Ethics question

Prepare for something approaching gossip.

OK, I have this friend...

...actually it's two friends. One of them owns a decent-sized spread of land (very decent indeed, hear me), and the other is his partner, and they spend most of their time on his land, where he's built them a home and some other things. The partner, let's call her "Janice" because that's nothing like her real name, has acquired something of a stalker. This stalker latched on sometime a while ago, forcing her essentially to move (she rented a house on some sim, and the stalker had one nearby at the time he started doing stalky stuff, and the landowner would not do anything). Now she "lives" with her partner on his nice land.

The stalker began to follow her to her partner's land. At one point (so I heard), he took to trying to hover some distance above the ground, but directly above her (presumably to keep her from seeing his green dot). And in this state, he would just cam on her. He was banned from the land - fair enough. Some months later, a small 512m plot of land adjacent to my friends' land came up for sale. This miscreant purchased it forthwith, and erected a small one-room shack on it. From that point on, he would occasionally camp in his little house, with nobody else there to talk to, and he would cam over into my friends' property and do the creepy-stalker-watch thing. I've been visiting, and we've all been sitting talking, and suddenly he'd tp into his house, and sit there, camming in on poor "Janice".

My friends complained to some sort of "police" that I never knew existed, who apparently could not do anything because the fella was on his own land. After that, our buddy the stalker built a big floating box over his shack, with a sign on it saying "Sorry, but griefers have forced me to limit parcel access". There were banlines surrounding it. Checking the land info, we found that he had restricted parcel access to a small white list, with only two names on it. The first name was Janice. The second was another neighbor of his, a woman (naturally).

Finally, my friends tried moving their personal space to a skybox, which they placed at 400m above the ground.

A week later, the stalker's house had vanished, replaced by a funny-looking spaceshippy skybox. At 400m.

My friends aren't exasperated or really perturbed by this guy. But, they don't like him all the same (reasonable, considering the circumstances). They do have a sense of humor though; so, in the air outside their skybox, facing the stalker's, they built a prim. Transparent from their side; from his side, it's - well, a very funny, ugly picture. They know he can just cam through it, but they don't care too much. They -try- to ignore him. But ignoring such a person can be so difficult!

At this point it should be told that my friend's land is not square; the plot over which their skybox was placed is seperated from the stalker's plot by another small tract of land - the one that belongs to the second woman on the stalker's white-list. That person has nothing to do with any of this, and doesn't have any skyboxes, and doesn't use the air that high up for anything. For all practical purposes, the picture is seen only by him at whom it was aimed.

But, my question, after all this, is - could the picture be considered griefing? I've read other threads where prims placed on a property border, which are transparent from the owner's side but have some kind of ugly texture on the other, are considered tools of grief and sometimes even extortion. AR'able, even. I laughed when my friends told me about the picture, and they even showed it to me. It isn't obscene or anything, it's just - horribly ugly and funny. But, I don't want my friends to be the ones who get in trouble after all this nonsense. Dear Abby, what's your take on all this?

Signed, "Concerned in SL"

well honestly, though it does sound suspicious with the moving skyboxes, you cant tell where someone is "camming" into, I stand in the middle of my plot for hours without moving, doesnt mean Im camming around my neighbors, means I'm on the forums, or checking my email, or some other mundane type of work I usually have to do while Im living the second life.

Letys hope its not the Alfred E Neuman picture on the dividing wall, that is a well known provoking picture, or the KCF guy... the wal effects everyone around that can see it so its not really a effective tool as she knows he can cam right thru it.

Whats more important is whether this tracker guy has some method of finding her, I have seen objects that somehow embed in the avatar they basically report heir position and sim to the owner of the object

A couple things she might be able to do, though all will walk the line of getting ar'ed too, she can buy or script if shes good a object that will push a particular person that gets too close to her. Or she can press ctrl+alt+shift+9 and snap pictures of him bald and give them to him a a shame gift, course theres nothing from stpping the guy from usung a alt no matter what tyope of precaution she takes... really when it comes down to it, its SL, if someone ee's you naked in SL , its kinda like someone seeing your favorite doll naked, not like actually seeing you naked

just get a bunch of freakish sex things with like all the fetishes and decorate ..this way he doesn't have to guess and will move on to innocent people..stalkers hate experienced girls..they want to feel as if they are looking into the closet at skelly's of the innocent...

ok that was just a guess but i thought it sounded good when i was typing it Oo

Dear Concerned,

Your friends should be in the clear. Presumably they have AR'ed the stalker, so LL has a record of an ongoing problem with him. If not, they should make a practice of doing so at every opportunity. Presumably our friends have made no effort to sell out to him or press him to sell out his 512 parcel, so there is no extortion involved in putting up their "situational art." Presumably the image is not only not obscene, but not racist, threatening, neo-Nazi, or any of the other good stuff that are specified TOS or CS violations. It is not a violation to be ugly - fortunately, because otherwise half the builds in SL would undoubtedly have been banned by now. Presumably the other lady with the intervening property has voiced no objection to your friends' artwork, and presumably the picture is entirely on your friends[' property, where Your land, Your rules presumably still applies.

Have you tried to enlist the other lady on his accepted list for his little love-shack? She could be helpful, especially if she has ARs of her own to file against him.

Between ARs, muting and banning, and attending to the details mentioned above, your friends should have nothing else to worry about from this guy beyond the knowledge that he is out there somewhere, which they obviously can live with. All they need to do now beyond all that is ignore Janice's lamentably inconstant stalker. The nerve! He could at least have had the decency to be faithful to her!

It's only extortion if your friend is trying to get someone else to buy the parcel, like they do with ad farms (put an ugly spinning sign on 16m in order to make someone desparate enough to buy it.) I wouldn't worry about the picture. Unless it's obscene, or offensive to a specific group, race, ethnicity, religion, etc, it's probably not AR'able.

For what it's worth, the guy sounds like a total looooooser!

Ha! Just put the stalker theory to the test. Have yer friend stay elsewhere for a while or get her to wear a big fat ugly AV when she's there. If she IS the focus of this guys interest he'll move on fairly quickly if she's not there, or she isn't attractive to the guy anymore.

Actually, we CAN tell. I started another thread a while ago, asking if it was possible to "see" where people's cams are. I was informed that there was a way - sort of. In the debug menu (which isn't the debug menu anymore on the new viewer), under the "character" list there's an option called "Show Look At". When you activate this, you can see a small 3-D crosshairs-thing, which represents the focus point of an av's camera. You see one for every av, yourself included. Usually, this focus point floats in the air in front of the av's face. When somebody alt-click cams on something, their focus crosshair immediately jumps to the point they're clicking on. If they focus on another av, their crosshair attaches to that person's head. When a crosshair is not floating in the customary location in front of an avatar (for instance, you see a crosshair attached to the trunk of a tree), you cannot directly tell for certain which av it belongs to, because the crosshairs aren't labeled. You just know that -somebody- is cammed in on that tree, or that wall, or that person, or whatever. But, you can deduce. When there's only four people in a sim (myself, my two friends, and the stalker), and the three of us are sitting in a room, but Show Look At is showing FOUR crosshairs in the room, there's only one person that fourth cam could possibly belong to.



I'm unfamiliar with either of these pictures you've mentioned. The photo they're using, as I've said, is nothing provocative or obscene. It's a 100% PG picture. It's just hilariously ugly and unflattering.

But now as you mention KFC, I remember once at some other sim, some griefer rezzed an object called kfc_trap some 30m up in the air. It looked like a KFC bucket, and it played this little 12-second clip (I think it was part of a jingle from a KFC commercial) in a constant loop. The object contained a "cage" script, but no matter what we did to it (or tried to do to it) it didn't do anything but float there and play that same mind-clawing clip over and over and over and over, audio-spamming a good portion of the sim. The thing stayed there for a week before the person who owned the land it was rezzed over finally showed up and got rid of it. I couldn't eat KFC for like a month after that.



That would be really creepy. He seems to know when she's online, because he only shows up when she's there; we just assumed it's because he checks the namelist of a group he knows she belongs to.



She's not worried about being seen naked or anything like that, whether or not it might happen. That's not what bothers us. We do think he's strangely attracted to her av, though; lately, half in jest, she's bought some rather weird avs to change into when he's around. Very weird avs. Yeah, I know - like I can talk about weird avs, right?

But again, that's not the problem. He's just bothersome because he knows exactly what he can do, shamelessly, without getting into trouble. He's like someone annoying who holds his finger an inch and a half away from your face and loudly chants "I'M NOT TOUCHING YOU I'M NOT TOUCHING YOU I'M NOT TOUCHING YOU", and who has no problem with following you around if you just try to walk away. It's easy to say "Bah, it's only SL, just ignore the clown", but it's not so easy to DO.

maybe Alfred E Newman can bring some sunshine in then
http://exhippie.com/files/Alfred-3.gif

Ah yes, forgot about Show Look At. Under the new viewer you will find it at Advanced>Character>Show Look At. Useful. in this case.

Nah, the image is definitely not AR'able in its own context.

There were some AR's in the past - I'm fuzzy about the past. Much of it took place before I rezzed; and they've talked to me about things but I haven't grilled them for details. In any case, he's not doing anything NOW that's really AR'able. As I said above, I think he knows what he can do (even if it's obvious to all of us - perhaps even ESPECIALLY if it's obvious to all of us - what he's doing) without crossing the Linden Line. He just sits and stares, wanting her to know he's there and that there's nothing she can do about it. It doesn't bother her the way I think it's meant to, but it's still annoying.

Even better, have her wander the skybox naked. But with an added "part".

They should set out lawn chairs, and with pop corn, and sit and stare at him. Hey it works!! (Don't ask me how i know)

For that to work, I think he'd have to be a member of the group, too. But it's a pretty easy script; same basics as storekeepers' online indicators.

Thanks a LOT, Mister. You know how hard it's gonna be getting all this Pepsi out of my keyboard????

No way, dude. Open up any group's window; they all got a scrollable list of members, and the list tells you the last time each person logged in. If the person is logged in now, it says "online" next to their name. And it says it even if the person has set "Do not show me as online in search", and even if they've hidden the group on their own profile. We've tried it.

Really? On my viewer (1.19.1.4) all members show "unknown" as the Last Login date, except the groups I belong to myself. Unless I'm doing something wrong. (By the way, to hide members, a group owner or officer has to uncheck the little "Members are visible" checkbox for the relevant Role(s). An individual member can only control visibility of the Group in their own Profile, not their own visibiity as a member in the Group list.)

Well - you may be right; we might've overlooked something. Still and all, what of a non-exclusive group that charges nothing to join? Couldn't he, or an alt, simply join up and keep track that way? I'm not trying to discount a script; as you said, it's a simple one. But this person doesn't seem to me to be the kinda person who knows scripting and stuff like that. Maybe it's just my contempt showing, but in my opinion the guy's av appearance is only a couple of steps off the newbie porch, and the things he's "built" on his land are all things that are owned by him, but created by other people.

It's not that simple though... you can usually tell, but the absence of cross-hairs doesn't mean someone isn't looking anyway.

For the official viewer - and with normal camming - you can look at the "look at" point from anywhere within a 50m sphere around it. If you see a crosshair floating 5m in front of someone while you're 30m behind them, you're well within that sphere, although they may not get a perfect angle.

You can also Ctrl-Alt-Shift cam around which doesn't have any limit on how far away you can cam, and it also doesn't change the "look at" point. They can appear to be staring at a point in front of them down on the land while their cam is focused inside the neighbour's skybox at 200m up.

In most cases you're right, you can tell since by far the easiest way to cam around is to anchor to items that are near the thing you want to see, but if someone wanted to deliberately avoid showing a cross-hair they could. I'd be rather worried if a stalker is that determined though .

Oh, sorry, I think we're just talking past each other. Definitely, he could join an open-enrollment group he learned about by studying her profile (in which case she might be able to find the overlapping group--though not sure what then). And the scripting thing: I'm pretty sure there are products that do this--possibly even freebies, dunno--so somebody with stalker tendencies might be able to score one, I expect.