I don't know if you saw CSI:NY last night, but it was a total travesty of information law. The episode portrayed a series of Second Life players involved in a series of assassinations, which CBS is continuing into a series of games within the virtual environment of the Second Life world.
Having entered Second Life (SL) nearly two years ago because I had acquaintances who were working on public awareness projects on issues such as Darfur, in the SL nonprofit community, I really resented the nerdy, desperate, greedy, rude, oversexed image that was given of the SL user.
At least they did show how SL gives "respite" to disabled persons by giving them a social environment where, for example, the mobility impaired can fly! But most of the por-trayal of SL seemed like a be-trayal.
No better was the image of the game itself, which was based on some World of Warcraft gamer's fantasy of a virtual world. Combat seemed central to interactions and status and access to closed doors. Bribes were required for avatar location information that (if they were able to get RL address information) the investigative team could have gotten from any Linden Lab employee or able hacker from within game. Which gets us back to legaliities...
I doubt if Linden Lab (LL, creators of SL) would have given over personally identifying information including contact info immediately for a crime investigation on the basis of a phone call? How open to fraud would we be in that case. Remember HP?
Considering the recent investigation of intellectual property (also known as a "sex bed"), they certainly wouldn't have been able to trace IPs to sources as quickly as the show had it seem.
I had heard that CSI was pretty true to science, but the people know nothing about information security, laws of evidence in information law, and various legal and technical bits. Ever since crime shows regularly mangled the miranda laws for expediency on a regular basis, I stopped expecting civics from crime shows. But I'd been told I could expect better from this show which, yes indeed, I have never watched before in my life in any of its incarnations.
But this episode was more than usually, as gamers would say, lame. As was their understanding of technology. It makes me wonder, are these folks really all that hot on forensics at all?
A computer "virus" did completely unlikely things to computers, via a mechanism more like something from Snow Crash than SL. Special effects in the game were dramatic but had nothing to do with what users could expect in the game.
Which gets me to my final point. Electric Sheep (esheep), a SL developer who had worked for CBS before the VIACOM group put some part of $7M in funding into them early this year, created a monster effort to bring new users into SL. Tonight, very little of it worked.
Even with a record 416 servers added to SL to accomodate the anticipated load, lag made the use of the environment, far less the add-on games, unusable. The onrez.com web pages from Electric Sheep for help and scenario descriptions didn't load (which should have been a far easier technical performance criterion to anticipate). The game "heads up display" or "HUD" with the buttons and widgets to manipulate the games took over five minutes for me to load up, with no way to know if it were even loading.
One good aspect is that Electric Sheep created a new Second Life client that, according to their minimum requirements, allows a fairly cheap computer to use SL, requiring for example half the system memory that the client from Linden Labs dictates. Yet some reports anticipated a million new sign ups -- which seems a little over enthusiastic. A million signups, and 999,000 users who will never return after their first laggy 20 minutes?
I am discouraged to think that new users to SL will be instantly discouraged, CBS/VIACOM will be discouraged, and existing SL users will be disaccomodated by the burden of socializing what new players do make it in, and the load on an already fragile SL infrastructure.
I want to see Second Life thrive. But folks, this is not how to do it.
And this is not how to present issues of online privacy, information law, rules of evidence, or the need for subpoenas -- in an age when those standards are eroding.
--
Shava Nerad, News and Opinion Correspondent:
Shava’s column, Iconoclasm, published irregularly and frequently to Gather Essentials: News, is an examination of the provocative ideas emerging in media and world culture behind the news.
Shava Nerad has been working on the Internet for over twenty-five years, at the boundaries of Internet and social issues. She is CEO of Indigenis, a consulting group working at the intersection of virtual worlds, social networking, and gaming communities, and will soon be leaving her position as development director of The Tor Project to help found a youth journalism initiative.
She lives in Somerville, MA with her teenage son, her fiance (a professional magician and fundraising coach), and a corgi/dachshund mutt named George.
Opinions here have nothing to do with Tor or Indigenis.
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Comments: 10
I don't think that the Sheep folks had bad intentions, but I do wonder if they had any impact or real control at all on how this went down.
Of the folks who play SL who we meet, one is a geek in the CSI lab who's all about skillz (like a serious combat oriented gamer geek, which SL isn't really known for), one is a woman who dresses elaborately and kinkily up as her avatar to go on a date (and gets killed), one is a guy with a serious disability who's afraid to meet someone in RL because he's dying of his disability, one is a philandering senator (also looking to have anonymous sex with women in "avatar costume" in RL who he meets in SL).
Jokes are made at the expense of sex, violence, and crossdressing -- and lots of sort of contemptuous sneering at the geekiness of it all.
In fact, in all of it, the only usual "whipping boy" they pass over without real comment is furries.
You might look no further than Virtually Blind, the site that is linking to your blog right now. Talk about "online privacy, information law, rules of evidence, or the need for subpoenas"!! My God, Duranske already claims this young man in Texas *is* the perpetrator, based merely on Stroker's claims; he was also attempting to reach him at home and attempt to play cop with him -- even though he is not a practicing lawyer at the moment -- and the notion that as a virtual legal blogger he can invade privacy like that is one that definitely needs discussion.
If you want to see how real journalism works -- and surely you yourself can at least appreciate if not practice the difference -- look at Eric Reuters piece on the same information. http://secondlife.reuters.com/stories/2007/10/25/eros-lawyers-id-john-doe-avatar-youth-denies-hes-catteneo/
Notice the head line -- he doesn't say that the perpetrator is found -- because a court of law hasn't established that. He gives the *news* which is that this alleged perpetrator denies it.
Notice what Eric writes about what Stroker and the private detective did -- they got two ISPs to track down two Dallas addresses associated with this "Volkov" account and the private detective (not a police detective) went to the family's door and confronted this 19-year-old kid.
Are you fine with that, Shava, with your concern for privacy? Given kids' culture of constantly plugging in laptops all over (a practice even accounting for "Volkov" to be plugged into the second house), it's really hard to establish who is behind the avatar.
What were the "rules of evidence," Shava? In determining this case involving damages of a grand $2,250, something Stroker probably burns through on his lawyer alone in a week.
Once again, I'd have to say that everything about this case looks like a show trial, with the chief purpose to be placing a chill on rivals who make knockoffs and yardsalers.
There are other more important reasons, however, that deserve far more study, and that has to do with the mismatch between TV mass culture and user-generated media with niche cultures.
You're also completely silent about the SEARCH problems represented on this browser, which I've campaigned about and written about extensively. With all your social consciousness, you really should be more concerned about the ways in which one company is pwning the SEARCH and steering to their own shopping destinations.
Actually, it's odd to come flame Ben's post here -- I just noted how hard it was in real life to track an avatar to a real person, so once again, we agree.
And frankly, I'm criticizing this show for its poor form because I generally avoid this kind of show.
My investigation with the browser were limited to touristing into the CSI sims for about an hour. Frankly I don't trust the privacy of the browser, given Sheep's history, so I'll leave it to more thorough researchers such as yourself to dig into that aspect.
I'm expecting not to use it again.
I'm less willing to forgive the degree of misrepresentation of Second Life that the show indulged in, especially the over-emphasis on combat. They made SL look like a dangerous place. For most of us, a big part of the appeal of Second Life is that it ISN'T a dangerous place; you can't be murdered, raped, or robbed.
Another misrepresentation is how easily they were able to get the IP address of an avatar, and then convert that IP address into a real-world address. They were doing the first part by apparent magic; they weren't even asking Linden Lab for it. And honestly, I hope the second part isn't as easy as it appeared on the show!
To comment on Prokofy's comment: at present, the search in the OnRez viewer is just the standard LL search. ESC says that they are developing a search tool of their own, but it is not currently ready, and is not in the viewer. There IS, however, a Shop button that opens up a browser (integrated into the viewer, not separate) to shop.onrez.com. My least favorite thing about the OnRez viewer is that the build menu is hidden by default (you have to choose a menu option Show Build Menu to see it); to my mind, that demotes the importance of creating content in Second Life.
Except during the busiest times on Wednesday night, the viewer and the toolbar have mostly been working well for people. The ESC developers continue to fix problems; both the viewer and the toolbar have been updated since the launch of Virtual CSI on Wednesday. (They were working on it pretty frantically; the opening day version was much better than one I tested only two weeks earlier.) The toolbar DOES seem to be a bit more problematic with LL viewers than with the OnRez viewer; the latest version of OnRez may have bug fixes that are specific to toolbar issues. (It's a VERY fancy HUD; it even shows motion video.) And yes, Virtual CSI:NY is less laggy if you use the OnRez viewer, but the advantage is specific to those sims -- the reason is that the textures for the CSI build are included in the viewer, just as the textures for LL's orientation islands are included in the standard viewer. At present, I think the best viewer overall for visiting places other than CSI is Nicholaz BE-s.
One thing that saddens me about the OnRez viewer is that it is not an open source project. The claim is that it is built on code licensed commercially from Linden Lab, not on the publicly available GPL source. But given the nature of the GPL, I'm not certain that is a valid distinction... and in any case, I'd rather see the Sheep release the source so that other open-source viewer projects could build on their work.
Obligatory disclaimer: I am working for the Sheep as a CSI:NY greeter.
Well, as to finding the address from an IP, it's getting closer every day. Right now, with an IP number, you can usually only locate a neighborhood (the nearest cable router) at best for a residence.
The government is pressing ISPs to do better than this, though, which means that soon anyone may be able to plug in your IP number and get your street address, mash that up with Google maps, and see a perfect satellite image of your house, including a good idea on how to break in the back door.
Lovely thought.
Use Tor. :)