December 2013 – Page 3

December 16, 2013

Bots, Communication Limits And Why Web Based Group Pages In Second Life Still Have Potential

Communications in Second Life have long been problematic, this is largely because there’s so much communication going on, this is a good thing by the way. Some people consider Second Life group chat to be broken, indeed there’s a webpage that asks Is Second Life Group Chat Still Broken? Other people login to a load of group messages and basically ignore them because they can be annoying.

In a thread over at SLUniverse, Darien Caldwell has brought to people’s attention the fact that Linden Lab have changed the bot policy, largely in terms of communications via bots. There is a temptation to raise the issue that there has been a lack of communication regarding a communication policy but I won’t go there!

The policy appears to have changed on December 11th and the new policy can be read here: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Linden_Lab_Official:Bot_policy . The page states that bots can add to the Second Life experience but that as each IM, chat message, inventory offer and group invitation creates load on the servers there comes a point where excessive use can cause problems for other users.

This all sounds quite reasonable, that is until you see that the limit where a bot’s communication is excessive appears to be at a much lower limit than would be applied to an object or regular avatar.

Bots are now supposed to send below 5,000 messages a day. Now at first glance that may sound like a lot, that is until you see that Linden Lab consider a message sent to a group as one message per recipient. This suggests that if a group has say 10,000 members then a bot could potentially be considered to be abusing resources if it sends one message to that group as that could potentially be 10,000 individual messages sent, which would be double the policy limit.

Now this is where things don’t quite add up. If it’s considered bad for a bot to be sending 5,000 messages a day then really it should be bad for anything to be sending 5,000 messages a day. I suspect that bots are being used to abuse the messaging system and Linden Lab are trying to discourage their use in communications. This policy certainly does that.

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December 15, 2013December 15, 2013

Ilan Tochner On Kitely’s Pricing Changes And More

In my previous post I mentioned Kitely’s forthcoming changes to their pricing structure. I had a few questions regarding this and other aspects of Kitely so I contacted co-founder and CEO Ilan Tochner who was more than happy to answer my questions.

Ilan also talked about the Kitely market, arts and education in Kitely and how users would like hypergrid access. For the purposes of this interview CL is me and IT is Ilan Tochner … I think you probably worked that out for yourselves, now on with the interview!

CL : “What is happening to the free time based plan that provides users with one free sim and two hours worth of time based access a month?”

IT : “The Free Plan will be discontinued. The Regular Account that will replace it will also include 1 free Metered region (what is now called time-based billing region) but will not include the free time quota that you have now. What will replace that will be announced on Jan 1.”

CL : “If someone signs up this month for a Gold or Silver plan, even if they are not currently a registered user, will they be grandfathered in too?”

IT : “Yes, you’ll be grandfathered in as long as you create an account before the end of the year and get on the Silver or Gold plan before Jan 1. Please note that our backend uses GMT so US-based people shouldn’t wait until the late afternoon of December 31 to order because our system will already consider that to be Jan 1.”

CL : “The bronze plan granted people two free sims a month, will people currently on the bronze plan still be able to keep their 2 free regions a month when they are downgraded to a regular account?”

IT : “The Bronze Plan is discontinued, as stated in our announcement people who were on that plan will be switched to the Regular Plan on Jan 1. They will not have 2 regions grandfathered in as they are no longer paying us for a subscription (we canceled all the Bronze Plan holders’ PayPal subscriptions for our service). People who had more than one Metered world can continue paying for it using our standard 10KC/day/region rate. The only price change for Metered worlds is that OAR-based operations will cost 150KC/operation instead of 10KC/region/operation. Alternatively, they can export that world to an OAR file now (while it still costs just 10KC/region) and delete the excess world.”

CL : “When will you be announcing the new fixed price options?”

IT : “Fixed-price options will be announced when we make them available on Jan 1.”

CL : “Under what circumstances is the time based billing option, the better option for someone?”

IT : “Time-based billing can be better for Premium Account holders as it can provide them with a lot more regions for a much lower cost than paying for each region using a fixed-price option. When all the visitors they expect are Premium Account holders neither they nor their visitors have to actually worry about time as none of them will be paying extra for it. Funding other people’s access to your Metered world can still be cheaper than paying for a fixed-price world if you don’t get a lot of visitors/hours in that world.”

CL : “Just to clarify, minutes only apply to visits to time based regions, minutes are not deducted when someone visits a fixed price region?”

IT : “The entire concept of Minutes is irrelevant for fixed-price worlds. They aren’t used there. Those worlds are like regions in Second Life, you pay a fixed price for the month and no one is charged for time inside them.”

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December 14, 2013December 14, 2013

Kitely Announces New Pricing Plans

It’s a matter of out with the old and in with the new as Kitely announces new pricing plans for their virtual world offerings.

Going – The USD$35 a month Gold Plan that gave users 20 free time based regions and unlimited access.

Going – The USD$20 a month Silver Plan that gave users 10 free time based regions and 120 hours access to time based regions. Access to fixed price regions doesn’t deduct time from a time based plan.

Gone – The USD$5 a month Bronze Plan that gave users 2 free time based regions and 30 hours access to time based regions.

Incoming – The USD$19.95 Premium Account which gives users 5 free time based regions and no restrictions on time spent in time based regions, your own or anyone else’s. This will replace the Gold and Silver plans. The Bronze plan is disappearing completely and people on the Bronze plan will be put on the regular account plan, which will replace the current free based plan. The details on the new regular account plan are not detailed anywhere I can see.

However there’s a grandfathered perk on offer for Gold and Silver plans which means if you’re using one of these plans at the end of the year you can stay on those plans and receive added perks. For example the Silver Plan will no longer have the 120 hours restriction, you’ll have unlimited access to time based regions as well as still being able to have 10 time based regions instead of 5 for the Premium Account.

The Gold plan, which has always had unlimited access to time based regions will boost the number of free time based regions you can have from the current 20 free time based regions to 30 free time based regions.

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December 13, 2013

The Tech Companies, Not The Security Services, Should Take The Heat For The Spying Game

The recent fuss about The NSA and GCHQ allegedly spying on Second Life users largely made me go “meh”. I mean this is what I expect those agencies to do and I really can’t see any way of stopping them doing it. However there is a level whereby I feel protestations about intrusive behaviour could work, that’s at levels way below the security agencies, it’s with tech companies.

AT&T are, according to Gigaom, rolling out a new gigabit service in Austin in two flavours. Premier, for USD$70 a month and Standard, for USD$99 a month. The terminology sounds odd, with premier being the cheaper option. However here’s the catch, the cheaper option means you need to agree to being part of AT&T preferences, which is targeted advertising, or as AT&T themselves explain:

“U-verse with GigaPower Premier offer is available with your agreement to participate in AT&T Internet Preferences. AT&T may use your Web browsing information, like the search terms you enter and the Web pages you visit, to provide you relevant offers and ads tailored to your interests. ”

So basically for the cheaper option, you sell your browsing habits it seems. This idea isn’t new, websites with advertising will often have the option to turn off the adverts for a fee. However it’s still very creepy.

When the recent hoo-ha broke about the spies it wasn’t the NSA or GCHQ involvement I found creepy, nor was it Linden Lab talking to the NSA about virtual worlds. The NY Times article claims that Cory Ondrejka was the senior Linden exec involved and reports:

“In 2007, as the N.S.A. and other intelligence agencies were beginning to explore virtual games, N.S.A. officials met with the chief technology officer for the manufacturer of Second Life, the San Francisco-based Linden Lab. The executive, Cory Ondrejka, was a former Navy officer who had worked at the N.S.A. with a top-secret security clearance.

He visited the agency’s headquarters at Fort Meade, Md., in May 2007 to speak to staff members over a brown bag lunch, according to an internal agency announcement. “Second Life has proven that virtual worlds of social networking are a reality: come hear Cory tell you why!” said the announcement.”

That all sounds very reasonable to me, Cory seems to be using his knowledge of his old industry and showing them the power of virtual worlds, it’s the next part of the article where it all goes a bit tits up:

“It added that virtual worlds gave the government the opportunity “to understand the motivation, context and consequent behaviors of non-Americans through observation, without leaving U.S. soil.””

That’s where it all gets a bit creepy.

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December 9, 2013

Nobody Does It Better, Makes Me Feel Sad For The Rest

Nobody does it half as good as you, baby you’re the best.

Second Life has long had strange issues, for example there is an issue known as “Prim drift” whereby a prim does not seem to be in the location where you last left it, or prims mysteriously seem to disappear and then reappear, it seems there may be an explanation for this!

The Guardian breaks the news: Spy agencies in covert push to infiltrate virtual world of online gaming. Allegedly, The NSA and GCHQ decided that they need to infiltrate The Horde in World Of Warcraft and human avatars in Second Life. Furries everywhere celebrate smugly at this news. This does possibly explain why The Horde seem to win more often than not in the Warsong Gulch battleground in World Of Warcraft.

Not surprisingly Linden Lab haven’t responded to The Guardians requests, The Guardian claims :

“Microsoft declined to comment on the latest revelations, as did Philip Rosedale, the founder of Second Life and former CEO of Linden Lab, the game’s operator. The company’s executives did not respond to requests for comment.”

However in the land of Azeroth, there has been a response :

“The California-based producer of World of Warcraft said neither the NSA nor GCHQ had sought its permission to gather intelligence inside the game. “We are unaware of any surveillance taking place,” said a spokesman for Blizzard Entertainment. “If it was, it would have been done without our knowledge or permission.” “

I’m sure that the NSA and GCHQ are delighted that their covert efforts went undetected by the GM’s in World Of Warcraft, I mean it would be far more embarrassing for them if Blizzard declared “Yeah, our GM’s knew all about it.”

However the article does suggest that Linden Lab were talking to the security services, indeed it seems Linden Lab tried to sell a use case of virtual worlds as being a place where you could observe the behaviours of non US citizens without leaving the USA. I’m sure those agents who quite enjoyed the idea of leaving US soil to observe the behaviours of non US citizens were a tad miffed about this, although wild speculation that they joined the PN or griefed sims with giant penises to wreak revenge over this suggestion have been strenuously denied. The article claims:

“In May 2007, the then-chief operating officer of Second Life gave a “brown-bag lunch” address at the NSA explaining how his game gave the government “the opportunity to understand the motivation, context and consequent behaviours of non-Americans through observation, without leaving US soil“.

Continue reading “Nobody Does It Better, Makes Me Feel Sad For The Rest”