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?

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!

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.
 

The firestorm of criticism surrounding the zf Redzone Second Life security system may be only the beginning of zFire Xue’s troubles. A shadowy group of Second Life hactivists claim to have breached the Redzone server’s security, gaining access to the server database and discovering cleartext passwords for most Redzone customer accounts on the site.

As if storing raw Redzone customer passwords is not bad enough, there is apparently a second table that tracks passwords from failed login attempts in the hope users will accidentally enter their Second Life account password. These failed passwords are conveniently displayed on the user profile page of the "Admin Overlord App"  as "Possible SL PW(s)".

In light of these revelations, the Herald strongly suggests that all zf Redzone customers change their Second Life account passwords immediately – and ask themselves why they would continue to run a product that attempts to guess their Second Life password.

Redzone User Data includes possible SL passwords stored in cleartext

Rumors that zf Redzone has been used in attempts to collect Second Life passwords recently gained significant metaverse mindshare as a YouTube video began making the rounds describing a web site that can predict player passwords based on failed login attempts.

It is widely believed that the video is from zFire Xue to Mariana Swashbuckler. Avril Korman reports that zFire Xue is part of a SL gang known as the "Mars Syndicate" which includes a member named Mariana – apparently the same Mariana to whom the video is addressed.

How did the hactivists gain access to the Redzone security system’s secrets? According to several sources, the site fell to an SQL injection attack in which carefully crafted URLs cause the site to hand over information in the database that was not intended for public viewing.

This is the same sort of attack which was used to breach the HBGary Federal site recently. We can only conclude that role-play security experts in both real life and Second Life have some difficulty with the basics of keeping their own sites secure. Perhaps they should not store sensitive data?

Passwords compromises are not the only concern raised by the leak. It appears that zFire Xue can also manually add players to the Redzone copybotter list.

We can only hope the Mr. Xue does not abuse this power to persecute his critics.

Admin Overlord App allows manual addition of "copybotters" and Account stats lookup

The amount of avatar and IP address information contained in the Redzone database is impressive – but not in a good way.  According those claiming responsibility for the leak, there are over 1.6 million unique IP addresses connected to various avatars in the database, and geo-location tools to identify real life location of Second Life players monitored by zf Redzone.

However, hactivists who have accessed the Redzone database have not published its contents so these claims will be hard to verify.
 

zFire Xue protects his own "Possible SL PW" from view

The hactivists behind the security breach went into significant detail about what they uncovered in this comment sent to the Herald early today:

screenshots having zfires password viewing pages and others. certain sensitive info is removed. please save and repost the images before they get remove.

“Admin Overlord Ap” – http://i.imgur.com/Vrfrt.png

“Account Data” – passwords were store using md5() hashed. a column is added later to keep the raw password to show to admins. after… the failedlogin table is added to store failed logins and show failed password choices to admins. probably use to steal SL accounts like in the video

zfires “Account Data” page – http://i.imgur.com/iIesN.png
 random redzone owner “Account Data” page (to demonstrate that possible all sl password is show to admins) – http://i.imgur.com/Vnt21.png

other infos: there is raw failedlogin passwords store for 2200 users. there is raw user password store for most with an isellsl and redzone account.

ips are not store encrypted like the “frequently asked questions” say. there is 1670471 unique nonencrypted ips connected to avatars. there is geoip tables in the db for finding locations from ip….

maybe zfire plans to stalk people around the grid using his redzone things. This table is in the redzone db:

[tracking] index, detectedname, detecteduuid, location, date, ownername, owneruuid, objectname, objectuuid

4 other people in the server at once.. bad security.

i only want to confirm. not data or mess up his data or something stupid. i did not remove the db or mess it up. i cant also wont leak the contents. maybe other people already got it though, from looking at sql error and posts of password changed without them…

please remove tracking and failedlogin tables and pass2 column from users table. thank you.

please also read OWASP and fix page zfire. dont be a jerk!!

As of this writing, evidence that something is seriously amiss with the isellsl.cx Redzone site persist as SQL error messages are displayed on several pages. Attempts to contact zFire Xue for comment have been met with silence – it seems likely has is busy inspecting his database and applications for leaks and damage.

Given the level of access the hactivists seem to have to his system, the Herald suggests Mr. Xue takes our advice to his customers and change his passwords – then ask himself why he would continue to run Redzone.

a general error on the isellsl.cx MadScientist forums

idea organizer now disorganized

the neighborhood watch throws errors

by Kaffe McMahon

(Originally published in the Swashbuccateer on Jan. 3, 2009)

Project Exodus (no it is not Charlton Heston does Second Life)- this project has been purportedly on the drawing boards of Linden Labs for over 6 months, prior to the new Land Pricing Policy. The plan was to enhance the experience of the SL residents and to offer new areas of exploration as well as things to do. One of these new activities being sailing and to update first entry into Second Life for new subscribers.

Concurrent  with this  project LL had been building up their main land and offering substantially reduced rates compared to private estates. Mainland Full Sim Tier $195 USA compared to Estate Full Sim of $295 per month as well as costs to terraform, build and have the land delivered.   The new rate plans were rolled out during the 4th Quarter of 2008 by Linden Lab. In effect this  killed off open sims as used , and allowed step conversions to Homestead or Open Sims to Full Sims no charge. These new rates for private estates were the coup de grae for many private estate holders. Sarah Nerd, long time land broker, got out of the land business.  Estates have been pulling out as fast as you can hit delete. The deluge is not over yet. January tiers starting to come due and the exit rate is expected by many observers to climb.

It leaves the question just who did LL want to exodus?  The rate uproar had barely settled to a low mumble when news started leaking to the SL population at large about Project Exodus.  A new body of water, Blakes Ocean,  is being built, by LL,  6 x 6 sims  with 36 sims for sailing. Linden Labs has stated that Open Sims were intended for light use, water and sailing. It would seem that the free new ocean would therefore be comprised of Open Sims.  This is not the case. It will not be robust enough for anticipated use and they are using homestead sims [ I would not be surprised if really full prim is used as there may be grid to burn with the drop out rate] Here is a link showing the new land masses and water. http://blog.nci-sl.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/sansara-heterocera122908.png

This was first wide spread mention of the new ocean, http://blog.secondlife.com/2008/12/19/hoist-the-mainsail-and-head-for-the-high-seas/. Found the main blog for SL  on December 19th.

The new region via the new ocean will connect to the Sailing Sims. In essence offers passage from estates to mainland. They still will pay for their land as they have and make decisions on allocation of water versus land on their sim. In addition to no charge to move all of their sims they have new water to sail. It would be a good guess this land will become more valuable.

A 1024 parcel near this near area was rumored to be at over 500K Lindens.  It is difficult to find this exact area since it is not launched yet and has not been heard of by many. A trip over to the Starboard Yacht Club finds a map on the floor that shows the new and old land.  Here are a couple of photos (this one and the one at the beginning of the article) and the slurl if you want to see the map I photographed:  http://slurl.com/secondlife/Hollywood/82/118/31/

The Sailing Sims is a "loose confederation" of water based estates and sims that have interconnected waterways. Consisting of about 120-130 sims. A map of their current lay out can be found here and they have a number of blogs and intersim races and events.

 
The timing of this seemed very peculiar, perhaps just a coincidence. LL  builds up their grid, financing expansion on new land sales. They somehow did not factor in that people would push the technology envelope to the limit and use the Open Sims full tilt. Yet, this same organization was able to plan a six month launch to move 120 sims, and build an ocean.  This seems to be incredulous that we are to believe that they had no inkling of Open Sims usage and had to discontinue this product. It seems paramount to a greedy grid grab.

I  lost an Open Sim and now we are our  finding our estate at a cross roads, like many others, I was upset. I had joined SOS to help mobilize efforts to save our water. SOS members were urged to contact  the Attorney General of California. To me and many others it seemed like Nautilus and other Main Land had been conveniently built up and funded by the 100's of Open Sims that were launched. The rewriting of rules of use freed up quite a bit of grid space. Many mobilization events happened, including events  at the Sailing Sims over in Hollywood. The Sailing Sector has not been that vocal in the SOS group as of late.  The efforts of the SOS group appear to be ineffective or shrouded in secrecy. They have been contacted for a comment. . .

Marktwain White, of the Sailing Sims was contacted  to comment on the Blake's Ocean and who will be allowed to use this water. Mark said:

"I still feel strongly about the OS pricing policy that LL has adopted. I feel that a 67% increase is wrong and have told the LL that on more than one occasion in my discussions with them. I have proposed alternate suggestions on the OS lite product and alternate pricing. Unfortunately they didn't bite."

He offered some excellent information and here are  his comments about the 'sweetheart deal':

"The most common comment about the Blake Sea Project runs like this: LL is playing favorites in selecting the USS for special treatment.
The problem with this statement is that it has a faulty premise. The premise above is based on assuming LL or Jack is your father and you all and the USS are his children. "

"The proper premise is that LL is a business that looks for the best tools and partners to accomplish a given task. If LL looks at three service providers and after doing due diligence picks the Blue Company over the Green Company or the Red company they are making a decision on how to best get a job done. A journalist for the business pages of the local paper would not say that LL was showing favoritism, he would say, LL picked the Blue Company as the best partner to work with them on project X."

"Do you think LL has spent the hours and dollars they have in creating the Blake Sea only to do a favor to USS? On the contrary, LL has finally figured out that they are not good community builders, they need partners to do that. They have learned along with all the Corporations the have build ghost towns in SL that it takes a community to bring life to the pixels. They get it now."

The above quotations from Marktwain were from correspondence we had via note cards. It is appreciated that he offered an update on the Exodus Project.

My email to the Attorney General of California generated a thanks for the information form letter. I do not know what the tipping point is to move LL to action.

Another idea is to see what can we do as another sailing community to move LL to work with us. Can we move forward as a "community of common interest" to meet our own needs. It is time a parley of the Brethren meet to work together.

Real JLU base still safe

by Xamol

Recently an article was written that claimed the Justice League Unlimited Base was attacked by two PN members on January 1st 2009. The article was based off photos given and a video posted on YouTube of the attack. The video on YouTube shows an obvious attack on what appears to be a Hall Of Justice, a building associated with the Justice League among other superhero teams from DC comics. With all of the information shown of the attack the natural conclusion would be that the PN clearly attacked the Justice Leagues Unlimited Base. But this was not the case.

The truth is the PN did attack a Hall Of Justice on this day but their attack was not a great victory as the PN claims. The area the PN attacked was nothing more than a RP sim. The sim – which is called Aftermath – is a RP sim for those who want to roleplay as Super Heroes in a friendly environment. Anyone visiting this sim can clearly see that this is no base of the JLU. The land group that manages the area is called the 'Legion of Justice'. This group was once free to join allowing anyone in the group to build in Aftermath.

Aftermath became a target of the PN a little over a month ago when it was a victim of a PN particle spam. On that day many PN alts joined the land group and would receive notices. A recent notice was that Aftermath was shutting down due to the changes regarding the Open Space sims. Most likely receiving this notice the PN arranged an attack on the sim. When the attack took place there we hardly any residents in the area.

But the question remains.  Why would the PN claim they attacked the JLU base when it is clear that it was a simple RP sim? The PN seek attention and what they feel is fame. So when their fame in compromised they lie. It would be compared to a situation or a man opening fire in a public park but then claiming it was a police station. They wanted a easy area to grief that would appear to be a base for a anti-griefers group based off Superheroes. But at the end of the day they attacked a simple RP sim that had no protection from there administrators due to the holiday.

Can that really be called a victory? If the PN believe so then they can take pleasure in their victory. The PN are the Second Life equivalent of terrorists attacking anyone they find with offensive images and disruptive devices. They feel above anyone in SL because they can do these things. They feel residents waste their time by socializing and trying to have some fun when in fact they long to be accepted by those in SL and RL. However it is true that Anti-griefing groups in SL do have a harder time because of this. But they are the glimmer of hope SL needs.

by Pixeleen Mistral, New Media/Film critic

The Holidays wouldn’t be complete without some snow-themed seasonal movie viewing, and a trio of films – two of them from the daring young director Torley Linden – left this viewer feeling that virtual snowball fights have now been covered from all possible angles, with varying degrees of artistic success.

Filmmaker TheGreatGigantor of the PN griefers documented a grifer attack and sim crash of the Linden Lab snowball fight event in Hatton sim with a rather grainy cinema verité offering that follows the well known PN plot line – cubes falling from the sky, resulting ultimately in a sim crash and involuntary logout. However, in a nod to the festive season, a blackface Santa Claus texture lightens the mood. Normally this sort of film would not be worth comment, but it explains a curious dream-like sequence in Torley Linden’s live film covering the various Linden snowball fight sims.

At 3:15 into his video, Torley Linden encounters a deserted sim, brings up the map and sees that the sim is listed as offline. Torley’s monologue is pure comedy gold as the watermelon-obsessed game god slowly realizes that something is not right – then quickly flees the scene, as he realizes that some players might not be following the Linden friendly greetings script.

Winterfaire – Residents vs. Lindens Snowball Fight! from Torley on Vimeo

Rounding out the offerings is a high-sheen Linden marketing hype video that was featured in the Linden Blog. Notable for an over reliance on quick cuts and various forms of gaussian blur filters, this film presents the sort of idealized image of the metaverse that the Lab hopes will help erase some of the bad feelings created over the last few months.

However, the film is listed as a joint effort between Torley Linden and his RL wife Ravenelle, and the Linden-by marriage status Ravenelle has achieved — along with favored access to the Linden publicity machine — is not likely to sit well with residents who might wonder if the playing field in M Linden’s game is level.

Oriental Express, Second Life (194, 235, 24) November 27, 2007: Want the latest news in the virtual world of Second Life – Raw, naked and bound – with whip marks? Step into Castle Prim for the premiere of “Prim* Time” anchored by Keiko Ketsugo which captures (literally) top Second Life correspondents, analysts and guests for a complete domination of current events. The program combines traditional journalism with the latest dominatrix tools, making the entire process of news gathering more threatening and placing the cutting edge news and information at the tip of Keiko Ketsugo’s whip. For a video preview go to www.primtime.info.

Keiko Ketsugo is anchor of Prim Time and has won numerous awards including the 2006 Journalist Pillar of Torture Award from the News Kneeling and Begging Alliance and the 2007 Mistress Award from the Virtual Press Doms Association. Ketsugo is the author of two books, Between Pain and Pleasure: A News Enslavement Notebook (Cuff University Press) and Chaining the Lies to Crosses and Whipping Them to Death (Harsher and Raw).

Primtime.info is among the world’s leaders in Second Life news and information delivery. Staffed 24 hours, seven days a week by a cowed and submissive staff in Prim Time World headquarters at Castle Prim (Freeze – Oriental Express, Second Life (194, 235, 24) and in bureaus across the grid, Primtime.info relies heavily on its inworld team of almost 4000 news professionals (give or take 3,998.) in partnership with Subrealism.org and sousrealisme.org. For more information contact Keiko Ketsugo at keiko@primtime.info or go to www.primtime.info.

Second Life is a 3-D virtual world entirely created by its Residents. Since opening to the public in 2003, it was grown explosively and today is inhabited by millions of Residents from around the globe.

*Prim is short for primitive a 3D object in Second life.

Only in SL can you start with dead hookers, then move up to virtual hookers

I watched the CSI:NY episode “Down the Rabbit Hole”. Which if you are in some other form of hole, you would know is part one of the CSI:NY Second Life episodes. Part one aired Wednesday, part two will air in February. Some of the things that made me smile:

Apparently, you can be either gender or something called a “furry.” These furries, as they are called, are easily seen as “griefers.” Usually armed with paintball guns that cover avatars with paint. If an avatar is hit too many times, they disappear down a hole and they can leave their shoes behind.

If you happen to track down the griefer in real life, you might find him lying dead at his PC, a .45 through the head. (Wait a minute….New York….griefer dead….a handkerchief with PN on it. No, no PN handkerchief)

If you want to change clothing, then you must go into Edit Appearance.

“Calling Cards” are actual cards lying on the ground. But be careful. They might be an invitation…to DOOM.

People have love affairs in SL. Including congressmen. Who knew?

There are gladiatorial arena fights that are required to gain access to certain land. And you can even use the severed head of a defeated avatar to fight off your other combatants.

But you still have a noob walk.

Even if you have all of the coolest weapons.

And you never need things like Search.

Overall, Second Life looks a lot cooler on TV then it does on my computer, which may lead to 2 million slightly disappointed users when they first log in.

Looking for new residents to comment, I found many silent PC’s. To my thinking, it truly is 1995 all over again. People just saw Sandra Bullock in The Net and now they are too afraid to talk to anyone in this strange new world.

Of course, in true SL fashion, when I went looking for CSI under Search Places, I find as the number two spot, ! Sexy World with skins. shapes, escorts and newbies. Welcome to Second Life CSI fans.

By Prokofy Neva, Wender of the Way Through the Tekkie-Wiki Woo

So I drop in on the iCommons Dubrovnik summit — virtual version — on the Annenberg Island (still more tomorrow), and Judy Collins is drooning on the sound track. Granola crunches under my feet and what’s that — patchouli scent on the air? covering up a doobie? People are speaking at least 5 languages.

Cory Linden — the *real* Cory Ondrejka — rezzes into view with his mouth moving about 3 seconds before his words are heard, like Bells & Spurs — his avatar is there with the title “Cory Linden” bouncing below a videocast of his typist talking at a panel in Dubrovnik, looking terribly metrosexual. The walls behind him are those kind of sweaty, earthen East European walls that have been splashed with blood and wine and piss for centuries — Sitearm Madonna and the gang have done a bang-up job of capturing just the look and feel of said buildings in SL, and the chicken-scratch dirt of the core sims was the perfect ground texture. Cory is saying matter-of-factly, “We just want to make a platform.” The servers will fall under the jurisdiction of whatever country they’re in, he adds. I IM a question to Jean Linden: “What will Linden Lab do if a given country or entity seizes the servers on which Second Life is streaming?” “We’re wrapping up soon,” she tells me. I’ll bet!

Real Cory fades and Virtual Cory bobs about for awhile, then falls offline. I listen to girls chatting in French and hear a dweeb sidle up to them and warn them that he has Babblefish open! I study the program, and decide I definitely need to turn on the sun and fire up another Diet Coke.

A brightly-back-lit Sitearm Madonna springs into view in a brilliant flowing red flexiprim dress — and what’s that peeking out from her hem? Sneakers?! “Moopf skates,” she explains cheerfully. “Modded to match my dress,” she adds proudly — the very model of a modern mash-up!. I sample the hors d’oeuvres, all Mediterranean-looking, all made by Casandra Jackson, who used to be in The Sims Online (and in the SSG!). “Those TSO people always know how to make good food,” I comment. I make my way to yet another table with — get this! caviar! with hardboiled eggs! and toast points! — and a Croatian phrase chart. I remember the days when I got off the train in Zagreb and they called the language back then “Serbo-Croatian” as one tongue. Some things mashed-up cry out to unmash, I guess…

Everywhere, information was wanting to be free. Just like those Balkan states in the former Yugoslavia! Notecards, videos, instructions, chat. I sat through what felt like an interminably long instruction video called “Good Copy, Bad Copy” — get it? Yuck yuck. I think the story went like this. Some rich white guys bankrolled some black dudes who had hip-hop records that then got “sampled” — bits of them got swiped to be replayed in other songs — and then the swipers got nailed and then everybody thought that bogus that The Man did that. So then the reporters — who were definitely biased on the subject — went around the world following “copyleft” — which is what you get when you don’t have “copyright”. so they showed more black African dudes in Nigeria who are talking about how they will be getting right in ur black culture in America, and some Russians and Swedes selling pirated CDs. (My contribution here in the great Metaversal Mash-up was to point out that the sub-title claiming that the Russian said “Oh, Fuck!” had actually said, “Oh, pancake!” which is a euphemism for the Russian word “whore” people swear with.)

So…more films and more clips and more stuff and then we are delivered to a poor neighbourhood in Latin America, where this chubby guy has a state-of-the-art studio to make CDs — and the narrator tells us the musicians never make anything, the producers never make anything, only the CD sellers make anything. Puzzling why this would be a *good* thing in a poor country (and how it’s really an emulation of the evil record companies anyway lol), my avatar starts to wander and fly about and then whoops, I’m lost, and I can’t get back to that movie theater again. I find it again, but SL working as it does means I have to start watching the movie all over again — there’s no way I can see to fast forward it. Well, a movie like that? It’s probably free, up on Youtube or sumpin. OK…so thinking about one of the really crystal-clear statements in the movie delivered by a Nigerian official who is saying, “People need to be paid for their work,” I head back to the snacks table, zooming in this time to see a fabulous lace tablecloth. Sitearm has no doubt been up nights knitting and tatting and photoshopping…but tells me she bought it at a texture joint.

Nothing says Old Europe like a lace tablecloth! As I admire it, Sitearm swipes a copy, SL-style, and pops it into my inventory — for free! “You should charge,” I begin. I then hand her a Wearable Pinwheel, which was an idea I had for a friend, Darling Valentine, who makes and sells them — they’re great! The sculpties finally enabled her to realize this idea, which was a bit difficult — there didn’t ever seem to be one in SL before. “See, I give you value, and you give me value,”Sitearm starts in. “But I *pay for* these items to be able to give them to others; you’re giving away work for free,” I explain. I sense that I need to be indoctrinated more by Lawrence Lessig, but I have to chose between him and two Linden office hours where I hope to raise some issues.

Then back again, less Lessig, to the art show. A disc jockey is spinning platter after platter of American jazz tunes from the 50s and 70s, and to the tune of Nat King Cole’s “Unforgettable,” he’s cracking SL jokes, like saying the slogan, “Your World, No Imagination” about the “Popular Places” list. See, that’s what happens when folks like this get to talking “information wants to be free.” The first thing they do is want to take away YOUR information’s freedom. I ponder the slogan for the conference, remember?

“to make sure that, at its crossroads, we guide the world along a path that will enable the kind of free culture and decentralized innovation that has characterized the early years of the Internet.”

Guide…along a path…free culture…decentralized…why is this all sounding suddenly like Tito?

And here’s where I really drill down on the t-shirt that is the emblem for the conference. It’s called “Molotov Man,” and it’s a painting of a famous picture of a Latin American revolutionary type in a Che Guevera cap sporting a cross flying off his neck ready to pitch a Pepsi bottle with a Molotov cocktail. Hey, what a mash-up, Amerika, Communist Russia, the works!

I meander over to a sort of monastery cell at this Evropa sort of building where the art work utterly fills it, like a griefer prim-litter attack on one of my rentals. Inside, I experience the Secondlifeyness of it all — here we are, the Mediterranean sea air wafting back the scent of roasted Balkan pig somewhere in the back yard, some sort of flying Is and Cs that Sitearm said the artist was going to try to do in RL too (now how will he do that?), all kinds of little mind-maps and memes and stuff.

Beating a retreat, I go and try to see if anybody is talking, but it’s all a dance break and people are dancing on the ceiling — or rather, unable to control their avatars due to a bad patch yesterday and wicked lag for some.

“How do you feel about having a symbol of urban guerilla terrorism serve as the t-shirt for this conference held in the Balkans about information wanting to be free, Sitearm? Is this supposed to be about like blowing up record companies and stuff?” I queried.

A guy with too many consonants in his name — he must be from here — sidles up and smirks with one of those “XDDDDD” type of grins, and tells me we need to blow up Microsoft due to Vista, too. I contemplate Balkanization and its discontents for a moment.

The artist, Joy Garnett, made it from a RL photo, explains Sitearm patiently, and I zoom in on a notecard.

“New York based artist and blogger Joy Garnett frequently used images depicting natural and technological disasters she finds on the web, as a staring point for her paintings. However, the real objective of her work is not to make political commentary, but to reveal the malleability of meaning within these images. Garnette is famous for her painting “Molotov” and she runs the popular and often political reblog NEWSgrist.”

The icommons website also explains:

“Joy is well known for her involvement in a copyright fight called “Joywar” which began when the well-known photojournalist Susan Meiselas threatened to sue her for the use of part of a photograph she had taken in 1979, as the basis for her painting Molotov. Joy removed the image from her website, but by that time artist members of Rhizome.org had already copied it in protest inspiring countless online permutations of the painting.”

You can see the Harper’s article about the controversy here, and Susan’s original photo here, where the fellow looks a good deal more angry, and you learn that he’s in Nicaragua.

How did it happen that a leftie photojournalist covering a symbol of the Sandinista revolution that was to become iconic come to clash with a mash-upper (we used to call them forgerers!)?

Arkadi Victorovich Rusin: “Lenin’s Arrival at the Finland-Station in Petrograd in Spring 1917″. Virtual Museum of Political Art.

Of course, both gals are stealing from an earlier meme called “Socialist Realism,” sponsored by Lenin and Trotsky and the gang, showing violent revolutionary paintings in a certain pastoralist style.

Soooo….the t-shirt you can buy at iCommons not only celebrates the copying of a photograph taken by a famous photojournalist and a celebrated controversy about copyright and copyleft, it echoes the celebration of a later-discredited cause of Sandinista glory, itself predicated on the Bolsheviks (yes! Prokofy is writing about the Bolsheviks again!!!).

I spot an SLNN reporter, comment on her lovely Jackie-O dress, and urge her not to hijack my story, but she assures me that nobody will, ah, have quite my take on things….

So what does this have to do with SL? Well, in the land of Copybot, of course you can copy anything and mash anything and make anything — and a lot of it was already swiped off the Internet at large anyway.

Everyone will mash and sell and resell and mash some more!

However, somebody always has to pay the tier! Who pays the tier for iCommons? It’s hard, studying their site, to find any mentions of “sponsors”. That’s in part because they really don’t like the idea of rich people being patrons of the arts and the civil discourse. They like to think that you will put out tip jars in SL and make it back that way.

Walter Annenberg, founder of the Annenberg chool of Communications at the University of Pennsylvania in 1959. Annenberg was a media mogul who made his fortune with TV Guide, which used to be sold by every single supermarket cash register in America.

Old media money still funds this new media stuff — and I always ask: ok, but what happens when Dad’s trust fund runs out? You sample, you mix, you match, you hate on the record companies, you say Microsoft Vista is evil, etc. etc. — but then who will pay for what comes next?

Somehow, I think we all will.