On Sat, Oct 05, 2013 at 05:53:01PM -0400, Shava Nerad wrote:
When it came to light recently that Linden Lab, operator of Second Life, had made some incredibly draconic changes to their TOS, the community freaked. And LL went to New World Notes (the primary metagame media) and smoothed things out with PR, for the most part.
Geez, sounds like things have taken a turn for the worse at LL since I worked there. :/
I've even entertained for a fleeting moment that they have some sort of weird NSL thing going on...NAH... C'mon Shava... Not every uncommunicative stonewall from an internet company you like has an NSL behind it... These are just odd times.
I think there's a significant probability LL has been subject to some sort of TLA interference of that type, although I can't comment on this matter in particular. In about Nov. 2011, while I worked there, there was a very odd incident in which word came down from on high that management wanted OTR banned from private user-to-user chat. The official viewer didn't support it, but some third-party viewers did, and the stated justification was to avoid "fragmenting the user experience" and "creating an exclusionary environment" - as if private chat weren't exclusionary by its very nature! At this point, I will note that, as of the last time I had source access to it, the SL server logged the full text of all chat even in its production configuration. All this seemed really not-very-okay to me and suspicious in light of the flimsy justifications given and the lack of apparent association with any of the product-type people one would expect such concerns to originate from. It all seemed to be Rod Humble and the corporate counsel. This came up in one of the server-side engineering staff meetings, and seemed to incite a good deal of opposition - which eventuated in Rod showing up himself to argue the point. He actually backed down, or at least gave the appearance of doing so - I'm not sure whether to count myself proud or embarrassed at having lost my temper a bit and accused him of being a fascist. I didn't hear anything more about it during the time I worked there, but I didn't stay that long after, having gotten a distinct sense that these were not the sort of people I wanted to be working for. I don't definitively know what degree of outside pressure was involved, although at one point Rod Humble seemed to let slip implied confirmation of my suspicion with the phrasing "why would I want to stand up to the FBI?" or phrasing to that effect. I think it's clear that the current management of LL are very decidedly *not* on the side of freedom, although I think the *engineers* there mostly are. -- Andrea Shepard <andrea@persephoneslair.org> PGP fingerprint (ECC): 2D7F 0064 F6B6 7321 0844 A96D E928 4A60 4B20 2EF3 PGP fingerprint (RSA): 7895 9F53 C6D1 2AFD 6344 AF6D 35F3 6FFA CBEC CA80 -- Liberationtech is public & archives are searchable on Google. Violations of list guidelines will get you moderated: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech. Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at companys@stanford.edu.