The Keystone XL pipeline is a proposed 1700-mile long pipeline that would carry diluted tar sands from Alberta, Canada to Texas. Tar sands (also called oil sands) are a mixture of sand and bitumen, a type of gooey petroleum that resembles tar. Tar sands can be processed into crude oil, and then refined into petroleum products like gasoline (aka. petrol), propane, and motor oil. TransCanada, the oil company who wants to build the pipeline, plans to process the tar sand in Houson, Texas, and from there will likely ship the product overseas. This plan would be extremely lucrative for TransCanada, but devastating to the US and global environments.

As we all know, gasoline and other fossil fuels release greenhouse gasses and pollution when they are burned. But the process of converting tar sands to crude oil also releases a lot of greenhouse gasses and pollution into the atmosphere. So, the whole process considered, gasoline derived from tar sands produces even more pollution than gasoline derived from crude oil. Even if the pipeline works flawlessly, and never ever leaks, the environmental impact of the pollution from tar sands would be immense.

But tar sands pipelines are estimated to be 16 times more likely to leak than a conventional crude oil pipeline. This is due to all that sand scraping against the inside of the pipeline, combined with the already corrosive nature of the bitumen. And TransCanada already has a crude oil pipeline: the original Keystone pipeline, which became operational in June 2010. Less than a year later, it experienced a massive leak from one of the pumping stations. And before that, even before the pipeline became operational, TransCanada was forced by government order to inspect and replace defective steel pipe purchased from an Indian manufacturer named Welspun Power and Steel. It seems that Welspun forewent certain safety checks in its rush to meet demand, and some pipe they had sold to other companies had already proved defective.

So, you may be wondering who TransCanada chose to provide steel pipes for the new Keystone XL pipeline? Naturally, it is the very same Welspun Power and Steel that provided defective steel for the last pipeline! What’s more, TransCanada has requested a permit for the Keystone XL to use thinner steel pipes than is standard, to save themselves $1 billion on construction. They’ve also requested to pump at higher pressure than is normal, I guess because they enjoy the thrill of danger and the smell of money.

It seems like the proposed pipeline is pretty much destined to leak. And when it does, it will be a disaster. The proposed pipeline would run directly over the Ogallala Aquifer, a huge natural underground water reserve that spans most of Nebraska, and parts of Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico. That aquifer provides 30% of the US’s ground water used for irrigation, as well as drinking water for 2 million people. The pipeline also runs through the Sand Hills of Nebraska, which contain 1.3 million acres of wetlands, one of the largest wetlands environments in the US; several hundred acres would be directly at risk if the pipeline leaked. And to top it off, Nebraska has a long history of seismic activity, making it rather shakey ground for a high-pressure pipeline built from cheap steel.

If a leak occurs in that area, the bitumen mixture could pollute the wetlands and leech down into the aquifer, contaminating the water with benzene, mercury, arsenic, and many other toxic chemicals. If an earthquake caused widespread damage to the pipeline, the impact would be especially dire. I can’t even imagine the possible impact if the pipeline were deliberately sabotaged. How do you secure a 1700-mile long high-pressure pipeline built with substandard steel? A few small explosives placed at strategic points along the pipeline could be catastrophic.

Obviously, people don’t want toxins in the food they eat or the water they drink. So, Nebraska, western Kansas, etc. would either need to find a new water supply (maybe build a pipeline from somewhere with uncontaminated water?), or spend a lot of time and money carefully purifying the ground water before it could be used even for irrigation, let alone human consumption. Either way, water would be more expensive, so food produced in that region would be more expensive. Plus, production would likely go down, thereby driving national food prices up even more due to scarcity.

So with a leak being pretty much inevitable, and the potential consequences of a leak being so dire, how could this pipeline plan have survived? Surely in the 2 years since it was proposed, the government agency responsible for studying its possible impacts would have realized what a bad idea it is, right?

Well, due to the multinational nature of the pipeline, the agency responsible is the State Department. And the State Department did release an analysis of the possible impact — but the Environmental Protection Agency has strongly criticized that report, saying that the analysis does not adequately address issues like the potential groundwater contamination or damage to the wetlands. The EPA said the same thing about the State Department’s analysis last year, but the State Department still hasn’t performed a thorough analysis.

Why is the State Department being so lackadaisical about such an important matter? That may be the influence of Paul Elliot, a former campaign manager for Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential run.

Today, Hillary Clinton is Secretary of State (i.e. head of the State Department), several former Clinton campaign staffers are State Department officials… and Paul Elliot is now working for TransCanada, as a lobbyist to the State Department. A Freedom of Information Act request recently brought to light emails that indicate Elliot has been liaising with State Department chief of staff Cheryl Mills, one of Elliot’s buddies from the Clinton campaign, to influence the State Department and ease the proposed pipeline deal through the system.

It’s easy to guess why the State Department didn’t conduct a thorough analysis, when they had an old pal whispering in their ear, assuring them that the pipeline would be safe, would create jobs and help the US economy, would reduce US dependence on Middle Eastern oil, and so on. To put it mildly, the State Department’s objectivity in this matter is rather suspect.

In the end, the fate of the pipeline comes down to President Obama, who has the authority to deny TransCanada the permit to build the pipeline. But, his stance on this matter isn’t clear. I’d wager that the State Department is advising him to approve it, but the opposition to the pipeline has been quite vocal. Scores of politicians, celebrities, scientists, Nebraska farmers, and others have urged Obama to reject the proposal. In August, activists staged a sit-in in front of the White House. Over 1200 activists were arrested and hauled off by police during the two-weeks of peaceful protesting. Hundreds of thousands of people have signed petitions and wrote concerned letters to the EPA, the State Department, and the President.

The optimist in me hopes that Obama’s rhetoric about supporting a “green energy future” means he will reject the proposal. The cynic in me thinks that Obama, as a politician facing re-election, wouldn’t dare go against his base on such a major issue. But the pessimist in me fears that the US government is too corrupt, too influenced by corporate lobbying, to place the wellbeing of the populace and the environment before the financial interests of corporations.

So, it’s not clear to me which way this will go. But it is clear that if the pipeline is approved, the consequences will be profound, even beyond the environmental impact. The hypocrisy and corruption of government is becoming increasingly intolerable. To approve this pipeline would be to pour gasoline on the fires of revolution.

Unfortunately, the appeal of Google+ quickly wore off, as it became apparent that Google was suspending accounts judged to be using a pseudonym or other “not real” name. The first highly-visible case among the Second Life crowd was Opensource Obscure being suspended, but hundreds more Second Life users were suspended within a week. And it wasn’t just Second Life residents: pseudonymous accounts of all types were being suspended en masse, along with accounts representing companies and organizations. Official statements from Google employees confirmed that Google+ users are required to use what Google calls “common names” or “real names”.

The usual rationale of real-name-only policies, like Blizzard Entertainment’s controversial Real ID system, is that forcing people to use their real names will promote more civil discourse. The reasoning is that people will think twice about what they post, since everything they say can be traced to their real-world identity. Personally, I’m rather skeptical that such a policy actually makes people behave more civilly, given how casually many Facebook users post homophobic slurs and bilious attacks under their real names.

But it’s true that the policy will change the tenor of discourse by making certain people think twice about posting anything that can be traced back to them. For instance, you probably won’t have as many posts from political activists, corporate whistleblowers (or even just people wanting to vent about their boss), LGBT individuals, abuse victims, ethnic minorities, practitioners of “alternative lifestyles”, or anyone else who might face real-world repercussions for expressing their views online, or who might be subject to online harrassment because of their real-world names. Google seems to have no qualms about excluding these people. Their latest video statement expresses a simple sentiment: show everyone your real name, or get out.

As it turns out, though, Google’s claimed justification for the policy is not so much that it make you behave more civilly, but rather that it will make you easier to stalk “connect with”:

Google+ makes connecting with people on the web more like connecting with people in the real world. Because of this, it’s important to use your common name so that the people you want to connect with can find you. Your common name is the name your friends, family or co-workers usually call you. For example, if your legal name is Charles Jones Jr. but you normally use Chuck Jones or Junior Jones, any of these would be acceptable.

From that description, I’d reason that it was perfectly okay for me to have a profile under my pseudonym, Jacek Antonelli. After all, I have many more friends and co-workers who know me by that name than by my legal name. This blog, written entirely pseudonymously, gets thousands of times more views than the blog I write under my legal name. My most well-known creative contributions to society, such as the Imprudence Viewer, were published pseudonymously. It’s pretty safe to say that the vast majority of people who know me (or know of me), know me by my pseudonym.

But, as blogger Skud has discovered, Google won’t let you use a pseudonym even if that is how you are most commonly known. Although, there is apparently an unstated exception to that rule: if you are a famous celebrity like Lady Gaga or 50 Cent, you’re allowed to use your stage name. But if you’re just a writer or technologist known by your pen name to your friends, co-workers, and thousands of readers, that’s not good enough.

Actually, it’s not just pseudonymous accounts that have been suspended. Blake Ross, co-founder of Firefox, now working at Facebook, was briefly suspended despite using his legal name. Once the news came out, Ross’s account was quickly restored. Others have not been so fortunate, and their accounts remain suspended, even after providing Google with legitimate government identification showing that their Google+ profile name matches their legal name.

Other users have been put on the chopping block for using quotation marks or other punctuation (‘Charles “Chuck” Jones Jr.’ would not be an acceptable name), numbers (even if they are part of your legal name), and sometimes even just non-English glyphs. All these are apparently considered suspicious by Google’s automated software, making your profile more likely to come up for review.

Meanwhile, at least one inquisitive person has used an obviously fake ID to convince Google to suspend an account, then used another obviously fake ID to convince them to reactivate it. So the policy may be founded on specious reasoning, it may stifle free speech, and it may be harmful to legitimate users… but at least it will be ineffective at stopping abuse!

As if the policy itself and its inconsistent enforcement weren’t disturbing enough, the consequences of being suspended are rather startling: all public sign of your account just vanishes. Your profile page, your posts, your replies to other people’s posts, are all hidden. All mentions of you are even redacted from other people’s posts, your name replaced with asterisks. Your account and activities are effectively erased from history.

What’s worse, being suspended doesn’t affect only your Google+ account. As Doctor Popular found out the hard way, it also locks you out of all other services that use the new Google Profiles system. Currently, Google Profiles is tied into Google+, Google Reader, Buzz, Picasa, and a few others. I would be very surprised if Google doesn’t also tie it into Gmail, Gtalk, Google Docs, YouTube, Blogger, etc. within a year or two.

So, if you use any of these Google services, you might one day find yourself completely locked out of years worth of your digital life, just because you are suspected of violating a policy that is fundamentally misguided and enforced arbitrarily and inconsistently.

That’s a pretty scary thought.

Scary enough, in fact, that I am extricating myself from all Google services, for both my pseudonymous and real-world identities. I have deleted my Google+ account so that I’m less likely to be targetted, and I’ve backed up as much data as I can. It will be a lot of work even to find suitable replacements, let alone migrate all my data, email, contacts, subscriptions, and so forth. But, it would be insane to rely on any Google services anymore, having seen how easily anyone — even people following the rules — can be suspended.

Further reading

• “Real Names” Policies Are an Abuse of Power – dana boyd | apophenia
• Who is harmed by a “Real Names” policy? – Geek Feminism Wiki
• My Name Is Me
• Why Facebook and Google’s Concept of ‘Real Names’ Is Revolutionary – The Atlantic
• The Cases For and Against Google+’s Real-Name Policy – The Atlantic Wire
• A Case for Pseudonyms – EFF
• Tateru Nino has written extensively about the issue, exploring it from a variety of perspectives.
• What’s Really Behind The Facebook/Google Real Name Debate? – All Things D
• Google+ Identity Crisis: What’s at Stake With Real Names and Privacy – Wired
• Google+ requires you to use your “real” name – Sai
• Google’s Double-Plus Real Names – Signifying Media
• “I’m Your Biggest Fan, I’ll Follow You Until You Love Me” – Border House
• Searching Twitter for #nymwars, #realnames, or #plusgate reveals a lively debate over the issue.

(Full disclosure: the viewer in that particular case was the Imprudence Experimental, which I am involved with. But, users of other viewers have been wrongfully banned by similar systems in the past.)

Simply put, a CDS does not provide any significant protection against content rippers. It is snake oil: a product created to commercially exploit store owners’ fear. If you have a CDS set up in your shop, you aren’t protecting your content, you’re just paying someone to invade your customers’ privacy, drive away legitimate customers, and blemish your reputation.

Most people don’t understand how a CDS works, but believe that it might actually be able to stop content rippers. The purpose of this post is to explain how they function, why they are ineffective, and furthermore why they are harmful to your customers and bad for your business.

How a CDS Works

A typical CDS works by telling each visitor’s viewer that it should visit a certain web page using the viewer’s streaming media system (the code that shows movies and web pages on a prim). The web page is hosted on a site controlled by the CDS operator. Each visitor is sent to a unique web address, which allows the CDS to figure out which connection belongs to which visitor.

Like nearly all web browsers, the viewer’s built-in browser is programmed to send its “user agent” to any website it connects to. The user agent is a chunk of text that includes information such as your operating system, the built-in browser type, the viewer UI skin you are using, and the name/channel of the viewer. For example, my user agent when using Imprudence 1.3 is the following:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; chrome://navigator/locale/navigator.properties; rv:1.8.1.21) Gecko/20090304 SecondLife/1.23.5.136262 (Imprudence; default skin)

(You can visit whatsmyuseragent.com with any viewer or web browser to see your user agent.)

Notice that the user agent text plainly states that I am using Imprudence. The CDS isn’t really doing any “detection”, just listening to what the viewer voluntarily tells it.

A Waste of Money

The method used by the CDS to “detect” the viewer has two important implications about its effectiveness:

1. The viewer can be programmed to lie about its name. A malicious viewer can claim to be the official Second Life viewer or a trustworthy third-party viewer, and the CDS would be fooled.
2. The CDS can only scan people who have streaming media enabled. Anyone can go to their viewer preferences and turn that feature off to evade “detection” (or to protect their privacy and avoid being harrassed by the CDS).

Using a CDS is basically the equivalent of a RL store hiring a bouncer to frisk every customer and kick out anyone stupid enough to wear an “I ♥ shoplifting” shirt. Pretty rude to your customers, and a waste of money, right?

Well, it gets worse.

An Invasion of Customers’ Privacy

Every time a CDS successfully “scans” one of your customers, the CDS operator can create a record in a database with the customer’s avatar name, the viewer they were using, their IP address, which store they visited, and when. Naturally, that means the CDS can track the SL shopping habits of your customers, since they will be scanned every time they enter any store using that brand of CDS.

What’s more, unless your customer uses a web proxy (most people don’t), the IP address can be used to determine approximately where on Earth they live. And if multiple avatars show up with the same IP address within a short span of time, the operator can reasonably guess that they are logging in from the same home or office, and might even be alts of the same person.

(Some CDS operators advertise the ability to detect and ban alts. But, this is unreliable and prone to false positives, since many internet providers recycle IP addresses. An internet provider might assign a certain address to a content ripper one day, then assign the same address to an innocent person the next day. Any CDS that bans offenders by IP address is potentially banning legitimate customers, too.)

So as a store owner, you are helping the CDS operator to gather information about your customers, without your customers’ consent or any sort of privacy policy, purely for the CDS operator’s own use. Even more humiliating, you are actually paying the CDS operator for the privilege of letting them track your customers. And don’t forget that you are being scanned by the CDS, too. All this just to have the illusion of protection.

What To Do About It

If you are a store owner using a CDS, get rid of it. You have been swindled. The CDS is useless, invades your customer’s privacy, bans innocent people, and harms your reputation.

I mentioned earlier that there was a specific instance of a CDS banning a customer using a legitimate viewer. It was a false positive; the CDS was configured to ban any viewer it didn’t recognize. When news broke out that the store owner was using a CDS, the store’s reputation took a hit. Even people who were not directly affected by the ban swore they would avoid the store as long as it used a CDS. Thankfully, the store owner removed it after being told what had happened. Lesson learned, hopefully.

If you are a consumer, protect your privacy. Turn off streaming media and audio when you don’t need it, especially when you are shopping or exploring. It’s not enough to press the “Stop” button, you must disable it in your preferences. Here’s how:

• In old-style viewers (Second Life 1.23, Imprudence, Phoenix, etc.):
  1. Open the Preferences window (Ctrl-P), and select the “Audio & Video” tab.
  2. Look for a checkbox labelled “Play streaming media when available” (or similar wording), and make sure it is unchecked.
     
  3. Below that may be a checkbox labelled “Automatically play media”. Make sure it is unchecked, too.
  4. Press the “OK” button to save your preferences.
• In new-style viewers (SL Viewer 2, Kirstens, etc.):
  1. Open the Preferences window (Ctrl-P), and select the “Sound & Media” tab.
  2. Look for a volume slider labelled “Media”. Next to that will be a checkbox labelled “Enabled”. Make sure it is unchecked.
     
  3. A little bit below that is a checkbox labelled “Allow Media to auto-play”. Make sure it is unchecked, too.
     
  4. Press the “OK” button to save your preferences.

Conclusion

There are simply no reasons to use a CDS, and plenty of reasons not to. They cost money, they don’t work, they violate your customers’ privacy, they ban innocent people, and damage your reputation when your customers find out you use one.

I understand that content ripping is a serious issue. If you have had your products ripped, you likely feel hurt and violated. But turning around and violating your customers is not the solution.

Yet, even though I haven’t played it in over three weeks, I still feel an urge to play it nearly every day. There is something about its creative, free-form play that is incredibly attractive, even addictive. Meanwhile, I have my own OpenSim region where I can create and do anything I want, yet it sits neglected for lack of time, interest, or motivation.

Why this stark difference? Why is Minecraft, the more limited and less creative of the two, the more appealing? And what, if anything, can I do to harness the creative drive that Minecraft inspires, and channel it into my OpenSim region and other projects?

Minecraft is entirely open-ended, with no set objectives, no experience points or character levels, no quests or story or ending. Just a world — your own world, infinite and unique — waiting to be shaped by your hand and imagination. In that respect, it’s very much like Second Life / OpenSim (SL/OS). Both start as pristine worlds, with no inherent purpose or goals, but which the players progressively transform into something unique and personal.

Of the two platforms, SL/OS undeniably has a vastly greater range of creative possibilities. Yet despite Minecraft’s limited toolset, it has inspired amazing feats of creativity: elaborate bases built into cliffsides, vast minecart railways, replicas of the USS Enterprise, even working simulations of computer microprocessors.

On the surface, Minecraft is quite simple, and not the sort of thing you’d expect to yield such creativity. You’re dropped empty-handed into a vast, randomly generated world of pixelated blocks of dirt and stone, trees, animals, and monsters. The monsters come out when it’s dark, so you need to build some form of shelter before nightfall. You accomplish that by digging up the dirt and stone blocks to make a cave, or stack the blocks up to make walls for a house or fortress. You can cut (or punch!) down trees, then use the wood to make various kinds of tools, which let you dig more efficiently, mine for coal and metals and gems, and craft weapons to defend yourself against the monsters.

From there, the game goes deeper, with dozens of items and objects you can create: doors, ladders, furnaces, minecarts, dynamite, even simple pseudo-eletrical circuits that can control doors and railways. As the game progresses and you gather more kinds of materials, the number of possible items you can create grows. But you are still limited to the items the game creator thought of. You can’t add a swishy cat tail to your avatar, or build a working airplane of your own design, or any of the countless other things that SL/OS lets you do.

So why is Minecraft so inspiring, so addictive, so fun? Why do I find it so much more compelling to build a create a castle in Minecraft, when I could create the same or better castle in SL/OS?

I would say that it’s precisely because of its constraints and limitations that Minecraft is more engaging and compelling. Too much creative freedom is daunting, and can actually stifle creativity. Minecraft strikes an appealing balance between constraint and freedom, guiding your creativity without forcing anything.

• Minecraft suggests a motivating purpose, but lets you ignore it. The danger of the monsters coming out at night gives you a reason to create a shelter. That initial purpose naturally suggests further courses of action: gather materials, expand your base, and make it really grand and elaborate. The game never forces you to do anything, but always provides a selection of constructive activities to choose from.

  SL/OS, on the other hand, provides no motivation or purpose. It is a blank canvas upon which you can paint anything you like, in any way you want, with near-limitless possibilities. But you have to bring the motivation, the purpose, and the focus to decide what to create.

• Minecraft provides a rich, interesting world as a starting point. When you first play Minecraft, the game generates a random landscape, just for you, complete with scenic mountains and valleys, rivers and lakes, trees and beaches. This constrains your freedom somewhat, but also gives you ideas. You may stumble upon a cool mountain formation, and think, “That’s where I’ll build my fortress!” Or, you may find a series of caverns that descend deep into the earth, filled with valuable materials and dangerous monsters, and think, “I’ll explore these caverns, and build a minecart railway to carry the minerals back home!”

  SL/OS does not provide any such a starting point. Instead, you get a flat plain, a featureless island, or (at best) a prefab terrain constructed by someone else. There are no naturally-occurring landmarks or points of interest, and the way the world is laid out in a grid of individual square regions discourages free-flowing, natural terrain. Again, you have to bring your own inspiration.

• Minecraft offers challenges and obstacles to overcome. It takes effort to gather the materials necessary to build anything. You have to dig up each block of dirt and mine every piece of metal, all while avoiding monsters and lava flows. Each material and item looks and behaves in a certain way and has its own limitations, which can inspire creative solutions. If you’re building on a high tower or cliffside, you risk falling and dying, thus dropping all your hard-earned materials onto the ground.

  These kinds of gameplay elements add a sense of danger and excitement to the creative process, and overcoming challenges increases the sense of accomplishment when you finish something. Building in SL/OS is comparatively safe and straightforward. Prims are a free and unlimited resource, not a valuable commodity that takes effort to collect. Most of the obstacles are due to technical issues or lack of training/skill, both of which tend to cause frustration, not excitement.

• Minecraft promotes spontaneous, continuous creation. You can just grab a tool and start digging, laying out blocks, or crafting items. Of course, you can do some planning if you feel like it, and it’s surely necessary for the really complex builds like the micoprocessor simulation I mentioned earlier. But in general, you just build as you go, drawing inspiration from your surroundings, and see where your imagination takes you.

  This is true to some extent with SL/OS as well, but most of the “serious” content creation these days is done outside of the world. Skins, clothes, textures, animations, sounds, sculpties, and meshes are all created in other programs like Photoshop and Maya (or GIMP and Blender), then imported into the world. This creates a joy-dampering divide between the act of creation, and the pleasure of seeing it come to life.

• Minecraft is pure play. The things you create are just for fun, and have no impact or consequences beyond the game (except perhaps the pride of showing off via YouTube videos). As far as I am aware, nobody is trying to monetize Minecraft by selling their creations or their creative services. Someone might think to do so — but that would, I suspect, ruin most of the fun, and turn the play into work.

  Meanwhile, SL/OS is increasingly saturated with people trying to make a buck. In the same way, I’ve observed the individual lives of many SL Residents (including myself) gradually shift from self-indulgent play and entertainment, to more serious business and moneymaking. Making money isn’t necessarily a bad thing, of course, but it does tend to take away the joy of creating things purely for pleasure.

So, if Minecraft has these engaging and addictive qualities, should SL/OS try to emulate them? Not necessarily. It’s important to remember that SL/OS is not a game. It sits halfway between a tool like Blender, and a game like Minecraft. It is both a content creation tool, and a content delivery and consumption platform.

Some aspects of Minecraft would simply be inappropriate. SL/OS would not be improved by requiring the user to cut down trees to make plywood cubes, for example. Nor would anyone find it entertaining to lose years worth of inventory because they fell off a tall building or were mauled by a zombie while AFK.

But, other aspects of Minecraft can be used to make the creative process more engaging, both in SL/OS and in the “real world”.

• Nudge yourself towards a motivating purpose, but don’t cling to it. Think about what you’re creating, and why (even if the reason is merely “it would be totally awesome”). Keep a selection of possible future courses of action in mind, and let your gut choose which to pursue. Allow your motivations and feelings to change, as they naturally will, but always be aware of them.
• Use a chaotic or inspirational starting point. Look for serendipitous inspiration in the shapes of coffee stains, ink splatters, the lines of a crinkled-up piece of paper, or other random shapes. Use a random terrain generator like L3DT as a starting point for designing sims. Or, get some modelling clay and just mush it around chaotically for a while.
• Set challenges and constraints for yourself. Use half as many prims as you thought were necessary. Pick an unconventional color or style, and make it work. Build it in a way that would be totally impossible in the real world. Make up rules about which shapes or colors can be next to each other.
• Start with media that promote spontaneous creation. Build with prims first, instead of jumping straight to sculpties or meshes. Work with malleable physical media like charcoal or clay. Make quick, throw-away sketches, mockups, or prototypes.
• Create for yourself, for fun, for the pure joy of creation. Be selfish. Indulge your creativity. Work on fun, cool things that stir up your imagination. Make a crazy hat to wear, or a secret fort where you can hide out with your friends. Be a kid. Play.

With any luck, learning these lessons from Minecraft will allow me to focus my creative urges on more meaningful and important things.

Yesterday was also the last rezday I’ll be celebrating in Second Life. A recent culmination of circumstances has pushed me away from Second Life, and triggered my migration to OpenSim. I’ll be wrapping up my affairs over the next month, then putting my Second Life account on the shelf. By this time next year, I expect SL to be mostly irrelevant to my day-to-day life.

I’ll explain why I’m leaving below, but I don’t want this to be a completely whiney frumple post. Yes, I’m leaving Second Life, but it has been a rich and amazing four years. Here are a few of the interesting things I’ve done in my time in Second Life (in no particular order):

• Built hundreds of silly little things as part of a weekly speed-building competition at The Shelter.
• Worked a variety of odd-jobs: scripter, texturer, builder, animator, artist, teacher, clothing designer, shop owner, and more.
• Taught dozens of students how to build with prims. (I was an instructor at NCI for several months, teaching one class at first, then later three.)
• Exhibited my artwork in several virtual galleries.
• Discovered countless things about myself that I never knew.
• Met the best friends I’ve ever known. (And hope to keep even after I’ve left.)
• Fell head-over-heels in love. (More than once.)
• Opened up a shop to sell several of my creations. (Some were more useful than others).
• Earned thousands of US dollars working as a metaverse development contractor. (And found out how much fun it is to pay self-employment taxes.)
• Created a series of “chibi” comics featuring toon versions of me and my friends in various silly situations.
• Organized the Creator’s Playgroup, a small group of friends who would do show-and-tells, themed creation games, and collaborative builds.
• Exploited a short-lived server glitch in order to build a giant megaprim sculpty octopus.
• Won second place for my entry in a UI design contest, earning a cash prize of over USD $700. (I also earned a multi-post tirade about the Leninist and anti-populist concepts my design supposedly exhibited, and about the downfall of the SL economy that would occur if I ever had the opportunity to implement my design. That was almost as good as the $700.)
• Owned a variety of homes: a modernist house built into the side of a cliff overlooking an icy waterfall; a peaceful garden facing out to the sea; and a sky platform high above a volcanic island that resembles a sea creature when viewed from above.
• Took an epic multi-day sailing trip of the mainland waterways, navigating my trusty Flying Tako through narrow channels, shallow waters, and hundreds of perilous sim border crossings — and lived to tell the tale. (My motto and catch phrase was “Sand bars and ban lines be damned!”)
• Developed a tool to create avatar animations with Blender. (Then gave it away for free.)
• Attended the Resident Experience Team Office Hours for months, providing feedback, ideas, and patches.
• Organized the User Experience Interest Group after the Resident Experience Team abandoned the above mentioned office hours. (We’ve met weekly for a year and a half, generating countless great ideas for Linden Lab to ignore.)
• Contributed numerous software patches to improve the Second Life viewer. (Linden Lab even got around to using a few of them, eventually.)
• Got fed up with LL and started a new viewer project with my friend McCabe — despite neither of us being much good at C++ at the time.

So you could hardly call my time in Second Life dull. There were ups and down, excitement and frustration, good times and bad. All considered, I’ve had a good run in SL. But the time has come to move on.

I’m sure some of you have guesses about why I’m leaving, but it’s not as simple as it seems. I could point to the kerfuffle over the Third-Party Viewer (TPV) policy as the reason for leaving, and people would nod in understanding. But that’s not the whole story.

True, after the annoucement of the new Terms of Service (which requires you agree to the new policy), I was certain I would have to leave SL and cancel my account before April 30 to avoid the legal implications of an overreaching and ill-conceived policy. But the policy has recently been revised enough that, although I still don’t like the policy, it’s no longer an urgent danger that prevents me from logging in.

So, I could stay in Second Life — if I wanted to.

But you see, by my own nature, I’m a creator. I can’t help creating things. It’s what I do, and I love to do it. It’s what attracted me to Second Life in the first place. SL was the ultimate canvas, a “game” where the goal was to create and share cool things with other people. My own skillset and interests in art, computer graphics, and programming served me extremely well in SL. There wasn’t (and still isn’t) much in SL that I couldn’t do if I applied myself to it. And as you can see from the sizable list above, I’ve tasted a huge variety of what SL has to offer.

Yet for the past year or two, I’ve had the growing feeling that the things I enjoyed about Second Life have been slipping away. I attribute this feeling to a number of factors:

• Frequent policy missteps by Linden Lab. Seriously, LL screws up so often that I have an entire blog category devoted to their messes. After a while, I just stopped caring enough to even write about it. Linden Lab pulling a serious policy gaff has become less novel than a cat playing the piano on YouTube, and far more depressing. A cat can learn to paw at the piano keys, but Linden Lab apparently can’t learn to respect or understand its user base.
• A gradual shift in Linden Lab’s corporate culture. When I first signed up for Second Life, Linden Lab felt like a cool, creative company full of awesome people who were passionate about SL. Today, Linden Lab still has plenty of awesome people, but it’s not a cool, creative company anymore — because the people with a real passion for SL aren’t the ones driving the company anymore. Maybe it’s inevitable that as a startup grows, the suits take over and it becomes focused more on profits and other serious-business-type stuff, and less on making something cool. But that inevitability doesn’t make it any less unpleasant.
• A growing cynicism towards Linden Lab among Residents. This goes hand in hand with the policy missteps and corporate culture shift. Unfortunately, there is a vicious cycle at work here. As a whole, Linden Lab doesn’t understand the Residents, so it frequently does things that upset and anger them. Having been burned by Linden Lab in the past, Residents habitually see everything the Lindens do and say in the worst possible light, and frequently overreact and lash out. These negative reactions from the Residents drive the Lindens further away, so that they understand and relate to the Residents even less, and are more likely to do things that upset them. Both sides started the cycle, and both sides perpetuate it. (Myself included, I’m afraid.)
• An increasing prevalence of fear, intolerance, greed, pettiness, and viciousness among the Resident population. For as long as I have been in Second Life, there have been doomcriers, bigots, moneygrubbers, and drama mongers. But they were just a nuisance, fringe elements that the rest of us shrugged off as we went about our lives. But today, those things are an integral part of the culture and mindset of Second Life. The dwindling percentage of Residents who are here to create, learn, and enjoy life are being overwhelmed by individuals whose lives are ruled by the most base and destructive aspects of human nature. Or so it seems to me. Maybe I’m just getting crotchety in my “old age”, and resentful of a new generation of Residents with a different set of values. But regardless of whether the phenomenon is real or just my perception, Second Life no longer feels like a haven for folk like me.
• My own shift towards more serious occupations. When I first joined Second Life, I enjoyed it tremendously. I learned new things daily, socialized with friends constantly, created and experimented freely, and explored the grid, eyes wide with wonder. Over time, though, I became more involved in “serious” things, and began to accumulate obligations. Teaching, running a shop, working as a contractor, organizing groups, maintaining a viewer, helping users and customers. The carefree days of my virtual youth are long gone; I’ve drifted away from my old friends, and my emotional connection to SL has frayed. Sure, I could make changes in my life to become more involved in the fun parts of Second Life. But given the overall situation, it makes more sense to start again in OpenSim.

So you see, the TPV policy was simply the impetus to act on my growing dissatisfaction with Linden Lab and Second Life. If the TPV policy hadn’t been so screwed up, I wouldn’t be leaving right now, but my departure was inevitable given the way things have been going. (Besides, given Linden Lab’s reputation for making exactly the same mistakes every time they introduce a new policy change, I doubt they were capable of not screwing up the TPV policy.)

So, what’s next for me? The exciting frontier of OpenSim, that’s what!

I’ve always wanted to have my own sim to mess around with, but a Second Life sim has always been prohibitively expensive for me. (A full SL sim costs USD $295/month, plus a $1000 set up fee). Now I have my own self-managed sim on OSGrid with free uploads, an unlimited prim count, megaprims however I want them, LightShare server-side windlight control, and precise collision meshes for sculpties — for a paltry USD $15/month.

So for me, OpenSim is a creative paradise. A giant, octopus-shaped creative paradise.

That said, OpenSim is still a rough and rugged frontier. I happen to enjoy that fact, and my skills are put to good use there. The reason I can run a sim for only $15/month is because I have the technical know-how to set it up and manage it myself. Less technically-inclined people should expect to pay in the range of $40-$100 per month for a managed sim from a commercial OpenSim host. Still, it’s a bargain compared to Second Life.

But OpenSim is certainly not for everyone. There are still plenty of glitches, and there aren’t all the amenities of Second Life. The number of users is much smaller than Second Life, and they are spread across a large number of separate grids. There’s not nearly as much content as there is in SL, and generally not “professional quality”. Not all of the grids have any money system, so you won’t find such a bustling commercial economy as you do in SL. But the flip side of all this is the fact that it’s easy to make a name for yourself in OpenSim if you’re open, friendly, and have a bit of talent.

I’m sure I’ll be happy pioneering OpenSim; it’s a good fit for me. As for my plans with Second Life, I’ll be tying up loose ends over the next month. I’ll be closing down Cuddlefish Junction soon, but I’m making arrangements for my most popular products to be sold through other shops.

I’m not disappearing, though. I’ll still be responding to emails, I’ll still be on Plurk, and I’ll be posting here about my adventures with OpenSim. I’m not cancelling my SL account, and I’ll probably drop in from time to time to export my creations or attend special events. In fact, given how infrequently I’ve been logging in over the past year, hardly anyone would have even noticed the change if I hadn’t said anything.

So, this isn’t really a goodbye; I’m just moving down the block. See you around the metaverse!

I’ve heard some grumbling from various established Residents, along the lines of, “Why do they think I would want this?” Indeed, it’s a really weak incentive for existing premium users who are already established in Second Life. A small parcel you can’t sell, a house that you can’t change or remove, and no events or classified listings allowed? Pshaw! Who would want that, when you can own your own, fully featured and customizable land?

Well, to all the people unimpressed with LL’s offering, allow me to point something out: It’s not for you. Or for me, or anyone else who has owned or rented land before.

The Lindens don’t think we would want this. They probably don’t care much what we think about it. We’re simply not part of the target market for this program. For an established land owner to ask, “Why do they think I would want a Linden Home?”, is like a professional mountain biker scoffing, “Bah! This bike shop sells training wheels! Why do they think I would want training wheels?”

If you want to evaluate the effectiveness of this plan, you must consider its goals. Jack Linden writes in the announcement:

A key aim for the beta is to provide easy entry into inworld home ownership (especially for new Residents) while not competing with estate owners. These estates do an amazing job of providing quality experiences for Residents. We want to create an on-ramp so new Resident can learn how valuable and simple owning land can be, but then move naturally on to larger parcels elsewhere.

The Linden Homes program is the spiritual successor of the ill-fated First Land program of years ago. Jack Linden wrote when the First Land program was discontinued, way back in February 2007:

The First Land program was put in place to encourage land ownership for those moving up to Premium membership. Increasingly we have found that these cheap L$1 per meter parcels were not benefitting those people as intended. Because of the low price, they were being immediately sold, or bought via alts, purely for profit.

So, the goals of this plan would seem to be:

• Entice non-land-owners into upgrading to premium accounts.
• Introduce more users to the benefits of land ownership.
• Provide a safe and positive first experience with land ownership.
• Encourage users to move on to full-fledged land ownership afterwards.
• Prevent the new land from entering the commercial land market.
• Avoid directly competing with estate owners and land rental businesses.

We’ll see whether the plan will actually achieve these goals in the months to come, but I think there’s a very good chance that it will be successful. The Lindens have clearly put thought into this, and learned from the problems of the old First Land program — even the ones they didn’t mention directly, like the unattractive sprawling masses of tightly-packed “shoebox homes” that one would find all over the First Land areas.

What’s more, there seem to be very few downsides, and few ways in which the plan could seriously backfire. Of course, many estate owners and landlords/ladies will probably stamp their feet and curse Linden Lab for competing with them. The wiser and more far-sighted of them, though, will be pleased that LL is growing a new crop of future customers for them.

All in all, this is one of the best plans I’ve seen come out of Linden Lab in a long time. Well thought out, well communicated, with their goals and motives laid out in the open. It’s not often I get to say this, but gold star to the Lindens on this one.

Now, returning to the current premium owners who are bemoaning the fact that this offer is useless to them: notice that none of the goals is “provide an additional incentive for established land owners to keep their premium account”. This plan isn’t about you.

So when you ask, “Why does Linden Lab think I would want this?”, what you’re really asking is, “Why is Linden Lab paying attention to someone other than me?” Whether we established Residents like it or not, the answer to that question is obvious and simple: Linden Lab is a business, and they have judged that it’s more profitable to put most of their effort attracting new customers, than to spend their days fawning over the ones who keep coming back anyway.

We’d especially love to hear from machinimists who are currently working with Second Life:

• What are the most frustrating or annoying aspects of working with SL to make machinima?
• What new features would help make SL machinima easier, better quality, or more expressive than it is now?

The in-world discussion will be tomorrow, October 15 from 3-4 PM SLT (i.e. Pacific time) at Hippotropolis in Second Life. If you can’t attend the in-world discussion, I’d still love to have your comments here on this blog post, on Plurk, or on the SL-UX mailing list!

Anti-inspect shields are a contentious issue for many reasons. Not the least of these is that it deprives designers of the new customers they could have gained from people seeing and admiring your outfit, and finding out who made it. But just as bad is that they severely reduce your framerate and the framerate of everyone around you, as Gabby Panacek has demonstrated.

Hurting the creators of the items you love, and slashing everyone’s framerates in the process? Well, that’s pretty vain and selfish, but maybe it’s worth it to stop “copycats” from stealing your style? Perhaps it would be, if the shields actually stopped people from inspecting your attachments — but they don’t.

In fact, there’s an extremely quick and easy way to completely bypass the shields, and you don’t even have to fiddle around trying to get the right camera angle. All it takes is 3 easy steps, which I’ll demonstrate with Caer Balogh’s lovely brown paper bag “Advanced Fashion Shield 1.0″, which Gabby kindly passed on to me. It’s just as useless as the real shields at stopping people from inspecting, but doesn’t hurt your framerate, and is way more stylish.

1. Enable Advanced > Rendering > Hide Selected. (Use Ctrl-Alt-Shift-D to turn on the Advanced menu if you need to.)
2. Open Edit mode (Ctrl-3) and click on the shield to select it. It will disappear from your view (except for its outline). If the person is wearing multiple shields, you can hold Shift and continue to click them until you have selected (and thus hidden) them all.
3. Click on the attachment you want to inspect.

Even the biggest, primmiest, laggiest shield, whether scripted or unscripted, sculpty or nonsculpty, can be bypassed in just a few clicks using this method.

So if you have a shield, please, take it off. All you’re doing is making SL less enjoyable for yourself and everyone around you.

So, it’s with some disappointment that I read Dusan’s recent post on Second Life’s permission system. His post is prompted by the progress of VWR-8049, a proposal to allow users to choose the default permissions for new objects that they create.

Dusan comes out strongly against it, and although I’m firmly in favor of it, that’s not the disappointing thing; I don’t mind people disagreeing with me. What disappoints me is that Dusan has bought into the baseless FUD that certain individuals have piled onto the issue.

Alas, not only does Dusan believe the FUD and let it color his entire analysis of the feature, but he also regurgitates it in a most unsavory and uncharacteristic manner, littered with baseless attacks, ranting nonsequiturs, and flawed thinking. I’m usually content to let this sort of thing lie, but it boggles my mind that FUD of this sort could spread when it has so many holes in it.

Isn’t copy/mod/transfer about as close as you can come to an ideal system for allowing people to create stuff, sell it, let others modify it, collaborate on it….all the things that Creative Commons purports to do but, well, doesn’t.

I’ll set aside the baseless (and frankly, irrelevant) jab at Creative Commons, and get straight to the point: No. Copy/mod/transfer isn’t as close as you can come to an ideal system. In fact, SL’s permission system has a variety of identifiable flaws and quirks that have plagued both consumers and creators for years.

• It’s too coarse. Where’s the permission to make prim hair recolorable or resizable, without letting everyone see the prim parameters? Or the permission to allow someone to only transfer an item back to the creator, so it can be fixed, exchanged, or refunded? What about the ability to have a no-copy/transfer gift box with an item inside that becomes copy/no-transfer when you take it out?
• It’s quirky. Did you know that for animations and sounds, the “modify” permission doesn’t actually let you modify them? It just lets you use them in gestures. Weird, right? And that “faux-modify” permission is so firmly established that LL would have to add another modify permission just to let people actually modify them, e.g. to adjust the priority level or hand poses on animations.

  And see if you know the answer to this one, without looking it up: If you have a full-perm object with a no-modify script inside, are you allowed to reset the script? How about if the object was no-modify, but the script was full perm? Even after 3 years of building and scripting in SL, I’d still have to check to be sure.

• It’s a hassle. Part of my job is making backup copies of collaborative builds, and this inevitably involves hours of checking permissions and calling in the builders to fix them. In one case involving many builders, the task of getting them all to fix their perms took a week, when the actual work of making the backup took only a few hours. In a few cases, we’ve had to discard entire sections of builds because we couldn’t afford to have it taking up space and prims for several more days while perms were fixed.

  You could argue that, being professional builders, they should have been more careful about perms in the first place. But that’s denying human nature: people forget things if they are not reminded. It’s this same human fallibility that Dusan offers as a reason why people must be protected from themselves by restricting their ability to choose their own default permissions. (I, on the other hand, offer it as a reason to have better reminders, and warnings where appropriate.)

  Store owners too have to deal with permissions for everything they sell, and they too can make mistakes. Setting the wrong permissions on a product can cause all sorts of headaches. If the permissions are too restrictive (more so than advertised), then customers will complain. If the permissions are too open (particularly if they are copy/trans), the product might “get loose”, being passed around for free or sold by other people, potentially reducing the store owner’s ability to profit from the product.

  Despite this issue being so important, it’s only within the past year that tools to more effectively manage permissions have begun to appear. (And I find it somewhat amusing that an optional tool to help content creators avoid permission mistakes, is being attacked on the grounds that it could encourage content creators to make permission mistakes.)

Indeed, SL’s permission system has been the subject of widespread criticism for years — by creators, consumers, and even Lindens! — precisely because it’s not all that great at the things Dusan thinks make it ideal.

C/M/T is what it’s all about kids: it’s Little Big Planet but with the right to sell your levels to others; it’s The Sims Online but with a wider range of avatars; it’s Facebook, or Twitter, but instead of little game widgets or bloggy haiku the whole PAGE is your own, and you can sell every bit of it, every photo, every poke, every status update, every font if you want and not turn around at the end of the day and find out that the platform owners, well, OWN it.

C/M/T built Second Life, C/M/T powered what must be the largest micro-transaction economy in the world today, C/M/T powered the ability to sell and buy stuff for fractions of a fraction of a cent if you want, C/M/T is what filled my inventory with 15,000 objects called, um, object, but they’re MY objects and I’ll organize them if I want to.

There are two big, leaky holes in the bottom of that argument:

• Linden Lab, the platform operators, do “own it”. Creators retain intellectual property rights on their SL creations, but the Lab owns and has control over the data. Can you really say you own your SL assets, when LL can delete them or restrict your access to them (i.e. ban you) at any time? Builders in particular lack a convenient way to create backups of their creations, and until that’s resolved, I’d argue that in practical reality, they don’t really own their creations.
• It’s a mistake to think that the only possible alternative to C/M/T is not having any content protection at all. C/M/T is not the only — or even the best — content protection scheme possible. And it’s silly to assume that Second Life would have been crippled if it had a different scheme. Indeed, I’d argue that the SL economy would be even stronger today if SL had been designed with an easier to use, more robust, more fine-grained permissions system than C/M/T.

Yes, counterfeiting CAN undermine the business. And that’s what this is all about – whether the Lab will actually protect content, or just give it a glance and move on. But there is enough protection in Second Life that it’s a damn good start: all content MAY be copiable. But the combination of good policy, strong enforcement, and reasonable uses of technology to counter it can all go a very long way to curbing theft to a minority.

Now, here’s a point where I agree, albeit with some reservations. The general consensus among those in the know about such things, is that perfect, unbreakable DRM technology is a theoretical impossibility, due to the so-called “analog hole“: if you can see (or hear) it, you can copy it. The only way to be sure no one can copy it, is to never show it to anyone. But, even so, it is possible to use technology to make it harder to copy. SL does this, and I think that can be a good thing, in moderation. (Past a certain point, it just tends to become annoying and disrupt legitimate use, though.)

SL’s permissions system is an example of DRM and content protection done in a mostly sane, if somewhat flawed, manner. Trying to apply more technology to prevent illegitimate copying in SL would be, in my opinion, treading into the realm of “annoying but not that much more effective”. Rather, I think the proper area to apply technology to, is the detection of illegitimate copying. For example, tools to objectively analyse textures and objects for similarity could be useful for detecting simple rips.

However, SL’s main problems in this area are weak policy and minimal enforcement. LL deals with takedown requests enough to satisfy the requirements of the DMCA, but the consequences to offenders are weak: the content is usually removed, but they can just re-upload it the next day. LL has not taken the initiative to define its own, more effective policy.

Open source isn’t much different than a quilting circle or a barn raising. A community comes together, everyone brings their own tools and time, and maybe they help build a new church or whatever: the whole community benefits, everyone who bore a hammer feels good about themselves, we can all take pride, and the world advances towards being a little more civil.

The problems come when Joe shows up to help out and hopes to get hired as a woodworker the next day, or the church is built on company-owned land, or Pete wants the cost of his nails reimbursed.

See – C/M/T, the permission system in Second Life, helps to solve a lot of that. You can still do stuff for free if you want – but you’d better know that you’re doing it for the right reasons, because more often than not free is nothing more than a cheap advertising ploy that makes you look more like WalMart than Tiffany’s.

So, Joe has unrealistic expectations, the church-builders don’t understand property rights, and Pete doesn’t know what “volunteer” means? SL’s permission scheme doesn’t help any of that one bit. Nor does it stop the SL content creator who deliberately gives out freebies in a dubious attempt to bring more paying customers into their store.

Those are all “wetware issues”, and SL’s permission system doesn’t address any of them in the slightest. And there’s no reason to think that new tools to help manage permissions would make people more (or less) likely to act foolishly or have poor understandings of the permissions system.

There’s this JIRA out now that argues that the mechanics of setting perms should be changed so that it’s EASIER to make choices about the stuff you make.

Let’s say you’re a builder working on a team – you need to transfer your stuff back and forth, it’s just easier if it’s all full permissions. So the JIRA proposes that you should be able to toggle your default permissions: turn it to “Full permissions” or “Transfer Only” and leave it there. Avoid the hassles of having to remember that every prim you rez needs to be changed from its default, avoid all the complications of resetting them every time.

The support for the JIRA is support for choice, and choice is hard to argue with.

This is actually a decent summary of the JIRA issue. It is about choice. But the choice isn’t a simple toggle between “full perms” and “transfer only”; it gives much more fine-grained control than that. If you want to keep your creation permissions as transfer only, you can do that. Indeed, that’s the default, so you don’t really have to do anything at all. If you want to choose modify+transfer, or modify+copy, or copy+transfer, or copy only, you can do those too. And yep, if you want to, you can even choose full perms.

Somehow, though, the fact that full perms is a possible choice has got some people gnashing their teeth about freebie culture, and predicting the downfall of the SL economy, or even capitalism at large, if this feature is implemented and people are allowed to make their own choices. (How curious that capitalism, a system based on the ability to make choices in a free market, apparently needs to be protected from the ability to make choices in a free market!)

Of course, all that freebie obsession and doomsaying is utter hogwash. It’s just unfortunate that someone as intelligent and thoughtful as Dusan could be taken in by it.

The current C/M/T system is, in fact, the ideal ‘nudge’, and is one of the hidden choice architectures within Second Life that makes it what it is: it nudges us towards the protection of content but still allows us the choice to change it.

The C/M/T perm system is a choice architecture based on the realization that we are not all rational actors (and especially not when we’re new to Second Life). It’s a nuisance at times, infuriating at others, but even for someone like myself who has rezzed his share of prims, I STILL need the ‘nudge’ of changing those perms so that I make the conscious decision that they should be changed.

That’s fine. I can understand the concern about setting your default permissions and forgetting about them, then creating some product and releasing it with the wrong perms. As I said, people tend to forget things, especially if there aren’t reminders. I’ve suggested some enhancements that would reduce the opportunity for forgetfulness (display an optional on-screen reminder of your current permissions), and limit the consequences of forgetting (allow permission settings to optionally be set only for the current session).

But those enhancements can only be made if Linden Lab implements the base functionality. And there will likely be a period of time when only the base functionality is available, before the enhanced versions make it in. So I’ll offer this advice for the meantime:

If you’re worried about forgetting that you’ve changed your default perms, then don’t change them.

No one is forcing you to use permissions settings that you don’t want to. The initial default permissions will still be transfer-only. If you don’t want to change that, then don’t. Just leave it alone, and it will be the same as it has been for years.

That’s your choice, and I’ll let you make it. So please, don’t tell me that I shouldn’t be allowed to make my own.

She’s trying to get an accurate sampling of opinions, which means lots of people need to vote, so she’s asking for everybody’s help to spread the word and get votes from as many people as possible. But the idea isn’t to get just the people who feel the same way as you do to stuff the ballot — spread the word in all circles, so we can really find out how people feel.

So, please give it a vote and spread the word (but considerately — don’t spam). The poll is running until May 12, a week from today.

• Poll: Adult content – Both sides of the question @ Dwell On It