What if beta content-restrictions don't work?

What if it doesn't work?

I don't mean all the problems with age-verification; those may be serious, but for the nonce I'm suspending disbelief and pretending that will all go flawlessly and there's no compromise of confidential identity information. (There are lots of threads about that already.)

Rather, what if the land-based content restriction just isn't good enough? Isn't there a journalist somewhere in Germany with nothing better to do than sit on a non-restricted portion of an estate and cam into the Adult area and make a machinima of nakkie AVs doin' the nasty, to plunk down in front of Robin and YouTube? Inasmuch as they're gonna do it eventually anyway, wouldn't it be better if they did it *during* the beta?

Is there any chance LL would then see the folly of the land-based restrictions, and forestall implementation till actual *content*-based restrictions can be implemented?

Given LL's policy of not knowing what tools are needed beforehand, it wouldn't surprise me to find they aren't ready for this. Think about it, we can move our camera to look anywhere, so would the parcels with the mature content just not show up if we aren't verified?

'twould look silly, what with a sim having 'water holes' in it that should be parcels. And how would they show up on the big map? Would they show up at all? I know that with the PG engaged, the Mature sims show up as X'd out, but what about if you don't have verification? Are you limited to just the PG areas on the adult grid? Or will the parcels just show up as an X?

There are a lot of technical questions that I wish were answered before it left beta!

"What if Adult Content is not Flagged
We require that adult content be flagged. If Residents and businesses attempt to violate this rule, we expect that such behavior will be reported by the community. Although we want to limit age-verification processes to adult content and Teen Second Life, in the event we encounter abuses of self-regulation, Second Life may have to require age-verification throughout the world. We hope that does not happen."

Which means, we're supposed to be doing LL's work, again, by reporting the adult content. Know what? I haven't got time or inclination to do it for them. I'll gladly get verified, (although I am not HAPPY at all with the company they chose,) but that's the extent of my participation in this debacle.

About 300 unnecessary abuse reports later (when they find out that people are actually trying to follow the rules, but some idiots will just cam into an area to see it, then AR it) we'll probably be seeing them do the grid wide requirement.

Oh, holy cr*p! I read that totally differently, to mean that grid-wide age-verification would result if residents were to flout the content-labeling process wholesale. But instead, this may indeed be the Catch 22 Clause: If anything about this doesn't work, we'll fix it worse.*

__________
*Okay, that really has nothing to do with Joseph Heller's book, but it's probably not my most tortured metaphor of the day--or even possibly this paragraph.

Age verification *will* eventually be mandatory to play SL. Never mind that it doesn't work, or that little Johnny can submit daddy's info to get his illegal account on the main grid verified. LL will have to be able to demonstrate that the suspected underaged user actually committed identity theft to access SL, and didn't merely lie about their birthdate on a registration form. But they will have to still make *all* of SL accessible ONLY to some sort of age-verified requirement, simply because it is technically impossible, the way SL is set up now, to prevent someone from standing on a G-rated parcel and accessing XXX content on a restricted parcel three sims away.

Any fluff about it being "voluntary" or "optional" is just sugar coating on the bitter pill. It's an 18-and-over adult environment. They make a good-faith effort to lock the doors to minors, or they shut it down.

The Earth will crash into the Sun and we will all die.

No. Wait a minute.

The Lindens will tweak as they go.

We also don't have any confirmation (yet) whether or not the system works.

It all revolves around this:



Residents who want access to restricted content can be verified quickly and easily. Parcelholders with COMMON SENSE (and wow is that in short supply these days) and with exceptionally violent or explicitly sexual content can flag their parcel so unverified residents can't access it.

Yeah... that's all insanely difficult. That's like a Zurich-level transaction.

Even if they are under 18 (see other threads)



More seriously -

What if all your violent/sexual content is in a skybox and the house on the ground is PG - how do you mark up that?

What if you run a mall on 4 floors where the adult stuff is restricted to the top floor only with suitable signage? Again how do you mark up that using the proposed parcel tools?

How are non-verified accounts kept out of parcels marked as verified only? Are they locked out of the parcel for all altitudes - which essentially makes verification mandatory for all the aviators - or will the restriction only apply to low altitudes like the current ban lines - in which case does that mean all content above 200m must be PG?

Matthew

Yep, I agree. The blog also intimates that there will be other areas of "verification" coming down the line. This is going to fundamentally -- and very much by design -- change SL.

Two words for kids wanting to experience something like SL, but "safe" content

Toon Town.

Such material is not supposed to be in a PG sim at any altitude (please find a nearby parent or guardian to explain the concept of "common sense".



The entire parcel would have to be flagged as restricted or the materials might be placed within their own sub-parcel (please find a nearby parent or guardian to explain the concept of "common sense".



It would be the responsibility of the parcelholder to keep restricted content within any barriers or out of plain sight (please find a nearby parent or guardian to explain the concept of "common sense".

Elex, after all these years you still crack me up

Good Job

Toy was my Building 101 teacher.

The restriction will have to apply at all altitudes. WAY too many skyboxes in SL that were built explicitly for the purpose of keeping sexual content and activities AWAY from casual intrusion. And even if the ban lines only go just so high, every secirity system in SL will unquestionably get upgraded to allow the owner to auto-eject any non-age-verified person who strays into the peotected area for the system.

You wanna fly? Prove you're at least 18.

But I reiterate, as long as it remains possible for a non-age-verified person to see into restricted access parcels, click on things there, buy from vendors there, these access controls are meaningless, unless you use them to protect a private sim that isn't connected in any way to non-controlled sims.

I'm telling you, it will soon be mandatory age verification, or no SL.

Of course, if they re-engineered SL completely, so a wall or a locked door could actually keep someone out, none of this would be necessary. Lock the bedroom door, and do as you please.

If you're restricted from accessing a parcel you cannot purchase things out of vends located within it. The transaction will be denied.

HA HA! Very funny, and quite innocently trusting. I've done it, and can assure you it is 100% doable. Most vending scripts, including the popular JEVN system, do not in any way determine what parcel the buyer is standing in.

Not only that, but does it stop the camera from panning into the 'verified only' areas? It'd suck badly to set a parcel as 'Adult' only to be AR'd because some nut job with no common sense decided to pan around.

For Elex: I wish everyone had common sense.. and used it. We wouldn't NEED rules if they did! (I mean this in a playful tone, but darned, it's hard not to be serious about a wish like this!)

LL would need to make changes to the money events in LSL to check the agent's location and verification status. I can't imagine that would be hard to do.

What if it doesn't work in beta... well I expect that they will roll it out to the main grid like always.

LOL

There will probably be an LSL function added, or a current function modified / expanded, so that there is a way to check if an avatar is verified.

Really though, the only way this can work grid-wide is if LL does make a fundamental change so that an unverified avatar can neither cam into or click on any object within a 'restricted' parcel.

Even if they change / add to LSL so scripts can test for verification, there are too many vendors and scripts out there that would need to be replaced / rewritten. And this wouldn't even work at all for stuff set to use the 'buy' function, i.e. buy copy or buy contents. That doesn't use scripting at all.

So we're back to not being able to cam in and click, as the only way to enforce it.

-Atashi

Well, I see it this way - no one needed to re-issue anything when they changed the debit permissions menu from blue to HELLO! CAN'T MISS ME gold. They could simply change it so that the money transaction fails when the agent is not on the parcel. Camming, I don't know.... I imagine they could have restricted content/parcels not be viewable in the client if not verified, no matter what the distance. But the viewer would need to track the camera position and use the parcel muting feature (which is under development in one of the alternative viewers) to block restricted content.

All of which might be clever were it relevant to the topic. (But just in passing: Zurich maybe, but also Brussels, Berlin, Beijing, Washington--oh, right, not Washington: the US Supreme Court--evidently lacking access to "a parent or guardian"--threw that conundrum back to local communities. All of which jurisdictions parcel owners are expected to simultaneously satisfy with their COMMON SENSE. Oh, no problem there. )

But the premise was that all that magically works; still it doesn't protect non-age-verified users from seeing content designated as restricted as long as the restriction enforcement is technology-limited to *parcels*, not *content*. So the current approach is ultimately not going to protect LL, either. Eventually some investigative journalist is gonna cam from non-restricted to restricted space and broadcast the horrors of SecondLife all over again. It just might be in LL's best interest if that failure were to become apparent during the beta, rather than after they've paid Aristotle a princely sum to roll it out grid-wide.

It's certainly a possibility that it eventually won't matter because everywhere in-world will require age verification. But there's also speculation that age verification is the first step in combining the teen and adult grids. At least one of those theories must be wrong.

Personally I find this rather amusing. For one thing I am so damned old that I have even forgotten the meaning of "undeage". The other reason is that after LL opened the grid so that CC info was not required everyone was screaming at them that they had to have age verification. It didn't matter that it was explained patiently time and again that CC info does not prove age. The furor went on for months. Now the furor will go on for months now that LL is taking a step to do just that.

So how is age verified if CC doesn't meet the criteria????? Notarized copies of your passport, driver's license or other data sworn to by 50 witnesses? Sworn affadavit by the attending physician at your birth? One of the porn site age verification services? It has to be a balance between taking a reasonable step towards some kind of verification but also be able to work for all of the geographic regions of the world.

Me I don't really care, I am not planning on verifying but if someday I find that I can't go somewhere I want to go then I'll go ahead and do it. One more company having my personal info is just a drop in the bucket compared to all of the other companies and agencies that already have my info in thier servers.

'Common sense' is, like 'broadly offensive', both highly subjective and culturally influenced. LL is therefore sooner or later going to have to stop skirting the issue and come up with the definition they actually want to impose. All this talk of hoping that 'common sense' will prevail is a lot of fluff to encourage people to believe they're cool, laid-back guys who don't really want to do this, and to sustain the illusion that the residents are in control. Personally, I'd rather they came straight out with their intentions so that we all knew where we stood.