise. This may explain why High Fidelity is more of an open source venture than Second Life was. Philip has witnessed that people will self organise and presumably he also feels they are capable of self governance. Philip does point out that technology has changed since Second Life was created, for example there was no cloud computing back then and he does state that they tried to make Second Life as open as they could. This is a comment that has a lot of merit. Whereas Second Life isn’t open in the way High Fidelity will be, it remains very open in the concept of user generated content.

Philip talks of how reading science fiction is almost an instruction manual for building virtual worlds and his big influence in this area is, not surprisingly, Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash.

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November 18, 2014

A Glimpse At The Ghost Of Metaverse Past

Back on March 1st 2006 Philip Rosedale and Cory Ondrejka presented a Google Tech Talk : Glimpse Inside a Metaverse: The Virtual World of Second Life. I’ll embed the video at the end of the post, it’s around an hour long but it gives a fascinating insight into where Second Life was over eight years ago.

An interesting point to note is that the presentation demonstrates Second Life in action but due to a database upgrade, the demonstration of Second Life could not be shown on the main grid. This exemplifies well the improvement in maintenance practices that we see in Second Life today, that sort of downtime generally doesn’t happen these days.

The video demonstrates well why Second Life was considered to have such great potential. Philip talks of the economy, the growth in land mass and how people could earn money and withdraw it via Paypal, which they can still very much do today. There’s no shipping involved in this sort of commerce, there’s no Visa requirements to work in an international market. Things have of course changed recently with identification requirements being more strictly applied, but you still don’t get dinged with shipping fees and you still don’t need a work Visa. However it should also be noted that a question is raised about IRS regulations, so even back in 2006 it seems that these things were on the horizon, people could see it coming.

The video demonstrates some of the creations of Starax, especially his wand which at the time, Cory suggested. cost USD$30.00, which took Philip by surprise although he does say how cool the wand was. He also discusses the success of Anshe Chung. There’s also an interesting point to be noted in terms of demographics. Back then the population was 43% female with an average age of 32 and an international population of 25%. I have no idea what the demographics are today but it would be interesting to see them.

The answer as to why Second Life didn’t have a standard scripting language such as LUA is answered here. However there were plans, after implementing Mono, to move towards using more standard scripting languages. Interestingly High Fidelity has gone a different route and is embracing Javascript and the hints are that Linden Lab’s next generation virtual world will also use a more standard scripting language.

There’s an interesting comparison between the World Of Warcraft model of using shards and Second Life’s one world model. Philip suggests that Second Life at the time was about as big as one World Of Warcraft shard. He also gives a nod to the fact that Eve-Online has a one world design, rather than shards.

A really good point with this video is that is explains a lot about how Second Life works, in pretty easy to understand terms. Cory describes the Second Life client as being “Incredibly dumb“. This isn’t an insult to viewer developers or the excellent strides they have made, it’s simply pointing out that a lot of Second Life’s work takes place server side, that content is streamed rather than stored locally. Now this is back in 2006 when the high speed broadband many of us experience today simply wasn’t available and yet, it worked.

However this was partially because by 2006 the cost of bandwidth had got a lot cheaper. Philip suggests that five years earlier they would probably have been out of business due to the cost of bandwidth.

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November 17, 2014November 17, 2014

Linden Lab Ask : What Item Would Be On Your Second Life Wishlist?

Linden Lab are embracing the season to be merry by asking their residents “What Item Would Be On Your Second Life Wishlist?” The Lab are working on a holiday gift item for everyone and have embraced social media for the feedback in the shape and form of Facebook and Twitter.

This usage of social media often disappoints some people as they would prefer Second Life to utilise their own forums and blogs for such events but I’m just pleased to see that they are now prepared to go beyond Facebook. I’ll take that as a happy compromise although they do have an Official Contests & Events section on their forums, which would probably be ideal for something such as this gift idea. I would imagine there would be challenges with gathering feedback from too many disparate sources.

Feedback on the Facebook page includes requests for :

A 24 hour day cycle
Cheaper Land Prices
Huge Tracts Of Land
A PC So I can get back on SL

I’m not quite sure these are the droids Linden Lab are looking for here. Personally I want to see more Orcs but I’m not sure that is suitable for a Christmas wishlist item!

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November 17, 2014

Hold On To Your Hats (And No Copy Items) It’s Maintenance Week

Linden Lab have posted an update on their Grid Status Page that a week of scheduled maintenance on the grid is underway. The post, which I’ve altered slightly to reflect that the maintenance is taking place this week, reads :

Beginning Monday, November 17, we will be undertaking a full week of scheduled maintenance. This maintenance will take place at approximately 7:00 AM each day this week. Each region will be subject to one or more restarts, as its host takes its turn for inspection. A five-minute warning will be broadcast for each restarting region. Additional warnings will be broadcast to regions where multiple restarts are necessary. Please be cautious about going AFK for extended periods in the middle of build sessions or handling no-copy objects, as you may miss the shutdown warnings. Please keep an eye on this blog for further updates.

The reason for the maintenance remains unclear. Nalates Urriah reports that they questioned Oz Linden about this at the Open Source User Group and Oz’s answer was :

They’re doing some checks on some of our server hardware that requires that they take them down briefly. I don’t believe that all regions will be affected, but I’m not sure.

However one positive is that maintenance such as this suggests Linden Lab very much have their on the Second Life ball.

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