Shockwave Yareach

I did bring up that I a) like it mostly, and b) still have the bug with the media music when too many parcels are crossed in what seems to be too quick a timeframe. I even suggested what seems to be the cause and a potential path of troubleshooting. Their viewer cost me nothing. My troubleshooting it for them cost them nothing, too. I guess we are pretty even

Teens: what it will change and has already changed is WHO is liable when the parents of the kiddies catch their kids doing the naughty. When it was an Adult Only game, then the kids were the criminals for committing fraud in order to access materials they weren't supposed to access. In one month, when it ceases to be an adult-only grid, then it's no longer the case -- the kids don't have to commit fraud or even lie about their age to stand on the border of the G-rated welcome center sims and cam into Sex Pose shops (complete with pictures and BUY cubes) and see graphic sex. Suddenly LL is in legal jeopardy for failing to protect little Timmy's innocence from us freaky evil ne'rdowells, and we are suddenly in legal jeopardy for providing the material to little Timmy in the first place. The law makes no distiction between my emailing dirty pictures to a kid and the kid finding a Playboy I'm throwing out in my trash -- I still contributed to the delinquency of a minor. Not to mention the threats to kids when the REAL perverts in the world realize that they can rez Skyboxes on G rated land and invite teens into "special" teen groups where they have their own private sex-dungeons in secret up at 3000m. All it will take is ONE lawsuit brought on by a teen's mom against one player (who was naked in her hottub in mature in her home and never even knew Timmy was pervcamming to start with) and SL will be abandoned within a week. Nobody is going to risk prison to play a video game. Sorry, nobody is going to risk prison to share a virtual interactive experience. Call SL whatever you want -- it's not something anyone with two braincells to rub together is gonna go to jail over. And the more LL restricts what we may not do with its volumous tomes of forbidden acts, the less "Our World" it becomes and the less reason we have to visit or pay money anymore. Or did the lessons from the now deceased There.com fail to register with the Lindens?

costs me nothing? So all these charges on my credit card, they don't really exist? Wow, that's a cool way to shrink my balance, I will say! Granted, the charges have shrunk over the years, with my canceling premium and closing my island due to LL's criminal bait and switch model of doing business. But I'm still renting here and still paying money to LL and to my fellow creators. The amounts can grow or disappear altogether in the future, depending on how LL fixes their company and how they do business with their customers. So no, I don't accept that the viewer and SL is free mode of thought. If everyone was logged in and failed to buy land, SL would be closed in less than a month. Someone is footing the bills for the servers, paying the LL executives (grossly overpaid) their salaries, and giving the programmers an occassional bottle of Mt. Dew and a corner of the cellar to sleep in. The person paying the bills is me and everyone else who buys anything from anyone in SL. As for viewer 2.4beta, I like it thus far. It seems less stable than 2.3 though, and the glitch where the parcel music gets screwed up if you pass through too many is still present - it appears the built in mp3 player gets two streams when the glitch occurs instead of just one. So the viewer just passes both on to the audio player and they contest for access. Once this glitch starts only a restart fixes it. It's almost like the viewer executes the change media twice sometimes instead of just once.

What SHOULD be done is: Marketplace is free for the first 12 items. Let people create stuff and get businesses off the ground. (Or tinker, in my case). For stores bigger than 12 items, the commission goes away and a charge per number of items is used instead. You make it a level playing field where there is no advantage between having land stores and having marketplace stores. In fact, the two should go hand in hand -- inworld is better for browsing while marketplace is better for searching and buying in a hurry.

*checks his watch, and gives consideration for pacific time* Okay boys. Time's up! Got an answer for all of us about how you are going to keep the presence of teens near us from getting us in legal hot water? Hmmm?

Why not simply have a tiny avatar?

http://www.virtuallanddispute.com/

People who have invested lots of money in SL when LL was still telling the lie that we owned our virtual property, still want to take care of their investments. And communities that formed around these properties are not yet all dead. We remain because of the money we've sunk in and the friendships we have in SL. We aren't deadset on hating LL -- I for one used to be one of their greatest cheerleaders and invited RL folks often to join me inworld. But that was before I realized the problems with SL are not technical in nature, but the results of incompetent management and lack of direction. We want SL to succeed. But it cannot succeed if it keeps shooting itself in the chest the way LL is doing. We are here because of our friends and money spent (hard to call it Invested anymore.) We are here in spite of LL, not because of them. Nor are we here for their benefit -- a lesson they will never learn. We are here for our own reasons. And if LL can make a buck off of that, that's fine with me. But the more reasons they give us not to be here, the fewer bucks they get. And that more than anything is at the heart of LL's problems today.

When Search is repaired, then I will pay attention to the advertisers on your websites. But until Search is fixed and stable again, I won't so much as glance at the ads. You've taken a function that was free and available to everyone and replaced it with one that costs US money (cannot pay for it with L$) and is only available for those people who are already successful enough to be able to afford it. Destroying Search and adding this creates an upper and lower class of builder and stacks the deck so much against newcomers that they won't even bother trying to form businesses. This is hardly an approach for getting more people into SL and invested here. I will use Search (borked as it is) and the Marketplace. When you have repaired Search, then I will click on the ads on the webpages. Not until then.

FINAL WARNING If explanations about what will be done to protect adults and teens from each other does not appear in the forums by Friday, or the teen merger is put on hold until such protections can be implemented, I shall contact every net filter program I can and report you as a wanton sex site rife with graphic depictions of every fetish known to man that can easily be seen by any teenager. And I will be able to prove it to them as well. I shall also be contacting various law enforcement agencies as well -- your safe harbor claim will not stand up in court once it is shown how you edited content on the mainland and violated contracts by forcing people into Zindra. The clock is ticking. Tick tock, tick tock. Still time to repent before the alarm goes off, harlequins.

18 IS a magic number -- in the eyes of the law. A day before it, and you are a minor who can't vote, can't smoke, can't drink, can't sign a legal contract, can't be put in uniform to fight for your country... and can't enter second life. The day you turn 18, you can buy stuff you couldn't buy before, get a credit card (not daddy's, yours), sign for a car or rent an apartment... and enter second life. A silly line has to be drawn in the silly law at some magic number, and in almost every state that magic number is 18. Like it or not, that's the legal heart of the matter. Teen enters SL and sends 100 people dirty pic of himself, then calls the FBI on those hundred people. Rationally, you'd say that since they never asked for the pics that they will be held blameless. Sadly, the LETTER of federal law states that ANY picture showing genitals of one under 18 is child pornography, and possession is a FELONY whether you asked for it, were given it, or any other reason you have it on any gear under your control. And yes, we have had children arrested here (in TX) for photographing themselves nude -- like it or not, that's just the way it is. We aren't as concerned about your being here when you legally shouldn't be because if one of you makes a baseless claim or your parents call the DA, the legal defense of "the child committed fraud to enter" covers us. But if that coverage is removed, then any one of you can say that I got on voice with you and made salacious suggestions. And I will then instantly go to jail -- absolutely no proof is required. And it is the threat to our RL lives that concerns us most. We don't give a Tinker's d**n whether or not you see a nipple or a lesbian 5 way -- more than likely you've seen a few things us oldtimers have not. What we care about is going to jail because we played a video game! And your MERE PRESENCE makes that a possibility whether you mean to threaten us or not! If SL is 18+ only, nothing we do can get us jailed. You teens show up, and suddenly we are open to false accusations, charges by your parents, arrest, prison, and being branded a pervert for our entire lives. No, no sir, it is NOT worth it. Period. If you love SL -- truly you love it -- then you'll wait until you are 18 and then enjoy it with the rest of us adults. But if the teens enter the adult grid, then you'll find the SL you enter will not be the SL you have (illegal) enjoyed up to this point. And in two years time, you'll find yourself on the other side of that magic number and you will get to wonder if that person who just IM'd you is underaged or not.

@Mysty: Let's consider the Picture Switcher that I and many other SL builders create on their second week of self-learning LSL. All it does is swap textures that are in inventory every couple of minutes. They aren't difficult. So I sell one of these to a teen -- it's a G rated item after all. Then the teen slaps 100 textures of every kind of erotic imagery imaginable and a few sexual positions that even circus contortionists would find challenging. Suddenly it's a Mature item. And when the kid gets caught with it in his G parcel, what name do they see on the picture viewer and what rating is it? I'm the creator, and I didn't mark the thing as mature because it wasn't mature -- not until the kid spent 1000L (a whole 5$; how ever WILL he get a bank loan to get so much cash?) to upload 100 pictures off his computer and populate the picture frame with them. Who will get in trouble here? The teen, or me? The teens are always the victims, just ask any cop. It will be me who gets in trouble for selling a teen a Mature item and not setting the rating properly. And if you think LL is going to take the time to examine the item and get to the heart of the matter rather than just knee-jerk banning folks, then you need more exposure to the Linden way and how they do business. This is just the first item that popped into my mind that can get us builders in a heap of legal trouble, with the law AND with LL, even though they by themselves are perfectly legit and not the slightest bit inappropriate. But when the hammer comes down, it won't be coming down on the minors. The hammer does come down and will always come down on the adults who "contributed to the delinquency" of the minor. And this is without even touching the problem of new builders or individuals who are just horsing around not knowing to set their material as Mature when it should be. Nor all the stuff prexisting that will never be set because the creators are rarely inworld anymore and the Marketplace store is on autopilot.

Every -other- game in the gaming universe has one very fundamental difference from SL -- you cannot create your own stuff within it. In Wow or Eve or wherever, you are limited to only what the game creator has already built in. Want to make that sword blue? Sorry, but Wizard didn't want it to be blue. Want to have your own home in a spaceship and decorate it? Sorry, but EVE doesn't allow for that. What SL is truly visionary in is its litterally creating a virtual world where you can do anything -- even if it's something LL hasn't thought of. If hacking and slashing is a good time for you, go to WoW. If you want to drink at a bar and ask the bartender for a drink that's not on the menu and have him invent it on the spot, go to SL. This however creates a playing environment that is pointedly unfit for children. If you permit people to create anything, then some percentage of the material will be sexual, graphic, or otherwise unfit for minors. And since there's really no way to control what people make -- either they can build anything or they cannot -- you have to assume for legal reasons that everything people create is potentially dangerous to minors. LL cannot know whether the prims I assemble are a fighting staff or a love ***is. Even if LL banned sexual everything, nothing short of LL inspecting every single created item for acceptability would prevent more X rated content from being created by builders and individuals across the grid. So attempting to "clean up" the grid to protect children is a non-starter, because apart from the ruin to LL it would bring, it would be impossible to enforce in the first place. So we have proven that any virtual world where people can create their own things will have some percentage of inappropriate materials, regardless of what LL wants, says, decrees from their ivory towers or executes people for. Thus such a place will eternally be hazardous to children -- if people can build anything, then some proportion of what gets made will be illegal for kids to see or use. Period. And the only way LL can prevent the legal problems caused by teens seeing adult materials on an adult grid is... to not let them on the adult grid. No, you cannot "clean up" the grid, not so long as everyone in it has the ability to make whatever strikes their fancy. Making the grid safe for children, apart from the financial disaster it would bring, would be impossible. So it's necessary instead, from a legal standpoint, to make the adult grid safe FROM children and the children safe FROM the adult grid. This means seperation. --||-

The next generation of SL can wait until they are 18 to enter SL. Just as the next generation of American Voter must wait till they are 18 as well. A minor is a minor is a minor, in matters of the law. Their entry into the ADULT grid which has not been made kid safe puts the minors at risk, and the adults already present at risk. Would you allow schools to have pornographic magazines, cigarette machines and a pay bar inside it? Dropping kids into the adult grid where the kids can buy/see everything over the border on M land, that's exactly what you have. And LL will have nobody but itself to blame when Fox News then eviscirates them for endangering children on the internet. The lindens SHOULD have created a G continent when they created the M continent and then most of the problems with this merger wouldn't exist. But they didn't do that. And while this cannot be done safely, it can be done safer -- which again, the lindens are not doing. So this whole thing should be shelved. The teens can wait until they are 18 to enter the adult grid, otherwise there is no such thing as an adult grid anymore. Teens cannot enter a bar. Teens cannot buy a car. Teens cannot sign contracts. Etc, etc. SL is just one more thing that requires people to be over 18, for the sake of the service and every paying member that uses it. While it would certainly be technologically possible to create a merged grid, LL is not doing and will not do what it takes to make such a system safe for anyone. So if they cannot do it safely, it should not be done at all.

Kids sneaking into the adult grid has always been a problem, yes. So has kids using fake IDs to get beer. But when the child lies to break the law by using a fake ID, the kid is the lawbreaker rather than the person who was fooled. The guy at 7-11 doesn't get arrested when the kid uses his brother's driver's license; the kid does. That's because the kid had to break the law first. By eliminating the need to have any kind of identification at all to buy beer though, yet still saying that one has to be 18 or older to do so, now the guy at the 7-11 gets to go to jail over and over again, because there's no legal protection for him anymore. How can he stay within the bounds of the law when he has no way to check what age the person is before selling his 18+only material? Answer: He cannot. And neither can you in SL when the teens get here, a matter you should consider very very carefully.

If I recall, that bug was only in the field for 2 weeks before it got fixed. Something about the master IP/user table in the Chat server getting entries added or subtracted while lookups were being done -- classic race state problem.

You say it can be done. Thus it is for you to prove your case. I cannot prove something cannot be done -- it is logically impossible to prove a negative. But I'll offer you a 1000 L bounty if you can demonstrate to all here any LSL code which uses llSay() to open and send out any Instant Message at all, on any channel. If you can listen to IM traffic on a sim's comm channels, then you should be able to talk on it as well. Yes? Or alternately, I'll even accept what channel numbers are used for Instant Messages, provided I am able to duplicate that the snooper can spy on my own IM box. I'm almost certain that I'm in no danger of losing my money. But we are getting off the real threat here, which is the children being dropped into an adult grid with no way for paying users of that grid to protect their RL selves from RL prosecution because a child's parent discovers they are being exposed to inappropriate materials. That is the danger we need to worry about here. The inner workings of the various subsystems of SL will mean little if SL is abandoned and collapses because of LL's gross incompetence and customers fleeing in droves because of the grave legal danger LL has exposed them to.

Nobody in any SL sim can directly find your IP address. The CopyBan and CDS systems use a trick where the media of a parcel is set to a specific server, and when you enter the parcel and the server starts to send your media, THAT server has your IP address because it has to know what address to send the MP3 or RTSP data to. They then tie that IP address to your name, see if your name is on their (always perfect without error) database of known copybotters, and ban you if you're on the list or if your IP address is the same as a copybotter (which is quite a problem for everyone on DSL or cable as the IP addresses get changed and reused -- today the IP address goes to a thief but tomorrow when I reset the router, it may get assigned to me instead because the copybotters are smart enough to recycle their modems and turn off media before committing their larcenies...

No, you are confusing the sim's LLSay() script function with the IM Chat system. They have nothing at all to do with each other. IM's are not in any channel in any sim that can be snooped. The IM and group IM are grid wide communications systems and the only affilication they have with LSL is the llInstantMessage() routine. Need proof? Okay. I send a group chat message to my group. What sim does it go to, and how does the message know to go to that sim, especially since the 50 people are on 50 sims? And when I TP to another sim, how do I continue to get messages when I'm not on that sim any longer? It's an understandable confusion for newcomers as the names are common. But no, instant messages are not on any channel in any sim. While there are some toys allowing "private" conversations over a distance for different job functions in a club or sides of a war that you begin by saying /7 or so (and I've sold some), those also have nothing at all to do with the Instant Message or Group Chat. Chat or IM involves a server out in LindenLand and it sends the IM data to the IP address used when the person logs in. If the person's IP address changes, all the UDP traffic fails to arrive and the connection is lost.

Absolutely Ceera -- someone hands me 100 dirty textures and asks me to build them a Picture Viewer with the pics. I do so and ship it back to them. Guess who just gave graphic sexual materials to a child, is going to jail, will lose his nice home and nice job, and be branded a pervert for the rest of his days? It will not matter that the child gave me the photos. It will not matter that the child paid me to build the item for him. Because I won't know the potential client is a child, I'm in deep doodoo. And if that child sends me textures of her own RL body, guess who now has child porn in their possession? And again the law won't care that she sent them to me, without request and out of the blue. If I was a teen greifer, I'd be salivating over the destruction I could bring by sending childporn pics out to a hundred SL citizens, calling the feds and giving out the names of who has said porn, and then never log into that account again. Tada, FBI arrests hundreds of people who have childporn images in their SL caches on their home computers, and nothing happens at all to the young scamp who is "just having some LULZ".

Graphic: It has been my understanding that the chat system could not be redirected. When a chat is opened, the IP address attached to that UUID from Login server is used to start sending packets to that user. Since there is no "my IP address has changed" case in the viewer (and why would there be?) there is no reason for chat to accept any redirection messages from anyone, real or fake uuid. The packets for Crispy Crisco only go to the computer where Crispy Crisco is logged in and nowhere else. This is one reason why trying to log in to an account twice at the same time fails. The chat data is not sent to everyone in the sim, which is one of the reasons group chat is such a mess -- the chat server has to relay the chat data out to hundreds of people instead of just one like in an IM. So there is nothing to snoop upon or intercept. Yes, there are more clever people than me out there. But I'm still in the top branches. And unless you mod a router between LL and your target, I cannot see any way even the best cracker could intercept IMs for whatever nefarious purposes we might imagine. A method involving tricking the chat system into thinking it's a group chat with you among the participants is potentially realistic, but that would involve knowing the holes in the chat system and you'd be visible in the participant list anyways. But if the data stream from chat doesn't send out Crisco's IM traffic where I can get a peek at it, then there's no way to snoop it. As for UUIDs, they are easy to acquire and hardly secret. All you have to do is run Sensor and call LLDetectedKey() to see the UUIDs of everyone around you...

@Ceera: This is why I proposed SVC6242. If it's not safe enough for the kids to enter M sims, then it's not safe enough to let them even see M sims to begin with. And it solves so many problems, like kids buying "adult toys" from a store just on the other side of the border line -- can't buy what your viewer never gets data on. And you cannot pervcam someone if the viewer never gets data on what you are looking at, either. https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-6242?

The Chat system goes through the linden's Chat server. your snagging of an IP would get the IP of a server in lindenland. The voice system goes through the Vivox servers. Your snagging of an IP would get the IP of a server in Vivox land. There are serious hazards involved in this change of contract -- inappropriate contact for the teens and legal jeopardy for the adults. But the threat of physical harm would have to involve the child giving either pictures through email, phone numbers to call in person, or them giving the addresses themselves. None of these threats is LL's responsiblity as they all take place outside SL. For all the dangers that exist and are good enough reason to stop this ill-concieved plan, the risk of snagging an IP address is quite low on the list.

Enough. I hearby serve notice that I expect LL (linden labs) to demonstrate intent and methods for protecting itself and all its users from the legal dangers caused by this change of contract and their importation of children into the adult grid. LL has 14 days, that is December 3, to show how it will protect its customers from all the various legal hazards they are inflicting upon their users. Alternatively, a moratorium on the action until such protections can be created. On the morning of December 3, upon seeing no relief or direction on this matter from LL, I shall then contact Net Nanny and all other internet filtering software companies, and petition for them to blacklist Second Life due to its clear and present dangers to underaged users. I have other folks I will contact as well; I'll not tell you everything however. Since LL will not acknowledge the legal hazards it is creating, I shall tap some shoulders and they can discuss it with you instead. This is all perfectly legal and morally unquestionable -- if you are so certain you aren't endangering anyone, then you won't have the slightest thing to fear. I am not looking forward to this. But your insistence on this shortsighted and dangerous course of action leaves me little choice. As a professional and as a parent, I am duty bound to protect my and others children. Letting 16 year olds be able to cam into houses and see adult material when you have the means to prevent it is criminal. And I will make certain every web filtering company knows how easy it will be for children to view and purchase inappropriate materials in Second Life, even as they are restricted to General parcels. And once branded a SEX site, you'll find that scarlet letter very difficult to remove and a serious complication for getting future business of any sort. You have two weeks.

Their privacy as far as I'm concerned is certain. Unless steps are taken so that teens cannot even see M sims and anyone/anything upon them, I will never again set foot upon Mainland. My purchases will be made in the marketplace and I'll just stay on various islands. So the teens are not in any danger whatsoever from me, real or virtual. I will not jeopardize my comfy life and career so you can throw children into an adults-only grid. I've given you a way to avoid most of the complications -- you choose to ignore the fixes. Fine and dandy. I'll just sit on my private chain and wait to hear which Lindens get hauled away to jail for "contributing to the deliquency of minors." I'll place a name on a tombstone behind bars for each one of you to commemerate your brave sacrifices.