Gravatar, or what’s wrong with the web

After posting a remark under one of Torley’s blogs I noticed how, instead of his usual Torley-tinted cube designs, there was now a small square next to my name that said Gravatar. A clickable link. I clicked.

I never heard of Gravatar. I never visited the Gravatar site. I never signed up for it and never asked for it. And yet the first thing I see on that site is that I am “logged in as Laetizia”. My old, Dutch email address was there - now defunct - and it said something about how I can’t change that. The FAQ furthermore told me that they are not deleting accounts “at the moment”. Like Facebook, once they got ya they don’t let go.

What’s up with this? Another fantastic new tool to identify myself everywhere - but these boneheads apparently don’t realize that there are people who use two names. Like an SL and an RL name. These boneheads didn’t realize that an email address changes. That I don’t want to run around with a stack of passwords to log in and out everywhere and change identity and that I was just fine with the way things were, thank you very much.

I don’t know about you but I flip out over this. I want a big red button that says NO, I want an email address of some governmental body which will force them to pull my account, I want to hack into their servers if need be and blow the whole spiel up. If my email address appears on the site of an organization I have never heard of before, the alarm goes off. And if they log me in just like that, two alarms go off. And if on top of that they tell me they do not erase accounts, the damn fire brigade pulls out of the station in my head.

I think it is coupled to WordPress, host to this blog - and Torley’s. And I am mad enough now to pull the whole blog because of it. It’s one thing to force feed me a new gadget with an option to opt out, which is the old Microsoft way. But that was on your computer, not on the internet, and that at least had the option to switch off. Goodbye talking paperclip nonsense. But this blog… first they gave me their 100% off-the-mark “possibly related posts” that I cannot get rid of, and now this!

I was going to start a Real Life themed blog on WordPress. But a) it automatically logged me in as Laetizia which is pointless, and b) now they pull this one on me. So I don’t think it is going to happen.

Gravatar.com collects your email address as part of the gravatar service. We will never rent, sell, or otherwise distribute or make public your email address.

“As part of the gravatar service”. Good thing they don’t run the water supply - they’d be pumping it into your house and flooding you out of your bedroom before you even ordered to have water. As part of their service.

(SL is a trademark of Linden Research, Inc.)

Meanwhile, back in the real world…

From Holland comes the news that Microsoft has asked Dutch dictionary maker Van Dale, the most influential dictionary publisher in the Dutch language, to remove the verb “msn’en” ["to be on MSN or a similar chat program"] from the next edition of their dictionary.

The news came during a court case during which Microsoft sought a preliminary injunction from the judge in The Hague against the msnlock domain name, used by Unicaresoft, which markets an anti-chat program by that name.

Like the company owner and inventer of msnlock, chief editor Ton van Boon at Van Dale argues that use of the term msn’en has become widespread and it’s meaning isn’t limited to using Microsoft’s chat program. They will probably add TM behind the name in the dictionary, but will not change the definition. TM, according to the editor, has no legal value [that is, in the Netherlands]. Earlier, Google requested similar action from Van Dale over the verb “googlen” (”using an internet search engine”) and the company duly added TM. Van Boon ads that companies do not expect to win these cases, but they fight them anyway to show that they are willing to fight for their registered trademarks.

Unicaresoft, meanwhile, presented a whole list of domain names, including pornographic sites, with MSN in them, against which Microsoft has not taken action. They suspect that the company is taking action now because the program msnlock limits the use of MSN. Microsoft denies that - a spokesperson said that they have nothing against the product, and that they try to go after every misuse of their trademarks.

The World Is Run By Lawyers

…and lawyers are, by nature, a bunch of pussies. I’m sure they would rather call themselves ‘careful’, but then they’re lawyers. They like to play with words, it’s their thing.

Just now I heard of the first victim of age verification - a woman who cannot access her own store because the landowner has flagged the parcel as mature, or adult, or whatever the extra-mature terminology is they dreamed up for our virtual world. Now hear this, all you Lindens out there:

THIS IS INSANE.

Open Google. Click Preferences. Check ‘Do not filter my search results’. Save preferences.

On the main page, click Images. Fill in a girl’s name - any girl’s name - or the name of a young, attractive female celebrity. And I guarantee you that you will see real life full nudity and possibly hardcore pornographic material, on the first page of the image search results.

Here’s one example I found with Google after a search using the first name of my mother (sorry, mom). I cleaned it up for this blog - actually it is one of the most modest pictures from that page. And it took under five seconds to find it.

And that’s exactly how hard it is for kids. And that’s why as a parent you need to monitor your kid’s internet behaviour. Yes, it takes time away from your precious career but hey, it’s a kid, not the damn DVD player. It needs looking after. And I am not going to do that for you.

Google does not demand age verification. The sites with these pictures do not demand age verification. My ISP never asked me for age verification. The government of this or any other democratic country hasn’t set a minimum age to web access. And therefore the good people that run our virtual world have no obligation whatsoever to introduce age verification.

I don’t know what is wrong with the lawyer folk in San Francisco. Maybe they are hardcore Christian fundamentalists with an agenda to clean the Internet of all the ‘filth’ that’s to be seen. Maybe they are just not ready for the 21st century yet, and still think you can somehow shield people off from mature content. But most likely they are just a bunch of pussies.

While you’re at it, go and see what Google turns up when you search for ‘pussies’ as described above… and don’t for a minute fool yourself into believing that your kids wouldn’t ever try.

Disclaimer: if you think you own the rights to the picture above, shame on you. It’s not even a good photoshop.

Sorry, no new post

You know, I was working on a nice questionnaire for the Lindens to fill in. Nothing ‘political’, nothing controversial (really!), and fully anonymous. I would like to know, and let you know, what it is actually like to work for Linden Lab and be a Linden in-world. Until Torley told me that that should - or in any case would - go through the marketing department of Catherine Linden.

Which makes the whole process of fact finding pointless, just because of the off chance that someone gets the bright idea to tell the responders what a good answer would be and what not. Of course I am not saying that that will happen. But I don’t want to waste my time and find a truckload of happy smiley answers in my mailbox, saying that all is well and we’re one jolly family. I can write those myself.

Linden Lab is becoming increasingly corporate about a lot of things. Of course there are areas where they had to get their ass in gear so to speak, but they have lost a lot along the way - especially trust and goodwill. I find myself already wondering if volunteering for a profit making corporation, trying to keep new customers inside, is something I should do. I mean - would you do that for your local supermarket or your Internet provider?

So, instead of some lighthearted insight in the world of the Lindens, there’s no new post today.

ummm… yeah, what is Scion City?

There it is, a fresh post, a mysterious text about what Hamlet cannot divulge and how involved he was, and a link, which he hopes we check out for ourselves.

Well, people, it’s an ad. Scion is a car brand sold in the US by Toyota. Sure, it’s a machinima, it has a certain cool for those who are into this kind of stuff, but in the end, it serves to sell cars. And the author of it all is our own Hamlet.

Comments are off on this one - we are to sit, watch and swallow our words. And so I cannot tell him how cheap and outdated I think the concept of this ad is (desert, explorers, treasure in the sand… try an IMDb search on that concept… yawn), how well executed it is (granted), how uninterested I however am to see the rest of it, but above all, how amazed I am to see Hamlet point me to an ad as if it’s the most exciting new thing since cherry coke - without telling me that what I am about to watch is an ad. For a car, I might add, I cannot even buy here in Europe.

So what is Scion City? It’s a new way to flog cars, and a not-so-new way to score hits on a website. Yay, yay. Next time I’ll double-check the status bar of the browser before I click on anything, Hamlet.

Compartimentalizing the Web

It started with Google - at least it did here on my end of the wire. The smartalecs from Silicon Valley thought it would be nice to offer everyone a service in their own language. Not by simply offering it as an option, but by default: typing google.com in the address bar will land you on google.nl here in the Netherlands. If you want Google in English, you need to click a link.

This has some strange consequences. I am engaged in online discussions a lot and if I want to find news articles to back up my position, I need to go to the English Google first. Any ‘nieuws‘ search on Dutch Google with English words will turn up only blanks. Now if they are so smart, why can’t they just give me the obvious English language news that I am looking for? Why doesn’t Google search the whole web for words not found in the Dutch language part of the web? And now YouTube has followed suit - it detects my IP and sends me ‘promoted videos’ in Dutch, even though I have (falsely) indicated that I am from the US.

The web used to be the ultimate global village, the place to find different views on things, different takes on issues, different expressions of culture. But this compartimentalization ends all that, locking the average user in his own community.  Surely there are ways around that, but these are hurdles a lazy net user might not be willing to take. And so the global village is changing into a global group of villages, with fewer people willing to leave their comunity to go peek over someone else’s fence.

I am a translator. I depend on the web to present me with information with which I can check the accuracy of my work, the precise meaning of terminology, the background of an event which is described in ambivalous terms in the source text. I want ready access to the whole web - not some ’service’ which limits that. What’s more, I’ll be moving to Italy in the next months. I am learning Italian but I am not yet ready to use Italian search results. And I’d like to keep up with Dutch news. But Google will see the Italian IP and just assume that that’s what I want.

And that’s the bottom line. I know what I want - I don’t want someone else to think for me. And finally, as a parting shot in the direction of Linden Lab: don’t you ever assume that I want to start each Second Life session in Virtual Holland. Let me find the communities I am interested in myself.