Will Redzone be hoisted by its own petard?

This is not a love song, this is another post about Redzone, which is getting to quite flabbergasting proportions right now for the sheer breathtaking cheek of it all, just when you think it’s safe to go back into the ocean along comes Redzone 2. There are some who think Linden Lab are dangling enough rope for Zfire and the Redzone massive to hang themselves, I’m not quite so convinced but there is something extremely unsavoury going on.

There appeared to be some talks between Linden Lab and Redzone, Zfire appeared to be listening, he agreed to opt in for the hud, he agreed to seek consent via the hud, but the comments on the Redzone forum puts  Linden Lab in the position where they’d like to know where Zfire got the notion to rock the boat.

The new community standards aren’t even dry from the printing press and the creator of the device that seeks to stop griefers, copybotters and does not at all have a primary function of detecting alts, is suggesting ways to circumvent the new community standards, you couldn’t make this up!

Redzone returned triumphantly to the Second Life Marketplace, complete with removal in its description of how it sometimes crashes intruders whilst ejecting them, which was a sensible move considering how stupid it is to claim a device does that. However it’s on the Redzone forum itself that most of the damage is being done and credibility being lost here.

Things start off quite well, Zfire posts:

“GZ did not win per say.
This could be temporary. If 20000+ Tier paying residents united against 700 GZers, I would expect yet another change.
The RedZone system will still ban alts of people on your ban list, as well as alts of Copybots.
Also provide a way for you to view alts if someone insists they are not someone else, ask them to prove it via a background check.”

The background check means the alt needs to give consent to the background check being won, Zfire is recognising the value of consent but things quickly turn seedy, I hope this is just people thinking out loud and Zfire being on the back foot because this simply isn’t acceptable, Zfire states:

“I will make more stand alone objects, free for zRZ owners, that include auto-consent functions if they remain in the sim 60 seconds or longer after being given a notice that they must leave within 60 seconds or will be considered as accepting consent. 60 seconds is more then enough time.”

No! For goodness sake, this is not acceptable at all, assuming consent is completely unethical. There are also requests from Redzone users to be able to see either the initials of alts or see them with part of the name missing, again, no, this is not acting within the spirit of the new community standards.

Meanwhile the TPV’s are still going to implement security features regarding media, Jessica Lyon of Phoenix stated on the Redzone forum:

“So.. I guess it’s time to make a formal post here. While I may control the official position of the Phoenix Viewer Project on matters such as this, I do not control and would make no attempt to control the opinions of the members on this team. That is to say, everyone is entitled to their opinion, and EVERYONE has an opinion… Internally.. we have team members in favor of Rz, and team members against it… Those opinions do NOT reflect the official position of the Project as a whole.

The official position of the Phoenix Viewer Project in regards to the Redzone matter, is neutral.. The project is not in favor of.. nor against Rz. There are valid arguments on both sides of this fence and we will not take sides.

However, we as a team have discussed at great lengths and agreed that users should have the right to control what connections their viewer or computer make to the internet. Because of this, we have accepted and are currently improving a patch that was submitted to us which provides the user a partial url string to which they can allow or deny a connection.

When a user enters a parcel that has a media url, and they have media enabled and the “Media Filter” option enabled, it will prompt the user before allowing the connection and say “The owner of this parcel has requested media at the following location to be loaded by your viewer”… The URL will be parsed beyond the domain, example… “http://sim4328.agni.lindenlab.com:……/…. php?…. /…. “

We feel this implementation provides acceptable privacy for both the visitors and the stream owners by not giving out the full URL. The visitor can then choose to Allow, Deny, Black list, White list. This feature can be enabled or disabled completely by the user in media preferences. The black list and white list will be shipped empty.

Now, while Redzone users may feel this feature is targeting Redzone.. and no amount of statement by me may change that opinion to which you are all entitled too.. I will again state the purpose of this feature for the record. “To provide the user the ‘Right’ to control what connections their viewer makes to the internet.” This is of course no different than the purpose of any firewall.”

Jessica is right here, the control should be in the hands of the user, not in the hands of outside entities. Meanwhile Henri Beauchamp who now runs Cool Viewer has posted the following in his forum:

“Here is a new release of the Cool VL Viewer, available now from http://sldev.free.fr/:

Cool VL Viewer v1.25.0.23 (stable branch, Snowglobe v1.5-based)

New in this release:

• New MediaFilter patch: based on a patch by Sione Lomu, this (largely) reworked patch allows you to authorize or deny individual media and audio streams. See this message for full details.
• Updated SLPluginAndMediaFixes patch: this new version fixes the internal web browser “cache” folder quirk which caused the latter to be written at the root of your filesystem (“/cache” in Linux, “c:\cache” in Windows). See this thread for details.
• Updated ContextMenuTextEntry patch: this new version improves the context menu of input lines and text entries by greying out automatically unavailable actions in the menu (for example, disabling “Copy” when no text is selected).
• Updated RevertUIchanges patch: changed to cope with the new MediaFilter patch.
• Updated CoolPreferences patch: changed to implement the options related to the MediaFilter patch (in the “Miscellaneous” sub-tab of the “Cool features” tab: new checkbox and “Reset filters” button).
• Updated CoolVLViewerBranding patch: Sione Lomu added to the contributors list.

Enjoy ! ”

The patch is designed to assist users with which media streams they allow, this is an attempt to put control back in the hands of the user.

What we really need here is for ZFire to grow up, for Redzone users to understand the damage they’re doing to a product they purport to be trying to protect and for Linden Lab to grow some and nip this in the bud before their new community standards become wafer thin. Redzone users should be seeking consent and informing people of what’s happening with their data all the time, if people are happy then they carry on into the parcel, if they’re not they bugger off and at that stage, they’ve prevented someone from entering their parcel anyway.

ZFire should be working on an ethical solution here, I’m hoping his comments last night were more due to having to take in the new community standards if he really is looking for loopholes, LL need to come down hard on him.

Hopefully later I’ll post something that has nowt to do with Redzone!