Relieved, a harried LL will hand over these functions to the FIC monoplists, who, in the name of saving us from Plastic Duck, will increase their hold over the airwaves, the real estate streams, the economic streams, the newbies, whatever there is to grab. It’s like how when the Soviet state collapsed, thousands of “private detective” agencies were formed to guard the oligarchs who were all made up of old KGB agents who fought each other. Same old, same old.

The losers from Plastic Duck are liberal groups like the Thinkers who can’t find a way to stop providng a platform to W-HAT because of their erroneous and empty-headed clinging notions that freedom of speech = freedom of *behaviour*. It doesn’t. You can have an art show that is vulgar, at least, in my world of an Art. 19 ideal. You don’t get to then take the World Trade Center and literally crash it into other players in the game, invade their properties with it, grief their events, and generally behave like assholes. Go on your own damn land and behave like assholes, thank you. W-Hat yammers on about Art. 19 and free speech and no one ever says “Um, but what you do is incitement to imminent action and ACTION not speech.”

With the destruction of the feeble and small thinking class through it’s hijacking of Thinkers, especially in this last week, with its emboldening of the FIC to scream for more “security,” Plastic Duck has been achieving the destruction of the state, the goal of all radical anarchic terrorist types, who work all the ends against the middle, get everyone fighting each other, so that the real destructive work is achieved not even by themselves but by everyone else. Hey, nice work!

I’m glad Phil got the patch in fast, but programming is not the only way to fight these kinds of threats to a free society.

What is the solution? Things like Plastic Duck have to be fought through increasing human solidarity, and finding various horizontal ways around the vertikal of terrorism. Thinkers should have ejected W-Hat long ago. It’s an old Bolshevik trick to constantly deny affiliation with the group’s worst actors but never disassociate from them by leaving the group. Thinkers is not *obliged* to open its doors to EVERYONE — no group is. Let them be in their own little isolated corner hooked up to nothing. And the security state wannabees among the monopolists also don’t get to invade me further in the name of protecting me from Plastic Duck, thank you very much.

What, people steal top designer’s creations, they steal my RL info without consent and reveal it, they harass through money-losing measures like rogue officer recall, and they don’t get permabanned, and W-Hat gets permabanned for what…again? A giant dick? And…a copy of somebody’s blingtard vendor thingie and some gun? Huh? There should be gradually longer terms of banning from SL, like 90 days or 120 days or whatever, with the meter running on tier and subscriptions. The severity of perma banning merely makes them try harder to get in on all their relatives’ credit cards and dial up from Kinko’s or whatever. Bleh. The way around Plastic Duck is…to walk around Plastic Duck. He’s not that witty or interesting. The hysteria fanned about about this by the FIC on the forums illustrates the emptiness at the core.

Walter>
Yes, I’ll be watching LL closely on this one to see how they react. If we dont see a shift to prioritise protection of works within SL itself, or still dont have the ability to do it ourselves, I doubt we will see much larger investment in SL-based applications.

At the moment, while we still depend on LL for all our security (due to a lack of alternative options), I would expect LL to take responsibility for these problems, until we see the ability to do it ourselves, at which point – any problems at that of the coders themselves.

-Adam

I completely agree, Adam, and you make good points. I just think the episode raises interesting questions about who is to be responsible for this kind of security in a “user-created” virtual world. It may be that the combination of LSL and LL security measures is insufficient to support robust business apps at this point. In any case, I do think the hack is testament to the power of the SL economy and the proprietors within it. It would be unfortunate if no fix is forthcoming and business owners abandon their operations as a result.

In the real-world you have processing power capable of implementing ciphers like AES or RSA. You also have the ability to access the compiled binary of your application, you could do a checksum to check it hasnt been tampered with, or something similar. in LSL the limited amount of memory availible, and the inability to view the content of the application from within itself makes the task a bit more difficult.

I’ve recently asked LL about increasing the security options open to us, and asked again when this exploit was discovered. Hopefully we will get a commitment by LL to improving the general security of the Second Life platform as a whole, something a few high profile sellers are going to require if they are to keep developing for SL.

-Adam