The Master Account proposal revisited

Back in 2009, 18 January to be more exact, Argent Stonecutter filed issue SVC-6212 in Linden Lab’s JIRA for Second Life, proposing a change in the way SL’s user accounts are handled. Right now, account name and user name are effectively the same – even after the discontinuation of last names and the introduction of the kludgy “Resident” last name in their place. Argent suggested (rightly) that username and account name be separated:

SL security would be better, also, if you separated the account and avatar names… so for example instead of logging in as “Argent Stonecutter”, I’d log in as “Argent007” or something that isn’t actually published… and then picked my “Argent Stonecutter” alt from a pulldown.

• Something else for attackers to have to guess.
• Better account management.
• Fewer name-password combinations for users to remember.

Argent’s point was to make log-ins more secure and account management easier. The discussion in the comments is quite interesting, too. Before I came to sit down and blog about this proposal, Ciaran Laval and Inara Pey blogged about it. So, what is that makes this proposal so special that I’m bothering to revisit it and attempt to draw new attention to it?

SL Intellectual Property – Next stop: Paranoia Central

Last time, in an anger-fueled post I decided to touch on a very sensitive and drama-inducing subject: the paranoia that is eating through the minds of many content creators in Second Life. It was quite a few RL years ago (late 2006, in fact; this sort of time interval in Second Life terms amounts to about a century) that the drama around Copybot started to unfold. For a quick and dirty summary, I will point you all to the coverage from CNET, because it is a serious resource, far more serious than the rants of many people on the forums, blogs and discussion boards. According to the content creators protesting against Copybot, it harmed them no end and put their livelihoods at risk, because it would allow everyone to copy their work and resell it.

In my previous post, I mentioned how the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the (conservative) Cato Institute and journalist institutions like Ars Technica and TechDirt  pointed out how the RL content industry presents bogus data to the authorities and the governments in its lobbying attempts (which are more often than not accompanied by melodramatic TV adverts about struggling artists who will become destitute by piracy) to pass pro-censorship “anti-piracy” laws (see HADOPI, SOPA, PIPA, ACTA and CETA). Yes, bogus data. And the U.S. GAO even protested about the content industry not giving them all the data and the methodology they used to come up with these make-believe results and conclusions. Once again, you can have a look at Cato Institute’s article “How Copyright Industries Con Congress” and, of course, the other sources I mentioned in my previous post on this matter.

On Intellectual Property, Stupidity and Paranoia

In Real Life, we have all witnessed the paranoia and even maliciousness of the corporations that “create content”: from the likes of Kluwer and Elsevier to the companies behind such organizations as the RIAA, the IFPI and the MPAA, they have all been going on about how “piracy kills music”, about how even a single photocopy that a student might make of a single page of a scientific book “hurts their business” and “deters innovation” and such.

Of course, as proven multiple times by such great resources as TechDirt and Ars Technica, this is all bullshit. Pure and utter bullshit. First of all, the RIAA has been proven to be lying off its teeth about the supposed impact of piracy. Matthew Lasar of Ars Technica called the RIAA on its lies here. TechDirt debunked the bogus data of the US Chamber of Commerce (fabricated at the request of the “content industry”) here. Even the (overly) conservative Cato Institute called the copyright industry on its bullshit, in a seminal article titled “How Copyright Industries Con Congress“.