In a recent article here in the Herald, Urizenus Sklar argued that the US Attorney in the Barrett Brown case was attempting to smear Barrett by listing a whole number of allegedly bad attributes of Barrett and then publishing them in a public court document.  

I think Uri missed the bigger picture here. Not that Uri is wrong.  But Uri missed the fact that larded into the US Attorney's comments is a tacit indictment of the entire US criminal justice system.  

The US Attorney's screed against Barrett looked like this:

Perhaps without realizing the prejudicial effects on brown the media repeatedly has publicized potentially inadmissible and prejudicial information such as Brown’s … anarchist ideology… troubled childhood and alternative schooling, declaration that he is an atheist, use and abuse of ecstasy, acid, heroin, and marijuana, lack of steady employment, claimed diagnoses of ADHD and depression, associates descriptions of Brown as a junkie, name fag, moral fag, court jester…

Now, the question is this:  Why on God's Green Earth should it be impossible, or even difficult, for someone who is an atheist, or someone who is depressed, or someone who has ADHD or someone who lacks steady employment, or someone who has used drugs to get a fair trial in this country?

You see the deep point here is that implicit in the US Attorney's statement is the admission that for people who are even just a tiny bit outside of the mainstream, the justice system can not be counted on to be fair to them.  Any perceived flaw which sets you outside of a Norman Rockwell ideal is enough to ensure that the justice system, if you find your way into it, will grind you to pieces.  Tiny pieces.

If you are depressed, you cannot count on the justice system to be fair to you.

If you use marijuana, you cannot count on the justice system to be fair to you.

If you had alternative schooling or raised by alternative parenting, you cannot count on the justice system to be fair to you.

If you are a student of, or influenced by, anarchist writings, you cannot count on the justice system to be fair to you.

If you were once a heroine addict, now on Suboxone, you cannot count on the justice system to be fair to you.

If you had a troubled childhood, you cannot count on the justice system to be fair to you.

If you lack steady employment, you cannot count on the justice system to be fair to you.

If you are a moral fag (that is, if you are ethically motivated hacker), you cannot count on the justice system to be fair to you.

In short, if you are remotely alternative and outside of the power structure, you cannot count on the justice system to be fair to you. 

That you US Attorney, for admitting this.  Now, when do we begin to fix the problem?

Perhaps without realizing the prejudicial effects on brown the media repeatedly has publicized potentially inadmissible and prejudicial information such as Brown’s … anarchist ideology… troubled childhood and alternative schooling, declaration that he is an atheist, use and abuse of ecstasy, acid, heroin, and marijuana, lack of steady employment, claimed diagnoses of ADHD and depression, associates descriptions of Brown as a junkie, name fag, moral fag, court jester…”

And not only was the prosecutor thoughtful enough to think of all the possible bad things one might say about Barrett, but she took the trouble to write them down so we could have them. And then she put them in a court document. And published it. And then a gag order was placed on Barrett and his defense team. Just so, you know, they wouldn’t damage his reputation by responding to these claims.

prosecutor's gag order: list bad things that might be said, then muzzle the target

Of course the ultimate concern is that all that chatter out there would make it impossible to impanel an impartial jury. Because people in the Dallas region are following this case in sooo religiously (being rabid readers of The Nation and all). And if there are two thing a Texan cannot abide it’s moralfags and namefags! Gosh, I’m so happy I live in a country where politicians appoint kind, thoughtful prosecutors that have everyone’s best interests at heart. Because, you know, if you are sending someone to jail for 105 years you wouldn’t want people to think they are - SHOCK! - an atheist or something.

Yes, summer is winding down, but it isn't too late to cram in some late late summer reading.  And who better to suggest good solid reading, but the FBI.  Dell Cameron, writing in the Daily Dot, has the goods.  He gives us the 20 online publications concerning Barrett Brown that the prosecution considers "must read."  Or is that "don't read".  Hmm these lists are so confusing...

Here is how Mr. Cameron lays it down.

I attended the gag order hearing on September 4 and listened as the U.S. government spoke candidly about the journalists who've covered Barrett's case. Twenty articles were admitted into evidence from various writers and websites. Much to my surprise, the U.S. government has great taste in journalism. I've collected the online articles it selected as evidence against Barrett Brown for your reading pleasure.

You want to know who made the list, don't you?  Well to see it you just gotta click through! [link]

Spoiler though, some of the names will be familiar to Herald readers!

It seems like just today that I published a long article explaining the strange case of Barrett Brown and how a beloved Second Life alumnus was looking at 105 years in prison for sharing a link to an online document dump. Come to think of it, it *was* today! And this afternoon, I received the news that a gag order has been issued for Barrett Brown and his defense team. A gag order? Let’s reflect on that.

The prosecution, to make the case for a gag order, offered up a number of articles that had been published in places like the New York Times, The Nation, The Huffington Post, etc – seven by that mild mannered tweed wearing lovable professor Ludlow! The view of the prosecution was that given all the people in Texas that read The Nation and the annual NYT articles on Barrett Brown it just would not be possible to find a neutral jury pool. Because you know, all people in Texas do is read The Nation.

Let’s put this in even more perspective. This is the judicial system that convinced itself that there was not too much publicity for OJ, or for Jodi Arias, or for really any trial that shows up on Nancy Grace. But OMG someone publishes a story in The Nation and the scales of justice are out of balance. You just can’t find a neutral jury anymore.

Allow me to opine:  Barrett Brown was exercising his constitutional right to *defend* himself against charges for which he has not been convicted. And, by the way, these are charges which he believes, as do I, that are not just false, but absurdly false. Ditto for the lawyers. If they can’t defend their client in public against false charges then the public will be ignorant of the specifics of the trial and will not be able to judge whether justice is being served or whether it is being miscarried. Of course that is probably the point – if justice was being served there would be no point in a gag order; there would be no reason to fear open discussion of the specifics of the case.

And so, as the Herald yacht powers its way towards Long Island New York, I stare at the now dormant Barrett Brown hotline wondering: Is this how the American system of justice finally collapses into a system for oppression and tyranny? Not with a bang or even a whimper, but just a dial tone?

Last week I was on the Herald Yacht, steaming towards the Herald retirement villa in the Turks and Caicos islands, when the emergency phone rang in the ready room. Helmut, my trusty cabin boy summoned me. Barrett Brown was calling.

Mr. Brown, for those of you who don’t know, is currently in federal custody looking at charges that could put him away for 105 years for linking to the cache from a hack of the private intelligence firm Strategic Forecasting. He was also an alumnus of the notorious Second Life griefer group The Patriotic Nigras and a second group called illuminati/i/illuminati. “Uri baby,” he implored, “you have to come out of retirement, the fate of the free world hangs in the balance!”

For those of you who don’t know it, the story of Barrett Brown is an interesting one. After his years as a Second Life griefer, Barrett graduated to being a rather gifted writer, penning many essays for Vanity Fair, The Skeptical Inquirer, True/Slant, The Guardian, and the Huffington Post. True to his roots, he mercilessly trolled conservative pundits like Thomas Friedman, Michelle Malkin, Charles Krauthammer, and Sara Palin biographer Robert Stacy McCain.

In 2010 Brown was working on a book on right wing political pundits, when some of the actions of Anonymous caught his attention and he penned a defense in support of one of their anti-censorship operations in Australia. This brought him to the attention of Gregg Housh (the Anon who bought a Guy Fawkes mask and, with a crack team of fellow Anons, made the first video for Operation Chanology) and Housh subsequently brought Brown into the orbit of Anonymous. Brown eventually became a frequent spokesperson for Anonymous during the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings. (Brown’s role did not involving computer hacking – he couldn’t hack his way out of a box of tissues.) His interview with Michael Issikoff in those heady days remains legendary. 

In February, 2011, against the background of the Anonymous actions in the Arab Spring, Aaron Barr, the CEO of a private information security company called HBGary boasted that he had identified leadership of Anonymous. This boast provoked an epic hack of HBGary by a hacktivist group called Intenet Feds (subsequently called LulzSec). That hack, which was splashy enough to garner the attention of The Colbert Report, resulted in every form of pwnage known to mankind, including the defacing and destruction of the servers and websites of HBGary. Along the way 70,000 e-mails were downloaded and posted online. One terabyte of data from HBGary’s backup servers were wiped, and as a final insult to injury the contents of its CEO Aaron Barr’s iPad were remotely wiped.

The HBGary hack was motivated by the desire to humiliate HBGary, but it had the side effect of dropping a gold mine into the lap of Mr. Brown. One of the first things discovered was a power point presentation that developed a strategy for undermining the credibility of the journalist Glenn Greenwald and thereby neutralize his defense of WikiLeaks. But there was more. There was a conspiracy of government agencies, lobbying and cybersecurity firms to carry out a disinformation campaign against critics of the Chamber of Commerce. There were also plans for data mining and disinformation campaigns targeting social organizations and advocacy groups.

The plot was already thick, but then it thickened more. By June, the FBI had the goods on the leader of LulzSec, one Hector Xavier Monsegur, who was known to his associates in LulzSec as Sabu. The FBI arrested Sabu on June 7, 2011 and (according to court documents) turned him into an informant the following day. Six months later (Dec. 24, 2011) under the control of the FBI and possibly the FBI’s direction, Sabu appears to have directed some of his LulzSec crew (now called AntiSec) to hack the website of a private security company known as Strategic Forecasting, yielding a trove of approximately five million emails. The FBI may have controlled Sabu and hence the Stratfor hack, but they lost control of the five million emails in the Stratfor database, which quickly made their way onto the Internet and then to WikiLeaks.

When the contents of the Stratfor leak became available, Barrett Brown (who again played no role in the hacking and had no relation to LulzSec or Sabu) determined that his ProjectPM should have a look at it. To direct the project participants to the Stratfor data dump, he pasted a URL into a chat channel. This ultimately would be the principle “crime” for which he is facing 105 years in jail.

It is worth noting that the contents of the Stratfor hack were even more outrageous than those of the HBGary hack. This time the emails ranged from proposals for renditions to surveillance on the Yes Men on behalf of Dow Chemical. One remarkable exchange revealed that the Coca-Cola company was asking Stratfor for intelligence on dealing with PETA, and the Stratfor Vice President for Intelligence remarked in a leaked email that “The FBI has a classified investigation on PETA operatives. I'll see what I can uncover.” Suggesting, of course, that not only did Stratfor have access to the classified material, but that it would be provided to Coca-Cola. The FBI had been turned into a private dick for corporate America.

The FBI, arguably itself responsible for the information being released, needed to get the toothpaste back into the tube, decided that one way to staunch the distribution of the Stratfor data would be to stomp on Brown and his Project PM. A warrant was issued for Brown’s laptop, presumably on the assumption that incriminating information would be found there.

When the FBI went to serve the warrant on Brown he was not home but at his mother’s house, and he sensibly decided to stay there. The FBI returned with a warrant to search his mother’s house, retrieved his laptop, and found exactly nothing incriminating. Deciding they needed a way to turn up the heat on Brown, they initiated charges against his mother for obstruction of justice.

At the time Brown was experiencing the difficult side effects of the medication he was taking to ameliorate the effects of his heroin addiction while also dealing with the harassment of his mother by the FBI, and he snapped, uploading a video to YouTube that vaguely threatened the FBI agent that was harassing his mother.

“I know what’s legal, I know what’s been done to me… And if it’s legal when it’s done to me, it’s going to be legal when it’s done to FBI Agent Robert Smith—who is a criminal.”
“That’s why [FBI special agent] Robert Smith’s life is over. And when I say his life is over, I’m not saying I’m going to kill him, but I am going to ruin his life and look into his fucking kids… How do you like them apples?”

Because threatening an agent would only put Barrett away for a few years, the charges that could lock him up permanently had to be found elsewhere. In this instance, the DoJ took advantage of the fact that the Stratfor data had a number of unencrypted credit card numbers and validation codes. This would be the pretext for charging Brown with Traffic in Stolen Authentication Features, Access Device Fraud, Aggravated Identity Theft. Add to this an Obstruction of Justice charge and the charges relating to the threat against the FBI agent, and Brown is looking century of jail time. He has been denied bail.

When Brown went to jail, work on ProjectPM ground to a halt. Even worse, the DoJ now took an interest in everyone else who had participated in ProjectPM. On April 2, the DOJ served the domain hosting service CloudFlare with a subpoena for all records on the ProjectPM website, and in particular asked for the IP addresses of everyone who had accessed and contributed to ProjectPM, claiming it was a criminal enterprise. The message was clear: Anyone else who looks into this matter does so at their grave peril.

Here we are. Barrett Brown sits in prison and many activists are afraid to go near the Stratfor files; worse, the mainstream media appears to be completely uninterested in their contents.

While the media and much of the world have been understandably outraged by the revelation of the NSA’s spying program, Barrett Brown’s work was pointing towards much deeper problems. First, he showed that this wasn’t merely a problem of private intelligence firms spying on us – it was worse than that. These firms are trying to manufacture a false reality for us. They are engaged in PSYOPS against a civilian population on behalf of their corporate clients.

But even this tells only half the story. One might have thought that private intelligence agencies were simply doing outsourced intelligence work for the US Government. But unfortunately it seems that the tail has begun to wag the dog – it appears that in many respects the US Government and in particular the Department of Justice is now working for private intelligence firms. This is evident when, for example, Stratfor asks for FBI classified files on PETA or the Department of Justice is used to try and punish journalists for probing into these private intelligence companies.

But I disgress. I began with Barrett’s call to the Herald hotline. So what did Barrett want? He put it this way: “Uri baby, in the hall of mirrors that is the Internets, you can only trust the Herald to get the story right. You and Pix have got to come back. The game is bigger now.”

And well, yes, the game is bigger now. Former Herald staffer Prokofy Neva saw this too, in her delightfully positive and chirpy essay on her blog Wired State. 

The entire thing makes me think of The Wrong Hands and the Justice League -- a story in Second Life that prefigured many of our woes in real life today…

… It's like the story of WikiLeaks and the story of the NSA, today. It is one of the many thing I feel were prototyped in Second Life where it was really easy to prototype -- a hostage community of people online that you could easily affect like dropping a rock in a pond, endless capacity for virtual harassment, endless edge-casing and lawfaring capacity with a troop of coders and developers of the same hacker tribe who are the managers of Second Life at Linden Lab.

Actually, I don’t know what that means and neither do you, but what I think Prok is trying to say is that reality is beginning to imitate the virtual reality of 2006, and those of us who honed our skills trying to sort through the spy-vs-spy mindfuck games of Second Life are particularly well equipped to navigate house of mirrors created for us by the NSA, FBI, private intelligence companies etc.

So now that the so-called Real World has begun to imitate Second Life, the Herald is returning to its mission of helping its dedicated readers find their way through the house of mirrors. There is a war on reality happening. The Herald is going to cover it. For Barrett Brown. For our readers. And for the lulz.
 

As I prepared to expose a horrific virtual pet abuse scandal in Second Life this afternoon, a pair of SMS messages brought my iPhone to life - and put virtual pets on hold as the prospect of being scammed out of $9.99/month by phone bill ganking scumbags caught my attention.

You didn't ask for MobChance - but we have already billed you by the time you read this

An operation named Mblox/BuneUS had somehow obtained my mobile phone number and enrolled me - without my consent - in MobChance IQ Fun Facts. Am I now part of an increasingly popular large scale scam IQ test on the general population? It appears so.

While the messages said I could end the service with a STOP txt or by calling their phone number, a quick search of the interwebs revealed that as soon as you see the first two messages, Mblox/BuneUS has already charged you without consent - a practice known as cramming. I had sent a STOP message, but when I visited the AT&T site it was clear that STOP didn't have any effect - there was already a $9.99 charge on my phone bill.

According to several accounts at scam tracking sites, the call center for BuneLLC is a complete waste of time. These are not the sort of people I want to negotiate with - it was time for a call to AT&T to get the charges reversed, and block the possibility that anyone else could try this stunt.

Yes, the gameifaction of real life continues with big bucks to be made by 3rd parties placing unauthorized charges on phone bills - particularly because the unwary are billed indefinately.

According to DailyFinance, a US Senate report issued in July places cramming charges at over $2 billion/year - and 17 state Attorneys General are calling on a limp FTC to enact rules to curb the practice for both wireless and landline phones. The FTC seems to want to proceed very cautiously - perhaps the revolving door into industry beckons - or is this more a case of regulatory capture? Meanwhile the wireless carriers are thought to have designs on becoming a sort of phone/3rd-party billing hybrid, and so are concerned about creating friction in the billing process setup. This leaves the door wide open for scams.

If the FTC is reluctant, could controlling this sort of fraud be something that even the lobbyist-money-dependent Congress can agree on? It would certainly be more productive than the ill-advised SOPA and PIPA legislation.

But perhaps limiting the opportunity for large scale fraud is too much to ask. Cramming is big business for both those allegedly running scams such as Jason Hope of JAWA.com and for the phone carriers processing the billings. This may explain why the practice persists - as Hamid Shojaee explains at AZDisruptors.com.

With the phone companies pocketing a portion of the charges billed through their systems, and the landline business on the decline, walking away from any sort of revenue appears to be difficult. Perhaps that is why after calling AT&T to get a credit placed on my account for the unauthorized charges, it took a bit of persuading to get the customer service rep to enable "parental controls" on the account so that third parties cannot place charges without my explicit consent.

In a rational world, requiring explicit permission before billing would be the norm, but for whatever reason, there seems to be a reluctance to limit the ability of grifters to scam via phone bills. Have you looked at the details of your phone bill lately? You might be surprised at the games that are being played.

It took a call to AT&T to get Mblox/BuneUS out of my bill

The assets of Teleplace are being liquidated after the business-oriented 3D virtual meeting place hit a financial singularity which prevents the venture's continued operation, according to a mailing sent to potential creditors - including the Alphaville Herald's own part time typist/technical advisor Mark McCahill. 

Mr. McCahill provided the Herald with copies of the liquidation notification but pointed out that the Teleplace software was recently open sourced as Open QWAQ, so the software will live on indefinitely -- despite the apparent demise of Teleplace, Inc.

seeking a more fluid situation

While opponents of open source may be dismayed at this development, software immortality is good news for the members of the Turing Church Online. The group had been holding their transhumanist services at a virtual venue hosted by Teleplace, but have now moved to another hosting service running the Open QWAQ software. Is it any wonder Second Life conspiracy theorists fear a  transhumanist tropism for open source systems?

Unfortunately, the Teleplace and transhumanist news cut short the Herald staffs' well-earned break from the virtual world news beat. After dusting the cobwebs off our virtual printing press and consulting the staff directory,  I was able to arrange a meeting with Mr. McCahill at the fashionable Martinis and Power - an after work club favored by Herald reporters despite having almost nothing in common with Philip Rosedale's new Coffee and Power work club.

Pixeleen Mistral: Hi Mark! Sorry to interrupt your vacation but what's this about Teleplace being shut down?  
Mark McCahill: Way back in the day - back when QWAQ was just getting started - I spent a couple days talking with them and they put me in their rolodex. Eventually QWAQ turned into Teleplace, and the rolodex must have made it through the transition. Now it looks like they are notifying everyone who might possibly be a creditor, and so a couple weeks ago, I got this notice. It sure looks like they are selling everything off. Here are the papers - what does it look like to you?

calling all creditors

Pixeleen Mistral: Hmmm. Looks like game over. That's a shame. Were you surprised to see Teleplace go into liquidation?
Mark McCahill: Not exactly. I knew something was up when Teleplace open sourced their code after a long run as a proprietary branch of the Open Croquet project.

It breaks down like this. David Smith and Andreas Raab worked on the Open Croquet project. They are some of the best software engineers I have ever seen - so they have really great tech - but its not just about the tech. David and Andreas went on to form QWAQ after funding for Open Cobalt got tight, which happened once Carly Fiorina left HP and Mark Hurd took over and started cost-cutting. At that point Alan Kay's research group was wound down, so David and Andreas needed to find a new home for their work. In the end, the people at the universities kept working on Croquet and David and Andreas formed a startup based on the Croquet code. That was the genesis of QWAQ, and eventually QWAQ changed its name to Teleplace.

But the business-oriented virtual meeting place market is really crowded, so a shakeout was inevitable. Look at what happened to Linden Lab - they took a huge hit and laid off 30% of their staff after Mark Kingdon pursued the business meeting place biz. So when the Teleplace code was open sourced, it seemed to be a sign that a change in direction was coming. It was ironic that the code was released under the GPL, but I imagine it was the best they could do.

Pixeleen Mistral: How was releasing the code under the GPL license ironic?
Mark McCahill: Teleplace is based on Open Croquet, and Open Croquet was released under the MIT license. This means that you could do pretty much anything with derivative works, including take them closed source and proprietary. GPL is different - and viral. GPL says that all derivative works have to remain open source. That is a big turn-off for companies that want to sell proprietary systems. Now, if I'm at a university working on a research project like Croquet, I want the widest possible impact for that research, so I prefer the MIT license. On the other hand, I imagine the only way the Teleplace guys could convince their board to release the code was under GPL, because the board was probably worried someone else might take the code and compete with them - so they wanted to see any changes made to the code. Unfortunately, this fragments the open source development community.

Pixeleen Mistral: How so?
Mark McCahill: We can't add any of the Teleplace code to MIT-licensed projects like Open Croquet or Open Cobalt without those projects getting infected with a GPL license, and we don't want a GPL license. So we have to be very careful to keep Teleplace code out of Open Cobalt. There is a way around this mess, which would be for the rights holders of the Teleplace code to dual-license it.

Pixeleen Mistral: what do you mean by dual license?
Mark McCahill: Make it available under both the MIT and GPL license and allow people to choose the license that suits their needs. I imagine that they will be selling the rights to the Teleplace code as part of the liquidation of assets. I wonder who will end up with the rights? Maybe they will also release it under an MIT license. 

Pixeleen Mistral: Where do you see the virtual meeting space for business software going next?
Mark McCahill: Onto mobile devices like the iPad and Android tablets. WebEx works really well on an iPad and I see a ton of tablets going out to corporate salespeople. To get anywhere in the corporate market, a 3D meeting space will need to be better than WebEx or Google+ video hangouts and work on tablets - and also do something WebEx and Google+ doesn't do.

Looking at the way the virtual meeting place market has played out you can see why Linden Lab bailed on marketing Second Life for business meetings. But as you keep reminding me, there is money in the babyfur and My LIttle Pony/Brony markets - and not much competition, so Second Life for fancy dress party socializing still makes sense.

Pixeleen Mistral: Never underestimate the power of cute, at least outside a business context.
Mark McCahill: If anyone would know, it's you Pix.

Rating: PG-13 for gore and mature themes.
What: Crack the case and you could win L$10,000!
Duration: 2 Hours with Friends
When: Mystery and Contest starts October 7th and ends November 1st @ noon SLT.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Pixeleen Mistral is dead and we must find out who killed her! Answer all 10 questions correctly, collect all 26 clues to solve the mystery, and join the Taunt Murder Mystery group to be entered into a L$10,000 drawing on November 1st at 7pm SLT. Play the game with friends to crack the case quickly! The entire mystery unfolds on Taunt sim.

The HUD can be found at Taunt starting October 7th.

**!! The first clue is inside the police department! !!**

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

TAUNT MURDER MYSTERY is produced by BabyDoll's Sexy Lingerie. Game written and designed by BabyDoll LaFontaine. HUD and components scripted by Dreamstalker Xevious. Custom buildings constructed by Ramirez Falta. Plants by Lilith and Dolly Heart from the Heart Garden Centre.

A final big thank you to all our friends, customers and Taunt Village merchants for their continued support! Models for the game are dressed by BabyDoll's, Short & Sweet, and The Bimbo Cheerleaders.

the end of an era

This was without question an historic day. If there was any question about Stroker Serpentine leaving Second Life, it was erased Wednesday morning when he made the flagship of his SexGen business available with copy/transfer/modify permissions. The bed that turned a former real life plumber into a millionaire is now available to anyone - and free.

The 600 animation virtual kama sutra is already creating waves of fear and uncertainty among other sex bed merchants. While a crowd gathered to witness history in the making earlier this evening, I spoke with Corsi Mousehold who has used sexbed sales to help pay land tier fees on FurNation - a refuge for furry avatars.

Corsi Mousehold: I am in tears
Pixeleen Mistral: I think the bottom just fell out of the sexbed market
Corsi Mousehold: Yes
Corsi Mousehold: Yes it did
Corsi Mousehold: And FurNation may have to close because of it.

Pixeleen Mistral: that was the first thing I said when I saw this
Corsi Mousehold: I could raise rent prices and stay alive

Pixeleen Mistral: well - do what you need to do
Corsi Mousehold: But .... Fuck Stroker really screwed me here.
Corsi Mousehold: I could DMCA but in SL things can spread like wildfire.
Corsi Mousehold: I would have to DMCA every single person I find that is giving it away
Corsi Mousehold: That's a nightmare

Pixeleen Mistral: good luck with that
Corsi Mousehold: Either way I will have 100+ more animations in mine than in these.
Corsi Mousehold: I'll just add these and call it 1500 L$ anyway
Corsi Mousehold: Take the lessers off the market. They weren't selling really anyway
Corsi Mousehold: FurNation is going to need support here.
Corsi Mousehold: Or it will die.

a crowd gathers

Pixeleen Mistral: FurNation is going to need to suck it up and get another revenue stream
Corsi Mousehold: Truth

Pixeleen Mistral: and SL is going to feel this too I think
Corsi Mousehold: Yes it will
Corsi Mousehold: Not in a month but in about two months everyone's going to feel it
Corsi Mousehold: And we thought the MLP release was bad

pink, blue, yellow and green balls + ToyMaster and TouchMaster

Bitcoin - a peer-to-peer virtual currency - has reached the point in the media hype cycle were the inevitable backlash takes hold, and the Bitcoin ecosystem becomes a target for high visibility hacks.

The latest incident took place yesterday, when the bitcointalk.org forums were converted into a Cosbycoin ad site, complete with pictures of Bill Cosby, links to a cosbycoin.com web site and a simulated upload of the reader's digital wallet converting their Bitcoins into Cosbycoins. Buttcoin.org has an extensive collection of pictures from the hacked site as does nanimogold.com.

Cosbycoin takes on Bitcoin

There is speculation that a group associated with the SomethingAwful forums may be responsible for Cosbycoins and this hack does seem to fit with the SA goon's style. Whomever launched the hack exerted some effort. Rather than simply injecting Cosbycoin images into the forums, they also set up a cosbycoin.com site and posted to other bitcoin forums.

Cosbycoin.com

This Cosbycoin hack is certainly embarrassing for the forum operators, and raises questions about site security, as did a hack of the MtGox currency exchange last June that lead to a collapse in the value of Bitcoins. Timing of the MtGox incident was particularly unfortunate, coming shortly after a Gawker.com story about Silk Road - an anonymous illicit substance exchange site - which stoked demand for Bitcoins. 

simulated upload of Bitcoin wallet

Meanwhile, the mainstream media has begun to take notice of the potential - and limits - of the crypto-currency.

Earlier this week, New York TImes columnist and Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman pointed out the value of Bitcoins has taken a nosedive recently and the system is vulnerable to "money-hoarding, deflation, and depression" - problems shared with real currencies backed by the gold standard. We can only hope that the know-nothing branch of the republican party takes note. James Surowieki of the MIT Technology Review also wrote critically about the challenges bitcoin faces in surviving the hype cycle.

The hype cycle backlash is one problem, but more a more immediate question for Bitcoin fans is how to address the challenge posed by Cosbycoin parodies appearing on their forums and an insecure ecosystem of currency exchange sites.

Matthew N. Wright of Bittalk.tv reports that there is support for the Cosbycoin hack by members of the Bitcointalk.org forum who are unhappy with poor forum moderation and a pattern of "shuffling important and popular issues under the rug" - exactly the sort of behavior that Second Life players have grown to expect from Linden Lab. 

a tip of the old Coffeepotting Gleefurs top hat to Ryokashi who first pointed me at this story - pixeleen