Category: Geek

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Religion in Second Life

A sincere religious community is developing within the synthetic atmosphere of Second Life.

Leaders of Christian, Jewish and Muslim sites estimate about 1,000 avatars teleport into churches, synagogues or mosques on a regular basis. Hundreds more list themselves with Buddhist, pagan, Wiccan and other groups.

The extracted video, both beautiful and eerie, gives me the willies, and I’m not exactly sure why. On one hand, it’s no more or less odd than any other simulation of the real world that takes place within the game. On the other, religion is all about community, and the religious community in 2L is virtualized – people never meet, and yet they do. Not sure what that means for things like religious involvement in local charities (are there soup kitchens in 2L too?), but I suppose it’s not so different than a drive-in church.

Thinking now of Europe’s great cathedrals and the centuries of hard labor it took to build them. Since Second Life is so heavily construction oriented (everyone’s both an architect and a contractor), will avatars set themselves to toil and construct some of the grandest and most ornate places of worship ever conceived?

Parallel question: Is Second Life a game, or is it something else? I know what Wittgenstein would say, but I’m not sure even the Second Life community itself have an answer to that one. If it is a game, what would that say about engaging religion within it? Perhaps “It’s only a game if you treat it like one.”

Music: Jim White :: Wayfaring Stranger
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I Bought Votes on Digg

Interesting example of how what looks like a nice, friendly democratic socialism on the surface can be easily corrupted with an elixir of money and a non-critical voting populace.

For Wired, Annalee Newitz describes her social experiment in gaming social news ranking site digg.com by purchasing votes through an external service.

I spent several days creating a blog intended to be as random and boring as possible. Built from templates, My Pictures of Crowds exhibits all the worst aspects of blogging. There’s an obsessive theme — photographs of crowds — but no originality and absolutely no analysis. Each entry is simply an illogical, badly punctuated appreciation of a CC-licensed picture taken from Flickr. Also, there are a lot of unnecessary exclamation points!

Digg claims that its algorithms are able to detect patterns reflective of vote purchasing, and that it shouldn’t be possible for popularity to be bought and sold on the open market. But there was more at work here — only some of the diggs received were bought – many more came from non-bought diggers “jumping on the bandwagon” — digging the story just because others were doing so. Newitz was able to goose the site with purchased votes just enough for it to rise through the ratings until it hit the tipping point, at which point critical mass took over and the site became a minor hit.

So, the magic mixture seems to be a just-right blend of pimps and lemmings.

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savenetradio

The Copyright Royalty Board has recently decided to nearly triple the licensing fees for Internet radio sites like Pandora.

The new royalty rates are irrationally high, more than four times what satellite radio pays, and broadcast radio doesn’t pay these at all. Left unchanged, these new royalties will kill every Internet radio site, including Pandora.

savenetradio.org has been created to raise awareness and reverse the tide, before this vital medium is smothered in its crib. Please consider sending email to your congress-critter / reps, encouraging them to stop the madness.

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OpenID: The Missing Link

The OpenID light went on today, after a little setup and testing. I can now go to a blog or CMS or discussion board or other service that supports OpenID and type in “birdhouse.org” – no username, no password. Hit Return, and I’m in. If I’ve never been there before, I get standard user-level permissions. If I’ve been there before and an admin has escalated my privs, I’m in as admin. Securely. How is this possible?

Created an ID for myself at MyOpenID (though you could use any OpenID provider). Doing so gave me an identity URL through that provider. But here’s the dirty little OpenID secret that shouldn’t be a secret: The protocol supports “delegation” — by adding a couple of meta lines to the header of any URL you control (the birdhouse.org homepage, in my case), that URL can stand in as your identity URL. So when I typed “birdhouse.org” into a blog that supported OpenID earlier today, it fetched that URI and read its delegation headers. It then knew my “real” identity URL at the provider. The provider was able to determine that I was already logged into their service and pass “true” back to the blog I was trying to access. If I hadn’t been logged into MyOpenID at the time, I would have been prompted to log in there first, as a middle step in a seamless process.

Once authenticated to the blog, which had the WordPress OpenID plugin installed, a user-level account in that blog was created automatically for me. The admin could then escalate my privileges to admin or whatever, and I’d still only need to type “birdhouse.org” to log in there as admin. And you can’t. So there.

Distributed single sign-on works. Totally elegant.

A while back, Six Apart launched TypeKey, a single sign-on mechanism first made available for Movable Type blogs. TK never really took off, for a couple of reasons. First, most blog owners had already discovered that requiring any kind of sign-on had a chilling effect on blog conversation — any barrier to commenting was too high, and tended to stop casual “stopper-by” conversation dead. Second, a lot of people didn’t want to put all their identity eggs in the Six Apart basket, didn’t feel comfortable having a corporation behind the critical task of identity maintenance. That assumption was bogus – TypeKey was always an open API – but a lot of people didn’t feel comfortable with it. TypeKey isn’t dead, but there aren’t many sites using it.

Lots of identity conversation at SXSW this year, with OpenID emerging as the “final” solution to the distributed identity problem. Ended up not attending that panel, but did get to eat sushi with Kaliya “identity is a commons that no one can own” Hamlin, who (by some accounts) is single-handedly responsible for wrangling the monolithic corporate gargoyles (who all wanted to sell the world on their own proprietary silo identity systems and end up falling into the same hole that swallowed TypeKey), tying them up in a room and making them take mushrooms and hug until they agreed to adopt OpenID. Now even AOL is an OpenID provider.

Free love works!

Thanks Milan

Music: Linton Kwesi Johnson :: Brain Smashing Dub
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Buzzword Enabled

BeOS used to market itself as the “Buzzword Enabled Operating System.”

Got a call from someone recently who was going to be speaking at a public event, wanting to make sure I could set them up with a “Web 2.0-capable laptop.” And so I did. Wasn’t hard, neither.

Music: Nick Drake :: Saturday Sun
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Married on Twitter

Count me among those who don’t “get” the Twitter phenomenon, which seems like it’s bursting at the seams lately. The need/desire to have your cell phone buzzing all day with transient random noise-bursts from everyone you know: “Eating a pretzel.” “Fiddling with printer.” “Feeding the cat.” Suddenly we’re all Japanese school girls? Being on Twitter (sending or receiving, not to mention both) seems like one of the worst things I can imagine doing to my day. I don’t even turn on IM most of the time, can’t deal with the distraction. But I guess meaningful things do happen on the network. From today’s Twitter newsletter:

There was a 9 minute delay between Alex twittering, “Being engaged. Timoni said yes!” and Timoni updating with, “Wearing my ‘I’m engaged!’ pin.”

And that, folks, was Twitter’s jump the shark moment. Whaddya bet.

Thanks Milan

Music: Stereolab :: Our Trinitone Blast
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Karl Rove and the DNS

Want to subpoena some gubmint email? Might be tough if the correspondents are using addresses @gwb43.com (think about that domain name for a second) rather than @whitehouse.gov.


whois gwb43.com

Registrant:
Republican National Committee
310 First Street SE
Washington, DC 20003
US

Domain Name: GWB43.COM

Administrative Contact, Technical Contact:
Republican National Committee dns@RNCHQ.ORG
310 First Street SE
Washington, DC 20003
US
999 999 9999 fax: 999 999 9999

Record expires on 16-Jan-2008.
Record created on 16-Jan-2004.
Database last updated on 4-Apr-2007 11:54:31 EDT.

Domain servers in listed order:

NS1.CHA.SMARTECHCORP.NET
A.NS.TRESPASSERS-W.NET

Who administers TRESPASSERS-W.NET? A little outfit called Coptix. And here’s Karl Rove with a Coptix brochure under his arm. Coptix claims the image has been Photoshopped, the brochure added artificially; Correntwire disagrees.

But let’s not get hung up on the photo. Whether Rove is involved in this or not, the law requires that public business be conducted on a public server. But Karl Rove does about 95% of his email through the RNC-controlled account — which is listed in DNS with a false phone number (illegal). Bypassing government-provided DNS servers gives the RNC the ability to bypass public oversight, to make a quick phone call and change email forwarding options in DNS, or to have email records destroyed, away from taxpayer’s prying eyes. Feeling warm-n-fuzzy yet?

More info.

Thanks Hamrah

Music: Akron/Family :: Franny / You’re Human
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The BeBox Is Back!

Bebox X16 Just when you thought you’d never see an example of computing hardware as enchanting as the BeBox, original hardware designer Joseph Palmer announces its resurrection – this time with 16 processors! And you thought pervasive multithreading on two CPUs was good. While he was at it, Palmer has added 16 (yes, 16) MIDI ports, a RAID 5 drive config, 64GB memory, and two GeekPorts. I think my time with OS X just might be drawing to a close. I hear the Haiku project is thriving these days.

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Web Design Horror Stories

Resurrected from archives of yore: Web Design Horror Stories from circa dot-com-boom times. Mostly a chronicle of painful developer/client interactions, e.g.

early club design client:
“more fonts. use more fonts!”
“ummm… how many do you want?”
“how many do you have?”

Interesting how many designers are balking/laughing at clients’ requesting things deemed impossible or incredibly difficult at the time, which are now easy or commonplace. Seems like a lot of the frustration comes from geeks having already become web-comfortable, with sales and marketing types struggling to replicate print and TV experiences online.

The best one that I ever heard from a potential client: “You know that game Sim City? Can you make my web site do that?”

Music: Mission of Burma :: Is This Where?
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Open Content, Remix Culture and the Sharing Economy

Loose notes from SXSW 2007 panel: Open Content, Remix Culture and the Sharing Economy: Rights, Ownership and Getting Paid

Eric Steuer, Creative Commons
Glenn Otis Brown, YouTube
John Buckman, Magnatune
Laurie Racine, Eyespot and DotSub
Max Schorr, GOOD Magazine

What is the business model of the Creative Commons? How is the rise of open content and alternative licensing models playing out in terms of authors getting paid?

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