Well, what a ride it has been. This is my 365th day with Second Life Insider. A whole year of writing about Second Life and things related to it. Digging up news tidbits and trying to generally provide you all with useful content and news. In the last year, I've produced 1,120 posts - a total of 367,657 words. We've all been working hard to bring you great stuff, and it's great to see how you've all responded. Journalists, corporates and media agencies read Second Life Insider daily. Linden Lab certainly does.

Second Life Insider is bigger now than it has ever been. The last couple of months have been absolutely massive, and your support has been fantastic. And we've got equally massive changes on the way, too. For the last month, we've been working behind the scenes on a new, expanded site: Massively. Everything you love about Second Life Insider, and a massive dose of news from other virtual worlds, and MMOs, more writers (everywhere I turn, I trip over another great writer that we've swiped from somewhere), more ... everything.

While it's a bit sad to put down the Second Life Insider name, it's even more fun and interesting to be branching out, and covering more good stuff. There's more than 200 virtual worlds and MMOs on our list, and more on the way, including everything Second Life as usual. So this isn't goodbye - it's welcome to SLI's new home. Welcome to Massively.

Hamlet Au is running a poll over on New World Notes. He's asking Second Life users to rate the quality of Linden-to-resident communications in recent months about updates, downtime, policy and so forth.

Think they're doing well, or doing poorly? Go and register your vote. We'll all be watching the results.

Linden Lab has responded to our request for comment about the Wonderland scandal with a statement. The statement was issued just minutes ago by Lewis PR, Linden Lab's external public relations handler. Lewis PR provides public relations support for a wide variety of companies and organizations.

"At present, we have no firm evidence of wrongdoing from our own investigations into Wonderland nor from our Abuse Report channel."

Linden Lab therefore has not acted on reports about the site from Second Life users and from Second Life's child avatar community (we are told that reports have been being filed since July) because they have not been able to find any wrongdoing.

Linden Lab's full statement follows, after the jump.

Second Life is a 3D virtual world in which all the content is created and owned by its Residents. It is used by individuals, businesses, non-profits and educational organizations to communicate and collaborate in an immersive and compelling way. All Residents using Second Life MUST assert that they are over 18 years of age and that they will abide by our Terms of Service which prohibit illegal activity and by our Community Standards which prevent broadly offensive behavior. While the vast majority of Residents abide by these agreements and use Second Life in a constructive fashion, as with any communications technology, such as email, the phone or the Web itself, some seek to abuse the system and behave in an offensive manner.

At present, we have no firm evidence of wrongdoing from our own investigations into Wonderland nor from our Abuse Report channel. There's nothing objectionable nor illegal in having a child-like avatar in itself and we must assume innocence until proof of the contrary. That said, Linden Lab is morally opposed to and has zero tolerance for child pornography, simulated or otherwise, within Second Life.

It is a primary concern of ours to keep Second Life a safe and legal environment. Second Life Residents are held to a clearly defined Terms of Service and Community Standards to prevent illegal and/or broadly offensive activities, and it goes without saying that anyone engaged in these activities will be permanently banned from Second Life. Additionally, it is important to clarify that when we discover minors in Second Life, or when their presence is reported to us, we terminate their access. Underage users are automatically directed to Teen Second Life, an area specifically designed for non-adults, and offering them a rich, creative experience collaborating with other teens.

In addition, Linden Lab is in the process of implementing age verification measures to require age verification for entrance to parcels with adult content. More information about this can be found here:
http://blog.secondlife.com/2007/09/18/identity-verification-and-flagging-parcels-for-restricted-content/.

In the rare instances of suspected child pornography of which we have been informed, Linden Lab immediately works to remove the offending content and involves local authorities where appropriate. At present in the US, we work with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and are open to working with similar authorities in other countries, such as CEOPS.

News of the Wonderland scandal is spreading through the UK press. Channel 5 News led with the piece - it's all over Sky News. Some of the UK's largest tabloids are picking it up - outlets with millions of readers. UK business magazine, The Business, has just taken up the story.

"users feel the virtual community is unsafe and uncensored; they're also deterred by the huge amount of sexually orientated activity which takes place in the world."

The Business magazine slams Linden Lab for their "unshakeable libertarian positions", and says "This will be a huge set back for Linden Labs [sic]".

Expect to be reading and hearing a lot more about this in the news in the coming days.

Of course, this activity directly contravenes Linden Lab policy - so, why didn't they act days or weeks ago, when this activity was reported to them?

We have been promised an official comment or statement from Linden Lab "shortly". That was nine hours ago.

[Update: 10PM SLT (US Pacific) - Linden Lab has just issued a formal response]

Six of Second Life's top brands Eros Designs, RH Designs, Le Cadre Network, Nomine, PixelDolls and DE Designs are filing suit against Thomas Simon (known as avatar Rase Kenzo), and ten other as yet unidentified avatars. The suit was filed in Brooklyn, New York by attorney Frank Taney, a partner with Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney who is representing Eros Designs against Volkov Catteneo, for similar copyright violation.

As long-time SLI readers are doubtless aware, there is no technological means that exists to guarantee prevention against copyright violation. Indeed, most such measures are usually bypassed or broken before they are even released into the wild. That leaves one forum for copyright violation - the same one that has always been there. The RL courts and the legal system.

Like it or not, real-world law applies to all your actions towards and in relation to other people, whether it is done in person, in the post, by email, instant message, on a web forum or in a virtual world. The law doesn't go away when you turn on your PC, as avatars Rase Kenzo and Volkov Cattaneo are discovering to their detriment. The law may be out-of-step, may be non-sensical in some cases - but it never ceases to apply.

What we have here is a straight up copyright problem. The defendants are basically alleged to have used a simple exploit to make extra copies of items that the system shouldn't let them make extra copies of. When a Second Life simulator crashes, the state of objects in the region cannot be used. Instead, the simulator must work back in time to the last checkpoint, and restore the object state from there.

If you can make a simulator crash this way, you can pull objects you own out of it at the last moment into your inventory. When the simulator crashes it rolls back to the last safe point, and there is a copy of the object, and you have another in your inventory.

One crash. Two objects. Taking it logically, if you were utterly determined, you can double the number every time you pull this trick off successfully. 16 crashes could easily provide you with 65,536 copies. What measures are being taken to combat this, other than making simulators harder to crash, we don't presently know. Plaintiffs claim that Linden Lab did not fulfill their obligations under the DMCA when given due-process notification.

Nevertheless, virtual world or not, this is just an ordinary copyright issue, like the scan of a book or magazine, an MP3 rip of a CD or similar. Was the content subject to copyright? Yes. Was it duplicated without the copyright owner's consent? Yes. Was the intent malicious, greedy, gainful or intended to cause harm? Yes.

Not a tough case to argue. It remains to be seen what, if any, defense is mounted against it. As always, Benjamin Duranske at Virtually Blind has extensive coverage of the story for anyone interested in more information.

The incident was marred, however, by the failure of the webservers for the CSI event, preventing many from registering via the CSI registration portal or downloading the OnRez viewer, both provided by the Electric Sheep Company.

Concurrency for Thursday exceeded normal expectations, and was very nearly a record at peak, but was not extraordinarily high. Of course, many new midweek registrants do not log in the same day or on a weekday, with many opting to wait until the following day to connect to Second Life, or until the weekend. Sunday's figures are going to be the ones to watch.

Is the CSI:NY promotion a hit or a miss? Frankly, it's too early to tell - making predictions at this juncture is no better than a throw of the dice. You might actually be right - but the conclusion isn't based on observed fact.

Popular CBS crime-based science-fiction series, CSI:NY aired last night across North America, featuring Second Life as a major feature of a two-part story, the second part of which is due to air in February 2008.

I hate spoilers, so we'll skip talking about the story. Second Life, as it is portrayed, is given a pretty reasonable treatment - the skepticism of many of the core characters is not unusual - however, this is not the Second Life you know, just as CSI is not the forensics department you'll find if you go downtown.

Taking place in some unspecified future, perhaps 10 to 15 years (or more!) on, the Second Life you see is the Second Life of the future. Faster, smoother, with altered basic mechanics. CSI:NY isn't a series about the present-day, and the Second Life they visit isn't one you'd have access to for at least a decade.

Once you've got that down, you can relax and enjoy the show. Second Life gets some grudging respect, and you can see at least one imagining of the future of your favourite virtual world.

In a few days we're going to have people using the new OnRez Second Life viewer. Maybe a lot of people. Maybe a whole lot of people. The OnRez viewer differs from Linden Lab's version most obviously in that the user-interface has been completely reworked to make it easier and less overwhelming on new users.

That's got to be a good thing, right? Well, not necessarily. It brings some challenges of its own.

The problem looks like it will be one of support. Outside of OnRez, every resource and How-To more or less relies on the basic Linden Lab viewer. There are a number of other editions around, but the user-interface in those has undergone no huge overhauls. Everything is pretty much where it normally is. With the OnRez viewer, things are obviously substantively different.

You won't be able to give sensible instructions about 'look here; click this' without knowing which viewer the person is using and having had some experience using it yourself.

Of course, a viewer fork was inevitable. This is the first major one, but it won't be the last. We can expect to see more revised user-interfaces out there over time. Probably in the long term we won't see dozens in wide use, but it would not be unexpected to see three-to-five quite different viewer user-interfaces emerge as relatively dominant.

The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic put on a concert in Second Life on September 14, for what we are told was to be 100 Second Life users. There's not many venues that would have supported that many in relative comfort.

Now, as reported by Reuters, well..

"According to the orchestra, 9 million Second Life denizens watched the performance live on Second Life's own cable network, and the broadcast repeats every couple of hours through November."

Nine million Second Life users watching live. The tensile strength of truth doesn't go nearly that far.

Perhaps counting beyond 4/4 is a mite harder than it sounds.

A special shout-out goes to Anastasia Tsioulcas at Reuters, who could have easily sanity-checked this figure, but didn't.

It's nice to find people who understand. Don Heider, associate at the Journalism School at the University of Maryland and Kim Gregson, professor of Journalism, Park School, Ithaca College, talk in a three way audio interview about Second Life at the Online News Association annual meeting in Toronto.

The Shelter gets a positive mention (and so it should!). A lot of territory gets covered, what Second Life is, anonymity (and the lack thereof), Second Life as a virchspace extension of the physical world, physical world extrusions of brands and businesses into Second Life, CSI:NY, Linden Lab's business model and more. Not 100% complete (it would be much longer for one thing) and not quite totally correct, but still well worth listening to, especially if Second Life is a bit opaque to you.

Observant SLI reader Matt Bowerman spotted the latest issue of Good Magazine on the stands in Austin Texas, sporting a cover story on Second Life. Unfortunately, the story chronicles one apparently sex-obsessed writer's wanderings and musings on his lack of a virtual penis. [Caution - contains a virtual penis image]

People who are familiar with Second Life will immediately find author Morgan Clendaniel's narrative littered with inaccuracies, and misleading turns of phrase. Heck, there are five assorted penis references by the time you get to the bottom of the second paragraph, where the author felt the need to violate the gambling ban to bankroll himself some genitalia.

Bolstering the "one man's search for a penis" narrative, is some supporting material and research. The piece aspires to become balanced, and it comes close, but seems to fall short of the mark and finishes with penises again. It's obvious that Clendaniel didn't have a great time. "Something fun and social must be happening in Second Life," he writes, "but it certainly isn't happening where I am."

Take a look. Tell us what your own thoughts are.