Friday, May 29, 2009

Why not just call the sim Dachau

Everytime Ll puts in content or transaction controls, it breaks the grid. This time is no exception, their recent adult content campaign, while it is necessary to sell to corporate clients, is worse than the breakage after the gambling ban. Crashes are proliferating, and the mechanisms to enforce create zones of unusability. More over they are going to force people on to 1.23 soon, while that build is still hopelessly buggy and crawling with problems. 

The Lindens have set up a series of "oatmeal" sims to test their new found totalitarian spyware. Why don't they just call it Dachau? Or Gitmo? Or some other place befitting what it is, an attempt to set up a thought police system that monitors thought crimes? Because that would be bad marketing. 

Now realize that I am in favor of segregation between sex seeking behavior and other places. I don't want people hitting on me when I enter a business conference, I don't want to have a skybox and then next day a strip club goes up next door with people spilling over. There's no question in my mind that behavior needs to have it's time and place. However the content controls don't do that. When landing in the PG sim, what was the first thing that happened?

You guessed it, an IM saying "Hey sexy!"

I then tried to walk on the PG sim, and it kept crashing me through the land down into negative numbers. That's right PG. I am on 1.22 but am verified, it would not let me into the adult area. So the answer to what is going on is very simple: it is broken, it is borking the rest of the grid, it does not work. I found a way to get into the sim easily enough based on a well known bug. They will fix it, but there will be many others.

Finally it makes me believe that the new avatar rendering, where only the final baked copies, are for nothing other than copy protection, and to prevent "naughty bits" from ever touching other people's computers.

Now LL allows child pornography in second life, in that it does not ban people who skirt the edges of obvious even when they do it in public and are reported. So they cannot take any kind of moral high ground here: they do not enforce the ToS or the law when it is not convenient to do so, but are spending virtually all of their programming resources to do this. No wonder so many techies abandoned ship. 

This is what LL spends it's time doing: breaking the service that people pay money for in pursuit of goals of questionable utility.


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