Second Life in the News

[Love Zhaoying]

9 minutes ago, Beth Macbain said:

Love, you're doing just as most people do, and that is what I find troublesome. No evidence has been presented. You are choosing to believe the woman,

I am giving her the benefit of the doubt (until the case is “settled” one way or another). I didn’t mean I literally believe her, but I have no reason to disbelieve her either.

[Whirly Fizzle]

I'm surprised this didn't hit the forums before the Wired article. Maybe it did & the mods swiftly removed the thread/s.

Seeing as this thread hasn't been removed yet, I guess it's ok to discuss it.

The first I heard of any problems were via Ms Pearlman's twitter a few weeks ago. I was following her because before she was fired she was "Maya Sansar".
Thread - worth reading the whole thing.:

Of particular note is this screenshot from the court docs where Patch & the Moles get a mention:

 

Both Inara & NWN blogged about the Twitter thread & lawsuit long before the Wired article:

Inara: https://modemworld.me/2019/08/01/linden-lab-in-wrongful-termination-lawsuit-over-alleged-cybersecurity-law-violations/

NWN: https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2019/07/linden-lab-tilia-second-life-lawsuit-kavya-pearlman.html

Not really sure what to make of the whole shebang to be honest.
Though Linden has always struck me as being extremely diverse & non-discriminatory with their staff hires.
There are a lot of women in high positions within the company - one is on the board of directors,  5 women are listed as upper management.

Also several RL Female Lindens who interact with us users inworld & on the forum are in high positions, eg) Grumpity Linden who is Director of Product.
Linden also enthusiastically support Pride & quite a lot of Lindens are openly gay.
I also know of more then one Linden who is transgender.
Linden Lab just does not strike me as a company that would discriminate against a staff member for being female or a person of colour or being in any minority group at all.

 

[Love Zhaoying]

I think it is interesting that there is not much discussion of the part of the story where the person at the center of the suit supposedly complained about well-known, heavily-discussed bad and tawdry issues in SL, but was rebuffed/ignored.

Do y’all just not find that part interesting, because “we all knew” about those things? (At my company, they have “we all knew” files in case certain bad things happen, so when they look back, they will see that they were fully aware of the issue.)

[Innula Zenovka]

2 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

I am giving her the benefit of the doubt (until the case is “settled” one way or another). I didn’t mean I literally believe her, but I have no reason to disbelieve her either.

You do realise that's not the way civil cases work, I hope.   That is, the respondent (the civil equivalent of the defendant, or LL in this case) enjoys the benefit of the doubt and is assumed to be innocent until the plaintiff has established her case "on the preponderance of the evidence."

I'm also not sure what "not literally believing her" (as opposed to ... "figuratively believing her", whatever that might mean?) involves.   

Personally, I'm suspending judgment one way or the other, since I know nothing about facts of the case, but I'll be surprised if her side of stands up to rigorous and impartial examination (but I was surprised when Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the Labour Party, when Leave won the Brexit referendum, when Donald Trump was sworn in as President and by lots of other things, too, so that's no real guide). 

[Love Zhaoying]

7 minutes ago, Whirly Fizzle said:

Of particular note is this screenshot from the court docs where Patch & the Moles get a mention:

So..maybe this explains why we got Tilia?

[Sammy Huntsman]

7 minutes ago, Whirly Fizzle said:

I'm surprised this didn't hit the forums before the Wired article. Maybe it did & the mods swiftly removed the thread/s.

Seeing as this thread hasn't been removed yet, I guess it's ok to discuss it.

The first I heard of any problems were via Ms Pearlman's twitter a few weeks ago. I was following her because before she was fired she was "Maya Sansar".
Thread - worth reading the whole thing.:

Of particular note is this screenshot from the court docs where Patch & the Moles get a mention:

 

Both Inara & NWN blogged about the Twitter thread & lawsuit long before the Wired article:

Inara: https://modemworld.me/2019/08/01/linden-lab-in-wrongful-termination-lawsuit-over-alleged-cybersecurity-law-violations/

NWN: https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2019/07/linden-lab-tilia-second-life-lawsuit-kavya-pearlman.html

Not really sure what to make of the whole shebang to be honest.
Though Linden has always struck me as being extremely diverse & non-discriminatory with their staff hires.
There are a lot of women in high positions within the company - one is on the board of directors,  5 women are listed as upper management.

Also several RL Female Lindens who interact with us users inworld & on the forum are in high positions, eg) Grumpity Linden who is Director of Product.
Linden also enthusiastically support Pride & quite a lot of Lindens are openly gay.
I also know of more then one Linden who is transgender.
Linden Lab just does not strike me as a company that would discriminate against a staff member for being female or a person of colour or being in any minority group at all.

 

I am taking a very neutral position on this, until more evidence hits the light and we know what actually happened. I am not taking sides. But I do agree with you, I don't see LL as being the discriminatory company, as you said. They are a very diverse company. So until more evidence hits the public, I am taking a neutral stance on this one.

[Love Zhaoying]

4 minutes ago, Innula Zenovka said:

Personally, I'm suspending judgment one way or the other

Exactly what I meant by “neither believing nor disbelieving”.

[Amina Sopwith]

47 minutes ago, Beth Macbain said:

On the contrary, I adore us women. We're the bomb-diggity.

Absolutely. That's why I was very careful to state that I know that internalised misogyny, though it's a related phenomenon, was not what was happening here. It's more a case of women being, very understandably, extremely anxious not to give credence to what apparently looks like a spurious claim. They don't want to give any ammunition to the "this never happens and it's all a crock" people. Totally makes sense. But I can understand why, to someone who's not been on the receiving end of that, or at least not to the same extent and with all the associated misogynistic stereotypes, it could look like a simple women-on-woman pile-on.

I'd be interested to know how much bad feeling would be generated against this woman if her claim is thrown out, against how much bad feeling there is against the existing unchallenged sexism in the workplace. I've no way of measuring it empirically but I think it would be interesting to know.
 

Edited August 18, 2019 by Amina Sopwith

[Love Zhaoying]

12 minutes ago, Whirly Fizzle said:

Though Linden has always struck me as being extremely diverse & non-discriminatory with their staff hires.
There are a lot of women in high positions within the company - one is on the board of directors,  5 women are listed as upper management.

Also several RL Female Lindens who interact with us users inworld & on the forum are in high positions, eg) Grumpity Linden who is Director of Product.
Linden also enthusiastically support Pride & quite a lot of Lindens are openly gay.
I also know of more then one Linden who is transgender.
Linden Lab just does not strike me as a company that would discriminate against a staff member for being female or a person of colour or being in any minority group at all.

I see a possibility that the suit is not “frivolous”, but at the same time the perceived offenses were not intended.

[Love Zhaoying]

3 minutes ago, Amina Sopwith said:

Going on many other cases, overall I think it's more likely that she really does believe she's been discriminated against, even if she's wrong.

Yes!

[Love Zhaoying]

5 minutes ago, Amina Sopwith said:

At any rate, if a man sees what looks to him like women piling in on another woman, it's good to understand that there really is a misogynistic backdrop in society that women, quite understandably, do not wish to be judged by.

This is fascinating.

[Love Zhaoying]

Why am I (seemingly) the only male in this thread? Asking for myself.

[Luna Bliss]

7 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Why am I (seemingly) the only male in this thread? Asking for myself.

A token male was needed for the thread. 

[Beth Macbain]

8 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

I think it is interesting that there is not much discussion of the part of the story where the person at the center of the suit supposedly complained about well-known, heavily-discussed bad and tawdry issues in SL, but was rebuffed/ignored.

Do y’all just not find that part interesting, because “we all knew” about those things? (At my company, they have “we all knew” files in case certain bad things happen, so when they look back, they will see that they were fully aware of the issue.)

It's not that I don't find it interesting, but that isn't what the lawsuit is about. She can't sue because LL didn't (to her knowledge) do what she thinks they should do. 

In my mind it's a completely separate matter. I'm by no means a cyber security expert, but I am a woman as well as a non-Christian who has worked for everything from companies with something like 60,000 employees to small businesses with less than 10, so I do feel somewhat qualified to comment on my gut feelings in regards to the reasons she's suing. In my 34 years in the workforce, I've seen and been on the receiving end, of some pretty vile behavior - sexually from men, and overall from "Christians". It is so much better now than it was 34 years ago, but it absolutely still exists. When you work in the Bible Belt, the religious discrimination and harassment is still quite prevalent and ugly. 

I do know my information has never been leaked due to a security breech by LL, and I'm assuming Moles have to sign some pretty strict NDAs, etc., and I'm not really concerned about them having access to my account and I can see reasons why they might need to, and I trust gmail's security more than I do most other companies, if that part of the lawsuit is true. 

People get mad because they believe LL doesn't take security seriously enough, and then when they take steps like Tilia, people get mad because they're taking steps to be more secure. Damned if they do, damned if they don't. I just know that I don't have enough knowledge of that subject to really go into any sort of depth on it. 

We call them CYA files in my company... "Cover your a**". I have plenty of them, too.

[Love Zhaoying]

6 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

A token male was needed for the thread. 

..was a token male required to start the thread?

[Love Zhaoying]

4 minutes ago, Beth Macbain said:

In my mind it's a completely separate matter. I'm by no means a cyber security expert

The way I read the article, the “separate matter” is issues she thought that she was hired to help deal with..

[LittleMe Jewell]

57 minutes ago, Beth Macbain said:

5 hours ago, Kurshie Muromachi said:

When I see the reports provided by former employees who have worked at Linden Lab within the last year and a half, I can't help but think that there's some sort of internal issue/struggle with the Lab. Even some of the things that employees have reported have been echoed in some form or another here on the forums.

Read the reports on pretty much any company and you'll see the same. Glassdoor is anonymous and bitter ex-employees often use it to lob grenades, and HR directors often use it to post false positive reviews to make their company look better than it is. I would take anything I read there with a grain of salt. It's the Yelp of job seekers. 

One thing I have learned over the years is that in most categories people will write about negative experiences far more than positive ones.  Some review sites do a better job at encouraging folks to do positive reviews as well as negative or mediocre ones, but Glassdoor isn't really one of those sites - at least in my experience within the IT world.

These days, it seems so many folks want their moment of fame.  I take pretty much everything on the web with a grain of salt, especially anything that gives even the slightest appearance of being there to get noticed. But then I've always been very cynical of people and their motives.

[Beth Macbain]

7 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

The way I read the article, the “separate matter” is issues she thought that she was hired to help deal with..

Read the actual lawsuit instead. 

Even if those were the what she was hired to deal with, LL was under no obligation to act based on her recommendations. She's not a lawyer, though. In fact, she has nothing in her background, her education, or her certifications to indicate she knows anything about law, international or otherwise. LL has an entire legal team for that. She is a techie, not a legalie, and those are two very different worlds, and the issues she raised are possibly far outside her scope of knowledge, or her job description, and that's why I think she was ultimately fired. 

That's just my interpretation, though. I don't know nearly enough about either the techie side or the legal side of such complex issues, and I've not seen the job description she was given.

[Love Zhaoying]

17 minutes ago, LittleMe Jewell said:

I take pretty much everything on the web with a grain of salt, especially anything that gives even the slightest appearance of being there to get noticed. But then I've always been very cynical of people and their motives.

Considering how the article was written, perhaps the whole thing was to get attention for the article’s site.

[Love Zhaoying]

5 minutes ago, Beth Macbain said:

Read the actual lawsuit instead. 

No, thank you. I don’t take direction. No offense taken or intended. I’m the original poster, and my OP was about the article, not the actual lawsuit. You can start a thread about that, or tell me 20+ times to read it, but I won’t. Yay for freedom of thought!

[Selene Gregoire]

49 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Why am I (seemingly) the only male in this thread? Asking for myself.

You're braver than most men?

[Love Zhaoying]

3 minutes ago, Selene Gregoire said:

You're braver than most men?

Or dumber!

[Beth Macbain]

10 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

No, thank you. I don’t take direction. No offense taken or intended. I’m the original poster, and my OP was about the article, not the actual lawsuit. You can start a thread about that, or tell me 20+ times to read it, but I won’t. Yay for freedom of thought!

I was basing my opinion on my interpretation her actual words and her actual credentials, not someone else's interpretation of them, but okay.  

You do you.

Edited August 18, 2019 by Beth Macbain
Added "my interpretation" to of her words.

[Kurshie Muromachi]

7 minutes ago, LittleMe Jewell said:

1 hour ago, Beth Macbain said:

5 hours ago, Kurshie Muromachi said:

When I see the reports provided by former employees who have worked at Linden Lab within the last year and a half, I can't help but think that there's some sort of internal issue/struggle with the Lab. Even some of the things that employees have reported have been echoed in some form or another here on the forums.

Read the reports on pretty much any company and you'll see the same. Glassdoor is anonymous and bitter ex-employees often use it to lob grenades, and HR directors often use it to post false positive reviews to make their company look better than it is. I would take anything I read there with a grain of salt. It's the Yelp of job seekers. 

One thing I have learned over the years is that in most categories people will write about negative experiences far more than positive ones.  Some review sites do a better job at encouraging folks to do positive reviews as well as negative or mediocre ones, but Glassdoor isn't really one of those sites - at least in my experience within the IT world.

These days, it seems so many folks want their moment of fame.  I take pretty much everything on the web with a grain of salt, especially anything that gives even the slightest appearance of being there to get noticed. But then I've always been very cynical of people and their motives.

Right. It's just a lingering concern. And I don't look at just negative reviews. Some positive reviews even have concerns within them. And yea, I know about the HR thing.

[Selene Gregoire]

Just now, Love Zhaoying said:

Or dumber!

No. Seeking knowledge is never dumb or stupid.