On The Dangers of Depending on a Single Provider

Yesterday I encountered a bit of a shock when I attempted to log into Second Life. Rather than seeing the familiar setting of my in-world beach house, I was greeted with a rude error message. "Login Failed. Second Life cannot be accessed by this computer. Contact support@secondlife.com."

"Ugh," I thought, "another error in an error-filled day." I had recently modified my settings.xml file to accomodate the weird screen size of my laptop and was convinced I had somehow managed to hork my settings to the point the viewer couldn't figure out which way was up. But after issuing the command `rm -rf ~/.secondlife` to perform a second life settings labotomy failed to clear up the problem, I started to get worried. Thinking my client install had somehow gotten horked, I re-downloaded and re-installed the linux client. Still no love.

At this point I sort of paniced and thought I had been permabanned. Fortunately friends were around to remind me to try to login from other machines. Fortunately, I could log in from the ancient iBook G4 I still have laying around the office running an old copy of viewer 1. After downloading viewer 1 to my main machine and trying to log in, still no love.

For whatever reason, my ID0 or MAC had been banned.

Something was seriously horked here, so I did what you're supposed to do in situations like this: I emailed support@secondlife.com like it says to do in the error dialog. In a few moments I got a response back saying that even though the client told me to send them an email, I'm really supposed to use a web form to file a ticket. After filing a ticket and getting confirmation from Linden's automated support tracking system, all I could do was wait.

While waiting, I found some Second Life Forum discussions about exactly the same problem. Apparently back in the old days this would happen from time to time and after about four hours after filing the ticket, someone would get to it and unban them. So I waited.

I'm a bit lucky in that I have a few support resources that most Second Life residents do not. As a former Linden, I have several personal friends who still work at the lab who were able to confirm that there's nothing on my account "rap sheet" that would indicate my account had been banned (we knew this already). The weird bit is there was no record of my IP address or my MAC addresses being banned either.

Yay! Random weirdness.

So I wait and wait and wait. This morning it's still not resolved so I send an email to a friend at the lab jokingly suggesting this is Linden's way to prevent me from attending virtual world standardization meetings in-world. Let me just stop here and say that while it's fun to let paranoia sweep you away and imagine a consipiracy to prevent you from doing your work in world, it's probably not accurate. Remeber the saying.. "do not attribute to malice what could easily be attributed to incompetence."

Rather than there being a conspiracy to keep me from logging in, here's what probably happened... When you log in to Second Life, your client sends a couple of numbers that uniquely identify your PC: the MAC address and the ID0. These values are used to identify the PCs of griefers, scammers and generally bad people. This is one of the reasons I was surprised to get the ban hammer. What the heck had I done to warrant banning?

MAC addresses and ID0's can easily be spoofed; "bad guys" do it all the time. And probably what happened is somewhere out there a random griefer picked a random ID0 and got caught. The random ID0 they picked happened to match mine and when they were "banned," Linden added the spoofed ID0 to the black-list. Once the "bad guy" in this story couldn't log in with my ID0, they probably picked a new one at random and went back to griefing. I, on the other hand, was left unable to get in-world because it's a violation of Linden's acceptable use policy to spoof these values. You're supposed to resolve the issue through the support center.

So you see what's going on here, right? Linden is using a technical mechanism to enforce a decent policy. But the only people punishes by its enforcement are legitimate users who don't spoof the second life servers.

After working my personal connections inside the lab, I was able to get this issue resolved. But I can't help but wonder what people who are NOT former lindens do.

So let me try to wrap this up with this thought: doing business in Second Life is unnecessarily risky. While it's a wonderful platform for people to express themselves and it's a great, social immersive experience, the policies that govern this virtual world are a bit wonky. And they're likely to stay wonky for the near term.

As messed up as Second Life is, it still has some great things going for it: lots of participants and lots of bling you can buy to name a few. But at the end of the day, if you run a business in Second Life, you are dependent on an external for-profit organzation for your bread and butter. In the 2D-web world, services are neatly interchangable. If you don't like Google's privacy policy, you could get an account at Yahoo! or Hotmail. Or at your local ISP. Or if you knew what you were doing, you could build your own email server. Ditto for other basic web services,

But you simply can't do this with Second Life because Linden owns the service definition. Not to mention, they've got a great head-start against potential competitors like InWorldz and ReactionGrid. Both are great services offering experiences that are more or less the same as Second Life, though with a significantly reduced community. Owners of virtual businesses stick with Second Life in spite of it's seemingly random behavior because "that's where the money is."

When we chartered VWRAP, our objective was to create a truely open virtual world ecosystem. The protocols we worked on were intended to be implemented by a wide array of participants allowing Second Life to grow beyond it's "walled garden" beginnings. By opening the virtual world up to potential competitors, Linden risked short-term reduction in revenues from land sales, but could have participated in a "3d web" that was more attractive to businesses (and educators and ...)

VWRAP is now effectively dead. The HyperGrid lobby may try to recharter VWRAP to focus on HyperGrid, but it's an implementation rather than a protocol. The IETF is sort of allergic to these types of efforts; taking a protocol implemented by a single product and "blessing" it as "the" standard. And with due deference to the activities of ReactionGrid and InWorldz, the larger business community is probably not interested in risking an investment in a protocol with a single implementation. (Thankfully, there are enough bleeding edge users out there that RG and IW can probably survive.

But at the end of the day, when you depend on someone else for technology, you depend on their business remaining stable enough to support your business until you've recovered your investment. This is why Linden makes a lot of people nervous. Sure, they have to adapt to changing business realities, but it's irritating when they behave seemingly randomly. It's even more irritating when you realize that it's their economy you're playing in.

And this is why dealing with OpenSim grids is irritating. You wonder if they're going to be around long enough for you to recover your investment in their economy.

Clearly it's not so irritating that I don't involve myself in their use and development. But I think I'm likely to be cranky and irritable 'til... well... until Second Life and Reaction Grid are dim memories (like AOL and Compuserv) and their creators move on to more profitable open virtual ventures.

[author's note: Kyle, Robin and Chris, who are employees of Reaction Grid have protested in the comments below. I think there's some validity to their comments. I was unclear in that last paragraph about what I wish goes away. For the record, I TOTALLY love what Kyle &co are doing at Reaction Grid (the company). I have nothing but best wishes for Reaction Grid (the company). What I wish goes away is the concept that you can only make money in virtual worlds if you're a "grid operator." That is, I hope we land in a future where "the grid" as a concept goes away and is replaced by a cluster of services that implement a virtual world. I hope Reaction Grid (the company) or Reaction Grid (the community) or Reaction Grid (the collection of virtual locations) all have a prosperous future. I do, however, hope that Reaction Grid (the artificially walled garden of content and identity) evaporates in the future. Given Reaction Grid's (the company's) support of HyperGrid and OpenSim, I believe they share that goal. This meaning was pretty obvious in my head when I wrote that last paragraph, but clearly it was unclear. I apologize to Kyle, Chris and Robin for the confusion.]