Category: News

Linden Lab makes a further statement on RedZone

Posted on by Inara Pey

Soft Linden has given an official update on the zFire RedZone situation over on JIRA VWR-24746, where he states:

Hey, all. I got the go-ahead to give an update on zF Red Zone specifically. Again, thank you for the ARs with specific info about violations. These have been very helpful for letting Lindens know what’s going on.
Tuesday morning, we removed zF Red Zone from the Marketplace for a second time. We removed the in-world vendor distributing the item as well. We determined that zF Red Zone was still in violation of our Terms of Service and Community Standards.
We asked for removal by no later than today of all zF Red Zone functionality that discloses any alternate account names. That is, even if consent is asked, the service may not act on the consent. In addition, we asked for removal by no later than Friday of the interface for and any remaining implementation of the zF Red Zone consent mechanism because it does not comply with our policies. If these updates are not made, we will take appropriate steps to remedy the violations.
As before, we appreciate your help in keeping an eye on content. If you find that any merchant’s product is not in compliance with our TOS or our Community Standards, please file an abuse report about the product. Do this even if you filed against a previous version. Include a specific explanation of what you believe is a violation, and ideally select and report the in-world object at issue in case it behaves differently than what’s in the Marketplace. Before reporting, make sure you have first-hand knowledge of the issue. Support can best react if you explain specific steps to reproduce or confirm a violation.

The wheels may turn slow, but they do indeed turn.

Soft Linden has been working hard on this matter – and keeping abreast of matters over the past weekend – and deserves a lot of thanks and credit for getting things to this stage. The entire matter may not be resolved as yet (the scanners themselves are still in-world and operating & may be unaffected if zFire meets LL’s current requirements and no stand has been made on the use of the device to collect data), but the fact we now have this situation is very, very welcome.

Soft, if you get to read this – thank you for your understanding, your commitment and your effort.

Update

The RedZone device vendor has been removed from zFire Xue’s in-world store by Soft Linden after the creator apparently replaced it following the creator attempting to place it back without meeting LL’s stated requirements. Commenting on the move, Soft said on the JIRA:

Soft Linden added a comment – 02/Mar/11 3:53 PM
Thank you for the additional ARs about the vendor being replaced in-world while the consent request mechanism was still in place. We’ve removed the vendor again and made conditions for recirculation more explicit.

New Community Platform launched

Posted on by Inara Pey

The new Community Platform launched today. The layout is clean and fresh and in keeping with the rest of the revised SL website.  Torley has produced one of his ever-impressive videos to help introduce the platform:

This is needed, as some of the elements of the platform are not entire intuitive. Take adding an avatar picture for example. Once logged in, there is an option at the top of the screen called My Settings. Within this is a tab called Avatars. One would think this is the place to upload and select an avatar picture for go alongside your posts.

Wrong.

While you can indeed select an avatar from My Settings->Avatars, you in fact have to upload any image you wish to use from your profile first. Your Community Platform profile, that is. This requires that you click on your name at the top of the Community pages then click on Upload Images (/View image for, once you’ve uploaded the first time) then upload a picture then go to My Settings -> Avatars to select and use it.

And if you want to get a background for your avatar picture, it is even more confusing, as you need to play around with the Social Connect tab of My Settings.

And if you want to use a custom background (such as the one on the left) – it gets harder, as nowhere is the required size of the background given. This means that you have to fiddle about guessing the relative size of the background – and the “preview” option in Social Connect is as useful as a chocolate tea kettle as it is not representative of the background’s size when used in forum posts…

Friendly, huh? I eventually got the image on the left to work after well over 30 minutes of pissing playing around with images, and the required size appears to be 117(w) x 210(h) pixels.

None of this gets the new platform off to a user-friendly start – and this is reflected in the fact that the first questions lined up in the new Answers section of the Platform are about … setting up forum avatar pictures…

Elsewhere, LL seem to have blundered yet again. Back when the Jive-based blogrum was launched, a glaring omission was that of a General Discussion forum. This lead to people being confused as to where to chat and, well, be a community. It also lead to some pretty heavy-handed moderation on the part of Linden Labs which at times – it has to be said – was very biased in its approach: threads critical of LL were rapidly shut down by LL staff as being “inappropriate” for the forum in which they were posted, while other threads with a more positive attitude towards LL were allowed to run unhindered, despite also technically being in the “wrong” forum topic area.

Well…guess what is missing from the new forums? Yup: there is no General Discussions area. Of course, the JIVE blogrum did get a GD eventually – but you would have thought someone in LL, staff churn or not, would have remembered what happened before and learned a lesson. True, the JIVE-based GD got to be a pretty unpleasant environment  – but discussion is what makes a community, and without a GD area, the new Community Platform has a big hole in it – and it is already causing mass confusion, with GD topics turning up in both the Entertainment and Your Avatar sections.

I’m not altogether sure how I’ll like the new layout – if I use it that much, I’m now far too at home over at SLU. The general approach seems good, allowing for the obscure route you need to take to get a good-looking forum avatar sorted out;  page layouts are going to take a while to get used to. Certainly, the lack of a clear-cut GD environment is going to lead to a lot of confusion as to where people should post, and LL need to sort this out now rather than leave it – or go back to stomping on threads for being “inappropriate” for the sections they show up in.

More guidelines need to be built-into the system as well: Torley’s video is good at giving a broad overview, but really, the system could do with around two or three more.

It’s also going to be interesting to see how long LL staff remain engaged on the Platform once the sense of Shiny has worn off of it for them. In that respect, I’m rather surprised that there isn’t a section entitled “Ask a Linden” or “Ask the Lab”, or some such – together with clear and concise guidelines – that encourages two-way communications between users and LL representatives. After all, this platform is about improving communications and providing channels of communication, is it not?

Linden Lab comments on RedZone

Posted on by Inara Pey

Following the recent change to the Community Standards, zFire Xue has been attempting to wriggle out of having to receive the formal consent of those being scanned by his RedZone devices to have their information “background checked”.

Tateru Nino carried the concerns of users about Xue’s unethical approaches to the situation, which included a threat the release his database to all and sundry (for a fee), and his attempts to equate implied consent with formal (or informed) consent; not to mention his willingness to effectively throw his users under the wheels of ToS violations.

The Lab were very clear on matters, as you can see here.

The change to the Community Services itself wasn’t enough. However, this move by Linden Lab – coupled with the fact that once again, the RedZone tool has been delisted from SL Marketplace and comments from Lab representatives thanking users for filing AR’s on the matter of the number false positive reports this tool gives (in matching avatar accounts to one another) is indicative that the wheels are still in motion on this matter.

Interestingly, at around the time the comments were made, RedZone again vanished from the SL Marketplace.

LL to make “concerted effort” on content protection

Posted on by Inara Pey

Stroker Serpentine and those involved in the class action against Linden Lab over content protection have reached an out-of-court settlement with the makers of Second Life.

During a recording of Metaverse TV’s Grumpy Old Avatars, Stroker stated:

“We settled the lawsuit with Linden Lab. We settled amicably, and reasonably, and we’re anticipating a concerted effort on Linden’s behalf going forward towards content protection and the rights of content creators and at least being aware of the fact that there is a lot of content theft going on out there.”

Precisely what this means for SL as a whole is unclear. That settlement has been reached would indicate that both sides realised they had slim chances for an outright “win”. That action of some description is now anticipated on the part of Linden Lab is clear. Quite what that action will be remains to be seen.  One wonders if the shelved Content Management Roadmap may get a dusting-down; if it does, then it needs to be given a long, hard look. The first cut wasn’t that impressive.

The legal department at Battery Street seems to have its hands full right now…

Data scraping: update

Posted on by Inara Pey

The media patch mentioned for Phoenix has, as reported earlier, now arrived in Henri Beauchamp’s Cool VL Viewer, in a somewhat modified form.

And already it is proving its worth for those concerned with attempts by others to scrape and gather IP addresses for the purposes of match – or simply gathering avatar information in general for the purposes of profiling & possible stalking.

  • Theia Magic, had a run-in a while ago with a club owner who was either somewhat economical with the truth during their exchange – or was playing a game of “place the RedZone, removed the RedZone, place the RedZone again when no-one is looking”. As it seems that, despite his loud denials as to running RedZone, he does in fact have it deployed and hidden. Given he’s been trolling the “old” official forums loudly denying he has or would use RedZone, getting caught out has obviously left him with the produce of several chickens on his face – or at least, that’s how I look upon the “colourful metaphors” he employs in his exchange with Theia.
  • The Hair Fair that has been running of late and has been widely advertised also appears to be running RedZone. Whether it is the organisers or an individual store is unclear; however, the patch flagged aggressive media stream pushing that resolved to the RedZone server as soon as a number of people using Henri’s Viewer arrived. The interesting thing here is that Greenzone failed to give any alerts.
  • Theia has now started a list of in-world locations that are attempting to deliberately mask their use of RedZone (see link above). So much for the RedZone Challenge initiated by Ciaran Laval in an attempt to gain transparency.

Quickware (another spying tool) has been linked to the IP Address 193.93.174.118.

Elsewhere, and connected with the use of the new patch, A “new” mystery domain has now been revealed as popping up frequently around the grid, again aggressively pushing a media URL onto people arrival at stores and venues. URL resolves to a domain called m.sparkgap.info (IP 69.163.222.23). It is unclear as to precisely what this is doing: speculation points to it possibly being related to CDS, but this is far from confirmed.

Caution certainly dictates both of these IPs are added to your firewall for blocking purposes – and in the case of m.sparkgap.info, added to your host file if you are technically-minded. Prior to the release of the media patch, there was speculation that it would probably uncover a lot more in the way of mysterious use (as opposed to outright misuse) people build around media streaming. m.sparkgap.info may yet be the tip of the iceberg.

Finally, Itazura Radio has some fun at the RedZoners’ expense while making some very valid points (sorry I cannot embed; EMI apparently get ticked off with me if I try).

And Cummere Mayo provides some excellent advice for those wishing to lose friends and alienate people.

A new working week commences tomorrow; one in which the new Community Platform is unveiled. This could well be a testing time for the Lab in terms of measuring up their actions against the words of their new CEO.

Further Information:

  • The humongous SLU thread on the subject (now with summaries!) – it is a monster, but an enlightening and addictive read
  • Henri Beauchamp’s Cool VL Viewer with media patch
  • Theia Magic’s blog with RedZone listings
  • no2Redzone – the latest information, information on blocking the RedZone site, etc.
  • My original post, with further links (and some repeats)
  • JIRAs on the subject of privacy – all worthy of your vote and watch):
    • SVC6751 -Make parcel_media_agent_command and similar request user permission
    • SVC 6793 – Establishing an opt-out system to prevent tracking
    • VWR24746 – RedZone security violates ToS, exposes private information & is being misused
    • VWR-24807 – Add abilityto filter cookies into the browser (Viewer 2.x)

Nailing the data harvesters (2): LL make a move

Posted on by Inara Pey

It seems LL have made a move to clamp down on tools like RedZone.

Until today, Section 4 of the Community Standards read:

“Residents are entitled to a reasonable level of privacy with regard to their Second Life experience. Sharing personal information about a fellow Resident –including gender, religion, age, marital status, race, sexual preference, and real-world location beyond what is provided by the Resident in the First Life page of their Resident profile is a violation of that Resident’s privacy. Remotely monitoring conversations, posting conversation logs, or sharing conversation logs without consent are all prohibited in Second Life and on the Second Life Forums.”

However, this has now been revised to read:

“Residents are entitled to a reasonable level of privacy with regard to their Second Life experience. Sharing personal information about your fellow Residents without their consent — including gender, religion, age, marital status, race, sexual preference, alternate account names, and real-world location beyond what is provided by them in their Resident profile — is not allowed. Remotely monitoring conversations in Second Life, posting conversation logs, or sharing conversation logs without the participants’ consent are all prohibited.”

[my emphasis]

Thus, at a stroke, the surreptitious ability of RedZone to gather information on SL users without their knowledge, much less consent is rendered void – or is it?

It’s not quite time to proclaim victory as yet. While the change to Section 4 of the CS is indeed welcome, it does not go far enough: sharing information that can be regarded as personal may not “not be allowed” – what about gathering of said information?

There is also the matter of in-store scanners (note that on his own blog zFire only comments on his nasty little (and purely voyeuristic) HUD as being updated to request people allow it to scan them).

The playing field has shifted, certainly – but, depending on what policy announcement is forthcoming from LL tomorrow – it seems that it may not have shifted enough.

Right now, the rule of thumb would be to keep your media tools disabled – at least for the time being.

ADDENDUM – Feb 25th

Thanks to Theia Magic’s investigations, it now appears that the RedZone in-world scanners give you a link to follow to the RedZone website in order to “give your consent” to be “background checked”.

This being the case, I’d advise people to keep media disabled and to stay away from the RedZone website – especially if following links using your own web browser,  rather than the built-in Viewer browser. Visiting that website is giving a clear indication that you’re OK with data being captured and – potentially – a cookie being deposited on your computer – even if you’re attempting to “opt out” of your information being captured!

The website is further confusing inasmuch as only those already scanned need to “opt out”. Despite the claims of zFire Xue, RedZone’s creator, those scanned / placed on the database are liable to be in the minority – therefore this approach could fool people into exposing themselves where there is no need for them to do so.

Beyond this, the solutions currently being offered up by zFire Xue relate purely to having your details (if any) “checked” on his database – they do nothing to prevent any actual scanning by his in-world items in the first place.

So – simplest solution: keep your media options disabled and remember there are a lot more stores you can shop at / clubs you can dance at that don’t use RedZone than there are stores that do use it.