afghan sloths

My roommate and best friend from the Naval Academy is being deployed to Afghanistan. You're probably saying "I didn't realize that the landlocked nation of Afghanistan required a significant Naval presence" but don't worry, the story gets weirder. We'll call my friend Sloth to protect his identity. I realize this doesn't seem very complementary, but as he once pointed out, sloths spend 97% of their lives sleeping, eating, and reproducing, so what's the downside?

More importantly, it closely approximates the life of US Air Force officers, which is important because Sloth did what is known as an inter-service transfer when he graduated from USNA, moving to the Air Force, which made him a pilot and gave him a sequence of expensive machines to drive all over the globe. Years of training and extensive deployments all over the globe has led to this:

An "in lieu of" mission to Afghanistan.

What the hell is "in lieu of mission" you ask?

In lieu of, or ILO, missions are where highly specialized Air Force airmen and officers -- who the Air Force has spent millions of our tax dollars to train as pilots, mechanics, and analysts -- are being sent to Afghanistan and Iraq in lieu of soldiers or marines.

That's right, because the combined might of NATO and the US Military is unable to meet their commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US military is pulling Air Force personnel out of their normal tasks and training to do a job they are not properly trained or prepared for -- guarding prisoners, for example. Apparently I'm not the only one who finds this practice ridiculous. Exhibiting a clear, liberal bias, "Air Force Magazine" -- published by the Air Force Association -- just posted an article about it.

Listening to General Petraeus testify, it was clear that the testimony we needed to hear was Secretary of Defense Gates, Army Chief of Staff General Casey, and Secretary Rice. Petraeus is correctly focused on his operational theater while Congress should be focused on the larger picture of how our military and diplomatic power is being deployed -- and the stresses it is under -- around the world. Many false comparisons between Vietnam and Iraq has been made, but one outcome of Vietnam's extended, unpopular, and ineffective application of force was a long period of reduced morale and material readiness of the US military during the 1970's. As we continue into a more complex and uncertain geopolitical future, why aren't our leaders spending more time focused on the big picture of what our military -- and its missions -- will look like during the next decade?

Sloth, of course, is not complaining. He's doing what he has done for nearly 20 years.

He's serving our nation.

I hope the Army does a good job of preparing him and that he comes home safe.

washington post hiding under virtual desk

Yesterday, the Washington Post published a piece about terrorism and virtual worlds, "Spies' Battleground Turns Virtual." For those who might not know a lot about the space, the Post set a calm, measured tone with the subtitle "Intelligence Officials See 3-D Online Worlds as Havens for Criminals." The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity -- I love when committees name things -- released a report about virtual worlds and their purported threats. Unfortunately, I can't find a link to the report online, so I can only comment via the game of telephone. Moreover, while I have briefed experts from many three letter agencies, I have not spoken to anyone from IARPA, which is a little surprising and does make we wonder how much research they've really done. So, what does the report say?

Unfortunately, what started out as a benign environment where people would congregate to share information or explore fantasy worlds is now offering the opportunity for religious/political extremists to recruit, rehearse, transfer money, and ultimately engage in information warfare or worse with impunity.

Wow, this does sound scary. But how valid is it? First of all, let's talk about the money. Linden's Ken Dreifach is quoted in the story, but beyond what he says, let's think about the money issue for just a moment. In order for real world currency to change hands via a virtual world, the real world currency has to change hands. I know, this does seem confusing, but consider the distinction between the Linden Dollar, L$, Second Life's in-world currency and the US$. L$ can be passed between players within SL, but in order for them to escape SL they have to be exchanged for something of value in the real world. Doing that requires one of the following events to happen:

• People to coordinate a meeting via SL to meet in the real world in order to exchange suitcases full of cash
• Coordinate in SL to use wire funds between banks
• Use one of the many L$:US$ exchanges using Pay Pal or credit cards to pay for L$, and then either Pay Pal or wire transfers to disperse the US$ proceeds

Notice anything? In all of these cases, banks or credit card companies get involved. Guess what? Ever since organized crime first started trying to launder money, banks have had to comply with government regulations on transactions, especially large cash transactions. There is no "money transfer with impunity" and asserting there is demonstrates a lack of understanding of the underlying technologies and capabilities.

This is important, because much like previous information and communications technology upheavals, there strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats inherent to virtual worlds that the intel community needs to understand. Poorly researched, headline grabbing reports do not advance their understanding or capabilities. As Jim Dempsey from the Center for Democracy and Technology points out, we have been here before. As a society, we have historical precedent for balancing the economic and social benefits of freedom against the potential harms.

What about the rest of the paragraph? Certainly there plenty of examples of games being used for recruitment and propaganda for extremist groups, both Islamic and Christian. But, if you are going to study how virtual worlds change the dangers and options, you had better understand how attempting to create a training scenario is Second Life is different from building it in the Unreal Engine or leveraging Google Maps. Or, for that matter, through images shared on Flickr and coordinated via one time pads and cell phones. The differences have tremendous implications for both traffic analysis and cryptanalysis.

Think about recruiting. Virtual worlds certainly have different affordances around recruiting than other media. The implications on trust and relationships of embodiment and place are receiving the research the deserve. However, leaping to the conclusion that virtual worlds are therefore perfect recruiting platforms misses the chance of using them to spread the alternate narratives so missing from Jihadist culture. Misses the thought of using them as better platforms for training the analysts and experts. Skips the resource of the thousands of native speakers of Arabic, Urdu, Persian, and other languages currently within SL.

Do intelligence agencies need to use virtual worlds and understand them? Absolutely. But they will only gain understanding by actually learning about virtual worlds. That will take significant time and effort, but there are many of us willing to help.

rock stars and business models

Last.fm, the excellent online music site recently acquired by CBS, made just announced that they were going to allow full track streaming from their web page. This is very cool, as Last.fm has one of the best search and recommendation engines around. I met their cofounder and CEO Felix Miller in Japan a year ago -- we were on Joi Ito's BlogTV together -- and thought he was a very thoughtful individual. Now that they have CBS' backing, it is exciting to see them expanding how they bring music to their members. 3.5 million tracks are now available for listening and you can hear them three times before you are prompted to buy them from iTunes or Amazon. I think this is a fantastic move, since -- much like my discussion on movies -- the content is already out on the web, only now you can offer listeners an easy way to pay for the music they like. Now, they're still paying for bandwidth -- although music is two orders of magnitude less data than video -- and I suspect the Rhapsody model of a flat subscription eliminates the hassles around per track purchases, but it is still a very good step toward doing what consumers want: make it easy for us to get -- and pay for -- content! Not all tracks by an artist are available, but enough are to give you a good flavor of a particular act. For example, my friend Salman Ahmad has a lot of his music available to stream or download.

However, what made my morning was the discovery that I could listen to Ryan Downe's music. Ryan runs the program management team at Linden Lab and I was lucky to work with him for over five years. However, I had foolishly never listened to his music until this morning when I was surfing last.fm. Holy crap is it good! So, if you are fan of 80's prog rock, you should take advantage of last.fm and give it a listen now!

interesting comments from the taxpayer advocate

Linden Lab's recent announcement about banking is making the virtual world blog rounds and soaking up the policy discussions. However, while listening to NPR, I heard some interesting elements in the recently released National Taxpayer Advocate's 2007 Report to Congress. The first piece revisits the oft-discussed taxation issue. In the "Measures to Address Noncompliance in the Cash Economy" section, there is a section about reporting using online auctions as an example. From that section:

Problem
Historically, only large established merchants accepted payment cards (e.g., credit, debit, gift, and prepaid cards). Today, many small businesses take them. Cash and checks accounted for only 45 percent of payments in 2005, down from 57 percent in 2001. Payment cards handled purchases of $2.6 trillion in 2005, with the total expected to rise to over $4.7 trillion in 2010. Credit and debit cards also account for 80 percent of Internet payments, with an additional 9 percent from related services such as PayPal. Internet business activity, which is one of the fastest growing modes of commerce, is typically conducted using payment cards.

The report suggests that if the payment vendors were required to report these payments, taxpayers would be more likely to report their earnings:

Although gift cards and cash back transactions might make it difficult for the IRS to
reliably match payment card data against amounts reported on returns, the IRS could use payment card information to identify returns with a greater risk of noncompliance. In addition, research suggests that the knowledge that the IRS receives payment information significantly improves reporting compliance even for taxpayers who are not audited.

I think this is a great news for Linden Lab, eBay, and other businesses that leverage large numbers of user-to-user transactions. Rather than putting the reporting burden on the world operators, it places it on the payment vendors, who likely already have the necessary accounting and documentation processes in place.

The second interesting idea is a customer service concept. Apparently, several tax bureaus from other countries have the idea of paying the customer if the tax bureau makes a mistake.

[A] fair and just tax system should acknowledge IRS mistakes and delays in taxpayer issue resolution, and where such situations cause excessive expense or undue burden on the taxpayer, make a de minimis “apology” payment.

The IRS apologizing? What an interesting change. Maybe this is why the IRS is no longer the most hated US government department.

It makes me wonder, as online reputation and social systems become increasingly central to how we do business, communicate, and play, whether including the ability to apologize is as important as being able to say thank you. Linden Lab's "Love Machine," which I had originally conceived of as a way to tip or thank people for going above and beyond, is a positive-sum method of saying thanks. The idea has since popped up at other companies and as a Facebook app. But it didn't provide the complementary idea of a "mea culpa" machine. We often joked about it creating a "Hate Machine", but that isn't quite what you want. Instead, you'd want a way to capture what you did wrong and who your mistake impacted.

But I had never thought about an apology payment. Must do more research on that.

adding an emmy to the list

The rest of the Second Life blogosphere already got this, but Second Life just won an Emmy! More specifically, the award for "Outstanding Achievement in Advanced Media Technology for Best Use of Commercial Advertising on Stand-Alone Broadband Devices (Personal Computers)" went to the L Word in Second Life, which was created by the Electric Sheep Company.

I am particularly thrilled to see this because I introduced Sibley to Second Life at the 2004 Accelerating Change conference, where I also met Jerry Paffendorf, Randal Moss, Jeremy Bailenson, and John Smart, all names familiar to those playing in and studying virtual worlds. Back then, Sibley was attacking a Holy Grail computer science problem -- video search -- at StreamSage, but being a bright fellow, he was already looking around for his next project. We kept talking and meeting until the timing was right for Electric Sheep to launch. I'm thrilled I was able to play a part in bringing Sibley into this space!

Reading the rest of the press release, it appears Second Life received a second Emmy, for "User Generated Content -- Game Modification"! Congrats, Linden!

glossy poster goodness

On Tuesday, I challenged Ian's claim that he could generate poster-sized images form classic game scenes. Of course, it ain't braggin' if you can do it, so Ian responded by creating the Atari Adventure Easter Egg Poster! Very cool. Now I just need a real job so that I can have a wall to hang one of these on.

In separate news, Ian just posted about the impending release of Fatworld, a game about the politics of obesity by Persuasive Games.