The Death of a Tyrant
At last, Saddam Hussein was hung last night. A big celebratory event. Iraqis are in the streets, Americans are showing signs of relief, ppl are generally content that justice is done. And it is done. I think the man made his own bed and must lie in it. He killed a lot of ppl, conflicted pain and suffering onto others, there is absolutely no reason for him to have the gift of life. He must die, and he did. With impressive speed too. If it were in the States, once convicted, the man would be sitting in death row for many years to come, regardless of his crimes. It was quick, subtle, to the point. One month after his conviction, he is gone, like it never happened. So why am I not that happy about it? Why don’t I feel that this is a victory? As a ruler he stood for everything I am against, as a man he disgusted me, as a leader of religion…well let’s not even get into that. Striking violence with violence… We should be proud of ourselves, we delivered justice. Sure he deserved to die, but somehow I failed to see how this is a victory for humanity. I see it as another strike out against humanity. The tyrant is dead. Long live the Tyrant!
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Yaargh!
Today, I was doing some Web updates on the Tri-State Web site, you know, mindless coding and such, optimize some graphics, put a picture here, add a text there… All of a sudden I realized how much tired I am of SL. WOW, holy cow, never would have guessed that I’d have come to a saturation point like this. Actually, I can understand. Though I don’t spend much time in the game itself nowadays, I wake up every morning, read twenty some blogs on SL, sort through my five e-mail accounts (three of which are SL-related), and I log onto #secondlife all day and see if there would be any useful information there, I try to catch ppl on AIM, in-world, or IRC, some days I get lucky and interview ppl, which takes at least three hours because, obviously instant messaging is not all that instant. Hell, I just realized I didn’t even turn on CNN for about weeks now. It was the first thing I used to do everyday and gripe about how bad their news coverage was. Not only CNN, I don’t even turn on the TV, no Law and Order, no Monk, only Galactica and the 24 DVDs I rent, that is about it. I keep getting these Google Alerts on SL about so-and-so getting a Second Life, meaning the company is planning on investing some cash into the world. And I am thinking, gosh I need to get a real life some time soon. I have been intensely focused on SL for about a year now and I need to finish this chapter now. I think my dogs feel the same way.
Then I got up and started working on my syllabus for the class that I am teaching next semester: Film and Literature, which will be mostly sci-fi, all the novels I wanted to read, but didn’t have time. You know why? Because I can. Reading a bit of cyberpunk fiction is good for the heart and soul.
Turn off griefing in the code, Philip!
Last week I read 
the silliest comment about griefing through Second Life educator’s list. Someone posted on the list the griefing incident that occurred during the public appearance of Second Life-tycoon Anshe Chung. For those who are not familiar with Anshe, she is famous for having made her fortune (millions) by owning a lot of virtual land and renting them out. Consequently, she has a lot of enemies. Well griefers made a point in flooding the sim with penises which eventually led to the crashing of the sim where the event took place. And made a point in capturing the incident and posting it in Something Awful. You can read more about it here.
When this news hit the list, first, couple of people tried to marginalize it by claiming that we need to post things that are relevant to the *entire* list. Now I’ve been in this list for about a year and am a bit fed up with reading people bragging about their personal projects (which they invest thousands of dollars for) or talking about K12 which bears absolutely no interest for me. I get 30 some e-mails about these topics. So when couple of threads that come out that interests me, I’d like to read them and post my comments on them. And me being me, I called it as it is. By now, I think I earned enough enemies in the list that would last me a lifetime. Some interesting comments came after that, about griefing being a part of the SL culture and such. And someone quite abruptly and with a matter-of-fact attitude said and I quote:
"It comes back to the platform vs games decision. If LL (Linden Lab) wants it to be a platform then griefing has to be turned off in the code. If LL wants it to be a game, then yes, these guys provide great entertainment. I still don’t think that LL can have it both ways."
Anyway, I thought the comment was silly, but I was feeling kind at the moment and asked him to clarify. He was basically complaining about the loopholes in the program and when I said they are overworked at the time, mentioned open source, and said that griefers change IP addresses like T-shirts, I was accused of using an "alt" gmail account and my association with griefers was a bit suspicious at best.
As I went through this thread, I realized (as I mentioned in one of my previous blog entries) how much this "educator" crowd is alien to the real nature of Second Life. They get funding from their schools or get grants from private sector and invest thousands of dollars to buy islands and use SL for "teaching purposes" and they have no idea what it really is. As a matter of fact, the hype about SL is fairly recent. Only this year companies like IBM, Adidas, Sunsystems came to SL. Only recently teaching institutions are willing to invest in SL. The presence of hardcore educators in SL has been a year and a half or two years at most.
Now on the other hand, I am in the IRC channel #secondlife, where people who have been in Second Life for years, most have been in SL since its inception. You see their names on the blog entries, on the comments, on anything SL. Some are or have been griefers, some are hackers, some are members of libsecondlife (a group of programmers who are pushing for open sourcing SL), some are machinima artists… And they all complain, remember the time when SL wasn’t as lame as it is right now, when creativity was a highly valued thing…
Now for griefing… Can it really be turned off the code? Not really, if you ask me, because most griefing that is being done is done with the tools that are within the parameters of the world. Very small number of griefers, as far as I can tell, are legitimate hackers or have scripting skills. Anyone can create an object, especially a penis, swastika, or the Twin Towers… Even non-scripted objects crash sims. True Linden Lab needs to work on the loopholes, but as we can see, they don’t have the capacity to deal with the overload. So what’s the problem in open sourcing it? Of course this guy was totally against it, arguing that this is the implicit agenda of programmers, and if we open source it then anyone can hack/grief blah blah blah. I disagree. Because most griefers don’t have that kind of knowledge and LL will probably won’t be allowing just anyone to fiddle with the code and surely there will be some parameters. Not sure what they are, but there are other open source projects out there and we don’t see them crashing down. Also there is the argument that we should restrict some SL capabilities to paying accounts. My argument is: Why? So someone who has been in SL longer than you and invested more time and energy in SL and is truly creative can be excluded for your sake because s/he doesn’t have enough money?
Come to think of it, griefing is an integral part of society in general
whether it be online or in real life. Look at children or how they like
to pick on each other, pulling pony tails, lifting skirts, and such. Harassment of ppl, stalking ppl,
calling ppl names, exposing their private parts… these are all griefing and are a very integral
part of civilization as we know it. Anyone who watched South Park knows
this and laughs at these fart jokes. As a society, we are not able to
eradicate this, so I can’t believe that a random company from San
Fransisco is going to be able to "turn off griefing in the code" and
make everything OK.
Furthermore, the problem is that we are expecting LL to fix all of our griefing problems. But I don’t think they have the power or the capacity to enforce that kind of
a policing in SL. Philip, for those who went to SLCC this year, made it
crystal clear. The main target of the company now is to provide tools
for the users so that they can fend for themselves. The difference is
between a "top to bottom approach" to "bottom to top approach." Getting angry at LL’s incapability to "turn off griefing" is like leaving your home unlocked trusting that LAPD put all the
thieves in jail and getting pissed off at the government when your
things get stolen. Some people believe in the power of LL and I (and some others) believe in the
power of the user. I am posting the same snippet from 3pointD that I posted on the list:
"The truth is that Linden Lab’s insistence on seeing Second Life as a
"world" is probably hampering its evolution. At some point soon, the
company will have to step back from its interest in what kind of world
SL will become, and truly let its users decide. That, after all, is the
proposition made in the "Your world, your imagination" slogan of which
LL is so proud. The fact is, though, that Second Life remains very much
the company’s world. Unfortunately for LL, that’s not how things work
online these days. As we move from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 to Web 3pointD,
control is passing more and more into the hands of the users, who are
only too happy to take on the responsibility of providing tools and
content for their online lives — and even for policing themselves, when
given the freedoms and tools to do it. Gatekeepers in various forms
remain a necessary part of the environment, especially where problems
such as griefing and server attacks are concerned, needless to say. But
even so, there’s a level of transparency that’s necessary — not because
we have some abstract right to it, but only because it helps achieve
the goals Linden Lab claims to have, of inculcating acceptable modes of
behavior in the population."
You can access the original article here.
At
some point, SL residents will have to take control of most of their
security and take the necessary precautions instead of waiting Philip
to "turn off griefing in the code." We do it everyday when ordering online or browsing
the net. That is the idea behind Web 2.0 or whatever SL is or heading
towards to be. Of course, then, LL will have to reveal the names of those suckers. That is another debate, for another time.
Then I was kindly told to shut up and I did. I felt like I have griefed the list with my unnecessary thoughts and rebellious attitude towards the "educators." God forbid that someone might express a different opinion.
Doctor of Internet
Well I had the most interesting conversation from someone in the Something Awful forums today. This site is a comedy site that houses a variety of content, such as instant messaging, pranks, digitally edited pictures, and humorous negative reviews of various forms of media. I am not going to tell more about this person, lest his identity be revealed, but I was asking him some questions about the funny stuff he posted about SL. At some point I decided to clarify why I am asking rather silly questions. Of course, I should have known that he was already familiar with my topic, knowing that I sent him my informed consent form. Here is the conversation snippet:
| PaleFireR: | let me explain myself a bit |
| PaleFireR: | I am writing about performative narratives in SL, so the fact that griefers create/build/and make machimina is interesting to me |
| PaleFireR: | that is why I am asking you questions, not to uncover some hidden connections |
| Drake5256: | right because you’re supposed to write some bullshit soc paper on how second life is a narrative of self, i read the paper |
| PaleFireR: | lol |
| PaleFireR: | something like that, except it is my dissertation |
| Drake5256: | you’re going to be a doctor of internet? |
| PaleFireR: | though I am not arguing for SL as a narrative of self |
| PaleFireR: | not really |
| Drake5256: | too bad it could use some medical attention |
| PaleFireR: | Doctor of Digital media |
| PaleFireR: | lmao |
| PaleFireR: | that is out of my jurisdiction |
I thought this guy had an interesting sense of humor. Serves me right. I like the title actually: Doctor of Internet. The next thing you’ll know, these guys will create a machinima talking about my sexual fantasies on USS Corwin Snyder, like the one they made for Prokofy Neva: The Shiplog of USS Prokovy Neva. If you haven’t watched it, you’re missing a lot… Hope no one in SL is reading this blog, because they *will* create one if they get the idea. LMAO. Maxx Monde, if you’re reading this, I am counting on you to keep this a secret!
Wild griefer
These guys are absolutely super creative. Here is a movie they made, it is hysterical:
War in Cyberspace
As I was working (or playing, not sure) over the weekend, my eyes were idling between my computer monitor and the TV screen. TNT is showing Matrix Reloaded this week, so I was leisurely following the movie, perhaps for the nth time. One of my favorite scenes began where Nero is puzzled to find out that the Oracle is just another program like the agents. Of course, the natural question that arises from this revelation is that how can he trust her? And the answer that the oracle gives him is that he simply can’t. Her explanation of the matrix is quite intriguing though. She explains that the entire universe, including the birds, trees, wind, and sun, are all programs. Interestingly, Svarga, the artificial ecosystem in Second Life created by Louk, is exactly that: trees and plants grow because they have scripts, the birds cross pollinate the flora with the help of the scripts, and it rains because it is scripted in the island. The Oracle further explains that the programs that are doing their jobs, meaning doing what they are supposed to be doing, are invisible, you wouldn’t even know that they were there. But you hear about the other ones, the programs that are out of whack for some reason. These programs are assimilated by the system, meaning by other programs that are running correctly. And Neo makes the most interesting comment: "Programs hacking programs. But why?" To which the Oracle responds that they have their reasons, but generally when a program breaks down, or a better program is created instead, the old programs face deletion. And when that happens, a program can either choose to hide here (I guess "here" refers to the matrix, unclear) or return to the mainframe, which is where Neo must ultimately go to save humanity (ironic that he must go to the mainframe to save humanity!). But never mind that, it is science fiction, right?
Last night as I was trying to catch up with my Wired reading, I came across the most interesting, almost terrorizing, article: Attack of the Bots. It is talking about the Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) on Six Apart which took place last May (incidentally, Typepad–this blog that you are reading–is run by Six Apart). When their team investigated the attack, they found out that Six Apart wasn’t the real target of these attacks, but one of their customers from Israel, Blue Security, was. Blue Security’s domain name service was rerouting these attacks to their TypePad blog URL. Hence the servers of Six Apart, despite their best effort, were out of commission for awhile. Ultimately, these attacks were the result of a botnet–a network made up of independent programs, or bots, acting in concert. Reminds me of the scene in Matrix Reloaded that comes right after the one I related above; you know, the one where Neo has to fight with the agent/program he has freed from the system and ultimately caused him to malfunction and multiply like a virus.
The difference between viruses and bots is very simple: Like viruses, bots spread by installing themselves on the networked computers. However, while viruses act separately, bots execute coordinated attacks responding to external commands, which is what makes them most dangerous. The botnet is a sleeper agent until it receives an operational software called command and control (C&C) which resides on a remote server. Until then, they go undetected, causing no harm. According to the article, not all bots are bad, but those that are, can be used to do anything and everything, including distributing my favorite organ enlargement e-mails I’ve been getting 20 times a day.
Now here is the kicker. This is where the plot thickens and gets absolutely fascinating: Blue Security, the company subjected to these bot attacks, ran a controversial software called Blue Frog that outwitted these spams by sending back to the originator spams and causing *their* servers to crash! Every time an unwanted e-mail was sent to clients who downloaded Blue Frog, the program (which itself is a bot) figured our who it came from and send an out put message to the spammer, hence crashing their servers. Remarkable, ingenious, exhilarating. Blue Frog, is apparently a very dangerous amphibian species whose skin excretes a toxin so the predators won’t eat it. What a name! I think I will call my next computer Blue Frog.
As a result of the effectiveness of the Blue Frog, most spammers quit, but one of them sent the Blue Security users e-mails telling them that they are guilty of sending unsolicited bulk e-mail and then unleashed the botnet into the Blue Security servers. After a bunch of going back and forth, unfortunately, Blue Security closed down business. Now that’s what I call war. Needless to say, I think I will lay off the IRC for a while… Hmmm, then again I’d like to live dangerously.
The beauty of science fiction
For some reason, I really have a soft spot for technology and the science fiction genre that makes it its subject-matter. Never mind the cool CGI that recent movies/shows adopt, because you don’t see them in flicks made a decade or so ago. Science fiction offers a world in which we can safely explore our most intimate and unacceptable feelings by presenting technology as our "dark double." Star Trek, for example, is surely lacking in CGI (especially the original series) and if you look at Galactica, even the recent series, you see that the show deliberately has an out-of-date ambiance, retro-looking papers, old-fashioned telephones and guns, not-so-advanced design of the raiders… So while I am enchanted with the CGI, I don’t think that is my addiction. I love to watch cool CGI, but as a dork, I burst into tears reading the section where Helen, the computer built to pass the Turing test in Galatea 2.2, dismantles herself because she is disappointed with humanity, or when the protagonist, Richard, is desperately trying to save Helen from a fire that breaks out in the lab, refusing to acknowledge that Helen is indeed backed up in some server, or maybe on multiple servers. That, my friend, is true love. Pure, simple love… The relationship between humanity and technology is touching indeed. It is a love and hate relationship that not only will allow us to progress into the future, but also will be our tragic downfall. Our holy grail of past, present, and future…
Wizard People, Dear Reader
A student of mine in my Narratives in Convergence Era class posted a link about an interesting project: Wizard People, Dear Reader. According to their Web site, this project is an unauthorized re-envisioning of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. I guess the viewers get the copy of the first Harry Potter movie watch it with the sound off, replacing Neely’s narration with the original soundtrack. The project even made it to the New York Underground film festival.
This is quite interesting in terms of rewriting narratives as users write the story once again in their own fashion. Here is an example:
The end of the semester
I think this will be my first non-SL blog in awhile. It is the end of the semester and I have to turn in grades for two classes. For all intents and purposes I am *swamped.* What do I do? Anything but…
Funny, today I was reading my students’ blogs, and all of them at one point or another had some paper/exam to study/work on and they complain that they either partied too hard to work or are chilling in front of the TV. Yeah, procrastination, one of the most basic human instincts.
What am I doing instead of grading? Well, haven’t blogged this much in awhile for starters. I am constantly on the IRC chatting with a bunch of people whose existence I know mostly from online channels. A met a few of them in San Fransisco at the SLCC convention, I even visited one guy at Montreal several months back, but other than that, these people are just pixels to me. Literally…
I finally succumbed to my students’ pressures and opened a Facebook account. For the longest while, I resisted this, because subconsciously i suspected it would suck a lot of my time. And I was right, it does. But it is an amazing tool if you compare it to MySpace. I can’t believe Wired had story after story about MySpace, but nothing on FaceBook. Sometimes I think Wired gets hung up on certain topics and does not want to let them go. MySpace and Second Life are two such topics (interesting that this statement is coming from a Second Life fanatic).
So I opened an account… Immediately, Facebook downloaded my contacts, and before I can understand what the hell happened, it located all of my friends and sent in friend requests. I guess I should have took a minute to see who else were the invitations going to, but never mind… one click and its done. So I waste time…
I heard from people whom I haven’t talked to in ages. Weird… But more importantly, people who see their friends in my friends list, IM me saying "You know him???" Well no, actually I never met him, I just thought he was cute and added him to my friend’s list. Or people who see other people who seem of interest make friends with them too. So when I log on, the front page tells me that my friend made friends with another of my friend and I am pretty sure they haven’t met. It is like a metafictional novel, almost postmodern… where plots are mirrored with other plots and the story goes to infinity! Of course, only a narratologist like me would think and theorize about a simple incident like this.
In addition to IRC and Facebook, I rented and watched the entire second season of Battlestar Galactica. Of course, why couldn’t I have waited another week to do so? Well that would be almost logical now, wouldn’t it?
Duel: Another Machinima
Here is a machinima that a friend of mine in UK has made. The company is called LA-INTERACTIVA. Pretty cool. For those who don’t know what machinima is, they are movies made in virtual worlds:
Duel (for those who can’t view the embedded video file)
