Second Life Griefing Tools And Equipment
Kalel Venkman in the Fortress of Solitude (photo courtesy of Venkman)I read the article by in the Second Life Examiner, about his role as ranger on the Playa. He writes that Burning Life Rangers are like “lubricants, reducing friction in the Burning Life community.” In a world that is self-governed, is there need for policing? The Linden Lab Terms of Service and Community Standards are in place as a set of rules for behavior – a LL book of etiquette if you will. But some folks choose to burn the book.Have you ever been in sandbox, happily building away, when you were suddenly swamped under an obnoxious mass of particles? If you’re being shot at by projectiles, shoved, caged, verbally abused and worse, you’re being griefed (see one of my ).
Tools And Equipment For Baking
Who do you look to for help? Linden Lab has its own we can use. For example, we can mute a fellow resident, or fill out an abuse report. But sometimes things happen that are beyond our skill set. Sometimes, we simply want help.
What’s more comforting than the sight of a superhero, flying to your rescue? Yes, you can put a call out to the Justice League Unlimited. The JLU will sweep away the nonsense and leave you safe and sound.
They have strategies to cope with the wide range of issues that cause grief in-world, from the obvious to the insidious, and offer assistance to everyone from sim owners to newbies.The group began organically in 2006 as a crew of comic book fans, dressed as their. Hanging around a sandbox one day, a couple of guys tackled a bothersome griefer using their innate tech skills, and from there, the JLU was born. It’s now made up of a 60-odd strong crew of scripters, artists, business people, authors, engineers – each contributing a particular talent to their collaborative undertakings. It functions much like a well-organized neighborhood watch. Their public service in SL has extended into the actual world; they sponsor and dedicate their services to a number of charity events, such as Project Jason.I was invited to Justice Island for a few sessions with Kalel Venkman, who offered a rare, behind-the-scenes look at the headquarters of the JLU. Business takes place in a stately space station, the Watchtower, complete with a dispensary of sophisticated gear, meeting rooms, a library, and a place of respite, in the form of Superman’s Fortress of Solitude.
At the center of all is Brainiac, a tool designed by the League to monitor griefer operations throughout the grid. It’s a powerful piece of equipment, linked to all the gear League members carry about their person during patrols.
Members go through a period of training and abide by a code of ethics that prevents misuse of any tool.While some may bristle at the idea of “policing”, Venkman is adamant that the League operates as a peacekeeping and education force only, in place to help all residents enjoy the best SL experience, free from unwanted interference. The JLU gathers intelligence about griefing actions and communicate regularly with Linden Labs. Member ZenMondo Wormser invited me on patrol one evening and I watched Kohaku Owatatsumi, JB Hancroft and Wormser whip through a sim full of zombies and shooters in no time. As for advice to newbies, when confronted, don’t retaliate, says Venkman.
“That does no good and just gets you into trouble yourself.' Their activities are a back breaking labor of love, like so much in SL, run on the good will of people who care that you have a good time. Although a dude or a dame in tights and a cape may not seem threatening, I assure you, they pack a punch. In a nice way. To read more about the JLU check out.
On Monday in class, we discussed the issue about piracy. According to W. James Potter, 'Piracy, in its simpliest form, is the unauthorized use of copyright material' (p.302). Anything everything can literally be pirated by somebody else, whether it is the music you hear, the book that you read, or the movie that you watch, it can all be pirated by someone else or even you, the reader of this blog, can pirate something. Now, while most people will not come right out and say that they have pirated something illegally, people do it all the time and believe that it is a perfectly fine thing to do, I mean, who would want to pay the money to go see a movie in the movie theather or rent it from a store when they can just burn a copy of it at home on their computer?
Most of the people the pirate things believe that they are doing a good thing, when in essence, what they are doing is actually a bad thing and technically, what they are doing is illegal and wrong.Piracy is a becoming quite the controversial topic, but it is not a recent issue actually. According to what Potter says on pages 303 and 304 of our textbook, 'Piracy has been a problem for the music industry for decades. As early as the 1950s, people used tape recorders to pirate music by recording it off the radio. People could also make a copy of a record or tape cassette using home-recording equipment, but to do so, they had to already have a copy of the recording and could make only one copy at a time.' Wow, people in the 1950s copying and pirating music off the radio.and to think people are making burnt cds with music on it in today's modern society. People back then where making copies of music on blank cassette players, and that actually kept on happening for quite some time as I actually used to have a couple of cassette tapes with music on it that was copied from radio stations, but now, not just music is being copied illegally as movies are becoming quite to item to pirate nowadays too.Movies have become to hot commodity to pirate here lately it seems, and pirating movies has gotten so out of hand, the lawsuits have been filed against some websites, especially thepiratebay.org. In the following YouTube video, it talks about how Sweden filed a law-suit against Pirate Bay for breaking Sweden's copyright laws.
What ended up happening is that on the second day the law suit was in place, Sweden dropped half of its charges on Pirate Bay because they made a technical error on how a bit torrent works. The lawsuit itself ended up being a rather big financial issue and fines were placed and other things happened, but as of today, Pirate Bay is still up and running, and you can get pirated music, movies, and other things from that website too.So all in all, I feel that pirating is in fact a big issue although most seem to believe that it is not.
Whenever someone makes an illegal copy of a movie, cd, etc they are stealing things that are not theirs from the original creator that made it. Yes, I am sure that people will still be pirating things long after I am gone and I am fully aware of this as well. When people pirate things, they are breaking copyright laws and literally taking away money from the person or people that made the original music, movie, etc. I strongly believe that people should not pirate things illegally from the internet which is way I feel that certain website, expecially music ones like LimeWire, should be taken down, but I am sure that the general consensus would disagree and believe that all pirated websites, not just LimeWire, should stay online because it's an easy way to get music. Pirating will always be a controversial issue to talk about because people feel that getting movies, music, etc from places like piratebay.org is fine, but really, everyone that goes to those type of places are breaking laws and do not seem to care.Disclaimer, there is some offensive langaue in this blog, you have been forewarned.On Monday's class discussion, we talked about griefers, the concept behind griefing in virtual worlds such as Second Life and other virtual worlds, and what exactly these people do to others that have an interest in these types of online games as well.
I searched around on youtube and I came across many different videos on the website that either said things like: 'SECOND LIFE-GRIEFER ATTACKS SIM ALL NIGHT' or 'DiSSENTiON SELF REPLICATING MEGACUBES- EPIC GRIEFING IN SL.' I decided to watch one of the videos that I came aross, and as I watched it, I looked around on saw at least twenty or so more videos all dealing with Second Life and griefing and then quickly I realized that this is a much more bigger issue than I ever realized.The first video that I came across was this:, and during this video, a griefer on Second Life is literally griefing one of the sim players all night while that person has either left for the day or is somewhere else in the building. The person that was playing the game was either a nurse or a doctor at a hospital, or it appears that way to me, as during the video, someone keeps coming over an intercom paging for a doctor throughout it. Around a minute or so into the video, a guy starts talking and states that there's a 'griefing emergency' going on and about 1:30 into the video, these grayish looking things start to appear on the screen.
As the video progresses on, these random pictures of Bill Cosby start to appear, and at about 2:50, the 'suspect' of these attacks is shown under the screen name of 'Homicidal String'. Throughout the rest of the video, they basically are just trying the find the person or people that started the attack on Second Life.Another thing the struck out in my mind was reading the comments on the video and how many people really and truly take this griefing stuff so seriously, and honestly, if I were into things like Second Life, I would be completely offended if things like that, or worse, started happening. One of the griefers that was in on this attack on Second Life commented on this video under the name 'Dirtface' and this person replied to comments saying this such as '.The reason we greif is because people like you have absolutely zero sense of humor, and being a dick on the internet to hypersensitive losers is absolutely awesome.
Making people rage on SL is awesome.' So why exactly do griefers do what they do to others? Most do it just for fun or to taunt and tease others that take Second Life and other virutal worlds seriously In his article 'Multilated Furries, Flying Phalluses: Put the Blame on Griefers, the Sociopaths of the Virutal World',author Julian Dibbell intervies a griefer named ^ban^, and ^ban^ says that, 'We do it for the lulz. 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'(p.1).Griefing is definitely a major problem and concern for those that like to enjoy playing Second Life as attacks can occur on anybody at any given time as well. Before this class started, I had heard nothing on this topic or did not know that it was an issue to online gamers either. After reading about it and watching videos, I now believe that griefing is in fact a major problem, but I also think that there is not a real clear answer to this problem either.
If you attack a griefer, all they will do is just laugh at you because that person knows that they can simply attack you right back in hopes that you will get mad and leave the game either for a little while or permanitely. So is griefing a problem? Yes it is, but there is no clear way to stop all of the griefing that is going on either in my opinion. In this week's reading, we discussed how people and companies are getting your personal information through the Internet.
Six different ways come to mind: monitoring, selling information, spam, identity theft, hijacking and infecting, all of which are ways that our information that is put up about ourselves online can be taken away from us without anyone knowing it. In this blog, I want to discuss one of these six, which is selling information, and how this is potentially the worst way to have your information stolen from you.According to what Potter says on page 287 of our textbook, 'Many Internet companies mine data on all sorts of topics and sell this information to anyone willing to pay, such as advertisers, future employers, prospective romantic partners, identity thieves, and predators.' Yes, you did read that correctly, the companies sell your information to anyone that is willing to pay the company to take it. Some of this information can be found freely online, and the textbook lists a few websites where you can go to access this, such as: (Google.123people.com), (PeekYou.com), and (Snitch.name) (p.287). As a side note, I actually checked out all three of these websites, and the first one did not seem to work but the other two did.So let's put this into prospective and look at an example of this. Say that you are really into golf for some reason and you list this as one of your hobbies that you like to do on your MySpace and/or Facebook profile(s). Advertisers try to come up with ways to have people buy their latest and greatest golfing equipment, so what does MySpace and Facebook do, they let those advertisers have your information so that just about everytime you log in, you see ads about golf cubs, golf balls, etc.
On your profile pages. Now, did you ask for this stuff to start appearing on your profiles? I would hope the answer to that question would be 'no'.Of course though, some people think that when they sign up to websites such as Facebook, MySpace, etc, they think that everything they put on those websites is safe from harm and that they will be fully protected from their information being used in harmful ways, and those believe this are wrong. Although there are indeed user agreements that people are supposed to look at before making a profile online, do people really read those things? I would bet not because most people either do not have the time or do not seem to care, so they just click the little box that says they have read the user agreement, and away they go. PBS actually made a couple of videos that are up on youtbe, and in the following link:, it talks about some of the issues regarding Facebook and its private policies.
In this video, it talks about how people have claimed that Facebook is sharing the information collected on its website and is sharing this information with advertisers. It also shows ways that the users of Facebook can change their profile settings to where only friends of the profile user can see their information, but if unchanged that person's profile and look at that person's information freely.
The video also mentions that Facebook users are now in control of who can see what, but have to go through a lot of different things to make sure that they get the settings the way that they want them to be which can seemingkly become a hassle to most people.So all in all, are the things that we post online really safe and will our information be used in ways in which we never intended it to be? I believe that there will always be ways for people to take the information that we post online without us knowing it. As for the second question, I believe that as long as advertisers will try and sell us things online that go with our interests and hobbies that we post online, companies will be giving those advertisers our information as long as they get the money from those advertisers. I personally am really big ito music and things of that nature, but do I really want to see ads on Facebook talking about the latest System of a Down cd or Yellowcard cd, not really honestly. So be sure to actually read those private policy stsatements that MySpace, Facebook, and other websites want you to read before you go posting up information about yourself that could wind up in the wrong hands.
Yes, this means that you may have to take fifteen or so minutes of your times to read all of that, but think about it, it will be better in the long run to read it and understand it before clicking, yes I have read it and agree to it when you have no idea as to what you just agreed to. By actually reading it, you are more aware of what you are signing up for, so just keep that in mind before signing something completely blindfolded. On Monday in class, we discussed the issue about piracy. According to W. James Potter, 'Piracy, in its simpliest form, is the unauthorized use of copyright material' (p.302). Anything everything can literally be pirated by somebody else, whether it is the music you hear, the book that you read, or the movie that you watch, it can all be pirated by someone else or even you, the reader of this blog, can pirate something. Now, while most people will not come right out and say that they have pirated something illegally, people do it all the time and believe that it is a perfectly fine thing to do, I mean, who would want to pay the money to go see a movie in the movie theather or rent it from a store when they can just burn a copy of it at home on their computer?
Most of the people the pirate things believe that they are doing a good thing, when in essence, what they are doing is actually a bad thing and technically, what they are doing is illegal and wrong.Piracy is a becoming quite the controversial topic, but it is not a recent issue actually. According to what Potter says on pages 303 and 304 of our textbook, 'Piracy has been a problem for the music industry for decades.
As early as the 1950s, people used tape recorders to pirate music by recording it off the radio. People could also make a copy of a record or tape cassette using home-recording equipment, but to do so, they had to already have a copy of the recording and could make only one copy at a time.'
Wow, people in the 1950s copying and pirating music off the radio.and to think people are making burnt cds with music on it in today's modern society. People back then where making copies of music on blank cassette players, and that actually kept on happening for quite some time as I actually used to have a couple of cassette tapes with music on it that was copied from radio stations, but now, not just music is being copied illegally as movies are becoming quite to item to pirate nowadays too.Movies have become to hot commodity to pirate here lately it seems, and pirating movies has gotten so out of hand, the lawsuits have been filed against some websites, especially thepiratebay.org. In the following YouTube video, it talks about how Sweden filed a law-suit against Pirate Bay for breaking Sweden's copyright laws. What ended up happening is that on the second day the law suit was in place, Sweden dropped half of its charges on Pirate Bay because they made a technical error on how a bit torrent works. The lawsuit itself ended up being a rather big financial issue and fines were placed and other things happened, but as of today, Pirate Bay is still up and running, and you can get pirated music, movies, and other things from that website too.So all in all, I feel that pirating is in fact a big issue although most seem to believe that it is not. Whenever someone makes an illegal copy of a movie, cd, etc they are stealing things that are not theirs from the original creator that made it. Yes, I am sure that people will still be pirating things long after I am gone and I am fully aware of this as well.
When people pirate things, they are breaking copyright laws and literally taking away money from the person or people that made the original music, movie, etc. I strongly believe that people should not pirate things illegally from the internet which is way I feel that certain website, expecially music ones like LimeWire, should be taken down, but I am sure that the general consensus would disagree and believe that all pirated websites, not just LimeWire, should stay online because it's an easy way to get music.
Pirating will always be a controversial issue to talk about because people feel that getting movies, music, etc from places like piratebay.org is fine, but really, everyone that goes to those type of places are breaking laws and do not seem to care. In this week's reading, we discussed how people and companies are getting your personal information through the Internet. Six different ways come to mind: monitoring, selling information, spam, identity theft, hijacking and infecting, all of these are ways that our information that is put up about ourselves online can be taken away from us without anyone knowing it. In this blog, I want to discuss one of these six, which is selling information, and how this is potentially the worst way to have your information stolen from you.According to what Potter says on page 287 of our textbook, 'Many Internet companies mine data on all sorts of topics and sell this information to anyone willing to pay, such as advertisers, future employers, prospective romantic partners, identity thieves, and predators.'
Yes, you did read that correctly, the companies sell YOUR information to ANYONE that is willing to pay the company to take it. Some of this information can be found freely online, and the textbook lists a few websites where you can go to access this, such as: (Google.123people.com), (PeekYou.com), and (Snitch.name) (p.287). As a side note, I actually checked out all three of these websites, and the first one did not seem to work but the other two did.So let's put this into prospective and look at an example of this. Say that you are really into golf for some reason and you list this as one of your hobbies that you like to do on your MySpace and/or Facebook profile(s). Advertisers try to come up with ways to have people buy their latest and greatest golfing equipment, so what does MySpace and Facebook do, they let those advertisers have your information so that just about everytime you log in, you see ads about golf cubs, golf balls, etc. On your profile pages. Now, did you ask for this stuff to start appearing on your profiles?
I would hope the answer to that question would be 'no'.Of course though, some people think that when they sign up to websites such as Facebook, MySpace, etc, they think that everything they put on those websites is safe from harm and that they will be fully protected from their information being used in harmful ways, and are those people wrong on that. Although there are indeed user agreements that people are supposed to look at before making a profile online, do people really read those things? I would bet not because most people either do not have the time or do not seem to care, so they just click the little box that says they have read the user agreement, and away they go. PBS actually made a couple of videos that are up on youtbe, and in the following link:, it talks about some of the issues regarding Facebook and its private policy. In this video, it talks about how people have claimed that Facebook is sharing the information collected on its website and is sharing this information with advertisers.
It also shows ways that the users of Facebook can change their profile settings to where only friends of the profile user can see their information, but if unchanged, and can still viee that person's profile and look at that person's information freely. The video also mentions that Facebook users are now in control of who can see what, but have to go through a lot of different things to make sure that they get the settings the way that they want them to be.So all in all, are the things that we post online really safe and will our information be used in ways in which we never intended it to be? I believe that there will always be ways for people to take the information that we post online without us knowing it. As for the second question, I believe that as long as advertisers will try and sell us things online that go with our interests and hobbies that we post online, companies will be giving those advertisers our information as long as they get the money from those advertisers. I personall am really big ito music and things of that nature, but do I really want to see ads on Facebook talking about the latest System of a Down cd or Yellowcard cd, not really honestly. So be sure to actually READ those private policy stsatements that MySpace, Facebook, and other websites want you to read before you go posting up information about yourself that could wind up in the wrong hands. Yes, this means that you may have to take fifteen or so minutes of your times to read all of that, but think about it, it will be better in the long run to read it and understand it before clicking, yes I have read it and agree to it when you have no idea as to what you just agreed to.
By actually reading it, you are more aware of what you are signing up for, so just keep that in mind before signing something completely blindfolded. In Monday's reading, we read about Wikipedia; how it was formed, what people do on the website, but most importantly, we learned how Wikipedia is an 'unmanaged division of labor.' In this blog post, I plan on discussing how Wikpedia is an unmanaged division of labor and what that means and how a Wikpedia article is a process and not a product.To understand Wikipedia, you first must realize that Wikipedia is what Clay Shirky, author of the chapter we read, calls an 'unmanaged division of labor.' According to Shirky, 'Division of labor is usually associated with highly managed settings, but it's implemented here in a far more unmanaged way. Wikipedia is able to aggregate individual and often tiny contributions, hundreds of millions of them actually, made by millions of contributors, all performing different functions.' What Shirky means in this quote is that Wikipedia is derived from many different users, and all of those users contribute to Wikipedia in some type of manor, and the contributions those users make, are either really small, such as just fixing simple spelling mistakes, or really big, such as contributing information to several different Wikipedia articles.
Shirky then goes on to explain how Wikipedia works and how it is really a simple and basic concept: create an article such as the example of asphalt, write a simple basic statement about your topic, and then, the magic begins as users of Wikipedia read the asphalt article and then begin to add more and more information to the original statement, and thus, a Wikipedia page is born thanks to many different contributors on the subject of asphalt. So, an article as simple as asphalt makes it to Wikipedia, but once the page is made, is it ever really finished?After a Wikipedia page is up and posted on the website, Shirky says that it technically is not ever done as there is always something that users can do to make the article better, this means that a Wikpedia article is a process and not a product and thus is really never finished.
Shirky states that, 'For a Wikipedia article to improve, the good edtis simply have to outweigh the bad ones. Rather than filtering contributions before they appear in public, Wikipedia assumes that new errors will introduce less frequently than exisiting ones will be corrected.'
Thid statement has definitely held true, as when new information gets added to an exisiting Wikpedia article, people will tend to edit exisiting errors to that article and also bring in less errors to the information that they will bring to that article. To help explain the following statement, the following video link:, shows how users can to edit Wikipedia articles making them better than what they already were. In this video, it shows users how simple it really is to edit a pre-exisiting Wikipedia article by giving a step-by-step demonstration and showing you all of the tools needed to edit a Wikipedia article as well, which is what Wikipedia users do when they get on there: edit articles to make them better and add new information to pre-existing articles, like those that did the exact same thing to the asphalt article.
So to say that Wikipedia is a process and not a product is very true, as Wikipedia articles are truly never finished and are always being updated by the users of Wikipedia, whether the changes are microscopic, or are large, Wikipedia is being changed constantly by its 'unmanaged division of labor'. For this blog post, I will focus on the hierarchy of friends and more specifically, the top 8 feature that MySpace has, the troubles that it can cause teens, and what teens can do to avoid all of the drama surrounding the MySpace top 8 friend list. As we all know, during the teenage years, most teens try to make friends with as many other teens that they can along with trying to be popular throughout their teen years as well.
And Equipment Hand Tools
When teens make a MySpace page, they add their friends that they know from school, but with MySpace's Top 8, they know also have to rank their friends, and this can be a very difficult decision for some teens. On page 220 of 'Taken Out of Context' by Danah Michele Boyd, it says that, ' Friending forces teens to be explicit about their connections to others. Yet an additional feature on MySpace-'Top Friends' (formerly 'Top 8')-takes this to another level by requiring teens to rank their Friends.'
As if teens did not have enough to already worry about, now teens how to rank their friends? To some, this can be extrememly difficult, as teens have to pick and choose how are their 'friends' and who are their 'best friends', and this can lead to drama between teens, and Boyd agress with this, as on pages 220 and 221, she says that, ' While teens can avoid offending classmates by accepting all Friend requests from peers, the ranking feature complicates teens’ relationships with their friends. In essence, this feature requires. So, why do teens take the MySpace Top 8 ranking so seriously?
I feel it has to go with the whole idea of teens trying to be popular, because when in middle school, that is really all teens seem to think about. Teens take the MySpace Top 8 ranking very seriously in my opinion, and if you are a teen and are on someone's top 8 friends, they, in return, expect to be in your top 8 as well, and if they are not there, some tend to make quite a big deal about it. On pages 221 & 222 of Boyd's dissertation, it talks about how important it really is for someone to be on a teen's top 8, and also being in the coveted number 1 slot of the top 8. Ryuichi sakamoto rain. A good example of this is when Boyd talks to this girl named Anindita, who is 17 years old from Los Angeles, as she says, ' People are like, 'Why am I number two? You're number one on my page.'
I was like, 'Well, I can't make everyone number two. That's impossible.' Especially with boyfriends and girlfriends, get in a fight like, 'Why is she before me? I'm your girlfriend.
I should be higher than her.' I'm just like, 'Okay.' I don't really think it's a big deal, the top thing. If you're friends, you shouldn't lose friendship over that.' As mentioned above, being in the coveted number 1 spot on the MySpace top 8 is something that teens take very seriously, and some argue that if they are number 2, 3, etc. And not number 1, they question as to why they aren't or even become mad or jealous as sometimes a teen's girlfriend or boyfriend may not be the first 'friend' on that teen's top 8. As Boyd says on page 224 of her dissertation, ' The most valuable position—the “first” one—is the one in the upper left corner of the grid.
Harbor Freight
This position is usually reserved for a person’s “best” friend, significant other, or a close family member. While few object to a significant other’s appearing first, some teens, especially girls, get jealous when other same-sex peers are listed above them on the page of the person they believe to be their closest friend.
Exceptions are made for family members and it is common in some teen circles to list family first. While some teens list family to avoid conflict with friends, others do so because they see a family member as their closest friend. This is exemplified by Laura, a white 17-year-old with Native American roots from Washington, who says: “My sister is in position number one because she is one of my best friends and she will be there for me most likely longer than anyone else.”.
So, what can teens do to avoid the drama that goes along with the dreaded MySpace top 8? Well, there are indeed a few things that teens can do to hopefully avoid the drama. The first thing that teens can do is that they can use the top 8 for family only, which is what Laura, the 17-year-old with Native American roots, did as she used her top 8 for her family instead of her friends, which seemed to be okay I presume. The second thing that things can do is to set their profile to private so that a teen's friends cannot see who that teen has slected for their top 8, hopefully avoiding all of the 'top 8 drama', but with tools that shown in the following youtube video, teens can still access their friend's profile pages to see who is on their top 8 and who isn't. The last thing that teens can do, which may be the easiest thing, is to just not create a MySpace profile at all, and if a teen does this, then they would not have to worry about the top 8 since that would have no online friends to put in the top 8 at all.
This may seem like the best option for a teen, but in some cases, it may not because teens would probably end up making a MySpace profile due to heavy presusre that their friends could put on them to make a profile anyway. So can teens really avoid the top 8 friend drama, I leave that question for you to ponder.