Adult content...who wanted the changes...

Yep, I would prefer aristol verification scrapped completely as it is easily defeated as the tick a box if you are 18, but NPIOF does require a bit more effort and has proven in the past to reduce the ease of access to adult sigtes by minors and griefers. Once their CC number is banned they have to go through the effort of getting another one, much more mucking around than just creating another hotmail address and random Aristole verification.

How difficult is it to make a Paypal account?

Or a credit card for that matter? I can get a prepaid one for ten bucks. I've never tried to verify an account with one of those, though.

Yeah, but can you get them as easily as you can make up a false ID or tick a checkbox? You still need to fork out $10 everytime and you need to verify Paypal to somethingsolid. Tick a check box takes one click, false Aristol verification ID just needs a random name & random drivers licence number using some random address 2 streets away.

So if you did report an underaged user, they would have a new account made up and logged back in in a few minutes, rather than have to go down the road to buy another $10 credit card or go through all the Paypal confirmations again etc.

If they need to do it often enough that matters they're likely to discover they're IP banned anyway.

They'll still be able to make a new account under the new policy in a few minutes, same as now. They'll just have an extra hoop to jump through to get to Adults rated regions.

Unless everyone is required to be verified, I'm not sure it's very helpful.

Yep, that's the idea of it, is to have regions accessesable by unverifieds (everyone) and have regions only accessablle by verified people otherwise, might as well ditch PG too.
It doesn't take genius to see that for SL to become the future 3D internet they have to start building a basis that restricts areas (and perhaps later content) to verified and non verified accounts. It might not happen this year, maybe next year or the year after, but it will happen. The Government will make them do it or shut them down. This is the gorundwork for progress in the future, there will always be changes in SL's social structure, it's just evolution.

Right, because that was an absolute priority before the 2d Internet could be created.

Oh, wait, no, there's no such "consistency" on the Internet. Why would you expect the "3d Internet" to be any different?

I highly doubt SL will be the "Next Internet" at least in LL's hands. They can't figure out how to put together and run a blog/forum/website without getting it all over themselves. While the Metaverse (tm) may happen, SL won't be the center of it. In my highly uneducated opinion.

Besides moving to Adult land, the new definitions ban sex furniture on PG land. I predict a movement away from PG, both by mainland people moving out, and estate owners changing their rating from PG to Mature.

Hey, Elanthius, do you track land prices by maturity? It would be interesting to see how the various maturity land prices move.

It's not just Adult land that's redefined. PG land is now prohibited from hosting sex furniture. So your paragraph is incomplete without adding something like:

"The Maturity Ratings for ALL land in second life have been changed [Reference Knowledge Base page 6010] Publicly promoted adult content must be located on Adult rated land....sex furniture and animations are not allowed on PG land. etc."

The verification requirement will in my opinion be about 50% effective in screening out underage people. It will be more effective in screening out *very* young people than 17 year olds. That is because fewer very young people hold credit cards than 17 year olds (20% do at that age in the USA), and fewer very young people would be able to figure out the faking of ID.

They could do a few simple things to increase the effectiveness:

(1) Add a bold message on login that this contains adult material when the account is set to adult level. That way a parent has a *chance* to see it if they inspect the software on their child's computer.

(2) Charge a nominal $1.00 fee when placing payment info on file. That will produce a visible charge on a credit card that a parent might notice. Then they can ask what it was for. Right now, a "stolen" use of a credit card number belonging to a parent and used to just register PIOF is silent.

I don't and it could be a little tricky getting historic data from what I have. The trouble is that finding the sim name out of search results isn't as trivial as it should be.

I'll see if I can cobble something together though.

Makes sense. As "Adult" has become the new "Mature", "Mature" has become the new "PG". And PG? That's where your naked sim gets teleported to after your adult sim crashes.

Because we stuffed up the 2D internet by not planning for it, so hopefully we would learn from our mistakes in creating a replacement.
I'm not saying LL wiill be the 3D internet of the future, but they want to be,, I suspect more likely they will fail, there are too many things they have stuffed up beyond repair because they can't break old content to do things the right way, but someone big is watching like microsoft etc, and will replace it quickly with a product that makes SL look like Active Worlds.

Remember Compuserve, Prodigy, Delphi, AOL? These all tried to filter and manage the experience and ended up getting rolled over by the Internet when it came along... and even then their chat rooms were full of underage kids. Remember the Prodigy decision, which was a major motivation for the Safe Harbor provisions in the DMCA, and established that it's *dangerous* for a service provider to try and do what Linden Labs is doing? No, you don't remember any of this, do you?

The only thing that's got a hope of working is not separating adult and kid spaces, it's requiring payment to get into SL at all, and to hell with the imaginary user-base numbers. Anything less than that, and you're better off with an "I'm really 18" checkbox.

Just because everyone trying to do something previously has failed it's impossible to do?

Requiring payment to enter areas of SL is probabl the best way and ditching Aristole to do it

Sounds like nearly every regulation I have ever heard of.

After watching people trying to do the same thing over and over again and failing, you start to figure old Al was right again:
No. Requiring payment to enter SL. Period. Otherwise people will just play games with the loopholes that LL is helpfully leaving in the system, like Aristotle, and gaming the definition of privacy and advertising. It's the old predators in the kiddy chat room problem.

But... what you want, as impractical as it is, is still not what LL provided. Nobody wants what LL actually provided.

Speed limits aren't on the honor system.

Get rid of Aristole for verification and it sounds ok to me.

For the most part they are. Only the unlucky get caught. The honest are limited to low speeds and have their time wasted. Those who choose to break the law, in large measure, get away a large percentage of the time.

Yeh, I've heard that argument before. I've even USED that argument before. Eventually you discover it's a load of crap, and you're lucky if the worst that happens to you is just wasting more time in court than you saved on the road.

But that's not what we have. You can't pick and choose. Either you asked for the mess we got or you didn't. You didn't.

It is what really killed all those services.. as the mods got heavier and heavier handed, and more people did they best to slide around the rules, the only winners were the lawyers.

You're only in trouble if you're caught. I did about 125MPH for a small part of my commute this morning just for the LULZ. No speeding ticket on me. =^-^=