Virtual crime, real time

A British man has been arrested and cautioned for stealing virtual goods, in a case believed to be the first of its kind  within the UK. The man is believed to have used phishing techniques to steal passwords and access user accounts and steal characters from popular online game RuneScape, reports the Times today.

That virtual goods have real value has long been known, have a look at this excellent paper from the University of  Manchester on the phenomenon of gold farming, the practice of slavishly creating goods for sale, for more background. China recently banned the sale of virtual goods for real money and two men were arrested last year, having made around £150,000 gold farming for World of Warcraft. It looks like virtual crime is being taken seriously by the UK with the setting up of the Police Central e-Crime Unit (PCeU) in September 2008, a spokesman for which is quoted in today’s Time piece stating:

People who seek to destroy others online gaming experience could be committing criminal offences, leaving themselves liable to prosecution. The PCeU will continue to work with the industry and investigate these allegations where appropriate.

Though one could ask how effective PCeU has been if it’s taken a year for one person to be cautioned for the misuse of  computers, one assumes that if he hadn’t got account access via a phishing attempts that there would have been no grounds for any action to be taken at all. The crux lies in how can you value something which is virtual in nature, many of the items in online games are the product of time spent in-game, either completing missions to win loot or through the acquisition of skills to create objects. What would be the real life equivalent, a piece of art has material value in that it is tangible, though of course a great piece has its price set way above the cost of paint and canvas but that is set by the well established Art market. A great piece of literature is similar, plus if stolen the tools for recreation lie in the original artistes head. Which is true to some extent with virtual goods, though there are the odd limited edition pieces that can never be recreated or won again.

I think one could also assume that if it were possible to put a price on virtual goods, you’d be able to get insurance already to cover them. A quick scoot of the net found a defunct company called You Play or We Pay, that opened in Jan 09 and was shut in April by the company behind World of Warcraft due to intellectual property infringement. It offered compensation for downtime, rather than lose of characters or goods.

So until there can be a financial figure, can there actually be a crime and do online users have any recourse to the law, or is losing a character or goods just to be viewed as a rather large inconvenience?

Also posted on Clicking & Screaming

Zen Spam

I officially give up pretending to both  you and me that I’m going to stop posting the more interesting spam I get. I’ll stop when it does, till then skip the posts with ‘Spam’ in the title.

Full disclosure over and so on to this week’s comment.

The utter mental mind f’ck that this comment gives me is almost as bad as the time when a Bostonian cab driver interrogated, a very jetlagged, me about the efficacy of the EU and whether if it had existed pre-WWII, would WW II actually happened. Ever had a moment when you thought that your brain was literally dribbling out of your ears? That was me just over a week ago, after a very intense three day visit to Boston. I was barely capable of thought let alone historical European political discourse.

Surely, if we inhabit the body, then we are also in possession of it? Which means that we do possess the wisdom that we apparently lack, or is the physical body an independent entity with which we’ll never truly be a part of, as we lack its inherent wisdom?

Answers on a postcard.

And the winner is…

…not me.

But I did come third, out of 12, from an inital long list of 100, which is fanfuckingtasticly amazingly wonderful, if you’ll pardon my tmesisic anglo saxon. There are many reasons why this is so, so I shall list them in easy to digest bullet points.*

• I’ve only been blogging since August 2008, a mere 15 months
• I don’t actually write that much
• When I do write, it’s normally about the spam comments I receive
• Or a rant on something bollocky in the social media sphere
• I think this ws the only short-listed blog that has a b(l)og standard wordpress theme
• Definitely the only one that features a picture of Bagpuss in the header.
• Most of the shortlist were company related
• I have an embarrasingly small readership**

You get the drift.

The most amazing thing is that the award brought together a couple of disparate factors in my life. Like, I suspect, many of you, most of my family and friends don’t quite understand what I do. I think to them having a blogger aroundthe place is like having a train spotter as a mate. You think it’s a bit weird and can’t see the attraction yourself, but it makes them happy so you don’t take the mick (too much), you occasionaly try to make small talk about it but quickly lose the will to live once they start talking and contemplate murder when they start drawing diagrams.

However the blog nomination proved that some people within the digital world like what I do and that my colleagues, family and friends, care enough for me to vote on something that makes no or little sense to them. Better still, they cared enough to pester their friends to vote for me too. How blessed am I?

So a huge thanks to all that voted and a massive thank you to the person who nominated me in the first place.

*also easy to write, for I has a few cobwebs this morning on which I am blame Chris Kempt’s hearing defect which translates, ‘No thanks, I’m fine.’ into, ‘a large rum and coke you say? Why, that would be spiffing!’

**not the size matters, t’is quality not quantity though it would be nice if one of you buggers left a comment every now and then to let know you’re still awake

The end of anonymous?

When we first drafted our social media policy, one of the more controversial points was that we suggested that no employee should be anonymous online. We got pretty strong feedback around this, most of which centred on a need for people to be able to use online to discuss some topics that they might not want to their colleagues to find out about, illness being one example cited.

All of which made sense and of course there is no way, or indeed desire, to be totally prescriptive when it comes to an employee’s online activity. That said we did stress that there is no such thing as being anonymous online. A point which has been beautifully proven in two distinct ways this week with the self-outing of Belle du Jour, erstwhile London call girl and sex blogger, and the resignation of a school worker in St Louis, USA.

At first the revealing of Belle, or Dr Brooke Magnanti, seems fairly straightforward. After maintaining her anonymity successfully for several years, she came forward as she believed an ex-boyfriend was about to spill the beans. The really interesting bit is that her cover could’ve been blown six years ago by a savvy fellow  blogger, known only as Darren. When Belle first appeared on the UK blog scene it was rather small, and he quickly realised that the quality of blogging was such that it couldn’t be a the work of a newbie. He knew, and had met, many UK bloggers and one morning it hit him that it could be Magnanti He then spent a few months collecting circumstantial evidence which persuaded him it was and then, he didn’t go to the press. Rather he did something else which was quite marvellous. He created a googlewhack, the only page on the entire interwebz to feature both ‘Belle du Jour’ and ‘Dr Brooke Magnanti’, and checked out who visited this site. Last week when he realised that someone from the UK paper, the Daily Mail, was on the snoop, he contacted Magnanti through twitter and tipped her off. This in turn allowed Magnanti to control her own revealing, making it far less sensational and neutering much of the newsability of the entire story.

For me, this restores my faith in humanity. Darren could have made money from this but instead he set himself up as a protector of Magnanti’s right to be anonymous. Unlike the story from St Louis, which makes one shake ones head in despair. Last Friday the St Louis Post Dispatch posted an article about unusual foods and ask for comments on the craziest thing readers had ever eaten. One commentator was rather base with his one word reply and it was promptly deleted. He then posted it again and this time the site’s social media editor, Kurt Greenbaum, noticed that the email alert from WordPress included the name of a local school, so he called them. The school’s IT director then turned detective, they confronted an employee about it and he resigned.

Greenbaum cross-posted from his own blog a post cheerfully entitled, ‘Post a vulgar comment while you’re at work, lose your job’. I particularly like this statement from Greenbaum in the post:

I’m not identifying the guy who posted the comment because, obviously, I don’t know who it was. I’m not identifying the school because, frankly, it’s not important to the story and I have no interest in embarrassing the people there.

Which to my mind says that if he did know who it was, he would not hesitate in revealing who it was. Nice.

Unsurprisingly it has attracted many comments, including one with the obligatory Nazi reference, and the vast majority of them are against his actions.

So where does this leave us?

Well, safe in the assurance that there is no such thing as anonymity and there probably never was. That Belle managed to remain a secret was down to Darren not being a Greenbaum, the fact that a man in St Louis now has no job is down to Greenbaum not being a Darren. I know that it could be argued that the nameless poster was the master of his own destiny, he didn’t have to post what he did during work hours but the entire situation is full of morally grey areas. Would Greenbaum have flagged it to the local Police dept or garden centre if the poster’s IP resolved to those places of work? Possibly not, but who knows for sure?

As Benjamin Franklin once said, ‘Three men may keep a secret, but only if two of them are dead.’ In trying to maintain your anonymity online you’re trusting your secret to  roughly 1.67 billion other people, and not all of them are Darren.

Also posted on Clicking & Screaming

Accurate spam?

For some reason the above comment reminds me a quote from the excellent Tim Minchin, in which he suggests that his last words will be, ‘but who will the world revolve around now?’

Policing the Interwebz

As we have oft banged on about mentioned occasionally, one of the joys of social media is that it let’s you hear what’s actually being said, and as we warn clients, what is being said is not always good. This is because our actions and interactions on the interwebz tends to accurately reflect real life, and unfortunately real life is not the place of pink fluffy warmth and kindness that we like to pretend it is. On a personal level, one of the other joys of social media is that it allows us to create rather effective filters so that we can easily avoid the iccky stuff that might put us off our cornflakes. Of course, when this self-created cocoon does occasionally get burst it enhances the shock value.

It’s not surprising that social media darling, Twitter, has a dark underbelly. We know about the spammers, who hasn’t been followed by a gaggle of horny Brittany’s at some point, but they are easy to block and ignore, making sure our filters stay intact. But it seems that Mike Butcher, over at TechCrunch UK has discovered an even seedier side, when he was tipped off about a user called Dinner_Guest, who appears to be blogging about the kidnap and subsequent killing of someone. Mike suggests that it could be a stunt, but also says:

Now, clearly this could all be part of some sick fantasy. The trouble is, should we take that chance, or do the Police in Brighton need to know that they have a potential serial killer on their hands who has taken to Twittering his killing spree?

It’s clearly not possible to know either way, until real-world events start to match up with Dinner Guest’s Tweets.

I hope that Mike did actually call the cops before posting, even though I do believe that it is a stunt. The account is only eight days old but has a professional background and its very second tweet was from Twitterlator. Most unusual behaviour for a n00b, unless of course this is not their first account, though why would they then ask how to follow people later on, unless of course they are pretending to be a n00b?Plus, what kind of serial killer realises that no matter who says it that 80 followers does not a viral make. In short, the whole thing smells worse than my rugby captains lucky socks by season end and I have a sneaky suspicion that all will be revealed by Saturday.

Stunt or not, it does raise questions about how we should react to incidents like this, and how we should then deal with the perpetrator if it does turn out to be a stunt. Mike raises a good point about how once the mainstream media finds out about this there will no doubts be calls for Twitter to be policed, which to me is equally as unpalatable as some of the stuff that appears online. It would also be practically impossible plus, if there is a serial killer operating in Brighton, wouldn’t it be handy if he kept tweeting about it so that he could be tracked down via his email and IP address? Must be far more effective than tracing anonymous notes and phone calls.

Also posted on Clicking & Screaming

Spam?

Ok, I admit it I have seem to have a spam issue. Not in that I get lots of spam, only about 3,465 comments in the past year or so, but in that I’m fascinated in the evolving fashions of spam. When I first started off it tended to be long lists of keywords around pr0n and medicine, most recently we’ve had the crap joke spam.

Today, I have confusing spam and I’m not actually sure if it is spam or not. The comment does reflect the post rather well, and if it weren’t for the email address I would no doubt approve it straight off and there is no linkage in the comment which makes me think it’s not spam. Perhaps it is a spammer who is actually commenting of their own free will, kinda like having a peek at your own Facebook page in between playing around with your ad settings for a campaign.

Why we can’t monetise social media

If you haven’t heard of Farmville then you’re obviously not on Facebook. If you are on Facebook and don’t play Farmville, it’s either because you did and gave up due to the neediness of the game or because you’re taking a principled stance against the news feed spamming application.

For those that are blissfully unaware of the game, FarmVille is a a Facebook application in which you play the role of a farmer (obv), the aim of the game is increase your experience. As your experience grows you can access more and better crops and each time you level up, you’re rewarded with Farm cash. Farm cash, which can also be bought with real life proper cash, is the only way you can increase the size of your farm and get goodies like extra fuel for your various farm vehicles.

It’s a simple game, though the creator, Zynga, is continually enhancing it by adding seasonal goodies, new crops and extra tasks. All of which seems to be working as there are currently over 63 million active players, up from 30 million at the end of August, approximately one fifth of all Facebook users, one half of all daily active uysers  and a number not short of the population of the UK. Personally I find it scarier that it has roughly six times the number of players that World of Warcraft does, which took four years to get to 11.5 million subscribers.

So how does this relate to monetising social media? Well FarmVille encourages every player to send gifts to their friends, a gift consisting of a tree, animal or decorative item, like picket fence. When you receive the item, the note accompanying it asks you to reciprocate. I think some items are only available via gifting and you can certainly get higher level items than your current level from affluent Farmer friends. While you are encouraged to spend cash to get farm coins, I don’t actually know of anyone who has done so, and therefore I think it is fairly safe to describe it as a ‘gift economy’ which reflects the economy of social networking as a whole.

In a gift economy goods and services are exchanged with no expectation of immediate reciprocity or indeed an explicit agreement of such, which compares to a market or barter economy where there is an explicit quid pro quo. Farmville would like to be a market economy but as users can get everything need by spending only time and giving gifts, I doubt it will achieve significant levels of non-advertising related income. Advertising in its own way is more like a barter economy, users donate some of their attention in return for receiving a free service, the advertiser gives some form of entertainment, offer or knowledge in return for that attention. Obviously the advertisers are hoping that the attention will turn into a transaction in the real world related market based economy.

So finally to my point, the internet, currently, is a largely gift giving economy, social networks particularly so. We pass on information we feel will be of use, respond to requests to fill in surveys, vote for people and generally never expect a direct return. Rather we hope that we will receive the same in return.

Which is what will make it difficult, if not impossible to monetise, or make it into a market economy. Just like FarmVille, why would we pay for something when we know we can get it for free?

Bashing the bunny MK II

Just over a year ago, in one of my very first posts, I talked about the newly public sport of bunny bashing. This is not a case of animal cruelty but rather the new found fashion for bloggers and blogging journalists to let rip when they felt that they had encountered yet another example of poor public relation skills in action. I’m fairly sure that as long as there has been both hacks and flacks, that hacks have complained about incompetent PRs, it’s just that now it happens far more publicly. At the time I noted that such attacks were cyclical in nature and I’m rather disheartened to be proved right as another Twitter storm developed at the end of last week over an inept voicemail left for Sally Whittle by a PR.

I should make it clear that I am not defending the actions of those who spam bloggers and journalists with poor targeted, mail merged, generic emails. Nor am I to excuse calling a freelancers one month after an article appears to castigate them for not mentioning a client. Rather I am here to ask what is the point in naming and shaming the hapless transgressor, which Sally to her credit has refused to do, and is the very same point I made last time round.

I know that the PR profession has become sloppy because when you upset a print or broadcast journalist, they worst they could do is swear at you or complain to your boss.  The former wasn’t that frequent and the latter hardly happened either.  Now of course irate bloggers get to name and shame.  Which is great, they get to vent their frustration and it ensures that the PR in question will do a better job next time.

Oh right it doesn’t.

I also explained why I’m against the PR Fail and PR Win blogs that collate the good, bad and ugly of the PR world. They are still going strong, though amazingly there is far more content on PRFail than PRWIN, even though much of what has been tagged as fail, often has little to do with a companies PR function.

So what can we do as profession to stop annoying those that we rely on in symbiotic/parasitic  nature? Stop employing idiots is the call from one commentator on Sally’s original post, which is a great idea but again who actually sets out to hire an idiot? More training, more guidance from the industry bodies like the PRCA or CIPR? Or am  I wrong and would the threat of your incompetence going public be just the thing to make PR people consider their actions a little more thoroughly?

Anyone else getting scared of Google?

The other day a fellow student at the fine institute that is Birkbeck, was heard to complain about the content of their  Saturday class. Unfortunately I don’t know exactly what the class was meant to be on, but apparently the lecturer spent the entire six hour session spouting conspiracy theories. Such as the government uses your Oyster card to track your movements. Which to be frank is almost complete bollocks, almost complete because if you a person of interest to them, then I’m sure that they do use this info. However for the average Joe Blow in the street? It just doesn’t have enough resources or indeed the technical capabilities at this point in time. This is the reason why ID cards are going to take a long time to happen, it’s pretty much impossible for one Govt dept to share its information with another due to legacy IT issues.

So stop worrying about the Government, instead I think you should worry about Google.

Like many of you, Google is my home page, I have gmail address, and not one of those Johnnie Comelately googlemail ones, I have a YouTube account, I used to use Blogger, I’m increasingly using Google docs. And I search a lot, and I mean a lot. For many of my friends and family, the G in GUI, stands for Gaffney not graphic, and really who can blame them as my google-fu is about 4th dan level*.

I digress, but you get the picture, strip Google out of my life and I’d have a gaping void, Admittedly one that could easily be filled by a variety of other providers but that’s the beauty of Google, it does almost everything and it does it well. I need only remember one password, one email address and I can access all my online treasure houses without resorting to a system of post-it notes. Just exactly how much I rely up it and just how much it knows about me I didn’t quite realise until TechCrunch told me about Google Dashboard which shows you in one handy place everything that you have told Google about  yourself.

In short it keeps track of:

Account & profile
Web-history
Gmail
Docs
Calendar
YouTube
Blogger
iGoogle
Latitude
Reader
Talk
Health
Orkut
Picasa
Shopping List
Voice
Contacts
Alerts
Finance
Friend Connect
Tasks
Custom search engines
Mobile Sync

Which is a fair bit of info, and on checking my own dashboard I discovered things that I’d long forgotten, like old abandoned blogs, that my last book search was obviously a vanity one.

Of course all this information is private, well private to me and Google, and I have no idea what it plans to do with that information, well apart from use it for increasingly accurate advertising (natch) and that is what scares me.

 

 

*5th Dan means I can google with a walking stick, sweet