Rejecting Images Before Display

Spamming textures as a form of griefing has been a hot topic for a few months now, but given the knowledge that child pornography is now being exchanged between some Second Life users (however few), isn't it more important than ever that we have a facility for rejecting images before they have the chance to enter our inventories and materialize upon our screens?

Also, some residents may not realise that when they reject offers of inventory, the transaction still takes place. The rejected item(s) go straight to our trashbins. Given the illegal nature of even possessing certain kinds of imagery, isn't it time this mode of transfer was altered, so that residents don't run the risk of breaking the law - even though they might have refused the offending material in the first place?

looks like they're limiting the number of images that will appear when lots of them are sent to you. ie. if somebody sends you 15,000 textures in one shot, only five will appear on the screen. that will resolve the spam issue - which is great.

but if somebody sends you five pornographic textures (illegal or not), they'll appear on your screen and everybody in the room with you will see them. i wonder about the legalities of having child pornography in your trashbin. does that count as possession? i'm not sure. my inventory isn't stored locally, but doesn't everything in it belong to me?

if so, a very dangerous form of griefing is possible.

I am not sure about the finer points of legality here, but I do know this: you can access your trash bin. That means, if having child porn in your inventory at all counts as possession (I strongly suspect it does), so does having child porn in your trash bin in your inventory. As it should, because otherwise paedophiles could just store their child porn in their trash bin, pull it out when they want to wank to it, and put it back in the bin when done. A bit too easy to avoid prosecution through that big a loophole, right? I'm confident no judge would go for that kind of defence.

If you get that kind of spam, delete it and purge your trash bin. That way you can prove you don't have access to (and therefore no possession of) child porn. Of course you do this after you AR'd the person who sent you the child porn spam, send a copy of the offending pics to LL so they can take legal action. That way you will have done everything that can reasonably be expected of you.



If someone looks over my shoulder when I retrieve my email, they will also see messages about barely legal girls "going down on the farm". No big deal, anybody who has been more than a day on the internet knows these things happen, even if you did not seek them out.

some excellent points there Suzy, and i would most certainly AR somebody sending me such material, but there seems to be such a dangerous flaw in the transfer mechanism that we might not always have the opportunity.

for example, if you're taking a few months out of second life and somebody sends you images, they are transferred into your inventory anyway, even though you're not asked to accept or reject them until you next login. what if those images are illegal, and during your absence the authorities decide to seize LL's servers (for whatever reason) and discover them in your inventory? you haven't accepted them, but that doesn't matter because they found their way into your inventory anyway.

the potential of this setup being abused by griefers also bothers me because the definition of child pornography varies internationally, and it could criminalise a victim without the perpetrator breaking the laws of their own country at all. a photo of a child in a swimsuit might be considered child pornography in the UK for example, but it wouldn't be in the US. US users sends UK user this image, and alerts the British authorities. it's a long-shot, unlikely maybe .. but the potential to get an innocent person in serious trouble is there .. isn't it?

i know i'd be happier if the accept/reject offer was made before inventory was transfered instead of afterwards .. but maybe that's impossible?

A more sophisticated solution would be to put stuff which is transferred to you in a dedicated 'on hold' directory where you HAVE to choose wether to accept the entries or reject them - no-copy items would return to sender and others would vanish into oblivion.

A setup like this should be enough for computer forensics deciding wether you actually used the stuff in your inventory or some malicious user decided to send you the textures/objects in question and you hadn't a chance to review it.

I think you would probably be safe from prosecution because you can show the pictures were sent to you after you last logged in, so you couldn't have accessed them in those months. You would however get in trouble if you did log in, and simply didn't notice those pics being in your inventory for some time. Very much possible, sometimes I get inventory offers when I am off-line, and I don't get the blue dialogue when I log back in. With an average huge inventory of a months or even years old avie, things can go unnoticed for quite some time.



I think you are misrepresenting the UK here, but your point is valid. Let's say, for the sake of argument, the pic is sent by a griefer to a Resident in Saudi Arabia or Iran. That could literally cost someone his life.



That would be good. Alderic's solution sounds like a good way to solve this.

only LL can demonstrate. i'm not sure i'd like to be at the mercy of their login and transaction records.
if you think i'm misrepresenting the UK regarding what constitutes child pornography, i'm really not.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_pornographyA famous case involving a British television newsreader:i agree. Alderic's solution would be excellent. not sure whether LL would agree it would be worth it though. ah, well .. at least i got some opinions about it anyway.

That ridiculous. What a mother's photo of her child in bath is about child pornography? It's just crazy whoever could think of it that way. I suggest they should investigate the one who raised the concern rather than the mother who took the photo. Whoever can think of it that way suggested they themselves are thinking about it in some way.

the important parts of that incident:

Someone voiced concern of child porn to the authorities, who decided to investigate. Which is good.

The investigation turned up only innocent pictures of the child in the bath, so no charges were filed and no caution given. Which is also good.

This tells me the police reacted adequately in the circumstances, and apparently pictures of your child taking a bath are not regarded to be child porn. Maybe they would have been if the child in question hadn't been a relative, but even then a naked child is not the same as a child wearing a bathing suit. I'm not from the UK, but I can't imagine a child wearing a bathing suit being regarded as child porn there without us in Holland knowing that of our neighbouring country. I do remember the accusation about the kid in the bath being porn by the way. It stirred up some discussion here too, because people here got (mildly) worried about getting equally innocent pictures developed too.

Hmm....I see it's not just here that has these kind of over-react worries. I still don't understand why could a naked child or child in bathing suit can be seen as porn...given the photo aren't that suggesting o.o