Op/Ed: Standing United in the Virtual War On Griefer Terrorism!

by Alphaville Herald on 22/02/08 at 10:54 am

Residents way of life, under attack by virtual terrorist acts

by Maximilian Proto, concerned resident

Good evening.

Our fellow residents, our way of life, our very freedom are under attack in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts. The victims are in clubs, or in their houses; dancers, content creators, businessmen and women; family, friends and neighbors. Thousands of second lives are thrown in peril by evil, despicable acts of terror.

The pictures of Super Mario particles flying all over sims, lolcubes bouncing, avatars orbiting, huge megaprims blocking our land, are filling us with disbelief, terrible sadness, and a quiet, unyielding anger. These acts of mass griefing are intended to frighten our virtual world into chaos and retreat. But they have failed; our world is strong.

Great residents are moving to defend our great world. Griefing attacks can shake the foundations of our most popular regions, but they cannot touch the foundation of Second Life. These acts shattered prims, but they cannot dent the grid of residents’ resolve.

Second Life is targeted for attack because we’re the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity for all virtual worlds. And no one will keep that light from shining.

These days, our world sees evil, the very worst of human nature. And we are responding with the best of Second Life — with the daring of our community, with the caring for strangers and neighbors who are coming to file abuse reports and help in any way they could.

Immediately following an attack, Linden Lab implements their company’s emergency response plans. Their ban force is powerful, and it’s prepared. In addition, resident emergency teams are working in Ahern, Straylight and Apollo to help with local anti-griefing efforts.

Our first priority has to be helping those who have suffering, and to take every precaution to protect the residents at their homes and around the grid from further attacks.

The functions of our world continue without interruption. Regions all across the grid which had been crashed are always reopening again, and will be open for business in the future. Our businesses remain strong, and the Second Life economy will be open for business, as well.

The search is underway for those who are behind these evil acts. We need to direct the full resources of our intelligence and law enforcement communities to find those responsible and to bring them to justice. We will make no distinction between the griefer terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.

I appreciate so very much the members of LindenLab who have joined us in strongly condemning these attacks. And on behalf of the Second Life residents, I thank the many world leaders who have called to offer their support and assistance.

Second Life and all its residents join with all those who want peace and security in the world, and we stand together to win the virtual war against griefer terrorism. These days, I ask for your prayers for all those who grief, for the people whose worlds have been shattered, for all whose sense of safety and security has been threatened. And I pray they will be comforted by a power greater than any of us, spoken through the ages in Psalm 23: “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for You are with me.”

These are the times when all Second Life residents from every walk of life unite in our resolve for justice and peace. Second Life has stood down enemies before, and we will do so this time. None of us will ever forget these times. Yet, we go forward to defend freedom and all that is good and just in our world.

Thank you. Good night, and God bless Second Life.

29 Responses to “Op/Ed: Standing United in the Virtual War On Griefer Terrorism!”

  1. SqueezeOne Pow

    Feb 22nd, 2008

    I hope this was an intentional joke, because I’m laughing!

  2. Razrcut Brooks

    Feb 22nd, 2008

    Well said, Mr President. Not only are the sims that sponsor terrorism our enemy-but also the sims that HARBOR terrorists and turn a blind eye. These sims should should expect swift ,multi-national invasions soon. They will be hunted down. Let them flee to the mountains-or skyboxes- they will still be found. There is one major estate owner that has hidden weapons of mass lulz-struction deep under ground. We will find them using state of the art technology (client menu, un-render the ground) and then we will bring that estate owner to justice. In fact, the scripted prim gallows are already being built for him.
    Our President believes this will be a quick military operation and I believe him. Surely this wont drag on for several years…will it?

  3. D. B.

    Feb 22nd, 2008

    Fail

  4. Reality Check

    Feb 22nd, 2008

    Dude.

    A PRAYER for griefing or victims thereof?!?

    I pray that someone finds out your RL name and adress, and visits you to give you a good whack with a blunt object. A heavy blunt object.

    One prays for victims of RL rape, murder, terrorism… NOT for some idiot baawwwwing cause an e-dong was fired at him or her in a fucking COMPUTER GAME.

  5. Nacon

    Feb 22nd, 2008

    You really sounded bored or something. Hoping for some shit to happen by writing this shit?

  6. dandellion Kimban

    Feb 22nd, 2008

    I wonder if all these pointless Herald’s articles around (because they are hardly about) griefing are to be considered attention whoring, spamming or griefing?

  7. Corona

    Feb 22nd, 2008

    copy filler day for the herald then?

    must be no news in world or you are feeling the loss of your reporter/editor

    ps go and stuff your delusionary adult version of the tooth fairy in a dark place

  8. magnus

    Feb 22nd, 2008

    TLDR,
    but the opening lines are almost as boring as those horrible pirate poems the herald keeps publishing ;)

    hooray for amateur “journalism”

  9. shockwave yareach

    Feb 22nd, 2008

    See Griefers? THIS is how you get LULz that everyone can share. Max was funny – you simcrashers are merely lame.

    HAHA! Funny rewrite of the monkey-in-charge. Thank you. (Isn’t it funny that nobody ever thanks griefers? Why is that, I wonder…)

  10. GreenLantern Excelsior

    Feb 22nd, 2008

    I don’t find this a bit funny. You should be ashamed of yourself.

    http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010911-16.html

  11. The Real Kalel

    Feb 22nd, 2008

    Hah… Funny how the griefers (and assorted wankers in tights) are the only ones who don’t get the joke.

  12. anon

    Feb 22nd, 2008

    hahah at everyone that doesn’t get it

    this is clearly a mocking parody of equating griefers to terrorists

  13. Greefin Oh

    Feb 22nd, 2008

    I’m laughing my ass off at this.

    Because when I think evil… I think of Super Mario Brothers. lol.
    That damn Mario is an unstoppable force. LOL!

    You know I was showing a buddy of mine yesterday Second Life for the first time. This is a man, who works a 9-5 job, fixing computers for Pharmacies. I showed him the lolcubes, the penis gun, the scat cubes. I showed him the 100 Person Orgy Rooms, Furnation, a freshly attacked Sandbox, complete with Dancing Mario Particles, and Screaming Splengbab Cubes. I even showed him some of the griefers, like a few PN Members, the 4channers, and the Goon HQ. My final stop was to this website, to show him the people who are “one” with SL.

    His response to all of this was completely hysterical. I’ve never seen the guy laugh so hard. His avatar even got “griefed” as few times while in a Sandbox. He didn’t cry or moan, or call every one terrorists. He simply said to me “You need to get out more”.
    And he’s right I do. And I try.

    Anyways, you guys are nuts lol. You make me laugh every day. Griefers rejoice. The MMO just got new NPCs to play with.

  14. ...

    Feb 23rd, 2008

    Really, you are no better than a griefer, posting crap like this just to rile people up.

  15. Nacon

    Feb 23rd, 2008

    (couldn’t help but notice…) ”spoken through the ages in Psalm 23: “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for You are with me.””

    Seriously? Are you really that scared and weak? Scared for some fucking idiot kids fucking up on Second Life?

    Sorry, thought we’re all better off to be scared of some crazed madmen with bombs on their chest, walking down on your street… not just some scripted prims by a creator with odd fucktard L33T name, behind the very glass layer on your stupid poorly lit monitor.

    (Your logic is such a failure at surprising result to every professors in the world. Quite possibly a new discovery here, but would have to be fairly unsure to either document it or not.)

  16. wtf

    Feb 23rd, 2008

    ……

    …..

    ….

    ….

    I think I lol’d…

  17. Kiran

    Feb 23rd, 2008

    “deadly terrorist acts”?

    Who died?

  18. RoFLKOPTr

    Feb 23rd, 2008

    Maximilian Proto:

    You should be ashamed of yourself. Because, not only did you compare griefing to the unwarranted murder of nearly 3000 people, you took total disregard for all of those lost lives to use for your own fucked-up propaganda. If you are an American, then you need to get the fuck out of my country. If you’re not an American, then you need to learn to fucking respect those of us who were affected by this REAL act of terrorism.

    P.S. I find it quite lulzy that GLE, one of the biggest faggots of all of you, posted in disagreement with your “speech”.

  19. dandellion Kimban

    Feb 23rd, 2008

    @RoFLKOPTr You really think USA are the only target of terrorism? How about you, once and for all, learn there is a world outside?

  20. tron

    Feb 23rd, 2008

    i havnt seen a griefer attack on a sim for about four months now and even then it was totally crap the idiot was banned from the sim in about 5 seconds and his ‘attack’ removed.
    if you ask me its only griefers themselves who try to make out what they do is even remotely damaging i have never heard of one sim thats been ‘taken down’ for a significant length of time.

  21. Nikola Shirakawa

    Feb 23rd, 2008

    How many of you are familiar with the words satire or sarcasm? This speech is clearly not serious. It is a satirical joke on those people like GLE up there that for one reason or another elevate griefing to be far more than what it is. I myself have heard a number of “anti-griefers” discuss the possibility of using the Patriot Act and FBI to stop people from firing poopguns. Short of child pornography beign traded, or bomb threats being made, there is nothing in Second Life that demands the presence of real-life law enforcement agencies. Griefing is not a serious offense. It is a fuckwad gesture that distracts your internet activities for about ten minutes, if that.The only ones who have a real right to complain are big time SL businesswomen and men, but they are really never the ones complaining for that. Anshe Chung was swarmed by griefers when she did a C Net interview several month back, but did she go the police? No, she just said who cares and ignored it. For all his paranoid ramblings, I have never seen Prokofy Neva suggest calling the police, or going to a judge to get a warrant on the RL info of PN. The only ones who say otherwise, and get angry at satire like this, are the every day schmucks that never seemed to learn from their mistakes. I’m as a big a target as you can find, even getting an entry in the PN wiki. But I’ve heard nothing of these kids in world for the simple reason that I learned where griefers go, and decided not to go there. When i got shot, I’d just come back, sit on a prim and continue on.

    This message was not connecting griefers to terrorists, it was making fun of those of you that do. All ti really does is asks you a single question.

    Why so serious?

  22. pompous is as pompous does

    Feb 23rd, 2008

    This guy sounds like that dumbass Communist Party dude…. Supercool Sautereau.

    The rest of us know by now that the PN are nothing but closet furry drama queens, and they’ve been very lame and ineffectual for months now. All thats left are dumbass script kiddies downloading shit off the interwebs to try out in the sandboxes, tho typically they get the B&hammer so fast they dont accomplish much other than messing up the sandboxes and some IM spam at the usual targets that the nooby griefers dont even know the names of, their keys are just in the scripts and they have no idea who they point at, or even how the scripts work.

  23. Witness X/NoName

    Feb 23rd, 2008

    “I’m as a big a target as you can find, even getting an entry in the PN wiki.”

    Nikola, Nikola, Nikola. Tsk tsk. Making yourself out to be something bigger than you are. You’re just a tiny little bit player who thinks when you sneeze it matters in the metaverse. I read your various comments over the months and I believe you simply have delusions of grandeur. You don’t matter, you are not a unique snow flake.

  24. Just Me

    Feb 23rd, 2008

    Great article .. I’m laughing at all of those who don’t “get it”.

    Now, why doesn’t the Herald simply stop reporting on the very few griefers out there and start ignoring them? They must be 1/10 of 1 percent…or less .. of SL. There’s SO much more to report on ! Why dwell on the kids and immature?

  25. Nikola Shirakawa

    Feb 23rd, 2008

    Not I’m not anyone important, i don’t pretend I am. I’m simply pointing out that, to the griefers, i am the ideal target, someone with a lot of stuff that can be sued to make fun of, and that will respond with nice long rants. And I can verify that I am considered important enough to the PN to have a page. You overlooked my argument, however, that I don’t get griefed. I am completely unimportant, as are the vast millions of other users out there, and This is making fun of those that can’t themselves, wrap thier heads around the concept. You are completely right, i don’t matter. They don’t matter. None of this matters. This “speech” was poking fun at those that feel otherwise.

  26. The Real Kalel

    Feb 25th, 2008

    Disregard that, I’ve just decided that the PN may infact be innocent.

  27. The Fire of Delight

    Feb 25th, 2008

    tron, tell me this sim, and I promise that we, the PN will do all we can to make up for our lapse in concentration.

    Yours Truly,
    TFoD

  28. The Lindens

    Feb 27th, 2008

    Kill yourself. Now.

  29. Archie Lukas

    Feb 28th, 2008

    HUZZAH

    I aplaud you for kicking griefer butt…..

    anyone who does that can’t be all bad.

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