DO NOT use SL to buy anything using your bank account, mine got cleared out

I don't think that question will be answered, Phil. I'm as eager to know the answer though, because it's made very clear that we poor saps are the brainwashed masses whereas her robust logic and intellectual clarity make her a class apart. But why she should waste her time posting in a forum full of blinkered idiots and inhabit a virtual world that is essentially a gigantic confidence trick from devious, grasping crooks who are out to steal our money is, frankly, beyond me.

Chaos, you haven't really given us much details on what has actually happened. Are you saying that someone hacked your SL account and bought L$ in your name then transferred them to someone else (in which case transaction history will show the name of the avatar used, and LL will have an IP address for them)? Or are you saying that someone stole your debit card and used that to purchase L$ independently of your SL account?
There is a big big difference. For the former, LL are to blame. If the latter is true, then blaming LL is hardly appropriate.

The visa and mastercard regulations (which apply to debit cards as well as credit cards) require that the merchant (LL in this case) be given a "reasonable period of time" to set the matter straight before your bank can intervene. "Reasonable" is generally understood in the banking industry to mean 28 days, not one business day as someone has said here.

The Visa and Mastercard Regulations is a large (approximately 2000 pages - I tried to read it once when I worked for MBNA, but lacked the mental resolve) contract that all merchants (retailers that want to accept cards), card issuers and acquiring banks agree too. It transcends nationality - all merchants and issuers in every country in the world adhere to the same proceedures. If they didn't, Visa and Mastercard would not allow them to use their infrastructure.

I can't count the number of times I had to liase with companies on behalf of my customers who insisted that they MOST CERTAINLY DID NOT SIGN UP TO WWW.CUMONMYFACE.COM UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES!

If you believe it is an error on LL's part, then you must allow them 28 days to sort it out. Your bank will be powerless to help until this period has passed - unless LL tell you they intend to do nothing.

If you believe that it is a malicious act by a third party, your bank will liase with LL and they will contact the police on your behalf. Don't forget, it is your card issuer who is the victim of fraud, not you; your card issuer are the ones taking the loss here.

This sounds to me like someone had tinkered with the ATM machine you used and has copied your card details - so no blame can really be attached to LL.

Rebecca: You have clearly never had any dealings with Blizzard if you think their customer service is superior. LL may have bad customer service - Blizzard have literally no customer service.

The most obvious implementation SL could follow in terms of how Blizzard run WoW is one account, multiple avatars.

However the same whines about performance are found on the WoW forums, the same whines that they don't listen, are found on the WoW forums.

Very true. Plus, there is more rickrolling there. I did like the multiple avatars on one account feature. Pity the game itself was too crap to keep my interest for more than 6 weeks. Performance isn't the issue; LL's customer service may be slow, but Blizzard's customer service people are actually directly rude to customers - I speak from experience.

Even in the first case, LL is probably not to blame. Chaos admitted in another thread to hopping around to different cybercafes trying to log on. He could have left his account login at any of them.

Ah, well in that case there is only one possible explanation.

Chaos is a buffoon.

as most used car salesmen will tell you....they love to hear when somebody is a mac user it means you can sell them anything .....exept for a good computer

Mac users will buy a good computer off you too - so long as you double the price.

Getting a tad nervous over there on the PC side, are we?

Not really. Macs are becoming more and more like a PC by the day. First it was Intel processors. When is the planned launch for Windows for Mac again? Next year sometime isn't it?

I even heard that some companies were toying with idea of making games for Macs! Someone might even be bothered to write a virus for them too oneday.

Back to the topic though;

I, for one, would like to know whether Chaos wrote his 11 support tickets in proper English, or in l33t sp33k like his posts. The answer to this conundrum might be illuminating.

I have worked in the UK banking industry for several years. Chaos is quite wrong. Plus, we actually have Citibank in this country anyway (their headquarters are less than a mile from where I live), so quite what his remark is meant to mean is beyond me.

Because everyone knows that a blog post should be the first reaction to a security breach!

Maybe his tickets just get automatically labelled as "very low priority due to asshattery", considering his support ticket history and the tone of voice he uses when "complaining"...

Edit:

Or maybe all the Lindens have muted him by now. ^^

If the latter, let's hope that LL has someone that speaks it.

Without getting into too long of a reply that will just get twisted and spun anyway I will explain briefly why I DO/Did care about SL:

Being a social scientist by early training, and a fully achieved person with a major career in the arts and an activist for a better world, I was shocked to discover just how many young people spend 10 or more hours a day in MMO's----this while stumbling into one myself (WOW) After a few months and gradually getting to know people, I began to see that WOW's big flaw, was that it was turning millions of young people--some of the best and the brightest-- around the world, into chair-bound losers, with no life. I saw that because of it's time-consuming nature, WOW or other MMO's should only be played by those who already have a life and who grasp reality of where they are going to be in the future if they don't get out there and do things for their real life.

The reason should be clear, it is because there is X amount of hours in a day and people have to sleep, so clearly these people had no time to be doing what young people need to be doing in this or any other society, in order for them to have a future of any kind. This means that a major and unprecedented, change is happening in all of the world society that leaves open the usual process of young people remaking or improving the world and creates a situation where the default now settles at the level of the lowest common denominator. MMO's should be for independently wealthy, retired or disabled people---but no for the core youth of the world.

Log on, waste time and drop into a fantasy world.

I was in a number of raiding guilds and got to know many hundreds of great young people, but who where dropping out of high school, bypassing college or flunking high school and college, barely even trying to have careers and relationships---forget it.

As I studied the MMO/online phenomena and studying the numbers and demographics and the process of what is now called game addiction, barely sees the whole picture. On one hand I clearly see the attraction to MMO's ---I am very much attracted to it myself----and on the other hand I see and have seen first hand the destruction it has had on young people and young people are always the hope for the world. In most of the MMO's, young people are training to learn to be efficient killers and learning/imprinting a kind of defacto code of warriors.

I speculated that since there is no way to actually get people to stop playing in MMO's and do real world---since real world is so unattractive to so many disillusioned young people--there could be another alternative----it became clear to me that if all these millions of kids could somehow make an income doing their MMO's---then that would at least allow them to pay bills and have a life. So then I learned about Second Life and how people can ***theoretically*** make an income with it and it was fun and creative to boot. Great.

Unfortunately, I see that SL is more of a bitter jungle then WOW and the company that runs it is no Blizzard by any stretch of the imagination. Instead of a well thought out way to create an environment that is conducive to a better world, it is a vile stronghold of greedy animals and perverts, parasitically praying on the naive masses and LL is a bunch of immature anarchists with nice cars, who try to absolve themselves from responsibility. To me it is just plain criminal.

Congrats people.


Sorry my motives for being critical of LL are so obscure to you. Whatever dream people can have for a better world is easily squelched by the heavy foot of greed avarice and stupidity.

Yes, but you didn't answer the question - why do you use SL? You've stated your myriad objections to it, so why do you use it?

Btw, making a living from SL is not just theoretical

Wow.. Thanks for explaining that, Rebecca, and welcome to my ignore list.

That Rebecca is what makes you a truly dangerous person. You want to save people from themselves. They are the "chair bound losers" and you are the enlightened one who knows best how others should live. Most evil in this world has come from people like you. People who want to "have a better world".

I stand and say "NO Thanks." Keep your better world, I will take freedom.


"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its
victims may be the most oppressive. Those who torment us for our own
good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of
their own conscience." C S Lewis

Because of the potential for creativity and my own love of all things immersive. In my own life I have no need for a "Second" income. my attraction to MMO's is really not that different from other's. But I have an innate sense of responsibility.

After raiding in WOW and loving it, for the sheer enjoyment of it, but seeing how the time factor, was effecting many young people's real life negativly I began to feel like I was tacitly agreeing to and contributing to the deliquency of young people of the future. Second Life was a conceivable alternative--but within a few months I learned the direction it was heading and see how---as it is----is no alternative to anything.

You state that SL is run by a den of thieves (my paraphrase), you criticise everything about it, and you never have anything positive to say about it. I can't for the life of me come up with a reason why you stay in it.

Don't you just hate people who quote an immensely long post just to make a 1 or 2 line response?

Im not staying in it. I still like the idea of it and what it could be if it was handled consciensiously and honestly. I am hoping it will be done right by others down the road.

To Chris: your "freedom" is an illusion. You are at the mercy of the lowest common denominator and the more time passes, this lowest common denominator will settle into Sl and it will just become more corrupt and more of a scammers paradise.

The term for it is "fool's paradise."

You don't have to be paranoid of people with compassion for others--the world needs more people with compassion, not people who think it will all magically get better if there was no government. Compassion is not an ideological thing. Ideologies without compassion, can be the real dictators.


Take a look at the level of compassion some people have for Chaos on this thread. Pretty sad.

Sorry Rebecca, I am at no one's mercy. I am a sovereign individual, responsible for my own actions. It is up to me to make the right choices for me.

It is not compassion to impose your will upon others. That is exactly what you want to do. You are right, it isn't an ideological thing. It is about the "enlightened" thinking they should be able to tell the rest of us how to live.

As for the compassion for Chaos, he is getting what HE has earned.

Altruism is the root of all evil.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbI7gxxbYpo

Then can I have your stuff?