Strange’s Second Life Blog

Later tonight, the new episode of CSI: NY will be shown and will coincide with the release of a new Second Life viewer. The AOLized viewer from Electric Sheep, called OnRez will be available for new users that sign up to SL through the CBS web site and to current residents. Some people are estimating that this will have the effect of giving SL 1,000,000 new sign-ups. The statistics that are posted (here’s Oct. 23rd’s) on SL Insider for October 24th should be interesting, to say the least. Your2ndPlace has a lot more “specific” details… check it out.

I’m trying to envision this whole thing as an opportunity. It’s an opportunity for the companies that I’m involved with to market products and services to a lot of “fresh meat” (or fresh pixels, as the case may be). It’s an opportunity for many other companies to do the same. The kind of congestion that this will cause in the SL marketplace could be overwhelming, though, so there are also some big doubts that go along with my optimism.

With this opportunity, there will be a huge jump in the percentage of new residents that will come in to Second Life with no money, at all. They will come in through a whole different experience and for a completely different purpose than the majority of the residents that are already here. A lot of them will see Second Life as a “who-done-it” game and will not even realize the potential of many other aspects of the platform. Will this truly be an opportunity to market products and services or maybe hire some cheap labor?

What this may become is the equivalent of illegal immigration into the US. We’ll have a huge jump in the amount of SL residents that have not had the time or desire to go through the process of getting their “virtual green card”, but all of them will need to make money, somehow. The job market will be flooded with these new “residents”, taking good paying jobs away from established residents and causing the average wages to drop. This is “great” news for employers in SL, since the overhead costs will go down. This is truly bad news for marketers in SL since the average avatar will have less money, and they’ll be frugal with what they “do” have to keep from paying to buy more Lindens, because they can’t earn them as fast.

Of course, this is something that Linden Lab needed. A huge influx of new sign-ups, of which a certain percentage will no doubt become “premium” members, a large media company that invests a crapload of money into buying server space (440 sims - 110 groups of 4 identical islands, each), and the media attention and “free” advertising that Second Life gets as a residual from the CBS advertising.

Is it really what Second Life needed, though? I hate making predictions, because I don’t like to get proven wrong, but in this case, I think I will. About 15 hours from now, or right around the time that the new episode of CSI: NY starts, the problems will begin. The first wave of problems will begin when current residents download the OnRez viewer (just to see what it’s like) and begin to log on. Some of these current residents will use their current name, while many of them will create alts, just for the purpose of using the new viewer. The time that it takes to log in to Second Life will start to slow down, considerably, much like what happens on “update Wednesdays” when the “all clear” is announced.

Suddenly, search will refuse to search and the ability to teleport will be gone. At the same time that this starts to happen, people that are watching the CSI episode will begin the process of creating their accounts and downloading the new viewer. The load-balancing that Electric Sheep has put in place to transport the new users to the various regions will be realized as a futile attempt to keep things running smooth while creating other problems that were not taken into account.

The default avatars will all begin to show up with “missing images” and/or “Ruthed” and the first impression that the new users will get will be highly detrimental to what CBS was trying to accomplish. While not affecting the new users, much, the ability to rezz objects anywhere on the grid will quit working. HUDs will not appear on-screen and users in the CSI sims will not be able to do too much, because of it.

Soon after the show ends (if not “right after”), Linden Lab will announce that something has gone wrong and they will begin a rolling restart to fix the issues. The new users will have absolutely no idea what that means and will suddenly quit moving, not realizing that they’ve been booted out. When they finally decide to log off and restart the viewer, their attempts to get back on the grid will not work. They’ll become frustrated with Second Life and realize that they don’t need this kind of frustration in their lives. Even though they just created an account, they decide that they don’t need to log back in, ever.

Starting on Thursday, there will be a big blitz of people reporting how many new user sign-ups there were on Wednesday, due to the new viewer and the CSI: NY episode. In the days following, the average concurrent users will not reflect the amount of users that recently signed up. It might go up, slightly, but “peak” concurrency will remain around 51,000, with average concurrency around 40,000.

Bloggers who have never talked about Second Life, before, will start to write about their experiences. There won’t be many long posts, because they will not have had a whole lot of experience. The backlash that will come from the bloggers, alone, will begin another wave of SL bashing from big media outlets. CBS and Electric Sheep will stand by their numbers… numbers that they’ll try to justify and spin. They’ll call the whole thing a success and will point out that this is something that is meant to last “months”. They’ll ignore the problems that were encountered on October 24th, and instead, focus on the long-term aspect of the whole project.

Did I say that I hate making predictions?

I honestly hope that my prediction doesn’t happen. I hope that the grid is able to withstand the amount of users that they are predicting and that everything does go smooth. Maybe “Massive Disaster” is too strong of a term for this prediction, too. There would only be a small percentage of residents who would truly consider it to be a disaster, while the rest of us would see it as a “bad night”. Let’s see how close I get, though.

Coming from the camp that “software wants to be free”,  this is something that just caught my eye. I just wanted to post it here as a reference, for now. With my laptop still in the shop, I need a way to bookmark sites, somehow (other than del.icio.us). I haven’t had any time to look into this deeper or even think about it any more than having a first impression about it.

My only question about this is “where” in the Terms of Service is this coming from? When was this changed? If this was in the TOS before the SexGen bed code theft case, the case would have never went as far as it did. Or is this part of the TOS that covers the open source viewer software?

I’ll update this post (or write a new one) once I look into this further.  By the way, just in case you’re thinking there’s some connection to the site that posted this… there’s not! I actually “just noticed” the site that I am linking this to.

I just want to preface this post by saying that I did not have any money tied up with Jasper Tizzy, The Bank, or anything else that he was connected to. I met him in a casino, one day and we started talking about web sites and hosting. He approached me as if he wanted me to build a site (or two) for him, and after discussing rates he said that he would have to talk to his partner (or something like that), and get back to me. At the time, I thought that we were discussing a web site for the SLEC. I approached him one or two more times, after that, concerning the web site that we talked about, and didn’t get a definitive answer, either time, so I stopped asking about it. Little did I know… and I suppose, little did anybody know…

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For the past few hours, I’ve been looking into Jasper Tizzy’s history. What started as a simple search for some small piece of information turned into hours of discovery and overturned lies.What started me down the rabbit hole was the discovery of Jasper Tizzy’s RL name on a cached page on Google. Some people already knew his RL name because it had been posted, and at least one other person fell down the same hole that I did. When he discovered it, he posted what he found on the forums at SL Exchange. After 8 pages of arguing other people and rebuttals from Jasper, the original posts had been edited by the author in an effort to keep himself from being banned in the forums. I only found this forum thread after I was already so far down in the hole that I couldn’t see light.What I discovered, first is that there were “many” accusations of Jasper Tizzy (I’ll refer to him, here with his SL name) being a spammer. Though Jasper defended the accusations on the slexchange forum by saying that he owns his own servers and rents space to hosting companies, I found out otherwise.

The past was pretty well documented here and here, and there even seems to be “some” connection to Eddy Marin who (in 2003) was called “the world spam king”, thought to be responsible for about 200-million to 250-million spams a day (again, in 2003).

Jasper defends himself in the slexchange forum in this post by acknowledging that Eddie Marrin (spelled differently on different sites) is a spammer. He also says that Eddie had servers in his datacenter and that “Big spammers and heavy usage porn operators” pay him a lot of USD every month to put servers in his datacaenter.

He goes on to say, in the same post, “So….. Will Linden Bank be a scam? With over 600,000 USD we take in at the datacenter, I dont think you will ever see a Linden Bank customer have a probelm.” From what’s happened over the past week, we can see that his prediction was wrong.

He continues, “Now I am in SL, like the internet was in 1995. I was a success then, and will be a success in SL too. Im not going anywhere anytime soon.”

Since the post was made on the forum on April 28, 2007, it makes me wonder what his definition of “anytime soon” is. Four months must be longer than what he meant, though.

Another thing he throws in for the pure purpose of name-dropping is that he hosted Audionet which became Broadcast.com (founded by Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner). At the time it became Broadcast.com, in September 1995, time they moved to a 30,000 square-foot facility (no need for an outsourced datacenter) in Dallas, TX. Before that, the one-page site was hosted by ccnet.com, based in Walnut Creek, CA. In 1999, Broadcast.com was acquired by Yahoo! for $5.7 billion. Jasper Tizzy was well out of the picture before that happened, if he even had any connection in the first place.

At this point, in case you haven’t heard, I’ll point you to a post from Sept, 17, 2007 (a couple days ago) where PatrickJ Ah tries to clear up some rumors and make sense of what’s happened over the past week. He says that in his opinion, “Jasper is gone from SL and I seriously doubt that he will ever return as Jasper.”

Tobia Forcella, who runs VSTEX (the exchange where Jasper’s companies were listed) added something that I found “strange” at the end of the notice, saying “I had only an IM from Jasper on 13 sept saying: “Hello - I have sold my business to PatrickJ Ah - please move all of my shares in all of my companies to him - ty”.”

Since it’s quoted from “hello” to “ty”, I’m assuming that this was the complete message, and that nothing else was said. Why, on Sept, 14th, did Tobia post this message saying that Jasper is “leaving Second Life and is selling out his business”. Supposedly, the IM that Tobia received from Jasper didn’t say anything about leaving SL. What makes it even more strange is the fact that nothing was actually sold to PatrickJ Ah.

As I continued down the rabbit hole, I only found about 92 domain names registered as being hosted on Jasper Tizzy’s servers. Most of the web sites that are set up on these domains are registered with the exact same information. There are a few that aren’t, which may be legitimate “customer’s sites, though not very many, at all.

The web sites that are registered with the same information are all either very poorly designed, or most of the links don’t work. Many of them contain the default template “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet” text, and usually all of the links don’t work. In the three servers that I looked most of the registration information listed Florida as the registrant’s address, with a few from Indiana.

On the server that hosts “thelindenbank.com” there is another domain that is listed as being registered to an address in Nevada. Interestingly, that domain has a picture of the exact same credit card that was used to announce the news that Atlas Venture Capital acquires “The Bank”, where the aquisition of World Wide Connect was also announced.

Of course, if somebody wanted to explain that away, they could. They could also explain that some people own many different domains… no big deal. I own plently, myself (15 or so).

The problem comes when all of the information is put together, though. Jasper says that he made enough money running datacenters to retire at 40 years old, but claiming “with over $600,000 we take in at the datacenter, I don’t think” you’ll see a problem, he doesn’t sound “retired”. He says that his name is on “maybe over 250,000″ domains (tech contact, I can understand, but not listed as the registrant, which is all I saw). In 1998 he “sold a search engine” and some software to Lycos for a bundle of cash. This post says that he still has a datacenter on Commercial Blvd.

One big question: Why is he hosting sites with Qwest, in Chicago (65.118.74.213) and with iDAQ Ltd., in Great Brittan (217.168.144.93) when he could easily use “his own” datacenter?

Why was he hesitant to give his RL info. It seems that now we know. From now on, I’ll be extra wary of people that say things like, “But I dont need money, and wont scam the SL bank to get a few bux for sure. I think since I was a leader int he internet, that Im going to be a leader in SL too.. Nothing in my past im scared of, nobody looking to sue me for anything LOL”

… as he walks away, laughing.

ADDED: Now (Sept. 22, 2007) it looks like some of the web sites have been taken down, including the one that looked like the “main hub” (because most of the registrant information for the other domains is using the name “Private Web Communities, Inc”) for the others, called Private Web Communities. It was there just a couple days ago. Why are you pulling your sites down, Frank? Are you quitting that game, too?

There are many different kinds of discussions that take place, every day, but one of the big discussions that I attended, yesterday was really “strange”. What was supposed to be a discussion about a religious sect opening a couple islands in SL, and the ramifications that it might have in the rest of SL turned into a session of name-calling and childlike “one-ups” between various people that disagreed with each other.

As far as what was supposed to be the topic of the discussion, I personally don’t see anything wrong with it. Nobody is “forced” to go to their new religious islands if they don’t want to. If I have no interest in it, why would I go there? As far as not letting people on your land, just ban them like you would anybody else. Simple. If nobody is violating the TOS or the community standards, they have every right to do what they want to do.

What stemmed from the discussion was something that I honestly couldn’t believe, though. Without saying a word about exactly what happened, I’ll point to a couple posts… well, one post, and a page on the Second Life web site.

The first thing I’d like you to read is a post from 2½ months ago called “Identity Boundaries“, over at Metaversed, paying particularly close attention to the third paragraph and the last statement of it that says, “Because the rules of SL are clear: if it is not on your first-life profile, it is not fair game for use in SL by others against your will. It’s wrong. And I stand by that.”

The next thing is (and I’ll paste it here) from the Community Standards page on the Second Life web site. The page clearly says ” The Community Standards sets out six behaviors, the “Big Six“, that will result in suspension or, with repeated violations, expulsion from the Second Life Community.” Number 4, which is called “Disclosure” does mention something to the effect of what Prokofy said, how if it’s not in the first life profile page, it’s a violation of privacy. I’m glad that she said that she will “stand by that”, but let’s look at the rest of what number 4 says:

“Residents are entitled to a reasonable level of privacy with regard to their Second Lives. Sharing personal information about a fellow Resident –including gender, religion, age, marital status, race, sexual preference, and real-world location beyond what is provided by the Resident in the First Life page of their Resident profile is a violation of that Resident’s privacy. Remotely monitoring conversations, posting conversation logs, or sharing conversation logs without consent are all prohibited in Second Life and on the Second Life Forums.”

Let’s just hope that she stands by the complete “Disclosure” section, and not just part of it. An abuse report “was” filed because (even though I do listen to her and value her opinion), I also stand by it. Being outspoken, popular, and knowledgeable does not give “anybody” the right to break rules.

ADDED: I filed the abuse report, first, and told Benjamin about it, later. He decided to file another AR. Prokofy has now posted the entire meeting (including the IMs) on her blog. Think about it, Prok… are you really “standing by it”, or just when it suits you? Maybe since you say LL will do nothing about it, anyway it’s okay?

Mainstream media keeps heading right down the same path, it seems. Just as I thought that Second Life bashing was about to end, another “SL Doomsday” writer points out all of the evils that she can find with the platform (which she refers to as a “Web site”). Scripps Howard News Service writer, Bonnie Erbe writes her latest opinion article just like most of the other people who have never stepped foot inside of it… or if they have, made their decision about the whole world in less than two hours in-game.

The fact that she calls it a “web site”, aside, many other things about her account of what Second Life is are off the mark. She bases her whole opinion as if conversations inside SL are all one-on-one, saying that “two people can interact unrealistically with each other, both posing as someone they are not.” I actually can’t remember the last time I was in a room with only “one” person. I do remember times that I was interacting with another person, though, and I will say that it was anything “but” unrealistic.

She continues about how Second Life has “caused” divorces and break-ups in the real world, saying that if people put all of the time and energy into real life relationships that they put into relationships online, everything would be all better. Of course it has! Blaming SL for the lack of communication between RL partners is “easy”… that’s why! If the communication and time spent together was good between people, they wouldn’t look for something else… be it Real Life or Second Life.

I have met some amazing people in Second Life, as well as in real life. Meeting people and getting to know them in Second Life is much different than getting to know somebody in the flesh, however. Bonnie says, “…just because your avatar mate is physically beautiful doesn’t mean he or she is a good person…”. Does she actually think people are that stupid? Everybody who is a resident of SL “knows” that the avatars aren’t “real”.

I honestly don’t even pay too much attention to the avatars of people that I talk to in Second Life. It’s more about a meeting of minds. You can tell a lot faster if somebody is a “good person” by how they communicate. The same holds true in RL, but in SL, the communication is “all” you have, so it’s actually a lot easier to make that determination, earlier.

Sure, there’s a lot of “LOL” and “afk”, but for the most part, people usually talk in complete sentences, rather than talking like 13-year-old girls in a Yahoo chat room. If Bonnie had ever stepped foot into Second Life and actually met a few people, she would have realized this. She would have met some interesting people and maybe even became friends with them. Well… she might have. Going into something with such a pessimistic attitude, she would have probably turned into a griefer.

Even though I will not be verifying my age with Linden Lab, I will be posting a lot of real life information and a short auto-biography on SL Reports. The decision to post the contact information for the Board of Directors was made at our latest meeting, on September 30th. The decision was made as an effort to be a lot more open and transparent. We see a trend, all over SL, of people wanting more information about the people that are behind companies that they deal with.

While I have no problem letting people know who I am in RL, I don’t feel that I need to “verify my age” with Linden Lab, through some third party who, in the past, has been known to sell mailing lists to other companies. I can be as open as I want to, without handing over my social security number (or even “part” of it). The use of social security numbers for identification is not legal, and in my opinion, a huge mistake by LL.

The RL information on the SL Reports site will include a history of things that I’ve worked on in the past, things that I’m currently involved in, and a RL picture. Links to various projects will be listed, as well as a list of various IM usernames that I use.

At the time of this post, the information is not on the SL Reports site, but will be coming, very soon.

Today Linden Lab announced that they will be using a company called Aristotle’s Integrity for the “first stage” of Identity Verification. The company, based in Washington D.C. is run by John Aristotle Phillips, who once designed an atomic bomb to get himself out of bother at Princeton University. He wrote a book called “Mushroom: The True Story of the A-Bomb Kid“. Now his company Aristotle International pits its software against ruses of underage teenagers trying to gamble or buy alcohol or cigarettes online. Phillips, 50, is not so much poacher-turned gamekeeper as nuclear physicist turned web nanny.

On May 9, 2007 Inigo Chamerberlin wrote an Op/Ed article at the Second Life Herald, titled “Philip Linden’s Folly“. Definitely worth a read, paying close attention to the links near the bottom.

This “first stage” will verify age. There’s no mention of what the “second stage” will consist of, and if the next level of verification will be required to access areas marked as “restricted”, once it comes along.

Personally, I will not be verifying my age with Linden Lab or any company that they’ve chosen to work with for the verification process. In my opinion, there is absolutely no need for me to visit any place that sets up restrictions on access to their land, allowing only “verified” residents there. From the comments on their latest blog post, I’m definitely not alone. Over the past few years, I’ve “been involved in” multiple cases of stolen identity from a merchant’s point of view, and while my RL company has lost plenty of money because of it, LL stands to lose their own “integrity”. The verification will be nothing more than a process to step through, having no real meaning, being riddled with stolen information after just a couple months.

It’s also very interesting how Linden Lab has chosen a company that is known for selling mailing lists for this verification. When the deal was announced by LL, back in May, Aristotle International threw a fit because a final deal had not been reached, before the announcement. It makes me wonder why it took so long to come to a final deal and what the issues with that deal were.

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