Like it or not, you cannot be impassive to it:Julian Dibbell’s Wired article on griefing, specifically what we’re experiencing in Second Life — organised griefing — may very well become the ultimate reference essay on description and motivation in the mind of the griefer.

Dibbell claims that ultimately griefers want to have fun and laugh at things that people find so serious; the more serious we find something, the harder they’ll hit to be able to laugh at it afterwards.

Open to discussion is, naturally, what we can do about people that claim of themselves:

Asked how some people can find their greatest amusement in pissing off others, ^ban^ gives the question a moment’s thought: “Most of us,” he says finally, with a wry chuckle, “are psychotic.”

Worth reading it to the end. Then read about Prokofy Neva’s interview to Dibbell.

And then discuss if griefers are just the ultimate jokesters in a society that lost their sense of humour; if they’re dangerous psychotics; or just bored people who revel in the limelight, and suddenly having found out that there is strength in numbers, and that the era of the individual hacker sitting in their basements without any form of social contact except bragging about their feats on the forums is now over, and organised griefing — sort of “hackers together, going out for a laugh” — is a new trend for the 21st century.’

[UPDATE 20080202: Hiro Pendragon's excellent essay debunking the Wired article should be required reading]

“And now for something completely different”, as the Monty Python would say.

CodeBastard Redgrave, scripter extraordinaire, blogger supreme (her blog is #2 according to SocialStatus), recent winner of the “AvaStar of the Year 2007″ award, having her picture hang up at Linden Lab’s HQ and definitely an excellent photographer & Photoshopper, is now fast becoming one of the most entertaining and fun people that I had the privilege to meet in the past few years through Second Life

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It’s more fun if you don’t speak German, and you have a sense of humour

Definitely great stuff from the creative people from magrathean.ca, one of the many Metaverse Development Companies for Second Life.

“Gwyneth,” Commander Au said to me, twirling his moustache behind the floating desk at HQ. “We have, uh… an issue.”

I dropped the pad on my lap and looked up to him. His mischievous smile was getting on my nerves. Sighing, I scratched my head, and mumbled: “What issue?”

“Well, the guys at the old asteroid mining station in Epsilon Eridani told HQ that production has dropped dramatically. We don’t know why, but we suspect the worst. It could be only laziness. It could be something unleashed in those tunnels — a new form of radiation, a biohazard, who knows. That mine is old, Gwyn. They’ve been working at it for centuries. Eons. Who knows what’s down there… Well, it’s your assignment. Talk to the locals. Get clues from them. There is a bar or diner on the mine, see what people are saying. The CEO of the mining operation fears a strike or even worse.”

I thought what would be “worse than a strike”. Come on, boss, this is an asteroid mine! What possibly can go wrong there, except someone dropping a charge and blowing themselves up by mistake?

Nevertheless, I saluted (which got a chuckle from Au), grabbed the pad, and, shoulders dropping, went to the Quartermaster to pick up my old suit. Time to get the old, rusty Spacebug ready.

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If you haven’t heard the big announcement by Linden Lab that they’re finally closing down “illegitimate virtual bankers” in Second Life, you’ve been missing all the fun

The announcement on their Official Blog states:

As of January 22, 2008, it will be prohibited to offer interest or any direct return on an investment (whether in L$ or other currency) from any object, such as an ATM, located in Second Life, without proof of an applicable government registration statement or financial institution charter.

As you might expect, getting such a charter is pretty much impossible in almost all countries in the world, so this effectively means: no more virtual banks in the “Wild West” of Second Life. More information is available here (you need a valid Second Life account to log in).

Responses to Linden Lab’s decision have been interesting. Prokofy Neva, for instance, turned libertarian for a while:

And so ends the geek dream of a vast international space where money would never become an option…which made it possible for money everywhere to become an option growing out of every prim with a dollar sign hover-text. Money *is* needed to finance this Wild West world. Where will it come from now?

My old friend Eloise Pasteur, turned economics journalist for Massively, just states:

It will be interesting to see if any of the banks survive this transition, and if they don’t, what comes along in their place. It will also be interesting to see if there is a run on the banks now.

You can bet on that — Eloise’s colleague at Massively, Tateru Nino, usually reporting on community issues, statistics, and events that impact the virtual world, covered the protests at JT Financial, one of the leading virtual banking institutions that will now go out of business:

Of course there are panic withdrawals right now, because, at the end of the day the depositors simply don’t trust the banks to be able to repay the deposits, so everyone wants to get their account completely withdrawn as soon as possible, while the money holds out.

Most “banks” have already closed down their ATM networks, of course — at least the most fraudulent ones. They’ve learned the hard lesson from Ginko — it doesn’t pay off to be honest and stay around to try to fix things. Better to cash out and head for the next Caribbean island Others, like the World Stock Exchange, have at least tried to keep their customers informed and provided them options to deal with the “banking ban” in the case it affects them.

The legal groups in Second Life, of course, see this as being only natural. Benjamin Duranske writes on his blog Virtually Blind:

My only complaint with this policy is that it has been too long in coming; it is clear and concise, and it undeniably makes the grid a better place. In the long run, policies like this, which acknowledge the obligations facing a company that offers users the chance to “make real money in a virtual world, that’s right, real money” (emphasis in original), will keep Second Life, and the grid in general, healthy and relatively free of regulation.

The irreverent lawyer Jessika Holyoke, writing on the Herald, suggests that different things are at stake here:

Additionally, Supply Linden generates revenue.  Each purchase of Linden dollars is straight revenue. [...] No capital investing in world, because they may be crooks, means that to raise massive amounts of Lindens you have to buy it through the LindeX.

An interesting theory. Would that mean that Linden Lab is actually just covering their own revenue streams by “monopolising” all currency-related issues? Does this mean that Raph Koster’s Metaplace, which will be open source and free, but will require people to buy microcurrency from his company, is actually getting it right?

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In this new year (*waves*!), the first thing I did was upgrading my Wordpress installation, and, while waiting, I thought it would be nice to read through DreamHost’s blog for some news.

DreamHost is my hosting provider. Any blog post I might make here talking about why I still use them for about a hundred sites (some of them quite “sensitive” for customers; several are just experiments, joke sites, or similar pretty useless things that need to be stored “somewhere” as one lives through the Internet age…) will just like advertising for them, and I apologise in advance for the “free advertising”. But for you Second Life residents, you might understand a bit of their philosophy: they’re to Web hosting what Linden Lab is to 3D content hosting. Namely, they are also somewhere in California (they used to co-locate pretty near to Linden Lab); they’re not the biggest web hosting company in the world, but they’ve got an impressive number of users; they are perhaps one of the few last hosting companies providing “best effort” service (as opposed to sign service level agreements, which everybody pretty much does these days); they’re strangely honest and open (the first question they answered to me was about mature content; they have exactly the same approach as Linden Lab); they’re also pretty much insane, as you can see from their blog, and nobody would take them seriously for doing business with (which does not explain why they have 600,000 domains registered with them, almost all fully hosted).

Also, like Linden Lab, they’re plagued with database servers going rogue, routers that fail with improper software, servers that drop out of the network without reason, and basically handling too much traffic for what their over-stressed hardware can handle. And, yes, they have to deal with the equivalent of griefing — nasty customers running rogue applications that take all available CPU time (like, well, spamming…) and/or consuming all traffic to a server, thus demanding that someone manually logs in as administrator and shuts that rogue customer’s script down. This gives non-DreamHost customers the idea that they’re unreliable, always failing, don’t care about their customers, and are making millions of US$ every month out of the poor customers who don’t know better and refuse to move elsewhere for some reason.

Well, why do customers remain faithful to DreamHost?

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