Posted by Shaun Altman
Wed, 10 Sep 2008 02:53:00 GMT
Yay, exploding web servers! Just when you think life has thrown you all of the stress that it possibly can in a two week period, something new happens! :) The server appears to have been down since very early this morning, and the ISP had to make multiple (slow) attempts to get us fully restored on new hardware.
All seems to be well with the server now. I hope to have a lot of exciting new content up on my blog shortly. I've been thinking a lot about the metaverse lately, and have also been working on some cool new stuff in Second Life. I hope you've all been having a better time than me for the last couple of weeks, and very soon I'll be bringing you all up to date on the things I've been thinking about and working on lately!
Posted in Second Life | Tags cool, downtime, metaverse, new, secondlife, sigh, stress, stuff, ugh | no comments
Posted by Shaun Altman
Fri, 01 Aug 2008 18:22:00 GMT
I've just had the absolute worst home rental experience of my Second Life, thanks to Ravenglass Rentals and its operator, Prokofy Neva. What happened was so nasty that I felt a need to write up a quick blog post on the topic, so that hopefully my readers will not fall victim as I did. I hope this saves some people from being taken to the cleaners by Ravenglass Rentals.
I decided yesterday to rent an e-home in Second Life, so I could make use of many domestic objects which had been sitting idle in my inventory for some time. Since Ravenglass Rentals was known to me in the past for having nice lands and controlled views, I thought I would check out a few homes in the Ravenglass region. Once there, I found the home pictured above, and immediately fell in love with it. The price was very excessive, but since I liked it so much, I paid the rental box one week's rent.
In exchange for my one week's rent, I received roughly one minute of property usage. While I was in my inventory window looking for my living room set, the owner of Ravenglass Rentals, Prokofy Neva, teleported to my rented home, banned me from the land I had just rented from her and reset the rental box for a new "tenant" (read: sucker) to come along and give her ANOTHER week's rent. My instant messages requesting an explanation and/or refund were subsequently ignored.
This is a very popular land scam, but it is usually practiced on private islands rather than the mainland. What the scammers generally do is sell off a whole island, then boot all of the buyers and sell it off again (and again and again). Its a disgusting practice, and I was very sad to see that it had seemingly become so mainstream that even an old hat such as Prokofy Neva might feel comfortable ripping off unsuspecting Second Life residents in this manner. Indeed, I could hardly believe my eyes.
Now it is true that I am an occasional critic of Prokofy Neva. With this in mind, I thought there may be some chance that she was stealing from me more out of a misplaced sense of spite and revenge than general business practice. Wanting to confirm which was the case, and noting that the e-home was once again available for rent within one minute of the time I had rented it, I asked someone that I know and trust to rent the same e-home from Prokofy Neva.
Again, the rental box was paid one week's worth of what seems like very excessive rent for this property. A sofa was rezed and 20 or 30 minutes passed. Then once again, Prokofy Neva teleported out of the ether, banned the tenant from the property and reset the rental box so it would potentially be able to capture a THIRD week's rent from a THIRD unsuspecting victim.
As with before, there was no refund and no response to IMs requesting an explanation and/or refund. It seems that indeed, this scheme must be a general business practice for Prokofy Neva and Ravenglass Rentals. It is a shame to see a once prominent land lord apparently having to resort to scamming and slum lording tactics to keep her business vibrant and her bills paid during Second Life's great depression. We can only hope that Prokofy Neva's Ravenglass Rentals will return to more ethical business practices as the depression ends.
Either way, after this experience, I'd advise anyone and everyone against renting property from Prokofy Neva, under the Ravenglass Rentals name or any other name. We were victims twice in under an hour, paying two weeks rent and receiving under one hour of property usage in return. It is my sincere hope, as I write this post, that YOU will not be the next victim of land seizure by Prokofy Neva at Ravenglass Rentals.
Posted in Community, Second Life, Business, Economy, Stuff That Makes Me Angry, People, Places | Tags land, neva, prokofy, ravenglass, rentals, scam, theft | 8 comments
Posted by Shaun Altman
Mon, 28 Jan 2008 00:28:00 GMT
It appears that the land I mentioned in my previous article has been returned from Linden Lab to the university professor, and the owner of the land has been unbanned. I am greatly relieved to see that, at least in this case, a powerful cabal of well-connected large land holders was unable to arbitrarily decide which of their neighbors is allowed to stay in Second Life, and which should face property seizure and banishment.
Posted in Second Life, Places | 1 comment
Posted by Shaun Altman
Thu, 24 Jan 2008 23:29:00 GMT
Linden Lab seems to have sent us another reminder recently that Second Life may have entered a whole new era. This is not the kind of era that we all hope for, such as for example, an era of economic rebound. Instead, it seems to be an era of, among other things, land seizure and account banning conducted by Linden Lab, based on what your powerful well-connected neighbor thinks of you and/or what you've built next-door.
Let me start this article off by saying that I'm not generally one to be critical of Linden Lab, especially in public. I love Second Life, and I truly believe that this type of technology holds a lot of promise for the future in a variety of areas. I also feel that generally speaking, there is no better qualified group of individuals on the planet to usher us into this new technological era than the folks at Linden Lab.
With that said, the events that I've seen occur recently leave me with a feeling of deep concern for what the future of Second Life may be like, and cause me to wonder if I'll even want to participate in that future. Let me share the most recent series of these events with you to the extent that I can recall them.
A couple of nights ago, someone sent me an instant message to tell me about a new build in the Furness region of Second Life. Furness is an un-zoned mainland region which the avatar Prokofy Neva owns a lot of land in and around. I learned that what seems to be a group of students belonging to a university, had begun construction of a tower on some land that one of them had purchased in the region. I knew that Prokofy Neva generally rented virtual houses in this area of the grid, and was curious about what effect a tower may have on the landscape, so I teleported over to Furness to check it out.
When I arrived, I found the avatar IntLibber Brautigan, the avatar Prokofy Neva, a few other avatars who's names I can't recall, and indeed, a partially constructed tower. It seemed to be shaping up to be a very nice tower, which while large, may have added a lot of value to the area. There was also signage present, facing a nearby road, which indicated that this land was to be the future home of Woodbury University in Second Life.
I was pretty busy at the time, so after having a look around the area, I wished the avatars good luck with their school project and teleported back to my home location. The next day, I received a teleport spam from Prokofy Neva, inviting me to the Furness region, with no accompanying instant message. I was still pretty busy, but being ever-curious about what someone as dynamic as Prokofy Neva is up to in Second Life, I decided to accept the teleport invitation.
When I arrived, Prokofy asked me if I remembered what was on the lot we were next to. Indeed, next to us was an empty lot where the tower belonging to the university students stood the night before, but it was no longer there. A closer examination revealed the land to now be owned by Governor Linden.
Prokofy Neva went on to inform me that the avatar who purchased this land had been banned from Second Life, after the seizure of the avatar's property (land) by Linden Lab. He then asked me a very chilling question. I didn't log it, so I can't quote it verbatim, but it was directly along the lines of, "Do you see what I can get done if I want to?".
This event is alarming mostly because when I viewed the build prior to it, there didn't seem to be anything present which violated the rules of Second Life. Prokofy Neva often theorizes about the existence of a secretive and elite cabal of Second Life residents, known as the "Feted Inner Core", or "FIC" for short. According to Prokofy Neva, this is a group of residents who are well-connected with Linden Lab, and receive special favors and/or special treatment within Second Life as a result of those connections.
Prokofy Neva also speculates often in public about which Second Life residents may or may not be members of this shadowy organization. I know a lot of people on this list, and because I've never witnessed an event related to one of them that I could describe beyond a reasonable doubt as special treatment, I've never really bought into the notion of "a FIC" controlling the destiny of Second Life. My eyes have been opened on this issue in a most surprising way though.
If these events took place as I understand them, it seems to me that in fact "a FIC" may be very much alive and well within the grid, and Prokofy Neva may be its chairman. I don't know about you, but personally, I know of no other avatar who can summon some friends with the last name of Linden, and say to them, "I don't like this build. Snatch the land from the person who paid for it, remove the build, and ban the land owner from the game".
In my view, these events serve to highlight a concern that I've felt building in the community for quite a while. I joined Second Life in 2004, which makes me a fairly old avatar by today's standards. Back then, Linden Lab often told us that we were building a world. In fact, the vision that they sold to me, which has kept me so passionately engaged through both good and bad times, was "Your world, your imagination".
Alarming events like these, which are happening often in Second Life's more recent history, seem to indicate that Linden Lab may have lost its way somewhere along the road. I worry that they may have forgotten about why we're all here and why we all invest so much time, emotion, money and expertise into building this brave new world, which they once proudly told us was forged by our imaginations. It appears that Linden Lab may have begun paving a NEW road, comprised of censorship, corporate sanitization, and pandering to the whimsical desires of special interests such as real-world mega-corps and very large land holders like Prokofy Neva, at the expense of the community as a whole.
This is a road that doesn't hold much interest for me as a resident of Second Life. It is my sincere hope that Linden Lab will find its way once again, and return to its roots as true innovators in the fields of communication, collaboration, experimentation and free expression, rather than continuing to evolve into just another sad reminder of the power that the status quo holds over all of us.
Posted in Second Life, Stuff That Makes Me Angry, Places | 7 comments
Posted by Shaun Altman
Tue, 08 Jan 2008 03:00:00 GMT
It has been a while since any news was posted regarding the Ginko liquidation process. Please rest assured that this isn't because I have forgotten about you, but simply because there have been no concrete developments since the last update. This has recently changed, so I thought I'd take a minute to advise everyone on where Ginko virtual liquidation trust stands.
IntLibber Brautigan has succeeded in selling the Von Mises simulator for L$300,000 and has delivered this sum to me for inclusion in Ginko virtual liquidation trust. This makes the trust a little better off than where it was a few days ago. However, news is not so good regarding the sale of BNT virtual shares formerly owned by Ginko.
IntLibber Brautigan has been actively blockading the sale of these shares, via administrative controls on his ACE virtual stock exchange, where the shares are listed. He feels that if our shares are sold, the price of BNT won't go up. This may or may not be true, but I must advise you that were it not for this blockade, the shares would be mostly sold by now and it would be just about time for a liquidation dividend.
I have been completely unsuccessful, over a period of months, in convincing IntLibber Brautigan to end the blockade. If you would like this situation to change, I would strongly encourage you to contact IntLibber Brautigan and share your feelings on the blockade of share sales with him. These are, in fact, YOUR shares. I remain hopeful that we will be able to sell these shares and recover additional funds.
In other news, World Stock Exchange has recently announced a service outage of "up to 30 days", stating that it is for reasons related to deployment of a new version of their stock market simulation software. As a software developer with a lot of experience in web applications, I'm fully aware that deploying a new version shouldn't impact the production version at all, or cause more than a few minutes to a few hours of service outage. With this in mind, it seems a little alarming that such an extended downtime is occurring, again, and I am a little concerned that something catastrophic or just plain bizarre may have occurred behind the scenes. I wouldn't want to speculate as to what this may be without any more information beyond the outage itself though, and I very well could be wrong.
I remain hopeful that World Stock Exchange will reopen. Failing that, I remain hopeful that the Ginko victim list can be provided by Hope Capital, so I can script a Second Life object of my own to deliver your virtual liquidation dividend. So, what's the bottom line for Ginko virtual liquidation trust?
We're L$300,000 better off than we were a few days ago, but we still have a long way to go. I remain hopeful that we will get there.
As a reminder, I am not affiliated with Ginko in any way. I am simply a third party and fellow victim, trying to help us all recover as much as possible from Ginko's in-world Second Life assets.
Posted in Second Life, Business, Economy, World Stock Exchange, Ginko Financial | 2 comments
Posted by Shaun Altman
Sat, 20 Oct 2007 22:54:00 GMT
On October 17th, 2007, the World Stock Exchange announced a fraud compensation package for shareholders at the bottom of this public announcement. When I read about the compensation package, I thought it was worthy of both examination and preservation. Lets examine it together. I've also taken the liberty of preserving the portion of this announcement that deals with the compensation package at the bottom of this article, as announcements frequently vanish from the World Stock Exchange announcement system.
Here are the basics of the fraud compensation package:
- A new exchange traded "fund", called WSE Traders Fund (ticker symbol WTF) will be created.
- The "fund" will hold shares of Hope Capital (ticker symbol HCL), the same "company" that owns World Stock Exchange.
- All shares in fraudulent World Stock Exchange companies will be destroyed, and newly created shares of WSE Traders Fund will be given to the shareholders of the fraudulent companies.
We can see from the basics of this fraud compensation package that all of its value will be derived from HCL stock. With this in mind, the most important question to ask about this fund is where will the HCL stock backing it come from? As Ginko Financial has recently announced the failure of its bond, I think we can reasonably assume that the fund's HCL stock will come from the 8,800,000 shares of HCL that were previously owned by Ginko.
As of this writing, the market valued HCL stock at L$0.75 per share, giving the fund a net asset value of around L$6,600,000. This is a pretty depressing amount of value for the fraud compensation fund, given that Ginko's fraud alone has a value of L$200,000,000. That is to say, if Ginko were the ONLY fraudulent company having its shares converted into this fund, each share of the fund would be worth about L$0.04 in theory. Given the very long list of other fraudulent companies that are also scheduled to have their shares converted into shares of this fund, I think that fraud victims can expect an asset value of around L$0.02 per share for the fund.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a big believer in the fact that World Stock Exchange should do what it can to make amends for all of the fraud that it has brought upon the Second Life community. This fund structure, however, begs the question, why even bother? Creating a fund that only compensates the victims for 2% of the fraud that they have endured at World Stock Exchange is nothing more than rubbing salt in the wounds of the victims.
Besides the fact that this fund seems to be an insult to all victims of fraud at World Stock Exchange, offering them only a theoretical 2% compensation for the fraud they have endured, there is an even bigger problem: Perpetual dilution of value! I don't know about you, but I'm not fooled into thinking that fraud at World Stock Exchange is somehow being curbed by a tiny compensation fund that costs the exchange exactly NOTHING each time fraud is committed there.
Since we can take it as a given that the fraud will continue at World Stock Exchange, this means that MILLIONS MORE SHARES of this fund will be created after the commission of each fraud. However, Ginko is the only World Stock Exchange listed security owning any HCL shares to seize and add to the fund. Therefore, as time marches on, the value of an existing share in the fraud compensation fund will DROP dramatically due to the commission of new fraud and thus the creation of new shares in the fraud compensation fund. Would YOU buy shares in such a fund? I sure wouldn't, and I think it is reasonable to assume that nobody with any common sense would.
If World Stock Exchange is serious about compensating the Second Life community for all of the fraud that it has ushered in, it needs to do a lot more than what was announced here. I think that to even show good faith, Connell should contribute his 5 million shares of HCL to this fund, so it has a better starting point. In addition, 90% of all trading commissions collected by World Stock Exchange should be used to buy back shares of this fund via market order, at L$1.00 per share or less, as long as any shares exist for sale at or below L$1.00. This strategy assumes of course that each L$1.00 worth of fraud is worth one share of the fraud compensation fund, as presently seems to be the structure.
I think it is a joke for this guy to get rich off of the trading commissions we pay him to trade what he knows to most likely be fraudulent stocks, and then insult us with a fraud compensation fund that is structured in a manner that not only fails to compensate us for the fraud that we are victims of, but costs him NOTHING. Yep, I think the joke is on us, and Luke Connell is laughing all the way to the bank. The world stock exchange ticker symbol for this fund, WTF, seems highly appropriate to me: What The Fuck?!
If World Stock Exchange wants to posture in press releases about how it is doing something good for their customers, who they state made World Stock Exchange what it is today, and were the victims of fraud at World Stock Exchange in the process, they can SURELY do a lot better than what they've announced in the excerpt below. There seems to be no actual MONEY to be found anywhere in this fraud compensation scheme for the victims. In fact, it seems that all World Stock Exchange is doing here is converting a bunch of fraudulent stocks into a single, unified fraudulent stock, and posturing to the fraud victims about how this is somehow a blessing.
--- Begin WSE Quote ---
- THE KILLER APP OF VIRTUAL FINANCE NOT YET REVEALED BUT COMING SOON....
THE SECRET IS REVEALED!
Yes its true, it has always been part of the WSE's agenda to ensure that all WSE Traders whom we class as stakeholders would be indirectly protected as much as possible from the potential ethics based fraud and misconduct that would come from businesses listing on the WSE during the start-up and development phase which has been almost entirely unregulated environment in order to cultivate and encourage growth.
The Secret is out and the time has now come as we feel there is an improved regulatory environment and sufficient information available to WSE traders in order to help them make informed decisions when trading on the WSE.
World Stock Exchange Traders Fund (WTF) is a specially designed fund that holds shares in Hope Capital Ltd on behalf of all WSE account holders who have lost their virtual shares or bonds in delisted companies up to the 19th October 2007. All WSE account holders are stakeholders in the business.
Management alone did not make the WSE what it is today and it is through the participation of our customers that the WSE has become what it is today and what it will become in the future.
WSE account holders will have all their shares in any company that was delisted due to fraud or bankruptcy converted into shares in the World Stock Exchange Traders Fund (WTF).
The WSE Traders Fund will be allocated shares in Hope Capital Ltd on 23rd October 2007 and will begin actively trading on the WSE on the 24th October 2007.
CURRENT CONVERSIONS INCLUDE:
APT 1 - 3
PNK 1 - 1
IBM 1 - 1
MPR 1 - 1
PCL 1 - 1
PPC 1 - 1
RIN 1 - 1
SEX 1 - 1
TSF 1 - 10
WED 1 - 1
TLS 1 - 1
XAN 1 - 1
XDT 1 - 1
SBJ 1 - 1
TGC 1 - 1
PGI 1 - 3
AMD 1 - 0.5
CIG 1 - 1
--- End WSE Quote ---
Posted in Community, Second Life, Business, Economy, World Stock Exchange, Ginko Financial | 10 comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Shaun Altman
Sun, 19 Aug 2007 09:34:04 GMT
Hey, thanks for visiting! I am the Second Life avatar known as Shaun Altman! :) A lot of people ask me questions in-world every day spanning a broad range of topics, and like most others, I have many interesting discussions in IM. I’ve always felt that a lot of these dialogs could be of benefit or just of interest to the broader community, so I’ve decided to start a blog where we can all come together and explore some of the current events in Second Life.
The content here will probably end up being pretty varied. In the near-term, I’d like to publish some of my thoughts on the World Stock Exchange, the current Ginko Financial situation and the broader Second Life economy in general. I’d also like to write a bit about what I’m up to in Second Life, the things I enjoy doing in-world and the interesting people that I meet. I’m currently tossing around the idea of authoring a series of LSL scripting guides as well, but I’m not sure if a blog is the best format for those. Let me know if you think such guides would be useful to you, and if so, how to best provide access to them via this site.
Above all else, what I’d like to accomplish here is to foster an open and welcoming environment for discussion and debate, so please don’t be shy with your comments. Its okay if you don’t agree with me, and its fine if discussions become a little heated sometimes too. I only ask that you keep your submissions clean and free of personal attacks.
If there’s anything you’d like to see more (or less) of on this blog, please let me know via blog comment or in-world IM. Second Life is all about ideas, so lets keep them flowing! Thanks again for visiting my blog! I hope that you will enjoy it!
Posted in Second Life, etc | 6 comments | no trackbacks
