ANUDDER CZECHKBOKZ? *DA* DIS IS TOO *DA* DIFUHCULT FIR US *DA* STOOPED NOOBIEZ TA *DA* FIGURE OUT *DA*!!11!!!1

Thus spake the Wisdom, the Power, and the Glory wielder >>>> “You allow libelous and slanderous statements to remain on your site, and you do not remove them, despite your own TOS.”

Most of the [elided by Uri] I have seen on SLU is your own, pondscum. Outing people’s gender, fishing for, and implying real life info, making unfounded, unprovable allegations against the webmaster, other players, etc. You know, hypocrisy suits you well. It’s hilarious watching you say what you do about SLU, from THIS site, which, since you were banished into the wilderness, has allowed you to publish more [elided by Uri] and outright lies than SLU ever would. Then there’s your blog. A putrifacted, toothless maw; belching forth utter tripe.

You seem more hysterical than normal Prok – is it getting to you?

Your story about the “interception” wears a little thinner each time you tell it, but sure, let’s give you the benefit of the doubt. You were the “last to know” about LL’s use of your technology despite Babbage Linden talking on his blog about discussing it with you for months. Whatever. It’s fine. You didn’t know. You were blindsided. So? That doesn’t remove any of the issues!

And I’m afraid you are blatantly misrepresenting the issue of stripping out the email addresses. It was *I* who raised it on the forums — forcefully. Robin then answered it publicly that she would take a look at this concern — she didn’t post a tinfoil hat picture like the rest of you, but took it as a valid concern like every valid concern about privacy in LL. I can’t imagine why you think you can “backdate” this issue now to make it look like *you* are the one who asked Robin to do this when *I* was the one who raised in the forums — where it counts — and got a public answer from her — where it counts — and this is all the public record — where it counts. Whatever private little FICy convos you had just don’t count because we didn’t hear them.

Cristiano, since this debate, there have been numerous patches of SL released. This business of the checkbox, which must be a hugely simply matter to program, has been discussed numerous times. Where is it? I don’t see it. And I won’t be surprised if I don’t see it in the next version, either.

Uh, duh, we know about how the snapshots sent to Snapzilla. But on the SL site itself, they are not named. Nothing is there. It is stripped out. Gone. Just missing. It only shows up if someone then follows it to Snapzilla. In fact, it’s not an easy matter, weeks later, to find some picture that was once on the SL site among the numerous pictures on your site.

You allow libelous and slanderous statements to remain on your site, and you do not remove them, despite your own TOS. You’ve done that with statements about me, and you’ve even made claims about me being the libeler and yet not removed my ostensibly “libelous” statements. So you have no leg to stand on when you go on yammering about your big concerns for privacy or standards of dignity. Your “rants and rumours” and forums in general of even more tabloidy and scurrilous than the Herald, if one can imagine such a thing, and that entirely undermines you so-called noble privacy mission.

Cristiano, your story is never going to be old, I’m going to go on comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable : )

. Let me clear up a bit of your usual FUD bullshit for those reading.

1) The snapshots sent to Snapzilla always contain the name of the avatar who sent them – this has been fundamental from the beginning, You cannot spoof it by changing the name – the avatar name is embedded in the postcard. This is to protect from someone taking a picture and submitting it as someone else. Would you prefer that it could be spoofed and someone could take pictures and send them as if they came from you?
2) Snapzilla existed before Linden Lab added the pictures to the front page – they intercepted them and started posting them to the front page. You act as if I had anything to do with this or control over it, which I do not.
3) In the next release of SL, there will be a checkbox indicating whether or not a picture can be included on the front page. In the interim, LL used pictures going to my site since they already had implied consent to be public, as they were going onto a public web site. A bit of a stretch on their part, but there you go.
4) I have always taken privacy very seriously, and have stated so and proven that with actions. I have not wavered on that, and I refuse to let you misrepresent me in any way. When you get a direct statement from someone, you just pretend that they didn’t say it. Both SLU and Snapzilla have clear privacy policies, and I have gone to great lengths to ensure that information is not only private, but secured.
5) I am the one who asked Robin Linden to have the email addresses removed from the postcards going out, long before you ever raised the issue, as they are not needed for any functionality on Snapzilla and are not read or processed at all.

Please stop with your obsession with my site, it is getting really old.

Cristiano

What I sent you wasn’t just “identical” in one instance, it was the *same* picture, which I, too, right-clicked on and then pressed on the link to get right in the world. Then I quickly snapped others where he was in slightly different poses or even in the same pose but of course you can see the light/angle etc is different.

So, I, too, right-clicked off the front page “Second Life Postcards” because it seemed urgent to save it before it got pulled. It never occured to me that it was anybody but Hank taking it; it never even occurred to me to give Hank ostensible credit as I was already featuring him in a story, but of course from now I’ll be more careful about trying to research the provenance of these photos on Snapzilla.

I think it’s absolutely HILARIOUS that a major reason why I got one of my bans off the forums over “dissing” Cristiano’s site (i.e. asking hard-hitting questions about it that even Robin Linden felt called upon to answer thoughtfully) was over just this issue. I claimed that there was no privacy for people in the game, if they wished to take a snapshot and get on SL’s front page just with their cool shot, but that when the screenshot was sent out of the game on to a third-party site, Snapzilla, the author of the shot would show up, because the email from inside the game would be whatever email they had tied to their account.

So if they had made an alt that happened to have that same email used on it, and they sent a picture to Snapzilla, it would then out that alt, because the game would automatically generate the same email as put “privately” in the game.

This is just a basic, ordinary, normal concern, expressed not only by me, but it’s the sort of thing that the tekkie goons on the forums have generated thousands of tin-foil hat pictures of me to ridicule me over.

I think many people haven’t been aware that emails sent in and out of the game used to have identifying marks on them, even your RL name if you happened to put that in your RL email return address. LL then moved to hide this better with a long AV key set of letters, but that too is its own identifying mark for the enterprising researcher.

Cristiano has spun this issue until he is blue in the face. He’s never
been able to say, yes, I hear your concerns about RL email and privacy and that’s why a) I urge everyone with these concerns to get an anonymous game email for communication outside the game with third-party sites and b) I reassure everyone that we take privacy seriously.

Instead, he’s sounded defensive, and yammered over and over again that the email gets stripped out and “never” read. He’s shown that people can opt to register on the site with names that aren’t their SL user names. But the fact is, the information *does* arrive into Cristiano’s hands. What he does with it then is basically a question of the faith the community has in him. I personally don’t share that high degree of faith that others do for all the reasons already so often stated (see my blog article “My So-Called Second Life”).

Hiro has amply demonstrated my essential point: whenever I see any picture show up on SL’s website, I can handily click on it and follow it to Snapzilla and likely find out the SL name of the person who took it unless they’ve taken care to disguise this by registering with a non-SL name on Snapzilla (I think that’s how it works).

Sure, everyone “knows” that these pictures go on Snapzilla after showing up on the SL front page, but if a picture doesn’t have an author on the SL website, it doesn’t have an author. I didn’t go reading SLuniverse.com trying to find pictures on their pages when I assumed the subject of the photo took it himself, I went into SL to follow the story. I took a lot of photos myself, and they looked very similar. I assumed it was Hank’s own picture, I came in and snapped very similar pictures, and I posted the story here because it’s a very important issue. When I looked at my e-mail sent queue and saw bunches of pictures, they looked the same. It simply never occurred to me to put a photo credit for Hank (since I believed it was him snapping ihs own picture) or to inquire whose photo it was. After all, that wasn’t the main point.

You, Hiro, did not send your own picture to the Herald. I did. And it would never occur to me that YOU of all people would be deserving a photo credit, though I saw you on the scene and I think you informed me I was on mute, because I just wouldn’t think that you, as one of the lead fanboys and LL loyalists on the SL forums, would be posting a picture that might appear to harm LL’s reputation or question its policies.

Like I said, you didn’t send it to the Herald as news, you sent it to Snapzilla, as fan stuff.

So you get credit for breaking the story to Snapzilla (if one can even be said to be “breaking a story” to Snapzilla, which is mainly just a fanzine). But you didn’t post it here, and didn’t wish to write even a caption or a brief story. Only four days later, long after the story ran, long after it was pushed below the fold and had about blogged itself out, did you show up with your snarky comment to draw attention to yourself and try to undermine me in some foolish way.

Sending a photo to Snapzilla is not journalism. If you want to engage in journalism, which you say you have all kinds of RL credentials in doing, send the photo directly to the editors, and don’t rely on an eager freelancer watching for stories to crop up, like me. Deal with the masthead people.

I see photo credits missed here all the time, and I suspect it’s because a) it’s very hard to determine them sometimes in a busy newsroom when they don’t come name-stamped (and you wouldn’t want them to come that way so as to preserve your privacy) and b) they are lazy journalists. The SL front page doesn’t name-stamp them. And most people just don’t seek that credit. I know I’ve seen photos of mine come and go here and I never blinked because the story is more important. Sure, it’s good practice to give photo credits. The Herald should try to do better. Notice that Uri reacted immediately to your request without even checking with me — to his credit.

In most cases, a pleasant, “Say, that was my photo, could I get a credit” — posted not on the blog, but in a private email would do the trick — for such a modest, unassuming, community-oriented selfless person such as yourself, Hiro.

And if you *must* blog it, I’d remove those supercilious and vicious little innuendos in phrases like “the appropriate place is generally a small italic font” etc because everybody in the news business — especially those at the Herald who work hard at this for no pay or peanuts in LL — knows this, and doesn’t need to be told about little italics. You’re either being a bossy know-it-all telling them the obvious because you don’t know it’s the obvious, or you are trying to be cute and sarcastic in a subtle way which also merely reveals you to be bossy and know-it-all anyway. So cut it out, Hiro.

OH, and finally, while I’m happy to admit my error about the photo credit and give credit where credit is do, I don’t withdraw my nasty, heated personal attack, Hiro. I stand on my nasty, heated personal attack. You’ve libeled and harassed me on the SL forums for months, along with others who differ from you and your FIC pals, and you’re at the lead of the pack of jackals there harassing most people on the forums with nasty, oh-so-subtle, cutting, vicious, fanboy remarks. You’re exactly what is meant by a Linden’s comment about “an insular group” ruling the forums. We need to break up that cabal, for the good of the world. I’m here to do that as hard, as forcefully, as dramatically as I need to, and as I said, I even fell on my own crossed swords and got permabanned out of that odious forum to make the point.

Everyone knows SL snapshots on the front page are intercepted en route to Snapzilla, and a quick check there would have you find:
http://www.sluniverse.com/pics/pic.aspx?id=22129
Yes, that’s my picture. The camera angle, lighting, character locations, heck, pixel for pixel is identical.

As your story goes, you saw this and then investigated. Now, for all of the conditions to be literally exactly the same AND for you to have the same video settings (note the widescreen format, as well), is extremely unlikely. I am extremely happy that you quickly realized this, and have apologized for your previous comments.

It’s entirely possible that you had a similar picture, but Uri opted to use mine. Or, perhaps you had your images named similarly on your hard drive, and uploaded the wrong one. Who knows! But it’s moot, I suppose, and I’m flattered to have photos of mine on an organization informing the public about current SL events.

But I’m so glad you were able to own up to your public libel, Prok. It’s refreshing to see someone own up to a nasty, heated, personal attack.

…

I apologize if my photo credit request came off high-handed. That wasn’t my intent. If you would, Prokofy, could you please inform me as to the wording I could have used instead? Surely, there must be some phrasing that I could have used that would not evoke a hostile, vicious response from such a clear-minded, un-biased thinker as yourself, Prok.

…

And as for your query as to why I didn’t bring it to the Herald — It did go to the SL front page, and someone from the Herald saw it. It’s a testament to the Herald looking out for news stories, as I would expect from you folks. Hence, I believe sending the image to Snapzilla was more than enough notice for you folks.

…

And, finally, as to seeing few photo credits in the Herald, perhaps it’s something you could start doing? It’s proper to give credit, and while most I’d assume were by the writer of the article, I’m sure there are other exceptions.

Good day to you!

Oh irony of ironies!