Heralding Business Ethics

~From a Second Life content creator, this paraphrased question~

An new but talented artist is doing some advertising pieces for me. She hasn't given me a price yet, but I do not think she will ask what I'm willing to pay. Should I encourage her to to charge more than she asks?

Short answer: No. Pay a completion bonus instead.

Long Answer: ~~ A short primer in business Ethics~~

Here is a spectrum with many, many points but five major colors:

Charity: you freely give money for little or no product at all. You provide fantastic products and services for next to nothing.

Soft Business: you pay generously for the things you need and want. You charge low for a superior product

Fair Business: you pay fair and charge fairly for fair service and products that are as good as the competition.

Hard Business: you dicker to get the best product for the least money. You provide nearly adequately for high prices.

Criminality: you get things you don't pay for. You provide a dangerous product for inflated fees.

One can run different areas of life differently without much difficulty: "Charity to family, fair business to everyone else" is a common example. One can, like SL, run a Hard Business, but market itself as a Charity. "Legal" isn't really a consideration, since you can be "legally criminal", say, if you are an insurance or fossil fuel company. Maybe gambling is "criminal", but perhaps casinos and lotteries really are selling entertainment as a hard business. The variations are endless and interesting to think about.

Now, where you put your dealings on this scale is largely a matter of personal decision, with a few modifying factors like corporate climate, zeitgeist, personal competence and current affluence. You can also decide who you will deal with and who you will avoid, with a few exceptions, like government. You can give your business to folks you respect. You can walk away when you are treated hard. The one thing you CANNOT do is decide what ethical style of business another person is going to run. Advise, yes. Set an example, yes. Encourage, yes. You can even enact or enforce laws to discourage criminal and hard business practices (unions were founded to discourage hard employers), but that only changes the playing field, not the intent of the players. Intentions can only be changed by the intender.

I like to run Fair to Soft Business, with some Charity, except where I have good skill but do not enjoy the work or people, then I run a Hard Business. Now, here's the point: for any style of business, but especially soft/charity folks, it's a slippery slope to encourage someone else to run a harder business and charge more than they already do. She might raise prices out of your budget. She might be treating you as a charity by choice. You often do not know, and can only rarely pry into that. You can still be soft charitable.

The soft/charity way to pay someone who is undercharging you is to pay them their usual fee early and eagerly, then pay a bonus or tip at completion, too. If she's not even that far and she does not have a usual price, then you (soft charity) make her a fair offer first. That favors the negotiation process toward her. (The Hard and Criminal business negotiating tactic is to either make your first offer hugely in your favor, or wait for the adversary to make the first offer.) When she accepts or names a price, accept it yourself so she saves face in an easy dicker, and you can still pay a bonus at the end of the job.

Love, Arth.

Chat relay Herald

Asked:

"Is it a breach of TOS for to relay a SL conversation to you?"

I did a tiny bit of research. I'd already posted some of this. Second Life's Community Standards says, among other things:

"Remotely monitoring conversations in Second Life, posting conversation logs, or sharing conversation logs without the participants' consent are all prohibited."

So Linden Labs prohibits copying conversation to me without consent under this "disclosure" rule. It used to be stricter, then looser, now this. In practice, the Lab does not seek out infractions; they only respond to complaints. Then, if evidence is present, they may issue warnings, suspension or expulsion for repeated malfeasance.

Federal and most state laws do not support this policy: non-confidential information is not required to be held in confidence by either party. Your conversations in SL even if held in Encoded IM, are registered in the SL servers, so federal privacy laws cannot apply. The Lab opted for a stricter policy.

Some Residents post in their profiles: "By this line in my profile, you give me consent to post or share any conversation". While this is an interesting legal ploy, I find it distasteful. Never do I see the complimentary post, allowing anyone to post what they say at will. As a solution, when discussing my own personal matters with other residents, I will ask any recipient (regardless of my seeing that line in their profile or not) to maintain confidentiality for my chat with, "Can you keep this to yourself, please?" thus revoking any permissions they may have assumed for themselves.

The Short Answer: Don't re-post.

For absolute legal safety, share nothing (no IM, no group chat, no world chat, no e-mail).

For any public disclosure or quote, get express consent to distribute.
"May I share your remarks with my advisers?" gives limited permission.
"May I quote you?" gives very broad permission.

To refer to a conversation you do not have permission to quote, alter the text to be non-identified or paraphrased, then you are not posting a log.

Yours, Arth.

Herald Names

This is a mirror post from a Second Life Notecard by Wolwaner Jervil.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Since Viewer 2.3 and change to single login names we have some confusion about what name is used,

Definitions:
Username: The one you use to login with - your unique name in Secondlife. It cannot be changed.
Displayname: The name you can freely choose once a week - it is NOT unique.
Single Username: a Username with "Resident" as lastname (by default since November 2010). It cannot be changed.


Lets assume the following:
(1) Old resident: Wolwaner Jervil with a Display Name of Wolwaner
(2) New Resident: Wolwaner with a Display Name of Wol

All settings only belong to my viewer -
others cannot influence the way I see them!

*********************************************
Old Viewers upt to SL Viewer 2.2 will show:
(1) Wolwaner Jervil - the original login name chosen
(2) Wolwaner Resident - the lastname "Resident" is the default for single login names for compatibility reasons.
This also applies to Radars and all other objects that display names until they are changed to include the single login and display names.

*********************************************
SL Viewer 2.3 has different behavior, depending on the setting used.
Preferences -> General -> View Display Names checked
Preferences -> General -> Usernames checked
(1) is shown as Wolwaner and below we see wolwaner.jervil
(2) is shown as Wol and below we see Wolwaner
IM Windows: we see Displayname (username): (1) Wolwaner (wolwaner.jervil), (2) Wol (wolwaner)

Preferences -> General -> View Display Names unchecked
Preferences -> General -> Usernames checked
(1) is shown as Wolwaner Jervil
(2) is shown as Wolwaner
IM Windows: we see (1) Wolwaner Jervil and (2) Wolwaner
This Version is essentially the same as it is in previous viewers

Preferences -> General -> View Display Names checked
Preferences -> General -> Usernames unchecked
(1) is shown as Wolwaner
(2) is shown as Wol
IM Windows: we see Displayname (username): (1) Wolwaner (wolwaner.jervil), (2) Wol (wolwaner)

Preferences -> General -> View Display Names unchecked
Preferences -> General -> Usernames unchecked
(1) is shown as Wolwaner Jervil
(2) is shown as Wolwaner
IM Windows: we see (1) Wolwaner Jervil and (2) Wolwaner
This Version is essentially the same as it is in previous viewers

So basically we can switch between the Username display like it was in previous Viewers, we can use the display names only - this seems to be the roleplay implementation and we can use both.

NOTE: Only the usernames are kept unique. So when using display names you might be able to see 2 or even more Wolwaners in the future - what a shame to my unique name creation.

Hope this helps to understand the differences - have fun with all kind of names now.

Greetings
Wol
SL Guided Tours

Fixing Teleport

An old friend wrote:

One problem I am sure you can help me to resolve is that I always fail to tp now that I am back in Second Life. Why? A new SL version?

With bad teleports, it is probably not your fault. There are LOTS of reasons why a TP can fail. The thing to do is try many things to fix it, one at a time, and keep trying. Sooner or later, something works.

What To Do

~Try another teleport type: landmark, map, SLURL, invitation, homing or Teleport button? Some types work better than others.

~Do you get a message why you cannot teleport to your destination? examples: "region is full", "region is down", "you are banned", "teleporting would move you farther away",
"teleporting is blocked". These messages tell you that there is something amiss with where you want to go right now.

~Try to teleport to a nearby sim on the map, then travel overland to your destination.

~Check the grid status site to see if TPs are not working properly. If the grid is bad, you just must wait.

~ Try the tips in one of Torley Linden's Video tutorial on Why I Can't Teleport:
~~TP first to an empty Linden sim like Pooley or Kara, then try your target
~~Try teleporting from high flying
~~Scale down your maximum bandwidth to 500 in the Ctrl-P Preferences Menu
~~Remove scripted attachments.
~~Log in to a quiet sim, using the "show start location on Login screen" and choose one

Here are a few other tools:
~Clear Cache fixes a lot of things.
~System Requirements - if your computer or internet connection are not fast enough for your SL viewer, teleports often fail. Either upgrade your system, or try another viewer:
~~ Older but still supported viewersr often take fewer resources, so run better.
~~ Older unsupported SL viewer takes even less resources, but only for technophiles who can take the time to debug connection issues by making simple edits to the code.
~ Some SL Third-Party Viewers handle older computers better than the SL viewer, especially Henri Beauchamp's Cool Viewer.

Technical Help

If you've done the "official fixes", but still cannot teleport, get Linden Labs help:
~ Second Life concierge for estate owners, call Toll-Free (US/Canada) 800.294.1067, or Long-Distance 703.286.6277, and ask for concierge service in resolving your problems.
~ For the rest of us, file a Ticket as an "Account Issue" and "Logon issue", which works for free accounts. There may be better options for paid accounts, but I don't know them ☻

While you are waiting about three days for a Ticket reply, you can get personalized help from other Residents.
~ Contact someone in a Resident Help Network group or an unofficial one like "Mentor Me."
~ Look in the Second Life Answers Forum
~ Check for new ideas in the Second Life Answers Blog.
~ You can ask me, but the above is about all I know on this issue. 0{ :-{D}

Love, Arth.

Heralding a cloud

This is a mirror post of a SL Notecard by Wolwaner Jervil and Valie Eun:

How to make yourself visible instead of being a cloud.

1) Ensure that all inventory items are loaded completely

• open the inventory sidebar
• enter some text in the search line
• wait until all is loaded).

2) Try edit appearance

• Open the outfits sidebar
• press the tool icon on right upper corner
• change something
• save, exit by clicking the green left arrow on the top line.

3) Try Alt-Ctrl-R (Rebake textures) to reload your Textures

4) Use one of the Preset Avatars from the library (Boy next door or girl next door) to REPLACE your outfit. This will reset your avatar to a library default. If becoming visible, get your previous items back on.

5) Open the Develop Menu (Ctrl-Alt-Q), go to Develop --> Avatar --> Character Tests --> Test Female or Test Male

6) Turn on the advanced menu (Ctrl-Alt-D), Select Debug settings.....a small window will open. select "RenderUnloadedAvatar" from the drop down box and then set it to "True" then click the X in the corner to close the window.

This will stop YOU from seeing others as clouds but not stop you from being one to them. They must change their settings for that. With this setting you will be able to see what item is not loading corrctly and you can replace it with another one.

Wolwaner Jervil and Valie Eun - SL Guided Tours

WJ and VE enclosed a note card inside the note card. Here is the English text:

*** SL Guided Tours - we guide you through SecondLife

******************* English *************************
SL Guided Tours offer various services:
A maintained index with description and pictures to many places in SecondLife at http://members.a1.net/secondlife/
A copy of this index is available inworld in at the Web-Tab of the profile of Valie Eun - you can also copy http://members.a1.net/secondlife/profil/index.htm into your own web tab to have the index in your profile available.
We offer courses and help to all new residents - IM for class schedules.

All our services are free - but a tip to Valie Eun or Wolwaner Jervil is always welcome - Thank you.

Join the group SL Guided Tours (also for free) to get tour tips and other information about guided tours, great places and class schedules in SL.

Wolwaner Jervil and Valie Eun (Owners)

Thanks, WJ and VE. I will add another trick:

0) Fully clear your SL Cache

• In Second Life, select Edit > Preferences > Network
• Click "clear cache"
• Travel to a very quiet sim, such as Kara
• Exit and re-enter Second Life
• Wait quietly while your inventory re-loads, as step 1) above.

There are even more tips at the Second Life Wiki Article:
Why Do I Look Like A Particle Cloud?

Love Arth

PS I made a invisible avatar with a surrounding particle cloud and a title that says ...loading. I'd post a photo, but you know what that looks like. 0 {:-{D}

Copybot Herald III

Anti-Copybot for creators, merchants and landholders

See my prior Copybot posts for more general information.

The short answer:

• Put a watermark on your original textures, especially skin, clothing, and hair textures.
• Put your prim-builds in vendor prims or boxes for sale.
• Put your model avatars in a bot-proof viewer.
• If you sell full-perm items, license and register your buyers.
  
• Use inexpensive bot-suppression security, and encourage other land-owners to do so, too.
• File DCMA claims and AR's.
  

The Long answer:

Linden Lab opines that copying viewers (like CopyBot and a dozen others) provide a valuable tool backing up content offline for Residents, so should not be banned outright. Thus, they can be used and abused.

For now, Copybot can only copy:

• Rezzed prims: parameters, textures, floating text and particles.
• Worn avatar: shape and one "baked appearance" of skin and clothing combined.

When Copybot re-creates the a prim texture, it uploads the texture by UUID directly to the prim. The texture itself never goes to the rogue copybotter, it's not in his inventory, and he cannot distribute the texture as a texture. The apparent texture is the same one the creator uploaded. This violation is indistinguishable from a prim that had the texture applied to it in the normal edit screen.

A full-perm texture can be saved to a computer and re-uploaded with a new apparent "creator", with or without a Copybot-like viewer. Most texture sellers specifically prohibit this activity in their sales materials, and register their buyers by having them acknowledge they've seen your terms of use for the sale.

Copybot does not separate clothing layers form skin layers when it "clones" another avatar. It only renders the baked texture to a whole skin when imported inworld. The copybot is listed as the skin creator. Unless a skin has a watermark or identifying design (say, a tiny shape behind the ear), the original maker cannot be certain it was theirs. With that mark there, a DCMA complaint will stick, have the copybotted skin or build destroyed and the copybotter banned.

Emerald Viewer and other viewers have a method of scrambling the baked appearance output so current copybots cannot read it, for now. Use it for your clothing shop model, or leave out nice advertising photos, or have demo versions of your work.

For now, copybot cannot copy:

• Notecards
• Scripts
• Sounds
  
• Animations and poses
  
• Avatar Attachments
• Prim contents

Anyone can copy notecards and scripts with a simple select all with copy/paste wherever you wish, including another SL notecard or LSL script. To prevent this, scripts are almost always "no-mod" (thus not editable) and notecards rarely carry salable information.

Sounds can be captured using mechanima techniques, but will suffer pollution from other inworld noises. I've not seen a way to copy animations or poses from SL to a computer.

Prim contents and attachments can be copybotted when they are rezzed inworld. When worn or still in display or sales prims, they are utterly safe from stealing. If you are a specific target for a rogue copybotter, he might buy your stuff, copybot it and attempt to undercut you. In this case, if you've watermarked your textures, they can be protected as outlined above.


In short, almost all SL content can be captured and re-created bypassing SL permissions parameters now. However, taking extreme or expensive anti-bot measures in your shop areas are unwarranted. The rogue copybotters cannot get at your boxed stuff there.

Scripter SweetNWild Magic offers some interesting security tools on XSteetSL. What impressed me most is this analysis:

Every region gets a lag spurt when an avatar arrives. The lag intensity is variant depending on a number of factors such as attachments an arriving avatar is wearing and texture resolution in their cloths and skins etc. (Such avatars have a very low render cost ARC) Copybots come into regions/sims close to ruth and generate little to no lag spurts. Several seconds later a region will begin to experience lag spikes and heavy drain. This is signature of a copybot downloading, stealing, & pirating objects, textures, skins, etc. from the sim. [However] some avatars who are not bots can generate little lag upon arrival, hence, the system method of detection is about 95-99% accurate.

I've not tested SweetNWild's stuff, but it looks quite good in the security script market.

Odd fact: The oldest copybot programs require two avatars. One avatar is the actual bot that only has a text interface to the user... The other is the controlling avatar who observes and commands the bot thru his console and/or IM or IRC. This video from 2008 shows this at work. If one-avatar copybots don't exist already, they will soon, I bet.

If you hear of or find your stuff out where it shouldn't be, here's instructions and guides on how to get the Lab to stop it for you.:
DCMA filing
Abuse Reports
Incident Results

Love, Arth.

Copybot Herald II

To follow-up on the Copybot Herald post,

What will happen if I use a unauthorized viewer, like Copybot, in Second Life.

Short answer: Nothing, just don't copy Second Life content illegally.

Long Answer:

The official Second Life wiki post is:

the use of CopyBot or any other external application to make unauthorized duplicates within Second Life will be treated as a violation of Section 4.2 of the Second Life Terms of Service and may result in your account(s) being banned from Second Life. If you feel that someone has used CopyBot to make an infringing copy of your content, please file an Abuse Report.

Here, “Copybot” covers many viewers that can bypass the normal content permissions of Second Life content, and not a specific product or viewer. Examples include the rather nasty Patriotic Nigras' ShoopedLife, Cryolife, and the old CopyBot Viewer (video demo here). Other viewers can export builds to your computer, like Second Inventory, Inventory backup, Emerald, Meerkat, and Cool Viewer.

Some of there viewers are approved by the 2010 "Third-Party Viewer" policy, and some are not. Marty Linden writes:

"We know that there are many compliant viewers in use -- beyond the seven that are currently listed on the Third-Party Viewer Directory -- and we will not interrupt their access to Second Life."

Reading between the lines, sooner or later, Linden Lab will interrupt access into SL from viewers that are not compliant. If you try to use an interrupted viewer, you will have connection denied, but could court some trouble. July 2010 SL Third-Party Viewer standards says:

We do not guarantee that Second Life will always be open and accessible to Third-Party Viewers and Developers... If a Third-Party Viewer or your use or distribution of it violates this Policy or any Linden Lab policy, your permission to access Second Life using the Third-Party Viewer shall terminate automatically. You acknowledge and agree that we may require you to stop using or distributing a Third-Party Viewer for accessing Second Life if we determine that there is a violation... We may enforce this Policy in our sole discretion, including but not limited to by removing a Third-Party Viewer from the Viewer Directory and suspending or terminating the Second Life accounts of Developers or users of a Third-Party Viewer.

In practical terms, going with listed and compliant viewers is safe against banning. If your favorite viewer can break Second Life's permission system, be ready to drop it at any time.

Of course, do not make illegal copies yourself, please, no matter what viewer you use.



What will happen if I get botted, stolen, copyright bad stuff in my inventory?

Short answer: if it's only a little, you'll likely lose it. If it's a lot, expect trouble.

Long Answer.

Official Linden Lab® Information:

If a legally sufficient DMCA* notice is submitted, Linden Lab will then remove the identified materials as appropriate. Repeated copyright, trademark, or other intellectual property violations by a Resident may result in their accounts being suspended or terminated.

*DCMA: Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1992 heightened the penalties for copyright infringement on the Internet. In December of 2009, Pink Linden wrote how they enforce Intellectual Property (IP) complaints:

Content that's removed as a result of the IP complaint will be replaced with generic placeholder items as follows:

• Textures, bodyparts, and clothing will be replaced with monochrome items that are the average color of the items they replace.
• Animations will be replaced with a special rotating animation by Blue Linden
• Sounds will be replaced with a new sound recording from Torley Linden
• Objects will be replaced with a plywood ball that displays an IP notice when you click on it.

WHAT TO DO
Don't panic if you receive a single IP complaint about content you got from someone else, ... Residents whose content is repeatedly subject to IP complaints may be suspended.

Don't Panic. But, what if your out-of-control inventory might have lots of questionable items? There are tips in LL's FAQ on the IP procedure: [with a few comments]

1. Think twice about offers that are significantly cheaper than the prevailing market price. If the deal sounds too good to be true, it probably is. [Copiers don't usually offer content in shops.. They sell it avatar-to-avatar or give it away freebie.]
2. Most retail stores do not have live staff to help with your transaction. It may be risky to buy from sellers who ask you to purchase an item by paying them directly.
3. Be wary of Residents who are less than 60 days old, who do not have payment information on file, and who offer lots of content. Creating original content is time consuming! [Look up the content creator using the edit tool to see if the profile looks like a legitimate content creator.]
4. Many Second Life merchants have a presence on the web in addition to their inworld locations. There are also a variety of websites devoted to reporting on or reviewing Second Life content and helping you, the consumer, find great content and reputable merchants. Spend some time on your favorite search engine learning about the content creator before you make a purchase in Second Life.
5. Before finalizing your purchase, be sure that the transaction details are what you expect, and check whether the seller name matches the creator name on the content. If they don't match, consider asking the seller about his or her authorization to sell the content. [Some sales scripts make this hard to check, but you can still look at the owner of the sales prims and the content therein.]
6. Be aware that there may be greater risk in using items from boxes of “freebies” from Residents you do not know. Freebie items may be distributed more casually within Second Life, and the Residents distributing them may not know their origin, who has IP rights in them, or how the IP owners may have allowed or disallowed their use within Second Life. [Even Residents you do know might be unknowingly passing on copied stuff. ]
7. Use extra caution when evaluating items that represent famous real-world brands, celebrities, well-known artistic works, or fictional characters or settings from books, movies, games, or television. These items may potentially violate intellectual property law and Linden Lab policies. For more information, please see our Xstreet SL Branding Guidelines and our Knowledge Base article on Intellectual Property.
8. Review your inventory, and delete content that you do not need and do not know the source of. This may reduce the risk that you inadvertently obtained content that is potentially infringing, and if you don't need the content anyway, some housecleaning may be in order.

It's now official Linden advice: Use inventory control. Get rid of stuff you don't use.

Love, Arth