Brenda Archer
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Posts posted by Brenda Archer
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Sold, thank you!
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Falcata 128, 175
1024 land near water on Heterocera continent for
1024 L.512L. -
Osondoson 83, 199
512 water land with one large side bordering Linden protected water and sailable to the ocean of the Jeugeot continent, for 10240L. There is an adjacent 16 sq m I will sell to the new owner for 1 L if desired.
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4 hours ago, CoffeeDujour said:
I'm not ..
Big region Grief (grey goo, the sky is falling, etc etc etc)
- This new continent is LL's baby, there is no way big region sized grief will hang about for long (even with so very many plots set to open rez & no autoreturn).
- Report, take screenshots, enjoy the show / go clubbing / rant about it on the forums.
- CHILL
Opportunistic Grief (the dreaded rando - it's your turn to be unlucky)
- ban individual(s) from your land
- hide avatars - prevents them from entering your land and interacting with you (and vice versa)
- if they persist report and use as an excuse to go shopping/visit a friend for 20 mins (like anyone needs an excuse) ... They care about your reaction, deprive them of that.
- make a note in their profile of the date & why you banned them, because give it two weeks and you will have no idea who or why
- Go though your ban list once a month and unban everyone you added the previous month. Very high chance you will literally never see that account name ever again, it's just taking up space and acting as a reminder that once upon a time, a jerk happened. More importantly, it makes managing your ban list harder long term.
- CHILL
Targeted Harassment
If they don't get bored and move on and find ways to harass you despite those steps .. you're past the point that any inworld security could ever be effective. Not having ban lines or an aggressive TP home orb on your land will do literally nothing. Report. Seek assistance. Reroll a new house.
This is really excellent advice, thank you.
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51 minutes ago, LittleMe Jewell said:
True, but you still have to be able to focus your camera on something and if there is nothing within your draw distance to focus on it is more difficult to zoom in on anything.
Nope, just set your camera so it doesn’t get blocked by land and then move it sideways using the controls, it will cut through everything. I do this all the time while I’m building or when I’d like to take a look at something I’m too lagged to physically get my avatar to.
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15 hours ago, LittleMe Jewell said:
If they did allow the orb to apply up to 500m and then 1500m and above, that would handle most hovering peeping toms because they'd be roughly 500m away from you and thus would have to set the draw distance to that or more to see you and a lot of people's computer just flat can't handle a draw distance that high.
My computer is a potato and I can do it, although of course my FPS will then be nothing.
I’m still trying to understand why someone camming over and finding my brand name avatar on my brand name furniture is personal enough to warrant all this *modesty*. The avatar mesh is not me, it’s a Barbie doll more or less like everyone else’s.
What is specifically me is my avatar name and UUID and no security tool does a thing to hide it.
I can see setting an orb to avoid awkward visitors. But that’s a different thing than trying to be somehow hidden. In any sense that has any non-RP meaning, you can’t hide at all.
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5 minutes ago, CoffeeDujour said:
There're ample opportunities for land in SL that can be configured exactly how you like .. I assume you already have premium, so why not look at horizons .. yes the buy in is kinda ouch, but it is double prim*
* If you look at land from the perspective of paying for prims (or Li if you prefer), double prim horizons land lets you own 702 Li with only a standard prem account, which if you were to pay for with regular teir would require an additional $7 per month, over the course of a year, you would give LL the same as the buy in price, so if you look at it from the perspective of paying a years additional teir upfront then any time you spend on that land after year1 is saving you $7 per month, every month.
Or if cheap: fly around with land owners turned on and see if you find a small abandoned lot you like or a good deal on sale. I found two Moderate waterfront lots that way, very very cheap. I use one to rez boats to go in the water around Jeugeot. The other one is in Heterocera not far from a "gas station" on the road where I rez a car.
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5 hours ago, CoffeeDujour said:
... and there is always the skybox option
This really is the way forward. And with a protected layer of air, we can have both planes and skyboxes too. We can even have a skybox that's a helipad! Win all around.
Since for whatever reason people don't usually wander at high altitudes, it's much more private up there than on the ground anyhow.
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1 hour ago, Female Winslet said:
Yes. . . . I've met a few people from SL in RL. I've met them at conventions. I've met them at crowded hotel lobbies. That sort of thing. It's partly just good common sense and partly exactly what you are saying above about how you never really know until you experience their RL behavior!
Some of my built in caution from RL moves into SL in ways where it just isn't needed. Situations like "Man I don't know invites me to go boating with him alone." In RL, I just say no thank you. If not that, for some reason , then I check him out thoroughly with people I know before even considering it. In SL male avatar approaches me claiming to be a close friend of one of my good friends, so I start doing this routine and then an hour later I remember that if there are any problems, I can just teleport out, so I can take a little more risk than I'd take in RL. True story. Actually happened.
Sigh. Perhaps the next gentleman who complains about women complaining about needing to be safe from men could share some of the ways he protects himself against assault/stalking/harassment by women.
One of the most freeing things about SL for me has been this lack of physical danger. At least while still in SL, you can hang out with anybody doing anything, and I still love that.
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15 minutes ago, AyelaNewLife said:
Chopped up your posts to highlight these parts.
I'd add one thing; normal people do not understand how these people work or their potential for deception, until they've fallen victim to such a deception. Or at least that's the way I've learned to protect myself online.
I put my Second Life into a box. That box isn't watertight because I'm only human, but as much as possible I keep the details about my real life outside of that box. My age, my birthday, my job, my location, my old university, my hobbies, my real name, what I look like, even what my voice sounds like, everything like that stays out of the box. I have fresh email addresses and social media accounts that don't link back to my real self, and anyone that tries to push past those boundaries gets cut out. I don't need to worry about who I can and cannot trust; because even if you compiled together every single conversation I've ever had here, you could never work out who I am.
Some people call me paranoid, others call it proof that I'm an alt/a RL man/an age player. For me it's just basic common sense, no different to locking the windows and doors whenever they're not in use. It's just some simple steps to keep myself safe, and that's more important than the fee-fees of some idiot that's never been on the receiving end of a doxx or a stalker.
If this works for you, go for it.
I’m at the opposite pole and a little digging will turn up my RL social media. Most people who have used SL for a RL related reason are in the same situation.
Instead I fall back to the level of caution I apply to social media in general. There are a few details of life I don’t post anywhere.
Social media is a real problem for anyone who has picked up a stalker. This is definitely an area where the law needs to catch up to reality. SL is actually better than average because we have anonymity.
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35 minutes ago, Selene Gregoire said:
Incorrect. Once upon a time the only land available was mainland. Private regions did not exist. Mainland was designed for everyone. Homesteads weren't introduced until 2009. I don't remember exactly what year private regions were introduced but it was only a couple or three years before homesteads.
We’re using a different meaning of “designed.” If Mainland was going to be thoughtfully designed for everyone, it would be a very different kind of software. Instead it started out as a techno libertarian Burning Man sandbox, there’s no way that’s for everyone.
There are good reasons why platforms like Facebook and games like WoW can get the mainstream, and SL cannot, even though LL really tried for a while. To my mind the biggest reason is just what SL *is*, a sandbox of mostly uncensored user generated content. The mainstream can’t tolerate this level of choice and self direction.
It’s not just prudery, although I’m not sure LL could ever be anywhere other than SF. It’s that the total sandbox and anonymity break down the social cues normies need to navigate.
I remember when the idea was being floated to show RL gender on the avatar and the overwhelming rejection of this idea by the residents - except for a very few male presenting avatars using very old fashioned conservative and religious arguments. When many people get thrown into another culture, they don’t know how to act, and if the culture is anarchy there’s no one to ask.
Sandboxes are great if you can enjoy the ride, but SL was never going to be a RL dating app and a sandbox at the same time. We still only have social SL as RP by the users.
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35 minutes ago, Female Winslet said:
With that said, I think that SL does a better job of protecting real life information and such than most platforms. Facebook it isn't.
But nothing is a replacement for good security awareness by the individual, especially if the individual is a woman. We shouldn't have to do that sort of thing. But in the real world, we have to deal with the reality that not good people are out there, that they especially tend to be problematic for women, and that SL hides them from us as well as it hides us from them.
Thank you, and I agree with your whole post.
I once naively thought I could know someone just from SL. But it does hide them from us, and if someone is a bad person we might never know until we experience their RL behavior. Some people live their whole life building up a narcissistic mask. They are often very good at it, and any virtual world is their playground. Normal people do *not* understand how these people work or their potential for deception.
LL is definitely no Facebook, for which I’m very grateful.
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2 minutes ago, AyelaNewLife said:
You keep talking in really vague terms about "insufficient privacy and security". Could you be more specific? What privacy/security concerns don't these tools address? What are the big vulnerabilities?
There's one thing I can think of, off the top of my head; the fact that a stalker can park an alt just outside your mainland parcel, on the same region, and can not only tell if you're on the parcel but also which room. Sure, they might not be able to watch you perform the horizontal tango with someone, but they can zoom in on your name + another name at a similar distance away in the nearby window and see that you're both on a bed; and it doesn't take a genius to join those dots. That's a problem, and one that LL could fix pretty easily if they cared enough.
In terms of stalking/harassment, the biggest security vulnerability anyone will ever has is a chat box. People openly talk too much, without realising how your tiny little clues you casually drop in conversation can be gathered up and melded together into a pretty specific picture. Actual "hacking" when it comes to harassment is extremely rare, it's mostly just loose lips and someone obsessive enough to join the dots.
Oh, and on a point of principle I abhor any implication that only women deserve security and safety. Harassment and privacy are gender neutral. This "women are the victims, men are the perpetrators" narrative is both divisive, harmful and outright nonsensical.
In practice and for cultural reasons, most of the harassment is aimed at female presenting avatars, but of course sociopathy knows no bounds of gender. I can think of an example right off the top of my head of a male presenting avatar with a male RL user who was RL doxxed by a female user. But this is less common than the opposite, just because the cultural drivers aren’t there. And the culture is one of the things a hacker considers when making a design, or breaking it.
You're absolutely correct to say someone near you on Mainland can know exactly where you are even if they can’t see your avatar. So real privacy in this case would be the ability to conceal your avatar name or presence, and we don’t have that. Firestorm, for example, will let me scan and zoom in on avatars anywhere nearby.
Additionally, if your main avatar owns the land in its own name, rather than a secret alt or group, you have a sign out that anyone can read.
So you want a lot which you have told no one about (at least no one who is not proven super trustworthy) and that’s your downtime home, while the other lot is the one where you entertain and which you tell everyone about. They should be far away from each other and the downtime lot could also be a private estate rental or a high skybox, although, in practice it seemed to me some people used their Linden home for this.
The concept here is keeping a secret. And the culture I come from doesn’t really support the idea of women being so self-interested, so we usually wind up learning it the hard way: you *don’t* have to be nice to someone who doesn’t respect your boundaries, you don’t have to be open to strangers.
An IP ban, which we don’t have in SL, is a tool you may have seen if you’ve had an RL online store. A website like this can log the IP addresses of every visitor who requests to see the site, and there may be a tool for the store owner to block requests to see the site from an IP address or a range of them. So for example, if a particular ISP in Florida was the location of someone running fraudulent credit card tests, you would ban the whole range of that ISP’s IP addresses from ever loading your store site. If we had this in SL, it could be a form of ignore or a form of banline. But we don’t.
Obviously this might turn into a case of whack a mole if a stalker was technical enough to use a VPN, but most of the SL type stalkers probably aren’t.
But we don’t have such a tool, so the only way to not be seen in SL is to be at a location you have kept a secret. This includes from whoever you’re SL dating. You don’t know him. And this is where culture comes into play, will you give yourself permission to keep a secret from someone? Because you should.
I would also say: if anything makes you embarrassed, don’t put it on the ground on Mainland. I have used silent Visitor Counters for a long time on all my lots. Generally, avatars just passing by on Mainland are on the ground. I rarely see anyone at my skybox with a ten second counter. So that’s where I rez any adult furniture that might make me blush. I might orb a skybox where I’m holding an adult party. But the truth is, it’s still not a secret from my neighbors who are in the next skybox over.
This is the other missing feature from Mainland - blocks on camming. We’re not going to get it.
I don’t see the point of doing anything in SL that makes you uncomfortable and this is where culture again comes into play. If I’m really too embarrassed to ever be seen on a sex bed or whatever it is, I won’t use one. (I’m not, but that’s me.) The old joke that PG is where the adults are comes to mind. PG with no sex furniture makes a nice downtime home.
So we can’t hide an avatar name on Mainland, we can’t stop anyone from getting our coordinates who is nearby, we can’t hide any of our rezzed prims from camming and we can’t keep someone being tossed around by a botched sim crossing or boomeranged by lag from dropping in even if they didn’t want to. For the love of god, why would anyone put adult stuff on the ground on Mainland? Unless they’re me and don’t care other people know they’re there, but Mainland really is not for everyone. By design.
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I don’t actually think a teleport home orb is necessarily wrong - it depends on the context.
Any of the currently available “security” options might be sensible and helpful in the right context.
What I’m trying to communicate in this thread, and I don’t seem to be making the point very well, is that even with a zero orb, banlines and can’t see avatars turned on, you don’t really have either privacy or security on Mainland.
I’m not making this argument to sneak in an argument that all these features should be turned off.
But what I’m hearing about in this thread are legit problems with stalkers and griefers and a desire for a level of privacy that doesn’t exist on Mainland because we don’t have the tools for it, not even with everything cranked up to 11.
When I was hosting meetings and adult parties, and the available tools were even less granular than what we have now, I always maintained a little parcel far away - owned or rented on a private estate - to serve as a bolt hole, and no one but me ever knew where. I maintain this will fix the casual harassment problem by simply being able to take off when someone isn’t taking a hint.
And bluntly, if SL harassment is bleeding into RL harassment it’s time to call the cops.
I have relocated from one state to another in the past to get rid of a RL threat, for sure if he was reaching me through a piece of software I’d turn the damn thing off. SL is not that important, unless it’s the source of your living, in which case you’re far more technical than what I’m hearing from some in this thread.
On a security level, we need to drop all RP and look at the software. We do not have real privacy on Mainland by design and the bones we’ve been thrown are not enough. They are not an IP level ban or a block to camming or wandering.
So instead of affecting your neighbors with banlines at property edge and hyperactive orb settings - and your neighbors are more affected by this than vehicle users - why not learn how your tools work, and their hard coded limitations?
If you’re in SL to meet with a select few and venture out mainly to shop or go to events, you want your real SL home to be a private secret. The ground on Mainland is not ideal for that, especially if an avatar and not an unlisted group owns it. If you can pay for land in SL, you can have two completely separate homes! This will throw off all but the worst stalkers.
Not just SL, but a lot of platforms are designed badly for women from a safety point of view. If you’re getting hassled, please drop the RP and try to think like a hacker long enough to protect yourself. It’s a world of security threat out there and the illusion of safety is usually just good luck.
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For this to go on for 17 pages is proof we’re dealing with bad design.
What we really needed were small sized “regions” at a price and size similar to a 1024 on Mainland. A number of them could be put on one server.
It’s clear the Mainland is not really private (this used to be worse) by design.
To get to my first Mainland home in 2005 I had to fly a long distance from a hub to Heaton. We couldn’t set home back then or have point to point teleport. My next door neighbor kept shooting me out of the sky with a cannon when I was trying to fly home and I had to file a ticket to get her to stop it. I don’t think she meant to be hostile to me personally, she just didn’t understand the effect of her scripts.
We only got point to point teleporting after a ton of complaining and only got avatar parcel privacy after years of begging. None of this solves anything except for those of us comfortable with the collective nature of Mainland. There really, really needs to be a feature of tiny, totally private regions with ban by IP.
In the meantime, I personally try not to be a difficult neighbor.
I personally don’t put adult furniture on the ground, but always inside a skybox. As far as I know, if you’re inside a house or a box you’re covered for TOS in Moderate. If someone is camming through solid prims, that’s on him.
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I have mixed emotions right now about SL Gor. I’ve met plenty of wonderful lovely Goreans, including BDSM liberal people and pew pew fighters who just like medieval weapons. But the US has a powerful political faction that’s trying to turn us into the _Handmaid’s Tale_. So while I have no problem with Gor as a kink, I can’t promote it as a religion.
Like security orbs, some things should only affect your own land.
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I wonder how much of this could be solved with a rule that if you haven’t logged in for a year, your land’s scripts will be temporarily disabled. I’m not saying this is the best idea, but I’m very curious.
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2 hours ago, animats said:
Maybe LL should charge extra tier if you have objects above 256m not connected to the ground on mainland. Skyboxes are really a cheat to make more land without paying for it, after all.
I really disagree. Small landowners have been building on the vertical in SL forever, and it’s not a cheat. Not everyone can afford the tier to spread out on a large lot. As long as the charge for tier also includes a limited prim count, landowners *are* paying for what they’re getting.
The largest cause of the privacy issue is trying to RP privacy while still on the ground. It just doesn’t work. People wandering mainland are mostly on the ground and always have been. This makes it desirable, and definitely not a cheat, to use a high skybox for a private room. It works - for whatever reason, people don’t often wander around at high altitudes.
I do think the approach that’s going to be taken with the new Linden homes is a really good one, with a ban on skyboxes below a certain level, but encouraged above. This preserves aesthetics on the ground, creates flyable airspace and encourages good privacy building techniques all at once.
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3 hours ago, Theresa Tennyson said:
As long as the other side is now at least thinking of compromising we should be reasonable. While we're debunking imaginary rights I should point out that there's no Right to Remain In Character; nor is there a Right to Amble. I haven't found a vehicle situation I can't get out of in 20 seconds
Getting stuck on a banline shouldn't be an issue with an orb because you wouldn't be in the lot that the orb would cover in the first place. I tolerate ban lines because they're comparatively avoidable. In a perfect world people would set up their lots so the ban lines wouldn't cover parts of a lot that the owner wouldn't have complete control of in the real world (i.e. open water next to a waterway or land immediately to the side of a road) but of course it isn't a perfect world. I would request that if that solution calls to you that you at least turn off Object Entry, so you don't have the situation of a vehicle entering the lot while the owner stays behind.
If I find myself in a situation where I can't quickly get out of a lot using the vehicle controls I just edit the vehicle and drag it out of the lot.
In other words, I'd be pretty happy with landowners if they would just calm down with "zero-second teleport home" orbs, which:
1) Increase vehicle littering as the owner isn't there to clean up,
2) Run the risk of permanently breaking any worn scripted object on the avatar being teleported,
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3) Really can't be considered a "landowner's right" (if such a thing existed) because the landowner's "rights" would end the moment the intruder is off their property.
Yes, the function exists and has its uses for dealing with specific problem people, but that isn't what a random person wandering across a lot line is.
No ambling would be the end of mainland as a community, so it’s fortunate most people aren’t trying to have total privacy on the ground on mainland.
I’m not fast enough, nor is my computer fast enough, to save myself from a bad sim crossing in twenty seconds using whatever technique.
I’m not in favor of an orb ban or even a ban on a zero second timer, but I question the neighborliness of someone who can’t subdivide his land so the zero timer isn’t right next to a road, or his neighbor, or who feels the need to orb someone a thousand meters above a house with no one in it and no nearby skybox.
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5 hours ago, HeathcliffMontague said:
As has been shown on this forum before, ban lines can actually encroach on Linden roads on the mainland. Not often, but it happens. Someone inexperienced with security setups may cause them to go wider than intended and cause a similar effect.
I consider myself a pretty experienced SL driver, and when mainland driving my scripts are kept low, I use vehicles suited for SIM crossings (not racetrack vehicles) and I keep an eye on the FS mini map all the way. I cruise. Still, if I cross a SIM crossing straight into a ban line or wayward security orb with 0 seconds I usually have little chance of recovering.
If I had land bordering on mainland roads or sailable waters I'd at least bother checking how my orb/security setup might affect those traveling past it. But that's just me. Although, if you at least take the time to check that, I'd think most in the driving or boating community wouldn't really give a toss what your eject time is.
Yes, exactly.
You can check your scripts using an alt that is not in your land group. Walk around your parcel, fly across it, see if your orb or banlines are actually doing what you think they are. Not only will travelers appreciate this, your neighbors will too.
I wouldn’t argue that I should be allowed onto water land just because it’s water. I use water as part of my own home with a mermaid RP theme. But if you are next to a Linden passage and your scripts affect someone in that passage, you have actually exceeded your rights as a landowner.
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FWIW, 20 seconds is not enough time if I have a vehicle stuck in a banline, a car turned wrong on rough or narrow ground or a separation of a skipper and a passenger after a botched sim crossing. It’s also not enough if I’ve had to set my wind to a low low speed so I can very slowly navigate a narrow strip of Linden water.
Also I’m not sure everyone knows how to use the Firestorm mini map to show parcel lines at the middle setting. So they’re steering purely by visual cues according to what has managed to rezz for them.
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My two cents FWIW as both a vehicle user and mainland owner of a small parcel.
I'm completely sympathetic to people who are getting SL stalked and have to be a bit draconian.
But I really wish there was more newbie education, not about "rules" which anybody can look up, but about etiquette and self-protection.
1) The wandering exploring newbies who wander into houses didn't get that part of the etiquette lecture. I always put dressing areas and bedrooms into high skyboxes. It is rare to encounter anybody up there, and even the neighbors I can see from there are all privacy minded. We have learned to assume a skybox is a bedroom and we keep out. It's almost superfluous to use an orb up there, unless you have the misfortune to get an actual stalker. I really like the suggestion to have a layer of air that is skybox free, so planes and skyboxes can live happily together.
2) You will get more sympathy for vehicle users if you try it yourself. You might enjoy it!
3) The two things I want to implore people to do (etiquette, not rules):
If you need banlines or an orb, don't buy land next to a sim edge, water, or a road.
Orb the house and courtyard but not the whole lot, so you can use a more punitive interval but nobody is affected just passing by.
4) People who expect privacy in SL without turning off avatar visibility can't have it, not because of parcel security, but because of camming. Even on the potato I use to go online, I can crank up my draw distance and change my settings so I can cam through land, prims, everything, sims away from me. Not everyone who does this is polite of intent. The correct reaction to this is not fear or modesty but a certain detachment about the Barbie doll you're using for an avatar.
5) To male avatars: the female avatars you find in their houses did not come to SL to have sex or even a conversation with YOU. Unfortunately everybody who drives a female avatar has come across a clueless character who didn't seem to realize this. It's griefing. It will bring out my hyperactive land security tactics like nobody's business, that includes damage, because I enjoy shooting at targets. But I don't like to do this, because I'm in the camp of the vehicle users and I'm not trying to tie up an innocent sailboat or a helicopter in my banlines and orbs. When I threw parties I had a private bolthole and set home to that instead of my club or house.
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Agreed.
Thank you LL for opening up the Jira. It's going to be a lifesaver for a lot of people.
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512 Jeugeot water land by Linden protected sailable to ocean
in Mainland
Posted
Price drop! Now 5,120L.