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from Al Jazeera, oops the BBC: (easy mistake to make).

The faces and behaviour of online avatars could help identify the people controlling them, scientists believe.

Using both characteristics, researchers hope to develop techniques for checking whether the digital characters are who they claim to be.

Such information could be used in situations where login details are not visible or for law enforcement.

Impersonation of avatars is expected to become a growing problem as real life and cyberspace increasingly merge.



http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14277728

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That link won't let me copy and paste a line from it, but what does it mean impersonations of avatars?  Do they mean real people as in celebrities?  Well, that is against the rules on LL.  You cannot make an avatar that looks like a celebrity, nor create any team logos, and so on and so forth.  As far as LL also, you cannot even try to over-ride intellectual property right by using a letter, such as N1ke to replace Nike.  That is against the TOS. 

I found the article lacking in information and poorly written.   Nor did it even have a point?  Such as this character could describe this personality type for example.  Very poorly written article. 

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Mayalily wrote:

That link won't let me copy and paste a line from it, but what does it mean impersonations of avatars?  Do they mean real people as in celebrities?  Well, that is against the rules on LL.  You cannot make an avatar that looks like a celebrity, nor create any team logos, and so on and so forth.

I found the article lacking in information and poorly written.   Nor did it even have a point?  Such as this character could describe this personality type for example.  Very poorly written article. 

 

i hack your password and take your avatar over, this system will check if it is the same person behind the avatar by comparing behaviour.

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Misleading title. =]

No-one's going to 'check' any avatar identities, it's designed for 2D-web services that use 'usernames'. The system's designed to compare a baseline of username behaviour (e.g. Compare how Dogboat usually posts) to presented behavior (e.g. the post Dogboat is typing right now) as a way to 'tell' if the two match.

It's more or less the same as the way credit card companies detect unusual behaviour on bank accounts. Most web stores already do this in some fashion.

It's tricky at present because websites often make the fundamental logical assumption that if a person knows your username and password, that person must be the user to which the username belongs. With passwords being increasingly easy to crack, this should be pretty helpful and not at all scary.

Hope that helps.

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might be interesting to know we already have something similar in place in SL.... your login location information is tracked and correlated to your RL location. This system has already been used to track who gets charged what VAT fees, and has occasionally been used to verify correct owners of an account after their account has been compromised.

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Freya Mokusei wrote:

Misleading title. =]

No-one's going to 'check' any avatar identities, it's designed for 2D-web services that use 'usernames'. The system's designed to compare a baseline of username behaviour (e.g. Compare how Dogboat usually posts) to presented behavior (e.g. the post Dogboat is typing right now) as a way to 'tell' if the two match.

It's more or less the same as the way credit card companies detect unusual behaviour on bank accounts. Most web stores already do this in some fashion.

It's tricky at present because websites often make the fundamental logical assumption that if a person knows your username and password, that person must be the user to which the username belongs. With passwords being increasingly easy to crack, this should be pretty helpful and not at all scary.

Hope that helps.

it isn't misleading at all.

a quote from the article:

Avatars are typically used to represent players in online games such as World of Warcraft and in virtual communities like Second Life.

As their numbers grow, it will become important to find ways to identify those we meet regularly, according to Dr Roman Yampolskiy from the University of Louisville.

Working out if their controller is male or female has an obvious commercial benefit, he said. But discovering that the same person controlled different avatars in separate spaces would be even more useful.



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Great.   A very useful advance in technology.    So now we'll be able to profile avatars in various virtual worlds, but we still can't profile terrorists to keep them from blowing up airplanes.  But it's much more important to know if two avatars in SL are actually the same person.   I'll bet this study was undertaken only after Dr Yampolskiy, et al, got a huge government grant to study this weighty problem too.

And I can't wait to see what happens when the ACLU sink their claws into this one.   Think I'll send the local office this link and get the ball rolling.

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Dogboat Taurog wrote:

it isn't misleading at all.


Apologies, I likely simplified too much in my explanation.

There's an implied difference between actions that take place as an 'account holder' (transactions, billing, etc.) that is omitted. There's no intention to ask any avatar for identifying papers, or to check that information supplied by the actual users is accurate, beyond that which is required for accounting purposes.

It divides up into two sections; profiling and fraud-prevention.

Profiling is the commercial aspect, determining whether "Dogboat Taurog" represents a male or female persona, and thus whether people should market paintball guns or sewing kits (to use two gender-typical examples) toward you.

Fraud-prevention is the analysis of the behaviour of a user against the established baseline, for accounting/billing purposes and preventing your account from being exploited. As you say, the article does suggest this might also be used to tie multiple accounts together; again mostly as a way to prevent fraud.

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when the net gets to invasive i'll probably just ride my horse more and cut the net out of my life as far as using it for communication of any kind..

i'm just really getting tired of all these different ways to tell who we are in the name of protection..

scared people buy anything that says protection on it like it is going out of style..

i don't mind giving information..i just don't care for someone or something assuming information..

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Ceka Cianci wrote:

when the net gets to invasive i'll probably just ride my horse more and cut the net out of my life as far as using it for communication of any kind..

i'm just really getting tired of all these different ways to tell who we are in the name of protection..

scared people buy anything that says protection on it like it is going out of style..

i don't mind giving information..i just don't care for someone or something assuming information..

it seems to be the trend nowadays, facebook and googleplus seem to be demanding real names, quite likely for profiling and advertising.

i read an article about a japanese system that used a camera to detect your sex and mood and gave you a corresponding advert.

bladerunner here we come.

as you say you might leave the system, i don't think you will be alone.

 

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No, not really.  It should have read impersonation of a username with some explation of how they are going to collect the data, and why they are collecting it, such as security protection, etc.  Not read impersonation of avatars. 

What's it's really saying, is it is going to detect how the person writes behind the avatar to help spot a possible hack into an account, or to try to send us more spam or invade our privacy, as other's are posting about in this thread. 

ETA:  No wonder users use voice and rarely post on the forum.  I think some are already trying to beat this spam and/or invasion of privacy. 

Mine and rl bf's account got hacked through Paypal, although when things are bought that are way out of sync to the regular activity; it's pretty easy for the credit card companies to figure out who did the hacking.

Profiling I'm not worried about; they've been doing that for years, and it's called phishing or data mining. 

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Mayalily wrote:

No, not really.  It should have read impersonation of a username with some explation of how they are going to collect the data, and why they are collecting it, such as security protection, etc.  Not read impersonation of avatars. 

What's it's really saying, is it is going to detect how the person writes behind the avatar to help spot a possible hack into an account, or to try to send us more spam or invade our privacy, as other's are posting about in this thread. 

ETA:  No wonder users use voice and rarely post on the forum.  I think some are already trying to beat this spam and/or invasion of privacy. 

Mine and rl bf's account got hacked through Paypal, although when things are bought that are way out of sync to the regular activity; it's pretty easy for the credit card companies to figure out who did the hacking.

Profiling I'm not worried about; they've been doing that for years, and it's called phishing or data mining. 

not just text, also behaviours, this is why study of avatars is so unique and useful to data collectors.

how you walk even, where you go. thats why they used SL, Wow and Entropia.

and not facebook or any other text only site, you may need to read it again.

ps, phishing is not what you think it is.

phishing is the bank scams which ask you to put your details and pin/password into a false front site.

they then use your info to get your money. anything that is asking for your details and claiming you are registered with them is phishing.

 

 

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Oh okay, I'm understanding this a little more now.

See, even you are a more informative writer on this subject.  That article had a lot of grey areas that needed filling in of the details.

Anyhow, on the subject of our avatar behaviors and such, that is very invasive, and it sounds like something to make SL PG or G rated only, and is trying to make these MMO's something more like Facebook but with avatars but keep it G or PG rated.  Though I visited My Space a few times when it first came out and I found it pretty boring even before Facebook.  But the reason I bring up My Space is because My Space could get a little racy at times, so I wouldn't exactly classify My Space as PG or G from what I had read or experienced; it got sexually out there, sometimes. 

One thing I don't like is that adults pay for the internet.  They should just create children's browsers, and let adults block their children from adult browsers. 

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Probably, but if browsers were separate and password protected where only the parents knew the password to adult browsers, it sounds like it sure would be a whole lot easier to keep kids/teenagers off of adult websites, and allow the adults to have the internet which they are paying for.

 

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of course none of them works worth a flip. it only takes one kid to access one hack, or guess one password and set up forwarding, and all their friends and friends' frineds to the nth degree are back in... but it's a fun game for the smarter and more social ones... people are so easy to hack =D

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I know I've heard that computers are so easy to hack and especially Windows, and they want us to do online banking and cancel almost all the banking jobs?  I don't like being forced with the computer when it comes to my banking info, though I consent to eBay, Paypal, and SL.  I have given SL my banking info and I feel it's fairly safe.  I only say fairly because my rl bf's and mine Paypal account was broken into once, but they bought beds - almost sounds like someone within Paypal who lost their job?  Perhaps, perhaps not.   However, the authorities do not tell you the person's name; they just let you know it's taken care of.  But it is no picnic to go through when it involes your banking/credit card info.  It's not a fun time at all to be hacked. 

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