Herkimer Highmist

Chic Aeon wrote: The reasoning is that we do not hold the copyright to those works and we did not create them from scratch. This was talked about in length on the CG Textures thread in the Building and Texturing forum a couple of weeks ago. If I'm not mistaken, this new TOS is also in violation of GPL-licensed (and other OSS-licensed) scripts wandering around on various websites. I wonder if this TOS also applies to material posted on the LSL wiki (e.g., all the GPL-licensed scripts in the script library). Regardless, it's rather ironic that you can no longer copy/paste a GPL script from the wiki to in-world without violating the license the script was released to the public under.

Darrius Gothly wrote:operations. Based on my reading of the new ToS, even those parts of these products that exist completely outside the purview of SL, LL and any of their systems .. are still included in the stuff they claim to own. In effect they have laid claim to software, databases and proprietary data mechanisms that they do not have any access to whatsoever! These products are clearly hosted on multiple platforms, and each one is useless without both the LL-hosted and externally hosted parts working together, so it can be argued that since LL claims rights to the part within SL then they also claim rights to the parts that live outside as well. I'm not sure about this...I have some services like this as well, and no server side script, no database, no file necessary to those services has ever been "uploaded, published, and submited to or through the Servers, Websites, and other areas of the Service." I'd like to think that not even LL would be dumb enough to claim rights to content fetched by an in-world client (not just http scripts, but also parcel media & streams, prim media, even a viewer's internal browser) is theirs, but then I wouldn't have previously thought they'd be dumb enough to put this in their TOS. Fortunately, I retain control over my external server, and have pretty high confidence that my current hosting provider would laught at LL presenting such a claim to them.

Darrius Gothly wrote: In order to get ready for that, LL's legal staff has done a massage of the SL ToS to bring it closer into line with what they hopewill be the future of internet law. From day one there has been a major quibble going on over who owns what. Even back in the days of such simple platforms as ICQ, there has been disagreement over who owns the digital assets uploaded or shared via the service. ...However the reality of the legal system dictates that we won't really know who owns .. I mean REALLY owns the digital assets we upload until a law-making case hits the courts and is tested all the way up to the highest levels. (Which could possibly mean the U.S. Supreme Court, but definitely means 2 or 3 decades from now.) What we are seeing is an initial attempt by LL to keep the power in their hands. In the most evil interpretation, it gives them the legal right to totally screw us over. Will they? Most likely not IMHO .. but then again our banking system used to be in business to SERVE the depositors. Now? Not so much. I've no doubt LL holds this point of view - I've seen similar arguments advanced for years by far more companies than LL. This bit from the TOS certainly reinforces that idea: Linden Lab has no obligation to monitor or enforce your intellectual property rights to your User Content, but you grant us the right to protect and enforce our rights to your User Content, including by bringing and controlling actions in your name and on your behalf (at Linden Lab’s cost and expense, to which you hereby consent and irrevocably appoint Linden Lab as your attorney-in-fact, with the power of substitution and delegation, which appointment is coupled with an interest). However, if one follows the reasoning that "if it's on our servers we own it and/or have every right to exploit it" to it's logical end, it also means LL doesn't own content on any server that isn't physically owned by them. Starting with all that content they've farmed out to amazon and other CDNs! How about those asset servers, are they on LL-owned hardware in an LL-owned datacenter?

And then there's this little bit at the end of 2.3 as well: "Linden Lab has no obligation to monitor or enforce your intellectual property rights to your User Content, but you grant us the right to protect and enforce our rights to your User Content, including by bringing and controlling actions in your name and on your behalf..." Does this mean LL is no longer covered under the Safe Harbor provisions of DMCA? Isn't bringing actions in my name something like buying life and fire insurance on your neighbor (or insurance companies selling hedging-type securities on stocks they don't own)?

CommerceTeam Linden wrote: We continue to work on paying out the remaining missed payments, but the majority of orders have been paid out at this point. Wow, you're STILL making right on your boo-boo, even after saying "within a week" the last two weeks? I'm curious: What's LL's justification for still taking commissions on these missed payments?

Sassy Romano wrote: CTL, one of the things that should be taken away from this thread is the utter frustration of merchants who are told to file a JIRA, only for it then to be immediately closed. They open a ticket which is immediately closed and told to file a JIRA and referred to this thread. ... I would also be interested to understand why the process of a purchase/payment transaction is not truly transactional and why we have situations where a marketplace transaction happens without the corresponding payment transactions. It's such a bad idea to use a defect tracking system (JIRA) for incident management, that it doesn't surprise me one bit to see LL's transactions fail ACID criteria without having any audit processes in place to catch those failures.

CommerceTeam Linden wrote: We want to update Merchants on the latest release. We are still seeing some issues on a small percentage of orders. We continue to investigate this and will provide updates as we have them. We've started the process to payout missed payments and distributions for the period from June 25, 2013, through July 9, 2013, Expect to see those payments appearing in your Second Life transaction history over the next week. In addition, we will be processing any payments that continue to be missed as needed. If you would like to track any missed payments with us, you are free to file a JIRA, but it is not necessary. We will automatically be refunding any missed payments or distributions. If you are still seeing issues (which means you clearly don't know the issue and haven't resolved it), than how can you say missed payments stopped happening on July 9? If you can track missed payments without our pointing them out, then why does it take a week to post those payments? If wire orders between banks can settle in 3 days or less, why does it take a week for you to post payments that have already been missing as early as Jun 25, which is over 2 weeks ago - for a total settlement time in your case of 3 weeks (assuming the gods of fortune should smile on us all)?!?! Given a predicted settlement time of 3 weeks, SL transaction history only going back for a month, and the commerce team's history of resolving these kinds of issues, I'd highly advise everyone to download their history now, because in two more weeks, missing transactions will start rolling off.

Dartagan Shepherd wrote: Or boycott, which really isn't in anyones best interests to lose money for the sake of protest, when that money is sorely needed by some merchants. It seems strange to worry about losing money from a company that is already keeping our money longer than any settlement period allowed by law. At this point, I'm thinking less about boycotts and more about filing a complaint with the FTC.

Darrius Gothly wrote: There needs to be incentive applied to treat the Marketplace with a professional attitude and work ethic. That incentive can only come from above. That means the Team Leader and/or the Team Leader's boss. To my knowledge those people are Brooke and Rodvik respectively. I mentioned this issue to some friends last night, and they weren't concerned in the least, since they were still able to purchase things on their side without having any painful issues. Between this and the commissions that LL is still making on MP sales, I can't see why anyone at LL has any incentive to change their current approach. I'm wondering if a SOPA-blackout style protest where MP store owners put all their items in inactive status for a day or two isn't in order?

Looking through my records here, I see that e-mail and ANS notifications are both extremely spotty now. ANS became extremely rare after 6-24, and email notifications became rare a couple of days ago. To compound the problem, I have email notifications that no ANS notification was sent for, and vice-versa. This really defeats the purpose of automatic notifications of sales, if we have to verify them manually using the dashboard and/or marketplace reports. Any chance of fixing this regression error soon?

Gadget Portal wrote: After reading all these replies, all I can say is... Actually, my complaint was that they break the site on some browsers, and their placement is terrible. It looks like something a hacker coded to infect computers, not a website done by professionals. Errr....so you did. :manembarrassed: I've also wondered if the various team(s) responsible for the web sites were given a very short deadline to get ads running, and they're tweaking it when/where they can.

I'm about to give up here. :smileyhappy: This started as off as a thread condemning Linden Lab for using targeted ads on their websites (not in-world, just the SL related websites). No, this thread started out very specifically discussing ads on the marketplace- you should try reading the thread from the first post instead of just making things up. My problem specifically (a post you never saw fit to respond to on it's merits) was that they are displaying ads they will collect revenue on in people's marketplace stores where user-created content is sold when they are already getting a sales commission. LL is having their cake and eating it too, at the expense of the same people who keep their world somewhat interesting. Can you imagine a world made only of Linden content? Well, at least it would be professional, right? In some people's furious denouncements of the recently introduced practice they levied some serious accusations against LL claiming they were purposefully placing less than desirable ads (the see your online arrest record, visit some sexy girlie sites, etc).. I don't believe that is true and I said so. LL did however purposefully choose to place ads from 3rd party ad networks, knowing full well that the ads in question would be displayed to some of their users. They also haven't changed any of the default settings. These are willing decisions made by LL, and I'd like to know why LL should not be held responsible for making them? There are consequences (arguably good and bad) for such decisions, but you have displayed a tendency to beat down anyone who isn't full of glowing praise for all that LL has ever done. Then we get the claims that the pop-ups can lead to mal-ware of some type being installed on people's computers. Again I don't believe that to be true (though, if you happen to click on the ad and it takes you to a malicious website that is certainly a possibility....but the pop-up, itself won't install mal-ware). You have shown on many occasions in this thread that what you believe is wrong. This is one such occasion, and my experience directly contradicts your belief. I have, on many occasions, removed pop-up fake ads for fake virus scanners that were installed by ads - and not even pop-ups. Google drive-by installs. They usually exploit graphic library vulnerabilities by putting very specific sets of byte patterns in their ad images - ultimately malware is installed that directs the user to a fake site that sells software to "fix the problem" - really, it's the ultimate phishing scam to collect people's credit/debit card numbers. The eastern European crime syndicates sell entire kits that include a registered domain, web-server hosting and the files for a legitimate looking site that infected PCs are directed to in - as well as images to use for "advertisements" with the various ad networks. These things have gotten so clever that they will actually manipulate files to fake out virus scanners. The only way to get rid of these that I've found is to start windows in safe mode, and I've only seen one program that removes them. Then we get into a discussion about being tracked on the Internet. Let me set some things straight here, because I can't stand such misinformation being put out there. Cookies are a necessity because HTTP is a stateless protocol. This means that every single request your browser makes to a web server is a brand new connection. You mentioned the tracking of IPs in an earlier thread, but that is not practical for session management (or tracking a user's browsing habits), because so many IPs are NAT'd behind a firewall, corporate intranets, etc. Cookies, which are passed back and forth in a HTTP header, are what make session management possible. Session management allows for things like the shopping cart on the marketplace. There is a bit of work that goes into the server side code for any website using session management, but that's largely invisible to anyone using a web browser to view a site. Tracking cookies are everywhere and if you don't know that then you probably should get off the Internet all together (that's entirely my opinion......take or leave it). You're quite conceited, you know that? You publicly display your ignorance of web-based technologies, and you know next to nothing compared to every web developer I know in this area, yet I don't see web developers running around saying you "should get off the internet all together (sic)" Is this what you consider professional behavior? Installing a pop-blocker will not prevent tracking cookies from being installed on your computer (blocking those cookies will to a very large extent but not completely) I have a pop-up blocker built right into my browser. I'm pretty sure most browsers have that option now, and I highly recommend people use them - not because they will block cookies, but because they will block pop-ups. It's a great example of using a feature for the purpose it was designed for - see how that works? Deleting cookies after the fact only gets rid of the cookie and prevents further tracking (to an large extent but not entirely). I have no idea what you meant to say here - it's nonsensical and self-contradictory. Cookies are not bad things.....your preferences for this forum site are stored as cookies (without them you would have to constantly redo your preferences. Cookies are notused to store preferences on the forum site - this can be proven by logging out, clearing all of the cookies in your browser cache, then logging back in. Your preferences will remain the same, because they are stored in a LL database somewhere, not as browser cookies. I clear my cookies constantly, and have never had to redo my preferences once. Maybe you should try it sometime. Tracking cookies have been a huge concern for years.....yet they are completely legal for websites to use (they ain't going away any time soon so it's best to understand what they are and how to protect your personal information....tracking cookies merely report back to the website that installed it to tell what site the computer with the cookie is visiting). There's no such thing as a "tracking cookie" Cookies can be used for tracking purposes, but the only difference there is how the cookie is used by that website. You have no rational reason to say they aren't going away either. Microsoft recently created a "Do not track" header that every other browser and web server has added support for, despite it's not being part of the official HTTP/1.1 specification. I think this effort is misguided, but it shows that there is far more concern about cookies being used to track people's browsing habits than you know of. As do the various legislative solutions to curb tracking that are constantly being proposed. Just because something is legal doesn't make it ethical. Most people, myself included, don't particularly care for tracking cookies but they are there and I know that they are doing so I adjust my web browsing accordingly (I seldom visit sites that I might not want to get ads from.......if I do then I block cookies while I'm on the site (that is not 100% effective but it helps). What do you mean you are blocking cookies? Doesn't this one statement contradict everything you say towards the effect of "get over it and deal with tracking cookies" Everyone here has tacking cookies on their computer........that's where your ads on Marketplace are coming from. Not from Linden Lab. And, basically, that's all I wanted to say.......you are your own worse enemy if you are receiving objectionable ads on Marketplace (or most other websites). Wrong, on so many fronts - not least of which is that you have no idea what's on my computer (or just about anyone else's either). Furthermore I would suggest you google up on things like ad networks and google's ad-sense. You're correct to say the exact choice of ads being served up to any specific user is not being made by Linden Lab, but to say they are coming from tracking cookies on my computer? You are completely wrong! Regardless of the method being used, it's clearly not accurate or precise - all of the examples of the mis-targeted ads in this thread alone demonstrates that. Now the discussion has turned to Linden Lab being in poor financial shape. I'm not going to play this game with you. I don't know who brought this off-the-subject topic up first in this thread, but whoever did is a troll, and I usually don't feed trolls. I'm making an exception with this long-winded post because you have spread too much misinformation in this thread for me to just let it go. You have also repeatedly said things to the effect that we will be tracked, that no method can stop it, and so resistance is futile. No amount of bars or locks will keep a determined burglar out of a house - so by your logic, does that not mean we should all stop using locks on our doors? Keeping that thought in mind, here is some advice a little more practical than your "the sky is falling, get over it" approach, to avoid both tracking and to make your browsing experience more secure: Some steps to avoid being tracked on the internet: Turn off third party cookies. Use a script-blocker Use an ad-blocker. Clear your browser cache OFTEN. This includes browsing history, not just cookies. Do not have your browser remember your passwords. Disable java. Uninstall it if you have no need for it. Go here to review your flash settings. For tracking, make sure you go to the "Global Storage Settings panel" and check OFF "Allow third-party Flash content to store data on your computer" Disable webgl (unless you absolutely need it for a specific reason). My script blocker does this, and it can also be set in firefox with the "webgl.disabled" setting. Finally Peggy, you took a comment I made about people saying adblockers are cheating and you twisted it around to make it sound like I ripped on an entire industry. (If you read what I wrote closely, you'll see I did not rip on the entire industry - but I feel that I certainly could, as I believe that a "profession" that uses, without any compunction, psychological methods to convince people to buy things they don't need and that will never provide them with any lasting happiness, is certainly ethically challenged to say the least!) You then managed to turned it around in your mind to also be an insult that was made against you personally. I don't really care about you taking your cheap shots against me - however, in another post, you assigned blame to Dartagan for what I said, and for that I believe you owe HIM an apology!

I replied to you having said among other things - and somewhat condescendingly - that "everyone is their own worse enemy on the internet." Since then, you have attempted to educate me twice - which implies you believe you have superior knowledge in these areas, even though you know nothingabout me or my professional skills. As a result, you've persuaded me of nothing you intended - in fact, I've largely skimmed your replies ever since I read "you're dreaming." For your information, professional simply means one makes a livelihood with some skillset - it implies nothing about a person's behavior. Joseph Goebbels demonstrated that quite well, wouldn't you agree?

Czari Zenovka wrote: What I find interesting about this whole ad issue is that, here on the Merchant Forum, most of us dislike these ads, don't want them on our MP stores and, in some cases, are blocking them. However, this same topic is ongoing on the General Forum and many of the people there think this is an excellent idea for more revenue for LL, are berating the people who don't like the ads to "get over it" or "don't open the website," - some are even intimating that by using an ad blocker we are somehow "cheating" or opening our PCs to more intrusive data mining. What a crock! First, it's cheating on LL's part to monetize content CREATED BY MERCHANTS. Second, the argument that about more intrusive data mining is an absolute lie. I'm sure the people saying that are ethically-challenged marketing pimps in RL who should wash their mouths out with soap before discussing (much less judging) anyone else "cheating".

Peggy Paperdoll wrote: You are dreaming. Yeah, you can limit who might track you or make it more difficult to be tracked but you cannot, without a doubt prevent being tracked. The best you can do is make sure what information about you is revealed is benign (no personal information). But your IP address that is assigned to your account by your ISP is public information. The IP is assigned to you by your ISP for a specific time frame if your IP address is dynamic (which most home accounts are). As long as that IP address leads to your ISP your ISP will direct the cookie to your computer......you can block it and/or delete it from your computer so that it is not stored (which means it will not report back to the site that placed it, but it's still has the address and your ISP will continue to route the cookie to you). Changing your IP address will prevent further "tracking"......until you visit that site again (then it starts all over again). You're just fooling yourself if you think you can browse the Internet and not be tracked. Stop lying to yourself and understand what is going on and you'll be so much safer than declaring "Um no, the people who try to track me are my worst enemy, not myself!" So they have my IP. So what? I could tell you my IP, and all you could find is where the router assigning it'd DHCP lease is registered at (which is several miles from where I sit typing this). There are so many things you have wrong, but I am not prepared to give a class on privacy and network/data security today.