Innula Zenovka

Or to divest themselves of a specialist and highly regulated product that, while potentially lucrative, is expensive and arduous to maintain, so they can concentrate on their core business?

I don't think b) is the whole story, though. Originally we used to transfer US$ to our SL US$ accounts via PayPal or credit card and LL were responsible from the time it arrived with them, including all Lindex conversions, which LL were responsible for accounting and reporting to the relevant authorities. PayPal, Visa and Mastercard weren't involved after LL received the US$. The problem wasn't that payment processors were worried about adult content (how else do people pay for adult videos and sex toys they buy online? Not bitcoin all the time, surely?) but that they weren't interested in, or equipped to handle, Lindex transactions.

I can remember confident predictions that voice would kill SL.

Or they recorded Lab Gab knowing that the sale was in the pipeline, and intending to devote the first Community Round Table to it, assuming the deal didn't fall through in the meantime. Meanwhile that particular edition of Lab Gab concentrated on the various projects on which Grumpity and her engineers have been working, with Kiera coming in for the final section. No date was given, as I recall, for the first Round Table, so they weren't committed to anything other than holding one the next time a suitable opportunity presented itself and Oberwolf (who I assume is a pretty busy man) was available..

Occam's razor would suggest to me that a final agreement about the Tilia sale had yet to be reached by the time it came to record and broadcast the episode of Lab Gab.

By what agency? Both companies are private, so there are no shareholders, only investors who are represented by the boards of both companies. Electronic money transfer is a very highly regulated business, though, and Tilia is licensed in 48 states and territories to engage in it. Presumably all 48 licensors will need to approve the transfer of ownership and new management structure. This may be just a formality but I would think it has to happen.

From what I've heard, Tilia has high administrative costs, plus overheads in the form of licence fees for all US states. It also exposes senior LL management to hefty criminal liability if anything goes wrong. In other words, while LL needed to invent Tilia to keep the in-world economy working while remaining in compliance with increasingly tight legislation on electronic money transfers, it's not the sort of thing in which you want to be involved long-term if it's not part of the core business.

I think it would be helpful if, when asserting that members of a particular SL community compromise a certain percentage of SL users as a whole, people would explain where they get their figures from. I don't know how to define SL users as a whole. Is it individual accounts that have logged in this week? This month? What? Nor do I know where I would get that figure from -- is it published anywhere? And I wouldn't have the faintest idea how to determine how many people were members of a particular community, particularly one defined by something as nebulous as how people present in SL, be they furries, Goths, tinies, bikers or whatever, let alone how many of them had logged in last week, month, or year. Perhaps someone will assist me in this calculation.

I don't know, but I would imagine that, at the appropriate stage in the sign-up process, the service provider hands you over to experian, who ask you a couple of questions to check against their records to confirm it's you, and they then pass you back to the service provider, along with confirmation that they think you're over 18,

But since they hold data on everyone anyway, I guess there's nothing to lose by using their services for age verification.

Yes, I remember the debacle with Aristotle, too, which must have been twelve years ago at least. So, presumably, do LL, who must find the memory rather painful. Things have moved on a bit since then, of course, and I see no reason why companies should insist on photo id, or any other method of age verification that's any more intrusive than is required to comply with their legal obligations. I've not studied the matter in any great detail, but I don't think I've yet seen any legislation that actually requires particular forms of age verification. The law in Texas,for example, says It's perfectly possible both to borrow money and to gamble online -- both age restricted activities in most jurisdictions -- without having to produce photo ID, so I see no reason to fear adult content providers will ask for photo id unless they're required so to do. I'm not so sure. I'm thinking of the major credit reference agencies, some of whom I know for a fact already offer online age verification services internationally, by asking you a few questions to confirm you are who you say you are (or, at least, that you know a reasonable amount about the financial affairs of the person you claim to be) and then checking that against the public and private databases to which they have access. Those companies have a huge incentive to keep their data locked down and out of the hands of identity thieves.

Will it require showing your ID or face? I've always been able to obtain credit cards and loans -- both of which are restricted, at least in my country, to people aged 18 or more -- online with a minimum of fuss and without any intrusive measures like having to produce my passport or driving licence, despite the fact that the lenders have an obvious financial interest in satisfying themselves I am who I say I am. Why should accessing adult content be any more difficult?

I know that PornHub have blocked people with Texas IP addresses (presumably reasoning that Texans are as well able to use VPNs as are anyone else) but I doubt we're going to see adult content vanish from the internet, or providers block the whole of the EU. To my mind, most affected businesses will bite the bullet rather than shut down.

The problem is, though, that about a dozen, I think, US states have either introduced, or are in the process of introducing, laws requiring certain types of website and social media to require age verification before they allow people to access particular types of content. The UK, France and Germany have all introduced, or are in the process of introducing, similar requirements, and the EU is in the process of considering an EU-wide directive. Obviously these initiatives aren't being introduced with SL in mind, but SL could very well find itself caught by particular definitions (I don't know -- I've not studied any of the legislation in any detail -- but I don't imagine LL's legal advisors would want to take the risk that none of it will apply to SL) and, to my mind, LL has little choice but to prepare for the strong possibility that it'll find itself -- along with businesses like YouTube, Meta and TwitterX, -- required to choose between adopting some form of age verification and banning adult content completely. Age verification has come a long way since LL's last attempt to require it, and I can't imagine anyone based in the US, Europe or most other places will find it very difficult or intrusive to verify their age via one of the many third parties who are now offering this sort of service precisely as a result of these legislative initiatives.

I am involved in a project that plans to use bots, a subject about which I know very little. Can anyone tell me, please, whether cinderblocks/libremetaverse (https://github.com/cinderblocks/libremetaverse) supports RLV?

St George is their patron saint as well as ours, of course. So I think they probably have an equal claim to use his cross in their heraldry.

It is. But Linden Lab still own it.

Linden Lab owns both Second Life and Tilia, so why is it surprising that they share a common Executive Chairman (who owns Linden Lab and, therefore, both of them) and his Chief of Staff, and common Heads of HR and Legal? ETA -- I should have written "common Heads of HR and Legal, and a common CFO"

And parts of SL might well be described as a "wretched hive of scum and villainy," I suppose.

If you're a Brit, as I think you you've suggested you are, then there's always the new photo ID to vote in person as a fallback.

From what I've read about the practice in some US churches, perhaps the pastor at a large local church had just delivered a homily on the subject of thanking uniformed soldiers when you see then?

I think the deity in question is Atropos