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