Woodbury U. Banned From Second Life, Again

Does Second Life clearly set forth the rules for building and maintaining a campus there? Did Woodbury transgress known and well-publicized rules? Or did Linden Lab swoop down on Woodbury in an arbitrary way that the university could not have predicted? In other words, is this about a TOS violation or freedom of speech?

I will state up front: I am no fan of Linden Lab. I have seen them pull some unethical and even (allegedly) illegal stuff in my day. They currently have two major lawsuits against them, one of them Federal. That stated, in my 5 1/2 years on Second Life, I have seen griefers run over everyone on the system. While I have not personally had dealings with Woodbury, I have seen groups such at the W-Hats, Patriotic Negras and others run wild on the system… and Linden Lab taking far too long to remove such sociopathic nuicances from the board. In each case I have seen, griefers proclaim innocence and oh-so-hurt attitude, and use exaggerated phrases exactly like, “Our brand is being maligned, and our 125-year mission is being trampled on.” LOL 125-year mission? LOL> Poor babies, oh so mistreated!I have no personal experience with Woodbury. But report from associates indicate it was basically a centralized organization of griefers that used a fancy facade to mask their activities.I think Linden Lab is finally… finally sending out a message to their users: We do have a TOS and we are now going to enforce it. Unfortunately, that TOS is one scary document that gives the term “fascism” a modern-day meaning. (From what I hear Linden Lab is re-examining the wording of that document I certainly hope so). Nevertheless, this case drives home one point: groups will beheld responsible for the activities of their members. If they continue to allow known griefers to remain a part of and operate out of their group… they can be held legally responsible. Like it or not, the face of computer law has changed. “Griefing” is no longer just griefing… it is now classified as a “computer hate crime” with very real criminal consequences. Those who regularly engage in such activities may come to find that being banned from Second Life is the least of their worries.

whatever, you guys are so jaded. Lets face it, you all know it and would have to be idiots not to know all the crap Woodbury University did(WU). I like the statements, “some trolling”, I spit out my coffee reading that. 94% of the group was kids trying to over attempt to be funny but failing due to their lack of tact. Not just were they untactful griefers, acted like 12 year olds spitting out meme after meme after meme because of their unoriginality, but they were not very smart. You say that the administrators couldnt do anything if they were around, another statement I laugh at considering all the admins did was promote bringing more into their ranks and bragging about their 4 sims and how “elite” they were.Which has always been fun to prove how inferior they actually were. Here’s the fact, and I’m not supporting WU one bit (bunch of homeless orphans now – stop showing up asking for a home), but Linden Labs won’t stop anything because they can’t. You can ban ips, hardware ban, perma, suspend, but people are too clever over their system and always come back. Linden Lab should just stick to trying to control a monster they created, which cannot be controlled or changed because there’s always people who will do whatever the hell they feel like doing. That’s the problem when you make a GAME that’s open sandbox.

I myself am a (COPYBOTTER)OR would be considered as one because I use a Rogue Viewer. I refuse to use emerald because of the rumors about it,that their team Downloads your XML Files when you save your content to your hard drive, The team collecting Debug Data without concent, and how long profiles and ect. in SL takes to load, my own Problem, and I would not expect Linden Lab to judge any group Based on what I do, because I have never used it to violate Copyright Laws, although in everyones eyes, I would be just another thief, so I dont make my SL name public. I am totally against Copyright Violations though, but Like having all the Extra Features, and perks.Well lets put it this way. Private Estates are sold Privately for a reason. if a person wants to put a Giant Volcano, or a Giant Pen** then they are more than welcome to, it does not violate TOS.Woodbury to me is Great, Yes Even woodbury got attack by a bunch of Griefers, like Mario Spam. When I saw the Owner Tizzy there, she Banned the people who were doing this stuff, and she was a responsible person. She did not premit people to use illegal viewers, and if anyone felt anyone was using an illegal viewer, or commiting Copyright violations, You should have filed an abuse report with Linden Lab.Not everyone has the time in SecondLife to watch and monitor security. I know myself that I monitor griefing all over the grid, the Big events like Thieves Motherload, The hacking OF BloodLines, The Goream meter cheats/Hacks, and many other things. I also file proper abuse reports to Linden Lab, when things are noticed, and leave it in their hands to deal with the issues. I trust Linden Lab myself…People who claim that woodbury were just a bunch of griefers are wrong, I got two griefers personally ejected from woodbury myself with evidence, and Filed abuse reports against them.Question.What if I went on vacation from SecondLife for one month, and I left build on my land, and My group open enrollment with no one else in charge, and trusted everyone to be mature, and then people came onto my estate, and started Hacking, Using my group Tag to commit tos violations, and other things, OR I gave an officer rights and trusted him to monitor things he invited a griefer gave him officer rights, and they griefed big times and they wouldn’t deal with it. Would Linden Lab rip my estate away from me, and Ban me just over other peoples actions? I honestly dont think they would…———-People who claim emerald, Skills Hak, and JCool are such good people, this is not true. they are all working togeter to take over our grid which is why I hope that Emerald doesnt get offically approved. They use onyx, and with emerald on the approved list, any of their developers could make a copybot verson of emerald, and take over the Grid easily, which was also posted on the Herald.http://alphavilleherald.com/2010/04/emerald-viewer-76000-unique-users-could-be-wrong.htmlSimply put you cant trust networked ban systems, or one admin group who has control over everyones region… You have to give those rights to sim owners only, and Make it fair to detect all clients, and kick all clients they wish including emerald or anything other than standard SL. This gives individual Owners Rights, and Does not violate TOS under Slander. ————–For those of you Who are in Anti Copybot Groups, I pity you, Your groups who have been here since 05/06 have been infiltrated by Copybot, and ROgue Viewer users themselfs, People who are very Trustworthy, its just people are too blind to see that these type of witch hunts hurt us all…———–Also I got news for everyone.Unless Linden Lab Fully Restricts logins from Any And all Other viewers other than SecondLife Made by Linden Lab, then People can still easily Spoof Any Client they wish and Login to it, Use fake mac address/sl freedom Easily Spoofed and can get banned as much as they want, Copybot stuff pass it around wont end.———–Thieves Motherload.A Secret no one wants anyone to knowThe Creators who were displaying the stolen content were offered a way to track all the copybotters around the Grid who stole from dozens of merchants.The Creator of Woodshed Designers, RH Engel, and Rebel Hope, who allowed displaying to creators on closed sims, Declined help from someone I cannot name who in 09 had the ability to track who re uploaded, and premissions exploited using a exploit in Linden labs security hole. as a result dozens and dozens of stolen content was given out. Also stroker was contacted and part of this they all refused to help.So even some of our creators in SL are dumb, This witch hunting, accusations without proof, accusing big groups are hurting us all and need to stop. Unlike CDS, we have proof that their system Violates privacy rights, and Bans Unfairly without proper controls, along with working with emerald team, ect.———-I cant say who or how, but I will say this, The rumor on the str33t is that Skills Hak’s invetory was downloaded not too long ago, and his coding for CDS has been leaked…So Yeah i keep an open eye around things, and if it is true I will find out about it.

“Guilt by association” is a logical fallacy. Anyone with basic debate skills or who cares to spend five minutes on Wikipedia (or is simply willing to do a little critical thinking) can figure out that blaming someone for what someone else did is illogical, even cretinous. If anyone reading is unaware of this phenomenon, here’s a URL with some pretty easy-to-understand facts about the association fallacy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_fallacyI was not involved in the meeting between Linden Lab and Woodbury, so I can’t comment on specifics of why the action was taken. I did hear second (or third) hand that LL declined to state any specific reasons or incidents behind the ban. They are usually very tight-lipped about these things. In the old days they said it was to protect abuse reporters from retaliation. I don’t know if this is still a part of their corporate communication, but it’s lamentable that their idea of a justice system is not at all transparent. Transparency provides checks and balances, discourages abuse of that system, and provides visibility into the system that can be used to correct procedural and other oversights. Checks and balances exist in real justice systems because human beings are fallible, and allowing them to watch over other human beings without such safeguards will inevitably lead to miscarriages of justice. If an account is to be banned, there should at least be some presentation of hard evidence and an opportunity to refute that evidence.They did sell Woodbury University several simulators last week, which is curious, if their aim was to ban the university this week.As for Prokofy, most of what she writes is full of logical fallacies; she likes to libel people on her blog and then ban them if they attempt to respond. She is not interested in any kind of honest debate, and most people do not take her positions seriously. Anyone with elementary critical thinking skills can dissect most of what she writes and find repeated examples of this. Her beef with what she refers to as “griefer groups” is that some fraction of the people in those groups sometimes harass her. Most adults understand that people are not responsible for what other people do; yet she would have an entire group banned, even if some of the people (such as myself) do not violate the TOS or CS. And, really, if you can be banned without breaking the TOS or CS, then why do these documents exist? People read them because they want to know what is expected of them. We read them in good faith. They should be presented to us in the same spirit.Like a chimpanzee or a junior high student, she is unable to understand that it isn’t everyone’s responsibility to take on her causes and hate her enemies. She claims that it is the responsibility of people such as myself to chastise and attempt to control members of groups we are in. In fact, it is not. I agreed to the TOS and CS for myself when I signed up. I didn’t agree to it on anyone else’s behalf, nor to be bound to the consequences for actions over which I have no control. I didn’t agree to be anyone’s surrogate father, and I didn’t agree to be a pretend policeman on the internet either. Nowhere in the provisions I agreed to does it state that I must be the keeper of other adults, who are presumably on the same footing as myself when it comes to the TOS/CS, and capable of making their own decisions. If Prokofy is griefed by someone who happens to be in the same group I am, that is not my problem. That is between her, the griefer, and the Lab. She has clearly defined procedures to follow if and when this happens. She can mute, kick, ban, file an AR, use land controls, etc. Linden Lab put all of these facilities at our disposal so that we could handle these situations.Imagine the case of someone in Prokofy’s rental group coming onto my land and rezzing a bunch of shouting prim litter. I do have to deal with that from time to time, being next to a sandbox. If the person doing it was in her group, should I tell her to police this person for me? What a perfectly absurd idea. The correct response is to disable object entry, ban the person, return their stuff, and optionally file an AR. Prokofy doesn’t exert mind control over her group members. She is not responsible for their actions. Presumably she doesn’t coerce them into griefing. So why would she be the person I would go to for satisfaction? Linden Lab is the party who has CONTROL. Without CONTROL, there can be no RESPONSIBILITY. The griefer has control over his or her actions, and Linden Lab has control over his or her account. Prokofy has control over neither. So, again, why would I go to her? And if someone who happens to be in the same group I am bothers her, why would she come to me about it?Take a look at that Wikipedia article. There’s a Venn diagram explaining how stupid the association fallacy is. Are we beginning to see the picture, class? Do I need to explain McCarthyism to everyone? Shall I screen Dr. Strangelove and fast forward to the part where Ripper is talking about preserving our “precious bodily fluids” to drive the point home?As for the JLU/Green Lantern Corps, they violate the TOS on a daily basis, specifically the following sections, and possibly others that I haven’t heard about yet:3.2 – You agree to use an Account Name in Second Life that is not misleading, offensive or infringing. [...] (Example: Kalel Venkman, one of the group leaders – “Kal El” is a name from the Superman universe which he does not have a legal right to use.)4.4 – [...] Intellectual property infringement on the Service is a violation of this Terms of Service, and you agree not to engage in such infringement. (Example: “Green Lantern”, Green Lantern-related art, Superman costumes, and so on, none of which have been properly licensed.)The idea that SL requires protection from people who disregard the TOS whenever it suits them is laughable. They’re like the fingermen in V For Vendetta, supposedly here “for our protection,” but in fact breaking the law CONSTANTLY. One of these groups even runs a private wiki, where they gather intelligence – including really creepy stuff like names, telephone numbers, and street addresses – and distribute it to other group members. What legitimate use they can have for collecting, storing, and distributing such information is beyond me.

Yet again I am accused of being guilty, when I have not violated the TOS or the CS. I haven’t incited anyone else to do so either. Yet again the allegation of “victory dancing” is presented, yet no evidence is given. Yet again we see this tired rant about how it’s my responsibility to police other people in Second Life, but the critical link – the logical connection between myself and the activities of others over whom I have no control – is never explained. Of course, it can’t be explained, because figments of the imagination and half-thought thoughts do not stand up to the cold, indifferent light of critical thinking.If a group is created specifically to grief, and it griefs, then the path is clear: The griefing is against the TOS/CS and whoever engages in it risks losing their accounts. This is already handled as best it can be, short of reinstating payment verification for all accounts, by what we all agreed to. If someone griefs, and they get ARed, the Lindens can look through the simulator and IM logs to collect evidence, and the offending avatars are sanctioned. This is very simple. It isn’t susceptible to half-informed guesses and fabrications and other nonsense, because it relies only on evidence. The Lindens aren’t saying, “You’re suspended for a week because it was personally vouchsafed to me by supernatural powers that you’re a griefer,” or “I have a strong suspicion that you’re a griefer.” They’re saying, “You’re suspended for a week because someone sent in an AR about you calling them the N-word, and when we inspected the server logs, we found it was true.”It’s cut and dry.Let’s look at these words next: “When you reach a threshold in a group where all the active people are going around on raids and harassing others”ALL the active people? Really? You know who all the active users are and you can account for their whereabouts and show us some evidence that every last one of them has violated the TOS/CS? Where is your evidence? What hard data can we review to determine whether your statements are factual? How do we know you aren’t making it all up?I am not hiding behind any damn thing. I don’t need to. Hiding behind things (i.e. walls of text) is your modus operandi, not mine.Now let’s move on to the “oppresion of people for their views.” This is exactly what you are guilty of. You attempted to denounce W-Hat as a group, tarring all with the same brush, and when I pointed out that there were plenty of people in the group who didn’t break LL’s rules, you knew that your original argument had been invalidated. You knew that you had spoken before you had all the facts. What you should have done is retracted that statement, but you didn’t. You then attempted to invent an absurd fiction that would paint me and others as being somehow responsible for what other people did of their own accord, which was just as lame and easy to invalidate as the first.I’m not smug about not being banned. What is there to be smug about? You don’t get a cookie for not breaking the rules.Let’s look at another gem:“The Woodbury saga in SL is definitely not one of “guilt by association”. Huns Valen is one of the guilty and associated …”…and then…“Don’t want to suffer guilt by association? Don’t associate with the guilty.”You can’t just play with words when you don’t like the definitions and facts behind them. You have attempted to paint a scenario which is backed by the association fallacy. You have portrayed me as being a griefer, when I do not grief. You have portrayed me as being a “victory dancer,” whatever that means, without presenting the slightest evidence in support of that. You have claimed that I “orchestrate” griefing, which is patently false. All you have to go on is this intuition that I am somehow the same as the people who harass you, and all of your poorly conceived rationalizations are an attempt to fabricate some structure in which this intuition could be plausible. You aren’t attempting to arrive at the truth, but to win an argument, truth be damned. You’re in this to try to convince people with poor critical thinking skills that you are right. You accuse others of dishonesty, when your entire position is based on guesses and prevarication.Now, let’s see to this – “No one is “libeled” on my blog [...] Huns Valen continues to plead innocence and disinform about my rules by claiming he is falsely banned. Yet he knows and I know full well that he orchestrates and sustains the griefing culture of SL and always has, taking care not to be caught.”According to Wikipedia, this is the definition of libel: “libel [...] is the communication of a statement that makes a claim, expressly stated or implied to be factual, that may give an individual, business, product, group, government, or nation a negative image. It is usually, but not always, a requirement that this claim be false and that the publication is communicated to someone other than the person defamed (the claimant).”Calling me a griefer and accusing me of orchestrating griefing EASILY meets this definition. Go ahead and try to word salad your way out of this one. I look forward to watching you try.Finally, “That Huns has implied all this time that he is part of the “non-griefing” part of W-hat, but that he should be able to find out anyway what was said at the Woodbury-Lab meeting says it all, doesn’t it?!”Please enlighten us as to what that “says.” Be very specific.

“Did Woodbury transgress known and well-publicized rules? Or did Linden Lab swoop down on Woodbury in an arbitrary way that the university could not have predicted? In other words, is this about a TOS violation or freedom of speech?”Linden Lab is busy reinventing itself as a corporate-friendly provider of business meeting space and “Sims” style suburban roleplay–their recent ads show happy white hetero sexual couples building dream-homes.The company has consistently marginalized academia by, most recently, effectively laying off their leading advocate to higher ed, Pathfinder Linden, by removing his position in the company.The Lab has also marginalized creatives by implementing a new viewer technology that makes user-generated content more difficult.Woodbury had a right to do what they pleased on their land as long as they did not violate the company’s Terms of Service.That Linden Lab relies for enforcement on a band of self-proclaimed superhero-avatars is pitiful, and it reflects the end of a promising and creative virtual world as we all knew and enjoyed it. If Woodbury students used racist names and engaged in griefing, then they–not the university–should be punished according to Linden Lab’s established abuse-reporting procedure.I hope the Woodbury admins will look to Open Sim and host their own servers, with the right to back up IP and allow students creative freedom.

@johntoradze, that “it’s not real so it doesn’t matter” attitude is exactly what has led to this problem in the first place. If someone carried out a concerted, sustained bullying attack on you via Facebook, web sites, Twitter, etc. would you say “get a real life”? Perhaps you are confused by the appearance of SL into thinking it’s a video game and less real than these things. The people administering the “Woodbury” sims are guilty of a sustained bullying compaign that I have witnessed with my own eyes, and which is no less real and no more forgiveable just because it happened in Second Life.

I quote: “Mr. Clift said he felt that allowing a diverse group of participants and setting up an open facility was the best fit for the university’s mission. … “Woodbury is sick of this,” he said, referring to the ban. “Our brand is being maligned, and our 125-year mission is being trampled on.””This “diverse group” included a bunch of lulz-motivated juveniles who have been waging a sustained bullying campaign. If Clift is worried about the Woodbury brand he should be defending against those people.@urspider, it would be fantastic if the Woodbury group were confined to their own OpenSim where they could do whatever they liked and express themselves artistically. There was some really good artwork in the Soviet Woodbury sim. However, a significant number of those same people wouldn’t go for it, because they wouldn’t have any prey to get their lulz from.

The arguments to the effect that “this is all virtual” and “it’s pixels, not reality” and “get a life” are really irrelevant these days when everyone is essentially online, all the time, and deeply affected by the onlife life. I think the authors of these posts aren’t grasping what is changing about the reality of our human life. Most of us are spending most of our waking hours actually online. We are either sitting at a computer terminal at work, going around with a laptop, or using an i-phone to go online to get email. At night, we come home and sit on the computer some more, playing games, checking stocks, reading blogs. All day long, we are immersed, peering at screens, big or small, and entirely wrapped up in the virtual world of online life that doesn’t have to be called “Second Life” to be virtual, and not “real”. Reality is increasingly a construct that includes virtualization of all types. For a person immersed in a debate on an online forum about an online blog or news story sitting at their computer to tell another person who uses virtual worlds to “go get a life” is increasingly an absurdity. People who make an avatar and go in a constructed virtual world like Second Life are perhaps better able to see how the world of email and blogs and online news and even your Skype video calls in which you send pictures and attached documents are all taking place in a virtual space, the Metaverse which isn’t the same as “meat-world” and is governed by different rules.The rules of this virtual space, this Metaverse, are sadly not the same as real life in the United States of America. Because this Metaverse is constructed of various corporations, big and small, and various Gov 2.0 projects that have merely copied the terms of services of these Silicon Valley corporations. In this virtuality, that more often follows the code of a MMORPG medieval society and not liberal modernism, the First Amendment doesn’t apply; due process doesn’t apply; checks and balances don’t apply; separation of powers don’t apply. The unconscionable corporate TOS governs every aspect of your speech and activities and being online, with no recourse; you are little different than a pre-Magna Carta medieval citizen.We have so valued the unfettered Internet as a tool to access pictures and documents and engage in commerce and socializing that we forget that once we all live here in 3-D, and once we all spend our time here, this absolute anarchy, coupled with brutal medieval oppression, also means unfreedom — lack of free speech due to TOS rules; lack of due process because companies aren’t governments; lack of checks and balances because the entire sector’s makers and coders continue to believe they live within a special magic circle exempt from civlizational norms, where they can propagate ideologies like “the liberation” of all content under Stillmanite free and opensource software values yet lock down free speech under politically-correct leftist codes.So I got news for you: this will be changing. Today, it seems unthinkable that a private corporation could be commanded to make First Amendment standards apply, and be prevented from expelling and banning someone who consistently reported on their malfeasance or their favouritism or their corruption. Over time, this will change, as both government and the private sector come to grips with the fact that the town hall, the public commons, the public space for deliberation are all online. Today, it seems unthinkable that guerilla new-media “artists” — essentially con men with “radical chic” notions — who endlessly claim First Amendment entitlements for themselves (and bully those who practice that right on reporting on *their* crimes) would ever be forced to stand down with that argument in a liberal society once you find that in fact, under criminal code notions, those groups are conspiracies to commit criminal offenses.While some find it inappropriate to compare griefers to terrorists, I think it’s a perfectly apt comparison in *reasoning by analogy* and the study of virtual worlds and griefing creates a perfect petri dish to really find the dynamic springs of what makes terrorism work and how a liberal society can prevent and counter it. The point is not that it exaggerates griefers to the level of fanatical killers who kill real people in real life, or somehow lessons the seriousness of victims of real terrorism to understand that the griefers’ nihilist and cynical *argumentations* and their *methods* and their *ideologies* are similar.For example, everyone is familiar with the role of the ideological mullah in terrorist groups, perhaps some aged and wise and even half blind man who himself isn’t strapping on the suicide belt or isn’t himself laying the bomb but who serves as the spiritual guide, the inspiration, the mentor, the reinforcer, the rewards-giver in a system of terrorism. That mullah is motivated not by cynicism but by deep fanaticism and belief in the justice of his religious views; he perceives harm to his tribe and justifies violence to everyone outside it as necessitated by that belief. Everyone is also familiar with the role of the urban and sophisticated radical leftwing columnist — so different from that conservative mullah! — who justifies jihad, saying that terrorists come from poor childhoods or countries mired in poverty or who suffered from torture — in this case, too, there is a fanatacism, but also often a cynical defiance — how dare anyone talk about Hamas rockets when they have to talk about Palestinian children suffering from malnutrition, etc.And in the same way, Second Life has such figures who both have a fanatical belief in the “no serious business” anarchy of the Internet, to the point that they will violent disrupt and terrorize anyone with a different belief about how the Internet can be used seriously for business and education, and who also devise, applaud, reward, inspire, sustain griefing, but who constantly beg off with a “guilt by association” “get out of jail free” card if they are not found actually pulling the trigger on a self-replicating prim. They may merely be seen victory-dancing later with the griefers revelling maliciously in causing the platform providers annoyance and work and bug-fixing yet again.Huns Valen is welcome to keep spinning his line here about lack of association, although he remains as a member, spiritual guide, applauder, apologizer and sustainer of all these groups, actively participating in keeping these constantly recruiting groups alive. He knows it; we all know it.Huns Valen indeed associates with the guilt; indeed as a famous oldbie, the inventor of an aircraft in a world where everyone can fly anyway, he is the spirit behind these associations of the guilty. Cunning ability to keep one’s fingerprints off criminal acts doesn’t mean one enjoys a moral pass or even a legal pass. Huns knows full well that hundreds of people — literally hundreds of accounts — have committed the most outrageous acts in the groups where he remains steadfastly as a member, for years, chuckling maliciously the whole time. Anyone with morality and a conscience would have long ago departed from organizations that cause other people such harm. Any normal civilized person who still felt some loyalty to his abusive group would still be able to separate himself from the tribe long enough to say “I don’t do that, but what they did is wrong and we should disassociate from them.” Yet he and his group members never do that; they never expel the “few bad eggs” but only recruit new ones; they never condemn bad acts, but ONLY condemn “guilt by association” hoisting liberals by their own petard — they do this because it is tribal politics, and in tribal politics, you do not show disloyalty to the tribe — ever. The modern version of this is even more sinister — the online tribe, itself illiberal and accepting illiberal acts in its midst — will then try to manipulate various values of liberalism, like “no guilt by association” or “art” to keep writing t
hemselves a moral blank check.Huns knows that if he literalizes and Fiskes on liberal values like “no guilt by association” or attempts to find literalist and legalistic notions of “libel,” that he can bat away most easily guilt-trip-wired liberals. He also is typical of Internet forums debaters who love to invoke the chilling threat of “libel,” even though in the U.S., the threshold is very high, where first of all, you could plead a truth defense, applicable here; secondly, you’ve have to show that your statement was “malicious” i.e. that you deliberately told an untruth to harm, and that it was not your own genuine personal belief, and thirdly you’d have to show that material damages was caused not to an avatar, but a RL person in real life. So Huns begins by pleading a liberal value of “no guilt by association” on due process grounds; he ends by invoking an illiberal notion of “libel” rooted in ancient patriarchic norms of “honour” and “respect”.That problem of facing down the enemies of the open society as they try to use the open society’s values, whether “free speech” or “libel” or “privacy” or “due process” in fact to instill radical illiberalism is exactly the problem that the West, particularly the EU and the United States, face with the ideologues of terror, and the architects of radical left-wing causes that develop theories of justifying violence like “defensive jihad”. This is the problem that real life universities and the U.S. government faced, for example, in first denying a visa to controversial academic Tariq Ramadan, then approving a visa for him. These debates aren’t trivial at all in academia at large or any specific university; the problem of griefers versus civilization can be seen at the University of California at Irvine when the Israeli ambassador was heckled deliberately in organized fashion by a radical Muslim student’s organization to the point that the university called police to escort them away. The University of Irvine didn’t have a better solution than the Lindens — they can try to create a free platform, but when the enemies of freedom disrupt it, they are forced to use unfree methods to keep the free platform free. Please tell me if you have a better idea — and that better idea better not involve never inviting the Israeli ambassador to your college.These problems of how to maintain free speech and liberal values fitting for a university are studied in the round, in 3-D, daily, constantly in Second Life which is both a simulation and versimilitude of real life, and a place where people construct alternatives to real life. Instead of ridiculing and dismissing this fascinating media experience with 1.5 million people participating in it from all over the world, every university and think tank and person intersted in the intellectual life of our time should be coming to this platform and helping to shape it. They must. Because we will increasingly be at the mercy of virtuality as it overtakes every aspect of our lives, not only socializing or entertainment but political activism, medical records, reputations. All of these policies for online life now are in the hands of geeks, coders, technological people with very decided ideologies of their own that feel they are not subject to any debate. This is the “Two Cultures” debate of the 1950s all over again, with the science now the over-exaggerated force over the humanities.Second Life has pre-anticipated time and again all the major controversies involving social media that postdated its emergence — privacy, civil rights, intellectual property, governance. These are all worth discussing not only in their own terms, but in the simulation predicting a lot of them and addressing a lot of them in the only way it can improvise on the fly.Linden Lab has not “marginalized” academia by laying off a Linden who had been there for many years who himself was not an academic or educator per se, but an IT guy who worked at Johns Hopkins, who, like many other geeks today in our society, are trying to transform their knowledge of technicalities of the Internet into control of every field of human knowledge that depends on IT. There are hundreds of universities functioning perfectly happy in SL without Pathfinder, as they functioned perfectly fine without him even when he was there, as they didn’t bother to queue up to get to his attention, but just did their thing or found other Lindens. Nor is Linden Lab antithetical to academia merely because they defended their trade mark, which they had provided ample prior notification about, in urging an educators’ online database to stop using the term “SL” in their name. The twin issues of non-specialist IT guys running things and copyright theft are two issues straight out of the geek religious ideology that has tried to remain hegemonic on the Internet and in online culture but which is now rightfully getting some opposition. These issues aren’t peculiar to Linden Lab alone; they are everybody’s issues and especially the university’s.Visionaries like Dr. James Bower explain that the university is disintegrating under the impact of online media and the disruption of traditional education by the intrusive online virtuality of the Internet and its news and games and widgets, and that ultimately it will have to be built anew — “the scalability of the Internet will destroy universities”(http://bit.ly/b1goEW). We aren’t *required* to accept his Constructivist or the more radical Connectivist views on “embracing the inevitability” of the destruction of the news and music and other content industries nor be doomed to marginalization as mislabelled “Luddites” if we wish to bring the liberal values of property and individual rights online, refusing to be collectivized as other people were in the 20th centuries’ totalitarianisms.

Also, I’d just like to comment that it’s my birthday today and this was a lovely birthday present to wake up to. :)

The New Terms OF Service doesnt come in effect till april 30th.Linden Lab may have the right under the Terms OF Service to ban anyone they wish, However its their reputations on the Line, my reputation that will end up destroying SL. I am a big threat to Linden Lab myself, and they cant lock out my hardware info because I provide them false info every login.So Linden Lab wants to ban my account, I will personally make sure Linden Lab goes down, using any and every legal methods I Can, including how they break the law in their game, Virtual Gambling with Zyngo, Real Life copyrights being broken daily, and hide behind the TOS we are not responsible for content, please file a DMCA report on it which is completely insane when there is much stolen real life intellectual property.I knew tizzy, and she was a nice person, I know that this person did not commit any type of copyright infrigments, or break the TOS themselfs, or knowingly allow other people to. This person Tizzy banned people who breaking the TOS from woodbury many times such as simulator crashing, But how is she suppose to know exactly who is using an illegal client on their region ect. That is Linden Labs responsibility. I was there personally, and I didn’t see shit. I have seen a lot of stuff outside of woodbury though.Not all clients are detectable as a Copybot Viewer, in fact you can easily spoof MAC Addresses, Frame someone for commiting theft who really did nothing at all. You can also put any client spoofed as logon looks just as real, and LL cant really tell the difference.As for the chronicle Posting this, Its journalism, Freedom OF Speech Yo, Freedom OF Infromation, they should have, because everyone deserves the right to information, and to know the real truths. Woodbury was a nice fun place while it was around for me.The whole Term Soviet Woodbury was for fun, The nazi stuff from Command and Conquer red alert 2, or Above it was just for fun, and laughing at nothing more, maybe roleplaying too. And it was their own sim and right to do so, unless Linden Lab claims we cant have any privacy now?

Got an audience for once, Huns, on the website of a *real* publication instead of Second Citizen? Is that why you’re posturing and raging and pretending to be filled with righteous indignation? There’s a special lameness in selling airplanes in a world where everyone can fly, but Philip Linden loved you like a son because it was a cool machine that had to use the physics properties of the world he made, so — understood. Blessed for life!Let’s focus on the basics here of what someone in *good* faith (that would not be you!), faced with a group that is documented by residents and by Lindens for consistently violating the TOS and the Community Standards, would do. They would *concede* that yes, this group was mainly made up of griefers who really did cause harm and really were caught. Servers don’t lie. Servers show who rezzed the script. Servers also show who used the third-party rogue viewer to god-mode stalk people and harass them. What does it mean to go on continuing to refuse to denounce the actions of such a group? Where hundreds of people have been banned for violations? Where the day-old alts pop up and get killed with enormous frequency? Where they are deliberately invited in to an invitation-only group? Seeing the documented story of such a group, what possible reason would someone wish to stay in such a group unless they supported it spiritually, intellectually, morally, both for cultural and for political reasons?Never in your entire Second Life have you ever, ever condemned griefing or acknowledged that these friends of yours harm others. You feign to not notice. You pretend not to see. You *lie*. That’s all. *You lie*. Everyone knows that this grief groups all over the grid, and has made a particular fetish of griefing my sims in Ravenglass Rentals. Hundreds of tenants have witnessed this, documented it, and filed reports on it in four years. And yet *you lie*.One doesn’t need to be a geek or use Excel spread sheets. A routine “visitor tracker” put up on my land next to the Woodbury “campus” in Ravenglass tells the story — dozens and dozens of permabanned people, likely 25 percent or more of a list of 200 people taking in slices of time by the script; dozens of day-olds who are gone as soon as you even try to plug them into the search box, the Lindens banned them from somewhere else where they griefed; dozens and dozens of mains who have been caught doing everything from obviously rezzing self replicators, nuisance signs, obscene textures, etc. to heckling and disrupting at events or killing chickens. People who themselves have had little vacations for 3-7-15 days for this or that minor offense, escalating sometimes to permabans (Hazim Gazov, Tizzers Foxchase). Anyone with eyes in their head can see it, merely by attending a few events and visiting a few sims. Hundreds of times, this has been documented.And yet you claim it doesn’t go on. You haven’t seen it. You don’t believe it. *You lie*.I don’t have to be *in* these groups; I merely have to *live next door to them*. You don’t. I don’t know where you hang out. Baku? where they all IM me, to let me know the deep connection between W-hat and btards and PNs and Woodbury, like the ultimate Digital Woodburyhat, eh? Furthermore, at least a half dozen groups I’ve counted have been formed by these people specifically to grief me, named with my name, or mentioning killing my chickens, or being my fan, or some other meme, with my RL picture, and with ridiculing avatars and puppets of my RL self. Many people have seen this, and you’re going to pretend you don’t know this, and never saw it celebrated in the Herald? You’re going to pretend that isn’t griefing? *You lie*.You have no case of “libel” against me because — again, *you lie*. We all saw the screenshot of you victory dancing with the grieftards some years ago. We can now all easily see your apologia for them in really twisted and sinister ways in the old forums. You don’t have to put your finger prints on every Mario particle attack and goatse deluge of a sim to be actively instigating these acts because *you remain in the groups, you continue to associate with these people, you continue to cover for them, you continue to deny they do what they do which is well documented, you continue to spout self-justifying word salad. *You lie*.It’s good for someone like you who bullies on the forums of the small pond of SL for so many years to face other normal people who question your absurd literalism; your extreme lawfare on copyright when it comes to your enemies, even as you coddle a group routinely copying content — there are witnesses who have Woodbury U come to Ravenglass and copy my avatar and all his accessories as they fly around. The facts finally catch up with those who keep lying, it’s only a matter of time.

Wow, the first and second paragraphs are ad hominem attacks. What a surprise. You’ve also failed to address the point that everything in SL is purely optional, and that buying pretend airplanes and buying pretend houses are not substantially different activities. I mean, really, why would you even bring this up? It’s a silly argument and irrelevant to the topic at hand.3rd paragraph, you assume all sorts of things that are not in evidence. The group is “mainly” made up of griefers? Prove it. Show me some hard data. If it was partially griefers and partially people who didn’t grief, would you still ban the non-griefers, and if so, how would this be justified under the TOS/CS?4th paragraph, you continue to assume things that are not in evidence. Let’s take a look at this question: “Seeing the documented story of such a group, what possible reason would someone wish to stay in such a group unless they supported it spiritually, intellectually, morally, both for cultural and for political reasons?” – Well first, you haven’t documented it. All you’ve presented is your opinion, which is not the same as evidence. Second, I don’t need to justify to you or anyone else why I belong to any group. Even if I approved of griefing, I do have freedom of conscience and freedom of association. It is not my job to hate your enemies and take on your causes. It is not my job to wag my finger at people who break the rules.“Never in your entire Second Life have you ever, ever condemned griefing” – Actually, yes, I have. I criticized the Griefer Manifesto by Grimmy Moonflower, and he put a bounty on me for it.“You *lie*. That’s all. *You lie*. Everyone knows that this grief groups all over the grid, and has made a particular fetish of griefing my sims in Ravenglass Rentals. Hundreds of tenants have witnessed this, documented it, and filed reports on it in four years. And yet *you lie*.” – What “everyone knows” is rather debatable, again an example of the argumentum ad populum. What people do out of my sight, and what abuse reports your tenants file, are of no concern to me. I don’t follow these people around and take notes about where they are and what they’re doing. I see no reason why I should take time out of my SL activities to run my own private KGB – not on your account, and not on anyone else’s, either.“And yet you claim it doesn’t go on. You haven’t seen it. You don’t believe it. *You lie*.” – You have just made a liar of yourself. I have never, ever claimed that no one in the WU group griefs you or anyone else.“Furthermore, at least a half dozen groups I’ve counted have been formed by these people specifically to grief me, named with my name, or mentioning killing my chickens, or being my fan, or some other meme, with my RL picture, and with ridiculing avatars and puppets of my RL self. Many people have seen this, and you’re going to pretend you don’t know this, and never saw it celebrated in the Herald? You’re going to pretend that isn’t griefing? *You lie*.” – Actually, I have seen the hand puppet of you. I wouldn’t be surprised if people form groups to ridicule you, and if you feel like ARing the creators, that’s your business. However, it isn’t any skin off my back if someone makes fun of you. What reason have I to care? You’ve been venting your spleen at me for years, and I don’t feel inclined to empathize with you.“We all saw the screenshot of you victory dancing with the grieftards some years ago.” – Really? Where is it?“We“ – We who?“can now all easily see your apologia for them in really twisted and sinister ways in the old forums.” – Link me to something twisted and sinister I said in the old forums.“You don’t have to put your finger prints on every Mario particle attack and goatse deluge of a sim to be actively instigating these acts because *you remain in the groups, you continue to associate with these people,” – Being in a group with someone doesn’t imply approval of that person’s activities. I’m sure there are creationists, neocons, and other socially poisonous people in some of the groups I belong to. I certainly don’t lose any sleep over that.“you continue to cover for them, you continue to deny they do what they do which is well documented, you continue to spout self-justifying word salad.” – I am not covering for anyone. If a group member gets banned for breaking the rules, that’s their problem. You say that what “they” do is well documented, but who do you mean by “they?” The particular people you don’t like, or everyone in the group, even people who never bother you? And where is the documentation? I’m not bullying anyone on the forums. How absurd. I’m not waging “lawfare” and I have no idea why you would even mention copyright. You want to talk about being a pain on the forums? You were so bad that LL banned you from even posting on the main forums at all.“*You lie*.” – You libel. You make written claims, expressly stated or implied as factual, that may may give individuals and groups a negative image.For your edification, I have spent no less than 45 seconds finding further definitions of libel, all of which fit your behavior. Retrieved 4/22 from http://www.answers.com/main/ntquery?s=libel&gwp=13 :__________________________a. A false publication, as in writing, print, signs, or pictures, that damages a person’s reputation.b. The act of presenting such material to the public.Tort consisting of a false, malicious, unprivileged publication aiming to defame a living person or to mar the memory of one dead. Printed or written material, signs or pictures that tend to expose a person to public scorn, hatred, contempt or ridicule may be considered libelous.(noun) The expression of injurious, malicious statements about someone: aspersion, calumniation, calumny, character assassination, defamation, denigration, detraction, scandal, slander, traducement, vilification.(verb) To make defamatory statements about: asperse, backbite, calumniate, defame, malign, slander, slur, tear down, traduce, vilify. Idioms: cast aspersions on.1. that which is written and published in order to injure the character of another by ridicule or contempt. 2. defamation expressed by print, writing, pictures, or signs.__________________________This is precisely what you do.

Thank you to everyone who wrote something on this page. I have been wondering whether I should learn more about Second Life, and was on the fence because I heard equal parts “cutting edge” and “yesterday’s news”.But after reading all this, I’m off the fence. No way in hell I’m going on SL.

The public stance of Woodbury has always been “It is an open enrollment group – therefore we cannot take responsibility for what the members do”. So when people join Woodbury and publicly greif and purposely make racist avatars, absolutley no one at Woodbury (in SL or real life) will apoligize or take responsibility. Just how long did you feel that “We have no control over anything” was going to remain an acceptable policy anywhere on the planet or on the internet?Woodbury made it quite clear that they would make no changes to their policies. It would remain open enrollment, the “do whatever you want” charter would remain in place (seeing the lynched avatars at the Woodbury Campus made that clear) and Woodbury was not responsible for anything.It is refreshing to see that while Woodbury was negotiating to purchase more sims that they would not be responsible for – someone at Linden Lab said “You have to be kidding” and pulled the nonsense plug and flushed it all away.

Oh yeah forgot to mention Soviet Woodbury Takes responsibility for their members, and their estates, only within their jurisdiction.Anything that happens from outside of their jurisdiction in a sandbox, or Linden Lab territory, is not their responsibility, or in another privately owned estate. And It falls within the owners/Linden Lab.If People Have irrefutable evidence against a member, like a video proving actual copybotting, or Intellectual property violations, and presented to them in a way good respectful manor, and proper abuse reports taken down, I am quite sure they will do something. But dont expect a snapshot that doesn’t prove anything to do any good.I fully support Woodbury

I don’t see any point in attempting to debate Huns Valen here, as he simply makes the same redundant and discredited arguments he’s made for years. Anybody who is not in on the goon conspiracy knows what he’s about. Anyone looking at his profile in SL sees that his favourite quote, pasted on his first-life profile, is a silly dialogue with one of the most notorious griefers, Crawlingin Meskin, who is now among the permabanned — to mention one of the many episodes of winks and nods he engages in. I think this is an article that explains some of the patterns of behaviour of these groups on MMORPGs, and how they always dissemble and pretend to be innocent. Possibly it’s not worth arguing with them on the merits, as they will always continue to lie, but ultimately, you are trying to speak to those on the fence — and I see somebody fell off their fence already : )http://brokentoys.org/2010/04/22/the-strange-and-terrible-saga-of-the-soviet-commuter-college/

Woodbury in no way deserves the treatment it is getting. First, ignore all the defamatory BS from Prokofy and her drones. She’s a diagnosed paranoid schitzophrenic who sees leninist bolshevik conspiracies in anything and everything that doesn’t agree with her kooky world view or which she thinks is impeding her ability to make more e-money. Imagine a rabid Sarah Palin on crack.Secondly, Woodbury was taken down the first time not for supporting griefing, but for *ceasing* to support greifing. The JLU and their friends used alts in griefer groups to raid the grid so that the public would see the JLU as necessary for their security. They attacked my sims in that manner. The JLU tried to blackmail Tizzers Foxchase into spying on griefers for them, which was rejected. Tizzers came to me for help and agreed to work with me to help eliminate griefing in SL by ending the “war on e-terrorism” approach that the JLU used, which was intentionally counterproductive, making SL into a big first person shooter game for socially maladapted but highly creative individuals. When we rejected the JLU’s combat/gestapo tactics and treated the situation properly as one of dealing with juveniles, we had tremendous success, reducing griefing across SL by 90% over two years, draining their manpower supply by giving their recruits paths to legitimacy, economic and creative opportunities (duh, what schools are SUPPOSED TO DO)…. In response, the JLU used their influence with Linden Lab to get Woodburys original sim taken down permanently. WU then came to me, and contracted my business to host their virtual campus. We worked well together, and eventually I went back to school at Woodbury, last fall, and am working on finishing a degree given the current economy.We governed the Woodbury group and ensured anybody engaging in actual griefing (sim crashings, TOS violations, etc) were ejected unless they turned over a new leaf. Woodbury gained a significant measure of respect inside the lab, and even hosted a very successful event at the SL Community Convention, in hosting a tour bus to visit Linden’s offices for the convention goers.In response, Prokofy, the JLU, and insider friends of theirs in the lab engaged in a campaign of libel against myself and my business, driving my customers away in order to cause my business to implode. Woodbury then got their own sims from Linden Lab again, were working amicably with them, until for some reason they did a 180 this past weekend and illegally seized the sims Woodbury had invested time and money into.Due to the damages done to me by Linden Lab, I am joining a class action lawsuit now before Judge Robreno in Pennsylvania (the judge in the famous Bragg vs Rosedale case) to recover $500,000.00+ in damages to myself and my business by Linden Lab and their coconspirators. I cannot comment on what the administration of Woodbury will do, but I doubt they will be sitting idly.As for Jean Hewlett’s comments, madame, you have absolutely no clue about what you are talking about vis a vis Woodbury. Woodbury consistently ranked as the #1 most popular virtual campus in Second Life, with daily traffic numbers ranging between 10,000-20,000. We were the only virtual campus to fully engage students in their own mindspace, and have been gaining a number of new students coming to Woodbury in real life, either as transfers or as individuals new to college, due to their prior participation in our virtual campus. Unlike yours and most every other virtual campus in SL, we didn’t treat the sim as a museum to build copies of empty halls named after dead trustees. Our virtual campus was a living laboratory for 21st century learning, and in particular, reaching out to individuals with the greatest educational disadvantages. In my several years of association with Woodbury’s virtual group in SL, I have rarely met someone the rest of the grid would call “Griefer” who was nothing but a bored young person with serious learning disabilities and/or socialization issues. Dr. Clift, Tizzers, and I have seen these types of individuals as Woodbury’s mission in SL, just as in real life Woodbury seeks to help disadvantaged students get out of the ghetto or barrio and gain a quality education.It is unfortunate that so many in our society see these sort of individuals as disposable, worth only being subjected to the dehumanizing depersonating one experiences when one is permbanned from Second Life. What more pronounced way to disenfranchise someone from 21st century society?

rivenhomewood: I already am in SL, and I agree that as an educational *platform* it can probably work well (though most of what I’ve seen on the SL grid hasn’t be very well done). However, I have and do strongly urge anyone who wants to do that to use a solution like OpenSim or purchase a full region and lock it down to members only (while restricting teleports) rather than expose themselves to the chronic playground silliness of the Second Life grid and many of its members. It’s not just the forum, by the way, as spending a few minutes at a public “educational” event dealing with avatars wearing spamming BDSM leashes or pole-dancing and shouting “LOL!” every seventeen seconds will show. And those aren’t griefers – they’re just regulars whose behavior is socially acceptable within SecondLife.

This really all sounds kinda pathetic, folks. Can’t you all find some other venue (in the blessed realm of Second Life, perhaps) to hash out your seemingly petty feuds over who first did what to whom? I feel kinda dirty after scanning down through all of this…

“I don’t see any point in attempting to debate Huns Valen here”Yeah, that’s right. Not here, not anywhere. Stop making wild accusations and presenting unfounded assumptions and outright fabrications as though they were true, and I will stop taking you up on it.

makomk, I’m going to take a wild guess and say that I likely know a great deal more about the Soviet police state than you do : )And I know for a fact I know more about this group than you do, such as to tell you, with all seriousness as a person committed to human rights, that the characterization of them as guilty as charged is true, because it’s based on copious documentation of their acts over may years by multiple persons. At a certain point, you cannot invoke abstractions like this when you haven’t seen the damages and the victimization. Whatever you want to say about “guilt by association” in our society, if you are sincere (and you are likely merely one of them as you are anonymous), that isn’t an endless cover and an endless excuse for crime, even in a liberal and just society. It just isn’t.The reason I’ve often used the term “Leninist” to describe this griefing group is because they use all the Bolshevik tactics and ideologies, like “the end justifies the means” (violence and harassment to make people stop taking the Internet seriously and do what you think they should do which is anarchy); subterfuge, body doubles, denials, active measures, agents of influence, etc (they count the Chronicle of Higher Education itself as one of their agents of influence); telling the Big Lie, i.e. denying the essential truth of their violence and coercion; wrecking and splitting, i.e. invading other groups and splitting them on the basis of their allegiance to their organization or not. There are numerous parallels to the Leninist organization, but that isn’t in any way to say that these people are “real life communists” — they’re affluent Americans at a small commuter college with just the usual nihilism and cynicism of the Internet-educated for their religion, who have hooked up with an Internet subculture that enjoys messing with people’s heads and harming them for real sometimes.As for any touching liberal concerns about “guilt by association” for those really reviewing the actual acts of these people, as I’ve explained repeatedly on my blog, you can’t keep hiding behind that liberal notion when you illiberally use your group deliberately to recruit and socialize and plan griefing escapades. If you have a closed group that can be joined only by a mechanical invitation, and you invite people with racist names and the names of those known already to have been permabanned, then…what’s up?At what point do you think you can safely say that a group with *hundreds* of accounts coming through them caught and banned based on the *server records* of Linden Lab for violation of the TOS (basically the computer crime of a Denial-of-Service attack) is no longer able to hide behind the “guilt by association” meme? Of course they can’t when it is a criminal *conspiracy*. Refresh your studies of law and the concept of conspiracy, i.e. deliberate intent to commit crime in groups. The notions of accessories and accomplies apply here. Often the apologists of this group speak of “600 members” although anyone who joined the group when it was open would see that hundreds had last log in dates ages ago because they left SL when they became bored, or because their accounts were banned or because they were the extra accounts of people banned on their main accounts who didn’t bother to return.It’s all amply documented, and it the issue is not the “police state,” although you are absolutely right that Linden Lab functions as a kind of police state in having an all-seeing eye without proper due process.Again, I’d urge all those trying to downgrade this very important modern discussion about real lissues into “he said, she said” or “oh, the dysfunctions of Second Life on parade” blah blah, and focus on the themes here: it’s about how you deal with the challenges of illiberalism in a liberal society without becoming illiberal yourself.The Linden system indeed works on the police-state KGB-like notion of informing anonymously or clandestinely on your neighbour. It’s a hugely corrosive factor in any society, and a feature of closed societies, which SL is. There is no due process; no public trial; no right to face your accusers properly. And that’s the way not only SL works, but Twitter or Facebook or your blog provider or this very site. All sites work that way makomk, that’s the problem; all of them run a system where they wait for abuse reports before acting, because they are usually common carriers or providers seeking safe haven and immunity to prosecution for libel and other offenses. They can’t pre-censor or have prior editorial control of content because to do so would be confession that they in fact control everything they don’t. So they use this other system, upon which the Internet social media explosion is based on — and of course it stinks as a system and has no oversight or transparency.Indeed, Linden Lab should publicize everything they have on this group; the names of the prosecuting Lindens; the names of those who filed abuse reports; the accounts involved; the charges; the defenses. But they don’t. They cite “privacy policy” meaning the privacy of the individual account and they cite fear of retaliation — if those who make abuse reports are exposed to harassment. I’m absolutely confident that if they publicize everything they have on these people, no one will be able to remain with a “guilt by association” trope. But they won’t. The system doesn’t work that way in Silicon Valley. Ever. Though the American people should demand that it should.I happily expose my own role as an abuse reporter of this group for the visible griefing they have done to me and my tenants and the disruption of my events. I’ve filed hundreds of tickets on them in four long years. And I’m not the only one — so have dozens of other communities in SL, but without publicizing it as I’ve done. And I’ve suffered the harassment for it, including even calls to my home phone, upsetting my children. These people are really vile bullies; reading their outrageous self-justification here is chilling — it’s the hallmark of the modern cyberbully who makes Eddie Haskell seem like actually the model A student that he feigned to be when he told Mrs. Cleaver she had a lovely dress…The server monitors everything and can supposedly trump any notion of “discovery” or any due process or any adversarial defense. That is frightenly scary for the future as it undoes every institutional protection against abuse we have built up in America for more than 200 years. Because even if there is a server truth, the adversarial defense must still be allowed so that a person can mount his alternative story to the prosecution; even server truths can be interpreted in different ways. With anonymity and proxies, one cannot be sure even who is operating an account at a given time.So again, if you don’t want to suffer guilt by association, don’t associate with the guilty — those who obviously, clearly, unmistakeably and deliberately commit crimes again and again. You cannot keep hiding behind that defense and raising even legitimate “but it’s a police state” defenses in this police state. Even in this setting, we have ample witnesses and documentation and videotaping of the griefing and the offenders admit their guilt in forums and chat constantly, saying they deliberately and knowingly provided a haven for 4chan in Second Life. Once another publication besides this one uses a little more investigatory power on the story the true picture will emerge. This university and this course with about 4 people in it haven’t produced any publications, works, conferences or anything in three years other than this one time they ordered a party bus for the SL Community Conference, got roaring drunk and vandalized the real-life building of Linden Lab with chalk.

I feel bad for the Woodybury — although you’d think they have banned the /b/ crew from their island. It kind of become a matter of negligence. I posted something on this nearly three years ago. http://theubiquitouslibrarian.typepad.com/the_ubiquitous_librarian/2007/06/second_thoughts.htmlSome screenshots of the /b/ 4chan fortress in its hey day. At the time I respected their creative hacker ethos — but it falls on Woodbury to monitor and address the problem if Linden accuses them of harboring virtual terrorists. I think when/if they come back for a third time that they are going to need a different name. Woodbury has become a magnet for trouble online.

Dr. Clift:The only people “maligning your brand” and “trampling on your 125-year mission” is you and your griefer buddies. Why Woodbury University (the real one, in Burbank) has tolerated the use of the name in SL (given its reputation there) for so long is a mystery.intlibber:So, it’s your, and Woodbury University’s (the fake one, in SL), mission to help so-called “/b/tards” assimilate? How noble of you. Last I looked, though, being a complete and utter @%&#0(* was not indicative of “various learning disabilities and socialization disorders.”Perhaps your time would be better spent writing for Encyclopedia Dramatica.