I’ve been meaning to mention this Washington Post article for several days now. In it, three disturbing things emerge right away. One is that terrorists are using metaverses like Second Life for easy, often untraceable communication and money exchange. A second is that there are predictable and troubling calls for increased surveillance within these metaverses. A third is that Linden Labs, far from protecting users’ privacy, is assuring intelligence officials that adequate surveillance is already built into the system.
Yet only at the end does the truly surprising observation emerge:
Jeff Jonas, chief scientist of IBM Entity Analytic Solutions, who has been examining developments in virtual worlds, which have attracted some investment from the company, said there’s no way to predict how this technology will develop and what kind of capabilities it will provide — good or bad. But he believes that virtual worlds are about to become far more popular.
“As the virtual worlds create more and more immersive experiences and as global accessibility to computers increases, I can envision a scenario in which hundreds of millions of people become engaged almost overnight,” Jonas said.
Looks like someone’s expecting a tipping point sometime soon.
“One is that terrorists are using metaverses like Second Life for easy, often untraceable communication and money exchange.”
Laughable. Anyone who followed recent, relevant lawsuits witnessed just how traceable communication is within Linden Lab’s proprietary service: they dug out plenty of text files… both “public” and supposedly “private” instant messages and used those (documentation can be found on the Virtually Blind blog which tracked those lawsuits and posted excerpts). And the Voice service in SL (a *recent* addition) is essentially the same as what’s been long available elsewhere on the net (Skype, anyone?). Including plenty of videogames. Nothing new here.
As to money exchange, that too is essentially bunk. With regards to SL, in order to convert currency there are only two methods: through Linden Lab’s Lindex system or through some *external* means. Linden Lab, of course, keeps financial records. And an external service is… well… an external service, and is thus as traceable as one would expect irregardless of Second Life.
btw, there is a cap to the amount of money LL will convert in a month (US$2500). To increase the Sell limit (up to a whopping US$5000), they review the account for potential fraud risk. These are hardly amounts over which to be alarmed. It’d be far, far easier to simply have someone carry money (and significantly more of it) over our extremely porous borders.
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There is nothing troubling here that one wouldn’t find equally troubling by the whole Internet itself; by the ability for someone to use WordPress to create a blog to post one-time pad data.
As to what it will(?) evolve into, I wonder how many people are calm enough in the face of all this security theater to see something else, like this: http://tinyurl.com/yor8xv (TheStreet.com).
I elaborated further about my thinking in this area today in a post entitled “Virtual Reality: There Is No Place Like Home.” Specifically related to your blog post, here are two related excerpts:
1. Virtual reality: soon serving the masses. As these alternate worlds become more immersive (i.e., ability to hold ones attention when in the virtual space) and accessible (think One Laptop Per Child), I think it is possible that a half billion people show up. How soon? In six to ten years – maybe faster. Why? Because there are a lot of people on Earth that would rather exist in a synthetic world as opposed to their real world. Hmmm … shanty town, nagging spouse, or insurmountable odds versus a stimulating environment with near limitless potential to reinvent oneself.
2. Tools are tools. Are virtual spaces dangerous? Well, is a phone, the Internet and email dangerous? Nope, not for the most part, in fact the opposite, as the social and economic values of these technologies far outweigh the consequences of misuse. Sure bad actors will continue to use the best tools they can get their hands on too. And with this behavior, as more bad actors show up … the folks paid to “protect†us will venture into these virtual spaces in an effort to detect and preempt. Hence some of my quotes in this recent Washington Post story “Spies Battleground Turns Virtual.â€