Linden Lab is building a NEW virtual world

[Madelaine McMasters]

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Thomas Galbreus wrote:

I haven't heard it before; 

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Sexting

Now you have. I'm usually the one who's oblivious to pop culture, it's nice to have company. ;-).

 

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Thomas Galbreus wrote:

I haven't heard it before; is there a specific service provider who's users get stigmatised in the public eye for alleged frequent behaviour like that?

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Nope, and I don't think SL users get stigmatized either. If they do, there are 12,000+ ( just checked here) people a day willing to accept the stigma.

 

[Freya Mokusei]

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Madelaine McMasters wrote:

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Thomas Galbreus wrote:

I haven't heard it before; is there a specific service provider who's users get stigmatised in the public eye for alleged frequent behaviour like that?

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Nope, and I don't think SL users get stigmatized either. If they do, there are 12,000+ ( just checked

here

) people a day willing to accept the stigma.

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Yeah, this stigmatisation effect doesn't exist. People love to shame other people, but it doesn't change behaviour.

Look at Tinder, Grindr, Reddit, SL, IMVU, Facebook, the list is literally endless. Sex sells, always has always will.

Additionally, a large number of prudes are highly sexually deviant. They buy sex and sex-related services more than those who are accepting and comfortable in a real life environment. Stigmatisation doesn't even work where it should work.

The idea that it could happen 'when no-one is looking' is hilarious too. Agenda detected~

[Rayzer Haggwood]

LL has in place a system where you have to be age verified to go to an adult sim. If you are not of age in your country then you cannot get into a adult sim.

 SL is for everyone to enjoy. Every faith, every religion, every sexual preference, every musical preference etc.. etc....

Everyone needs to be tolerant of aspects of a virtual world they don't enjoy, but others may enjoy greatly. Everyone in SL is creative in their own special way. That creativity is what makes SL the incredibly wonderful world it is.

 SL2 should be apealing to an even larger audience of users so the creativity level will increase. A steril world will die. A diverse world of many cultures and activites will definately flurish. The bottom line for LL is that they need to appeal to a very diverse and large user base in order to keep users active and inworld. Hense the developement of SL2. It's going to be good. It's going to allow highly creative people to flurish. Not everyone will agree on everything LL does.

[Perrie Juran]

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Rayzer Haggwood wrote:

LL has in place a system where you have to be age verified to go to an adult sim. If you are not of age in your country then you cannot get into a adult sim.

 <snip>

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The only verification right now is "self verification" based on the date of birth you provide at sign up.

The only exception to this is in the event someone is accused of being underage (an AR) and LL asks that a person provide RL credentials.

The old age verification system was dropped several years ago.  It really was a short lived thing.

[Innula Zenovka]

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Perrie Juran wrote:

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Rayzer Haggwood wrote:

LL has in place a system where you have to be age verified to go to an adult sim. If you are not of age in your country then you cannot get into a adult sim.

 <snip>

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The only verification right now is "self verification" based on the date of birth you provide at sign up.

The only exception to this is in the event someone is accused of being underage (an AR) and LL asks that a person provide RL credentials.

The old age verification system was dropped several years ago.  It really was a short lived thing.

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When they ditched the old, hopelessly flawed, verification system, I remember Viale Linden telling the Adult Content User Group that almost all the rest of the internet used "self verification" and LL had decided that there was no reason for SL to adopt a more robust or restrictive system than that used by, for example, Blogger.

If I had teenage children who had unsupervised internet access, I'd be pleasantly surprised if Adult SL was the worst thing they encountered online, considering what they could find simply by turning off Safe Search in Google or Bing.   And I would be considerably more worried about people  they might encounter in social networking sites rather than in SL.   Because of my RL job, I am familiar with several cases of  children and adults being sexually assaulted in RL by people they met on social networking and instant messaging sites.   That is not the case with SL, as far as I know..

[Freya Mokusei]

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Innula Zenovka wrote:

I remember Viale Linden telling the Adult Content User Group that almost all the rest of the internet used "self verification" and LL had decided that there was no reason for SL to adopt a more robust or restrictive system than that used by, for example, Blogger.

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This is still true today. There is - as I'm sure you know - no such thing as a universally-accepted, entirely unspoofable method of testing age. None at all. The reality is that it's both impractical and unfeasible to rest this pressure on a service provider (esp. when a service provider has so many other exceptions to the law). It's more ridiculous to place this pressure on the end-users, who have no legal or technical ability to determine real life age. It's a hundred-times more likely that such pressure is socially conservative security theater, adding a legislative risk to activities that the state can't control.

There's only one role that gets to tell kids what to do with their spare time: Parenting (and if one poster is to be believed, German law) have some catching up to do with reality. I don't see how this could be anyone elses problem. It has never been Second Life's role to take on the rules of the most repressed countries and mindsets as a baseline.

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Innula Zenovka wrote:

 That is not the case with SL, as far as I know..

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There was one case that hit the SL 'news' that affected RL minors, as far as I can recall. Was not the medium for abuse (obviously), but instead for communication between abusers. This is typical risk for any online messaging service, and would not have been avoided with better age or identity verification.

[Rayzer Haggwood]

Hmmm... I wasn't aware they had dropped the age verification... From what I've seen, it used to work pretty good. Guess it didn't work to their satisfaction.

[Thomas Galbreus]

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kiramanell wrote:

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 trying to 'engage in sex in SL with an avatar run by someone that is under age,' as Drake1 put it, has

nothing

to do with pornography. It's called c

hild solicitation

, and can be defined as 'An attempt to convince a minor to engage in a sexual act or conduct.' An entirely different law.

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I still think clicking a poseball and watching the effect is rather not a "sexual act" but causing / distributing / consuming a depiction of a sexual act. It would still be child abuse according to the German law though if the depiction is pornographic and exposed to a person who is 14 or younger - because showing pornography to such a person is listed as one form of child abuse.

 

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kiramanell wrote:

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 Pornography is generally seen as "Sill photography or video footage that contains explicit and (often) intensive depictions of sexual acts." Engaging in (legal) sex with someone in SL is, therefore, not pornography at all.

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You mean because pixels showing avatars are no photographs or videos? According to the German law and the English Wikipedia, depictions in all media can be pornography, including pixel animations.

 

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kiramanell wrote:

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 But, you will just say that any sexual depiction is pornography

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I think any sexual contet in SL is in high risk of being classified as pornographic, but to be precise: According to the German law, not any depiction of sex is pornographic, but depictions that focus on the sexual act itself, that have not a lot of narrative around it, that emphasize genitals etc. (Those genitals I saw popping up on Marketplace were pretty oversized - if that is as frequent as oversized female breasts and male muscles it might be the norm in "adult" SL.)

It might be possible to explain successfully in court that some mild animations are not pornographic according to the definition in he law - but I guess it would be quite uncomfortable to sit in that court chair.

 

According to this Wikipedia article the definition of pornography in the US law seems rather broader than in Germany.

I guess US citizens can be more relaxed about it only because the US law seems to have no problem with an age "verification" that consits of simply clicking a button that sais "I am at least 18 years old".

[Thomas Galbreus]

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Innula Zenovka wrote:

Has any German user ever actually been prosecuted under these laws that so concern you?

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I don't know - but I think I read somewhere  that about ten German police officers are present in SL to look for offenses. Ten are not many, so most will be lucky.

 

These laws don't concern me a lot because I am not into the "adult" content anyway. My concern is that SL could have more people and a better reputation. I stopped telling people about using SL because I don't like the reactions.

[Thomas Galbreus]

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Madelaine McMasters wrote:

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 If they do, there are 12,000+ ( just checked

here

) people a day willing to accept the stigma.

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That number is high enough to keep SL in business and provide reasonable profit, but it  is still a small number compared to World Of Warcraft, Minecraft, YouTube or Facebook  - despite SL having more variety than WoW, better graphics and more persistence than Minecraft, more interaction than YouTube and better communication tools than Facebook.

[Drake1 Nightfire]

Is it wrong that i took the sound from that clip, added a dry humping animation and made a gesture out of it?

[Drake1 Nightfire]

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Thomas Galbreus wrote:

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Madelaine McMasters wrote:

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 If they do, there are 12,000+ ( just checked

here

) people a day willing to accept the stigma.

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That number is high enough to keep SL in business and provide reasonable profit, but it  is still a small number compared to

World Of Warcraft, Minecraft, YouTube or Facebook 

- despite SL having more variety than WoW, better graphics and more persistence than Minecraft, more interaction than YouTube and better communication tools than Facebook.

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None of those are in the same category as SL.. WoW and Minecraft are games, straight up games. You cant built in WoW and the building in Minecraft is done solely in Minecraft, no user created content. Not like SL has anyway.

YouTube and Facebook are nothing like SL.. At all. YouTube makes money off ads, that's it, that is the only way they make money. Facebook does the same but adds in games you can buy things in.. Better communication tools? YouTube has the comments section. I will grant you, chat in Facebook never has lag. But you can't have a group conversation.

Show me one serious Platform that is like SL that is as popular.. Just one.

[Thomas Galbreus]

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Drake1 Nightfire wrote:

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None of those are in the same category as SL.

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Wow, you found that out all by yourself?

Of course they are not the same, but they have overlapping features, and where they overlap with SL, I find SL better.

Not so much overlapping with Youtube, but I included that because I find it strange that more people use a platform for passive consumption of 2D clips than an interactive 3D world.

 

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Drake1 Nightfire wrote:

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the building in Minecraft is done solely in Minecraft, no user created content.

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What do you mean? You don't consider it user created unless done with external programs?

[JoJo Aurelia]

This all has me thinking reading all of these responses. As I said before, when I first joined SL, I didn't really "notice" the sex thing for a good long time, and until I searched for it. I had my settings set to G when I joined, knowing in advance I'd probably not be looking for sex. So, I'm thinking my point was mute, because I recall when I changed it to A, in my search I was getting "Rape Clubs" and really, yikes, graphic images. I visited a few adult clubs and was a bit shocked at the gifs and pictures, not really the avatar sex thing, because, well... it's an avatar. But, another thing, a few times I did meet under age people in M clubs. One was 13 and one was 11. This was before the teen grid closed. The 13 year old girl was soliciting for sex. I reported her and they removed her account within 1 hour. So, from that experience, I think there can be young kids in SL. Now, the other point that had me thinking, most "kids" haven't heard of Second Life. I talk to a lot of people and bring up SL and no one has heard if it. On the chance they have, it's something they thought closed. Kids today, I feel, are not interested in Second Life. They want action, purpose, prizes. They're on SnapChat and apps with their phones. They're into the newest things we've not even heard of yet! So, I kinda don't think it's a serious problem. If a child comes in for the purpose of sexual activity, I'd really question how they found out about SL and what goes on there.

[Drake1 Nightfire]

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Thomas Galbreus wrote:

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Drake1 Nightfire wrote:

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None of those are in the same category as SL.

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Wow, you found that out all by yourself?

 

No need to be rude.

Of course they are not the same, but they have overlapping features, and where they overlap with SL, I find SL better.

Like what?

Not so much overlapping with Youtube, but I included that because I find it strange that more people use a platform for passive consumption of 2D clips than an interactive 3D world.

 

Cute cat videos don't compare to SL in any way, shape or form. Saying people use YouTube more is like saying people watch Television more than they use SL.  You don't say?

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Drake1 Nightfire wrote:

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the building in Minecraft is done solely in Minecraft, no user created content.

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What do you mean? You don't consider it user created unless done with external programs?

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Nope. I don't. Stacking blocks and using the programs within the game to make things for the game are not user created content. They are following a set of inputs to make something. User created content is something built completely with their own imagination, not just slapping components together  to follow a design.

Tell me, what have you made in Minecraft that No one else could? Creating something means you actually create, not follow directions. "oh look, i took these parts and assembled a fence." You didn't create anything, you assembled.

[Thomas Galbreus]

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Drake1 Nightfire wrote:

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Thomas Galbreus wrote:

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Wow, you found that out all by yourself?

 

No need to be rude.

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My goodness, what a hypocrite.

(Before that he got moderated here for calling me "moron".)

 

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Drake1 Nightfire wrote:

Saying people use YouTube more is like saying people watch Television more than they use SL.

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I find it equally strange if people watch more television than use interactive media. I don't own a TV set anymore.

 

ETA:

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Drake1 Nightfire wrote:

Stacking blocks and using the programs within the game to make things for the game are not user created content.

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I find that rather rude towards prim builders. You could also say using Blender is just stacking polygons.

[JoJo Aurelia]

I see it's a debate from a few people... anyways... peace and love.

[Drake1 Nightfire]

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Thomas Galbreus wrote:

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Drake1 Nightfire wrote:

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Thomas Galbreus wrote:

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Wow, you found that out all by yourself?

 

No need to be rude.

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My goodness, what a hypocrite.

(Before that he got moderated here for calling me "moron".)

 

Did I? I thought i edited that myself.. How odd. Apparently you have inside info on the workings of the moderators. 

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Drake1 Nightfire wrote:

Saying people use YouTube more is like saying people watch Television more than they use SL.

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I find it equally strange if people watch more television than use interactive media. I don't own a TV set anymore.

 

ETA:

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Drake1 Nightfire wrote:

Stacking blocks and using the programs within the game to make things for the game are not user created content.

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I find that rather rude towards prim builders . You could also say using Blender is just stacking polygons.

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They are not just stacking blocks, they are actually building things. You can't compare Minecraft to SL. You were the one that said "You don't consider it user created unless done with external programs?" Now you are saying Blender is ok? News flash, that is an external program. And you are being obtuse if you think blender is just stacking polygons..

Why don't you quote the whole thing in context?

Drake1 Nightfire wrote:

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the building in Minecraft is done solely in Minecraft, no user created content.

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Thomas Galbreus wrote:

What do you mean? You don't consider it user created unless done with external programs?

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Nope. I don't. Stacking blocks and using the programs within the game to make things for the game are not user created content. They are following a set of inputs to make something. User created content is something built completely with their own imagination, not just slapping components together  to follow a design.

 

[Thomas Galbreus]

Don't feel ignored, I just thought your (interesting and in places frightening) post needs no commentation.

[Thomas Galbreus]

I don't get your point. People build entire castles in Minecraft. It's like saying building things with Lego blocks requires no imagination.

[Madelaine McMasters]

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Thomas Galbreus wrote:

 I find it strange that more people use a platform for passive consumption of 2D clips than an interactive 3D world.

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Thomas! You shouldn't be surprised by this at all. People generally prefer passive activities (Oh, I do love a good oxymoron). Obesity and diabetes are on the rise in the developed world because we'd rather sit and eat processed food than exercise and cook from scratch.

That said, we are social creatures, so if you can maximize human interaction while minimizing effort, you win. I think that explains Facebook's and Linden Lab's relative market capitalizations.

[irihapeti]

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Thomas Galbreus wrote:

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There are also people who consent to cannibals eating them. No problem then?

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not for the cannibals. altho given all the processed food people eat these days. not like the olden days. the eatees probably need be smoked longer i think

[Sparks Racecourse]

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Freya Mokusei wrote:

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This is still true today. There is - as I'm sure you know - no such thing as a universally-accepted, entirely unspoofable method of testing age. None at all. The reality is that it's both impractical and unfeasible to rest this pressure on a service provider (esp. when a service provider has so many other exceptions to the law). It's more ridiculous to place this pressure on the end-users, who have no legal or technical ability to determine real life age. It's a hundred-times more likely that such pressure is socially conservative security theater, adding a legislative risk to activities that the state can't control.

There's only one role that gets to tell kids what to do with their spare time: Parenting (and if one poster is to be believed, German law) have some catching up to do with reality. I don't see how this could be anyone elses problem. It has never been Second Life's role to take on the rules of the most repressed countries and mindsets as a baseline.

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Really?   I guess you never heard of Card Logix.  http://www.cardlogix.com/docs/whitepapers/CardLogix-Age-Verification-for-Online-Gaming-WP.pdf 

http://www.cardlogix.com/docs/whitepapers/CardLogix-WP-FAQs-for-Age-Verification.pdf

Primary being developed for Online gaming industry.  Ever been to casino and someone ask for your identification?   In my early 20's, I went to Las Vegas and got carded at a local casino.  This new technology is coming to the onliine Gaming.   The problem with the old secondlife method is that a third party held the information, but with this smart card technology.  Then it is embedded on the chip.  Most PC's come with a webcam and fingerprint scanner for secure log on.  Only one person can unlock the data as it is transmitted via a hardware secure connection with the website. 

 

 

 

[kiramanell]

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Sparks Racecourse wrote:

Primary being developed for Online gaming industry.  Ever been to casino and someone ask for your identification?   In my early 20's, I went to Las Vegas and got carded at a local casino.  This new technology is coming to the onliine Gaming.   The problem with the old secondlife method is that a third party held the information, but with this smart card technology.  Then it is embedded on the chip.  Most PC's come with a webcam and fingerprint scanner for secure log on.  Only one person can unlock the data as it is transmitted via a hardware secure connection with the website. 

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Really? Finger-printing? Biometric data on a chip? Why don't you add a retina scan, while you're at it?! Seriously, you've been watching way too many movies if you think this kinda James Bond stuff will be commonplace for gaming, LOL,

If you read the article further, you can see your casino example was apt, as the system seems designed with online gambling in mind, Linden Lab is never going to implement this purile cloak & dagger stuff, just to satisy the obsession of 1 German user who thinks every pixel is pornography.

Ultimately, the onus is on the user not to lie about their age: not on LL to prove they aren't.

[Freya Mokusei]

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Sparks Racecourse wrote:

Really?   I guess you never heard of Card Logix. 

http://www.cardlogix.com/docs/whitepapers/CardLogix-Age-Verification-for-Online-Gaming-WP.pdf

 

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You're right, I hadn't. Thanks for this information - even though it doesn't meet my definition (it's not at all universally-accepted, nor will it ever be). Most PC's do not come with a camera or fingerprint reader.

It's an interesting toy project, but ID cards and biometrics are both dead-ends for wide acceptance. From a light reading, it looks like they've thrown every idea at a wall and mangled an identity system out of it. Biometric data stored on-the-card is pretty dangerous. I would be surprised if this Card Logix system couldn't be spoofed by co-piloting - someone verifying and then leaving an unverified user at the controls - pretty simple, turns these expensive toys into a pointless exercise.

High compliance costs and zero practical sense make this idea non-viable in a free-to-play online market. As above, Casino's are a vastly different use-case, where identity verification has a financial pay-off and is heralded as positive security - both do not exist in Second Life/virtual worlds as a whole.