Ban all non SL viewers, stop stealing

[Kampu Oyen]

Closed perms merchants hate copybotters, and they should.

But copybotters are also dependent on items being closed perms in order for cracking them to have any special value.

Full perms merchants are actually the natural enemy of copybotters.

If you make all your stuff full permissions, there will be no profit in copybotting it.

And, yes, people WILL still pay for it instead of bugging all their friends to share copies.

[Madeliefste Oh]

Ghehehe, the first sentence in this video: "I want to talk today a little bit about predictable irrationality", turns right on LL.

[Medhue Simoni]

I think you bring up a good point here, which was not the point that I was making when I posted the video.

 

Disclaimer: I'm not speaking for LL or any1 else, these are simply my impressions, as I see it.

 

During the past few years, I think we have seen this kind of stubbornness to not test hypothesis at the Lab, which is kind of funny to even say. The V2 release, I think, was a prime example of this. Granted, whether something is better or not is a vague and subjective thought process, but it can be tested and conclusions determined from those tests in a very general sense. This requires scientific testing tho, not tests simply to prove your own point. So, I would contend that the LL team had a whole set of years where things were just done, with the assumption that everything they did was right. We, as the user, were completely ignored. The MP is another example, and the inworld search would also fit into this category. These are all key parts of the product. I would contend that they are the most important parts of the product when you think about functionality of the whole system.

Now, we have seen some major improvements in the viewer, but the other 2 areas have had little to no real improvements. Yes, there has been work done, but I've seen no attempt by LL to actually compare what we have now, in terms of MP and Inworld Search, to what we had before. If you are not willing to look back at how something was done right, then I think any real success will be very short term. There are very good reasons why things in the past worked.

All that said, I do think we have a new LL that is willing to test things, but I would question their choices as to what to focus on. Plus, I would question Rod's thought process on how things get implemented. In a normal game company, you could probably do things in these ways, and the only person that gets hurt is your own company. The company sees the affects of an issue right away. In our case, LL is 2 to 3 steps removed. So, if they implement something that is not good at all, it will be months before they see this in their profits, in many cases. When we are the 1's that suffer first, it only makes sense that LL is going to get some extremely negative reactions. SL is not a platform you can just willy nilly make big changes, and then just reverse them if things get too bad. By the time LL realizes it, they just lost hundreds of regions and pissed off a good portion of the community. I guess what I'm saying is, trying something new is great, but implementing them with no real testing to see how it impacts the community will result in what we have now. In the past, we have seen lots of things get done, many times without most of the public even knowing about it before hand, and then a reluctance of LL to retract what they've done, or no ability to do so.

Let's all hope that LL is learning from their mistakes, keeping an open mind to the failures of what they implement, and being proactive in fixing them. I fear that in corporate environments, this is an extremely difficult thing to do, as few people stick around long enough to even learn from the mistake. I'd also contend that user groups are not the way to go. They should be dropped totally. All conversations about changes or new things should take place on the forum for all to see. I don't know how many times I've missed stuff that are directly related to what I do because I had no clue that some obscure user group is talking about it. It's just crazy that all these things are so hard to find out about.

 Heck, as a fulltime merchant, I can't even take a week off without missing a ton of stuff that will impact my business. I have friends that take a short break and come back, only to find out all this stuff is different. They come to me and I have to explain to them in hour long conversations what they need to do to fix things. All this because there is no easy way to find any of this out on their own.

 

[Kampu Oyen]

The video echoes what the Heath Brothers say in "Switch", in terms of the way that behaviors that are often attributed to matters of character are better explained by situational variables.

And because I prefer to see things that way in any case, there is a kind of temptation to believe that LL can get itself straight just by fixing the situational variables that are limiting them in producing the behavior which they, themselves want to produce.

But, also being a scientific person, I agree with your lecturer that intuitions have to be tested.

So here's a test:

What situational variables will explain the already-announced box shutoff of 1 June without DD support for breedables as anything other than an intentional service downgrade?

 

[Perrie Juran]

---

Kampu Oyen wrote:

So here's a test:

What situational variables will explain the already-announced box shutoff of 1 June without DD support for breedables as anything other than an intentional service downgrade?

 

---

When did they announce box shut off of June 1  ?????????

"Update (March 31, 2012): While we work to address current Marketplace issues, we will not require any Merchants to migrate listings away from Magic Boxes to Direct Delivery before June 1, 2012."

http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Merchants/Marketplace-and-Direct-Delivery-Update/td-p/1462915

"Not require...before" does not equal "box shut off."

[WADE1 Jya]

---

Perrie Juran wrote:

---

Kampu Oyen wrote:

So here's a test:

What situational variables will explain the already-announced box shutoff of 1 June without DD support for breedables as anything other than an intentional service downgrade?

 

---

When did they announce box shut off of June 1  ?????????

"

Update (March 31, 2012)

: While we work to address current Marketplace issues, we will not require any Merchants to migrate listings away from Magic Boxes to Direct Delivery before June 1, 2012."

http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Merchants/Marketplace-and-Direct-Delivery-Update/td-p/1462915

"Not require...before" does not equal "box shut off."

---

I read that to mean that on June 1st, precisely (not before) we will require all Merchants to migrate all listings away from Magic Boxes to Direct Delivery (because a box shut off happens that day).

---------------------------

As to the thread title, many of you probably missed the threads spammed all throughout the forums earlier this morning openly advertising for some sort of really nasty copybot/griefer/malware/spyware viewer. Luckily, moderators evaporated these threads fairly quickly but I am sure it will be discovered elsewhere & be insanely popular in certain circles. Seeing the proclaimed capabilities of this thing was proof enough for me that hiring the best of the TPV people onboard & then banning all TPVs would be very smart move for Lindens. Start prosecuting all unauthorized network access attempts as this is now a felony under US law.

Scary perhaps shortterm for them to take such definitive action, but the huge longterm benefits can't be ignored.

Closesource it & add some quality industry-grade security -- you know like Apple's got. The security holes here are just too big & they can certainly afford to lose certain crowds that are only here to drag SL down anyway.

[Innula Zenovka]

I saw those spamming threads, too, and what struck me is that the group, and its ripper/griefer viewers, have been around for ages, as their allusion to the "thieves motherload" incident of late 2009 suggested.    The original incident was horrible for the people whose content was ripped, but LL acted swiftly then to rectify things, and people's customers remained loyal and supportive, and, ultimately, not a great deal of long-term damage was done, any more than has been done by subsequent, similar, though smaller scale, exploits.

To my mind, they posted the stuff today to troll people (which, after all, is what they do).     They have no reason to advertise their plans here, after all, other than to alarm people -- which they seem to have succeeded in doing -- and maybe advertise their viewer a bit (not that it's hard to find).    Personally, I can't see why anyone would want to pay a fair bit of money for a ripper viewer when they could far more easily use the same money to buy oodles of L$ in order to obtain stuff legitimately, without downloading a viewer packed full of heaven knows what malware and risking getting machine banned for their trouble.   But I guess there's a few suckers around.

To my mind, talk of banning TPVs is a colossal over-reaction, and, as I keep on saying, wouldn't do a great deal of good. It would inconvenience content thieves, is all, rather than seriously disrupt their activities, and it would cause considerably more inconvenience, disruption and economic damage to LL and residents both than groups like today's spammers could ever, in their wildest dreams,  hope to achieve.

 

[Perrie Juran]

---

WADE1 Jya wrote:

---

Perrie Juran wrote:

---

Kampu Oyen wrote:

So here's a test:

What situational variables will explain the already-announced box shutoff of 1 June without DD support for breedables as anything other than an intentional service downgrade?

 

---

When did they announce box shut off of June 1  ?????????

"

Update (March 31, 2012)

: While we work to address current Marketplace issues, we will not require any Merchants to migrate listings away from Magic Boxes to Direct Delivery before June 1, 2012."

http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Merchants/Marketplace-and-Direct-Delivery-Update/td-p/1462915

"Not require...before" does not equal "box shut off."

---

I read that to mean that on June 1st, precisely (not before) we will require all Merchants to migrate all listings away from Magic Boxes to Direct Delivery (because a box shut off happens that day).

---

My take on it was after they got over the 'WTF Houston we've got a problem' moment and saw that some of the oxygen tanks supporting the Market Place had ruptured, that was their guesstimate on the amount of time it was going to take to fix the problems.

Maybe they could start requiring it come June 1, but if the problems are not resolved by then, how Rodvik could consider it acceptable to risk rupturing more oxygen tanks would be beyond me.

Still, I don't see a deadline expressed in that statement.

[Kampu Oyen]

I understand that "not before" could also mean "after" or "never".

With LL's previous use of language, though, it would be more consistent either with "any time after 11:59 PM on 31 May, but  only once we've had time to first deploy all the associated borks that will make it sort of a moot point".

And by "will not require", I suppose they could also mean "will gladly allow to go out of business anyone who choses not to comply", which could mean a shutoff date before 1 June, even assuming that the whole statement isn't of the same degree of credibility as that in which Brooke told us that no DD code would be deployed without advanced notice to merchants (see 13 September 2011 incident).

[Perrie Juran]

---

Kampu Oyen wrote:

I understand that "not before" could also mean "after" or "never".

With LL's previous use of language, though, it would be more consistent either with "any time after 11:59 PM on 31 May, but  only once we've had time to first deploy all the associated borks that will make it sort of a moot point".

And by "will not require", I suppose they could also mean "will gladly allow to go out of business anyone who choses not to comply", which could mean a shutoff date before 1 June, even assuming that the whole statement isn't of the same degree of credibility as that in which Brooke told us that no DD code would be deployed without advanced notice to merchants (see 13 September 2011 incident).

---

Linden Speak can be as hard to decipher as Klingonese or Ferengi. 

Just like there would be no Teen Merger or Premium Accounts would receive regular gifts.

[Kampu Oyen]

>Linden Speak can be as hard to decipher as Klingonese or Ferengi.

That's why I compare what they've previously said to what they've previously done in order to make sense of what they say they are going to do.

What you can expect, based on the prevailing pattern of precedents:

On 1 June, boxes will be disabled while breedables and items of similar permissions will still not be supported by DD.

 

[Drake1 Nightfire]

---

Kampu Oyen wrote:

>Linden Speak can be as hard to decipher as Klingonese or Ferengi.

That's why I compare what they've previously said to what they've previously done in order to make sense of what they say they are going to do.

What you can expect, based on the prevailing pattern of precedents:

On 1 June, boxes will be disabled while breedables and items of similar permissions will still not be supported by DD.

 

---

Good. I hope they all die of starvation. Selling limited quantity items on the MP takes up space, mainly because they never get taken down when they are sold. Also, there are many many unscrupulous people that are selling empty breedable boxes. 

If they do fix this i see a crap load of people trying to sell off their massive inventory of breedables that wont sell inworld.