Category Archives: Cyberspace

Second Life – A flawed masterpiece.

Posted by on January 15, 2012 No comments

For the last couple of years, I’ve been involved in the virtual world of Second Life. For the most part, this has been a rewarding experience. Although I have over time become more aware of some of the flaws. It’s been a disheartening thing, seeing a platform that I believe has real potential being held back by these flaws. Happily, the creators of Second Life under the guidance of Rod Humble are working to make the technology more accessible and easier to use, which is excellent news, and have plans to drive the world forward.

I see Second Life being used by numerous artists and other creatives. People the world over are able to tour art galleries and view works of sculpture. Further to this, Second Life makes art exhibits happen that are just not possible anywhere else. Concerts can be held and DJs can play virtual sets. I’ve listened to artists from across the world performing live from their own homes, so I know first hand that there is a live music scene in Second Life. All of this is available to you, as long as you have an internet connection. Remote location, or physical disability need present no obstacle to fulfilling Second Life.

Of course, my more usual field of comment is agnosticism, religion and spirituality. This area is most certainly catered for in Second Life. In my early days, I found a region called “Bodhi” which was well constructed and hid snippets of Dharma in gems around the landscape. Bodhi is now gone, to the best of my knowledge, but there are plenty of other places. The Skeptical Buddhists Sangha and Kannonji are just two such places with discussion and talks. Consulting the inworld search yields many more.  The odds are, if you enter your faith or lack thereof into Second Life search, it will be there.

In addition to this, there are many centres of learning, not just focussing on inworld skills but things of use outside of Second Life. You can also find support groups inworld for any number of things, and I find myself reflecting that if Second Life saves even one person through these groups. Or when it enables people to grow and reach nearer their potential through these classes, then it’s all been well worth it

Looking back at 2011

Posted by on January 1, 2012 No comments

Well, this has been an interesting year, in some senses I’m glad it’s over.  I also feel a sense of some foreboding about next year.  Maybe it’s the darkening nights, the shadows lengthen and grow…

This year saw us take another hit in the financial system, in truth the problems never went away, just glossed over with loads of printed money.  Of course, you can’t keep doing that; as a very wise man said “Ye cannae change the laws of physics!”  How very true, we are about to find this out.

We’ve seen the whole software patents story take turn after turn.  Apple vs Samsung, then Apple vs HTC.  I can’t shake the feeling that Apple might just have entered an arse kicking contest with a Centipede here, but time will tell.  But the interesting one could be Barnes and Noble vs Microsoft, this seems to be a far more interesting story as B&N take aim not at the patents but at the strategy of using them.  Clever, and also something that could be very disruptive.  We have the SOPA act still being fought in the US, this could easily wreck the Internet as we know it and the potential effect of freedom of speech and fair use is chilling.  A short video here explains things.

Finally, the Occupy movement.  This has been fascinating to watch, and eye opening.  In fact, just as bemusingly, the suicidegirls.com twitter feed turned out to have better US coverage than the mainstream media!  Outdone by a software porn site, hang your heads sirs, hang your heads. I except Al Jazeera and Russia Today from this, I consistently find some very good stuff on both those sites  Occupy has started to show the hypocrisy at the heart of some quarters of the Western establishment, tactics were used on American and UK citizens that were not in keeping with anyone’s idea of the response of a democracy.  Though the fact that it had to come to this speaks volumes.

For 2012?  Well, I’m not much with the old crystal ball.  But, I’ll give it a whirl.  I see us living more within our means, this won’t be such a bad thing as the alternative simply stores up more trouble.  Better to start now.  I can see the software patent system coming into disrepute very quickly, and I suspect that the tech landscape could look a bit different this time next year.  The patent war is to the death, and I wonder about how the current hegemonies will hold up.  For freedom of speech and SOPA, I recommend paying the Electronic Frontier Foundation (or EFF) a visit and doing some reading to see what can be done.  The internet is not taking this lying down however, and I think that the industry lobbyists and their pet politicians are going have more of a fight on their hands than they realise.

Occupy.. I can see more trouble on the horizon. Especially in the USA, the controversial Detainee Bill promises more grief for the occupiers.  I honestly can’t understand how Barack Obama let this one past him, I can only hope someone comes to their senses while there are still any freedoms left worth defending in America.

No Silver Lining

Posted by on December 3, 2010 No comments

I’ve been watching the Wikileaks releases with some interest.  They seem to largely prove that the people who run this planet are every bit as human as we thought they were.  There are few (if any) great leaders and there seems to be a lot of underhand dealing going on.  Not much of this is really a surprise.

The fallout around the documents is far more instructive than the content of the documents themselves.  We are seeing how little regard anyone in power has for any notion of freedom of speech, or for any idea that they should be accountable to their people for anything.  I understand that there are situations in which things have to be kept quiet, but there seems to be a little rebalancing needed here.

Part of the fallout has been regarding the Amazon EC2 Cloud, and this is of interest to me as a self confessed geek.  You see, I’ve never completely trusted the idea of the cloud.  While many people seemed to think it was the best thing since sliced bread, I counted myself among those who looked on with a degree of reservation.  As you may know Wikileaks moved it’s service to the EC2 cloud to help it to stay online.  According to the news coverage, Amazon promptly dropped the service to Wikileaks after receiving phone calls from certain US senators.  This, of course, raises serious questions regarding freedom of speech; questions that are quite rightly being pursued.  But it also confirms my fears about this ‘wonderful’ idea of cloud computing.

You see, I have to make the point that your access to the services and data on the cloud (your data, by the way) is only there on the sufferance of the service provider.  At which point it’s no longer really your data, and no longer your server (it never was).  This means that you’d better have access to local copies of the data and local facilities.

Of course, the above is equally true of any failure in the hosting service or your internet connection.  Let’s face it, if you need to maintain local copies of the servers and data in order to keep things running, then the argument for cloud computing doesn’t hold.  This is part of my reservation about Facebook, it’s a walled garden and I have no easy way of exporting my data out of there.  If my account is closed, or inaccessible then it really becomes Facebook’s data, not mine.  So, by extension any intellectual property I have with a cloud company is no longer in my control?  That’s worrying.

I suppose the cloud doesn’t have such a silver lining after all.