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Website Magazine : Second Life: Navigating the Metaverse

posted on Monday, February 12, 2007 3:48 PM by PetePrestipino

Second Life: Navigating the Metaverse
Source: Website Magazine

By Wayne Porter

Second Life, the popular social site where users create custom avatars and literally build a new, virtual world can be an excellent place to extend your brand.

Second Life is also an ideal place for product experimentation, feedback and simulation. However, failing to prepare your company for this new arena can end up wasting time, money, and even harm your brand.

It’s important to understand the contours of this brave new world and realize some of the common mistakes that other companies have made.

1) Failure to understand the culture. The culture of Second Life is in no way monolithic. Chances are, you will find someone or some group that shares your interests or has the right dynamics and demographics that your company is seeking. However, actively pursuing those people can be a major turn-off to potential customers. Let your company’s reputation speak for itself and be transparent about your intentions. Your community will find you. It is not whom you know, but who knows you.

2) Failure to understand how properties, monetary issues and terrain impact usability. There’s nothing that regular and influential Second Lifers detest more than egregious or out-of-place buildings, islands or constructions. Do your research and know in what part of the world your company is going to set up shop and how you are going to develop your program.

3) Disrupting the culture or group of artisans. Do not attempt to insert your brand into the general day-to-day of Second Life or the conversations that are occurring in other places. Your brand will suffer and the long-term result will be a waste of Lindens — Second Life dollars. Realize that people in Second Life are people in the real world as well. Their avatars might look different, but the psychology of not wanting to be bombarded by an advertising message is the same.

4) Your brand may be perceived differently in Second Life than it is in the real world. You must realize that your company’s offline brand may have different perceptions in the virtual world because of the type of user actively engaged in Second Life. You will not be reaching the same demographics in Second Life as you do with a newspaper, TV, radio or even online media buy. Research your target demographic and understand who will be interacting with your brand.

5) Failure to survey, immerse and spend adequate time building relationships in a neighborhood. Even though Second Life has more than one million users, the secret to success for any brand is relationship building. Allow people to learn something about your brand and contribute to the overall experience of the average Second Life user rather than trying to make a quick profit. Even small brands can have an impact in Second Life where innovation is rewarded through micro-transactions.

Second Life, despite its strange terrain, new vocabulary and learning curve for new users, still comes back to community, participation, and joining the conversation. Just don’t be surprised if you end up talking to someone with blue wings or purple skin. He might be a 19 year old college sophomore at Stanford or he might be the CEO of a giant company. You can check out Second Life the Official Guide from your favorite bookstore.
Here are some additional resources recommended at the Linden Labs Second Life site.

* http://www.secondlife.com : The main site and your link to the economy, land, auctions, podcasts and your gateway to The Grid.

* http://www.reperes-secondlife.com : The first market research institute on Second Life. Helps companies in the development of their products and offers on The Grid.

* http://www.virtualworldsvideo.com : A large, curated resource of machinima (films made inside of virtual environments) with a heavy emphasis on Second Life.

* http://www.secondvita.com : RSS Feeds with Graphics in Second Life

* http://secondseeker.com : Unofficial Second Life Reviews

About the Author:
Wayne Porter previously served as Director of Special Research at FaceTime Communications and is also co-founder of Revenews.com. He is a MSFT Security MVP x3, a Google Security VIP with a strong background in e-commerce analysis and analytics. More at WaynePorter.com.

Website Magazine

The following is an excerpt from an interview of Katt Kongo of Metaverse Messenger (M2), conducted by Andrew Mallon of Mallon Advertising Representatives.

What is Metaverse Messenger?
The M2 is a newspaper which solely covers the world of Second Life (SL), providing a source for news and entertainment, as well as a way for businesses to spread the word about their products and/or services.

Describe your marketing activity/experience in SL:
I started the M2 in August of 2005. The first month, we had 200 readers. We currently have 12,500 readers. We got to where we are now by actively marketing our product, being visible in the community and being a reliable product.

How can a company of any size best utilize this new, virtual economy?
One of the M2’s slogans is “Be Virtually Visible.” No matter who you are, whether a small virtual company selling virtual goods, or a real-world company coming into SL for a cross-promotion, no one will buy into what you are offering if they don’t know about you. Get out in the world, advertise your product or service.

Corwin Chevalier of House Chevalier

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Software - Security, Protection, Spoofing and Lies…

There are many names: liar, lie, lies, liarcard, liar card, liarcard.com, polygraph, voice analysis, spy technology, spoofcard, spoofcard.com, spoofing, teltech, tel tech, cheating, cheat, cheaters, is he lieing, is she lieing? There is only one Liar Card!

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The Unofficial Second Life Linden Dollars Guide: Second Life Linden Dollars Guide - Killer Guides

Top earners in Second Life make more US Dollars with their Second Life busines ventures than many players in the real world. The Second Life Linden Dollars Guide is a great way to uncover the slick tricks and secrets of the wealthier players.

Highlights of the Second Life Linden Dollars Guide:
- Earn more than 3000 Linden Dollars per hour starting from scratch
- Step-by-step guides to making textures and animations
- Five advanced scripts that put your competition out of business
- Real estate for Newbies - they make the complex world alot easier
- Contains well documented ready-to-go business concepts
- Find out how to get 140 USD for every Second Life account you create

The Money Trees
Free Linden Dollars are out there if you know where to look. Especially if you are new to Second Life. A complete listing of money trees, free items and script resources are included. It’s an ideal jump start for new players. However, veterans know that money tree locations change from time to time so this is not always spot on.

Second Life Business Opportunities:
Find the right idea for a hobby business, part-time job or to incorporate your own Second Life full-time business. The Second Life Linden Dollars Guide applies SWOT analysis to many of the popular busineses. Choose the right types of products and market them like a professional. The guide shows you how to anticipate the market, the money needed and potentialy how big the market will be.

The Land and Real Estate Game
Provides a land price reference and how to get top location plots at largely discounted prices. Make the best out of your land with a compact guide to terra forming and provided rent scripts. The real estate market has been in flux lately so every edge you can get- helps.

Freelance Work and Jobs in Second Life:
Find out how to learn them, the best ways to get work, how much they pay and how to maximize your income from them. This is by far the easiest way to pick up Lindens and remember Linden dollars, depending on the exchange rate, translate into real hard currency.

The Second Life Linden Dollars Guide cuts down the learning curve. Use free, 3rd party software to your advantage, employ powerful cross-selling techniques and discover the ideal locations for your shop or kiosk. These hints greatly boost your chance of making a nice score.

Markets and SKills Covered:

Becoming an Artist
Avatar Creation & Skin Development
Avatar Animations
Fashion Design
Game Development
Hair creation

Constructing Houses,  Land Terra Forming & Model Furniture

Music and DJ work and how to sell tunes outside of the Second Life World.
Generating Textures and custom scripts or script editing. Scripts are always in demand.

Making Videos- also known as “machinima” which is becoming red hot.
Mastering the lucrative Weapons Market as well as popular vehicles.
Special Events from marriages to hot parties…

Tutoring and Teaching
Tutoring for new players and advanced players is a great way to collect cash. Build your business network and customer base and get paid. Giving lessons is booming and saving time is the same as making money.

Free scripts: If you are serious about making money, you need to have the right scripts at your disposal. With this guide you receive them complete and for free. Put them to work right away and generate profit instantly. Learn how to work them into your events and how to maximize your income.

Setting up Group Projects: What works and what doesn’t, what you can expect from them and what the top  hints to make them work. Whether it is advice on land issues or project planning: You now have a serious manual at your hand to manage all the big and small problems you will encounter. Collaboration is key!

Second Life Resources: Need more video tutorials? Don’t want so spend Linden or real Dollars on tools? Looking for additional manuals, database and guides? The best of them are listed with explanations in the Second Life Linden Dollars Guide. Knowledge is power. (For some sample videos check out Torley’s guides or visit http://www.virtualworldsvideo.com/ 

Free updates: All future updates of this guide are included in the purchase price. When an update is published, you will receive a notification. Just log into your account and download the update for free! This is critical because Second Life moves fast and updates keep you on top.

Summary:

While I am normally not a huge fan of micro-guides, this particular line is cheap enough to justify the cost whether you are in it for fun, the money or maybe both. Making money is fun! It is impossible to cover every nuance of Second Life, but after reading many of the mainstream print guides I do believe this is a far more practical text and worth the small investment.

The texts are easy to read .pdf files (Adobe Acrobat Reader files) which you can get for free by downloading it here. Killer Guides is not affiliated with any game producer or publisher. The offered products are not official guides.

How To Get It:

Get the Second Life Money Guide Link here as well as links to many other titles like WoW, Matrix Online, Star War Galaxies, Tabula Rasa and many, many others. Let me know what you think.

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I am currently testing ScribeFire 2.2.9, a new plug-in for FireFox 3. What really caught my eye was that ScribeFire is now a MediaWhiz company. Currently the service is in closed Beta. I am curious as to the deal structure- CPA, CPS, CPC,CPM or more than likely a hybrid depending on volume and vertical.

QuickAds allows you to add a fully optimized banner ad to your blog without adding a single line of code. Here are more reasons to try out QuickAds:

• Leverage our relationships with top ad networks and serve one ad
  that we are optimizing with our technology to make sure every
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• We have a direct sales team that is out pitching your blog to direct advertisers and agencies.
• One dashboard to track all your earnings from multiple networks. No need to login to multiple ad networks.
• One consolidated check with no minimum payouts and lighting fast
  net 7 payout terms. You will get paid on the 7th of the month for your
  previous month’s earnings.

That means more resources behind this great tool and more
features to come. Chris Finke will be staying on board to help drive
the tool forward and I will be helping to lead the charge along with a
full team of Internet marketers and technologists. We have been
building this ad optimization technology quietly in the background for
the last six months and are excited to get users on board!

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Looks like CISCO’s CEO and Chairman John Chambers really puts his money where his mouth is!

Group Notice From: Autumn CiscoSystems

Cisco Chairman and CEO, John Chambers will be at the Cisco Bandwidth Stage in Second Life. Mr. Chambers will be talking about the power of collaboration!  Seating is first come first serve!

Teleport to SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Cisco%20Systems%204/66/38/22

or use

TINYSL: http://tinysl.com/S5ffbff)

Location: Second Life
DATE: June 24th, 2008
Time: 11 AM SLT/2 AM Eastern Standard

If you can’t attend in Second Life, it will also be streamed live on the Cisco Virtual World Blog at: http://blogs.cisco.com/virtualworlds
Second Life URL (SLURL)

SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Cisco%20Systems%204/66/38/22

or

TINYSL: http://tinysl.com/S5ffbff

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Second Life has taken a bit of beating lately, but don’t be fooled. Virtual Worlds are alot more than trying to sell products or mass market to avatars. Get beyond the ‘blingtardian” factor and you will find some amazing uses. For example a project I worked on, TheWallSL, was commissioned by someone who wanted to remain anonymous. I was stunned at the response, people crying over VOIP, or the fact the virtual memorial was more accurate (sans reflection.) than the real one.

Many companies are on the charge because they realize the many advantages to virtual work spaces go beyond selling trinkets or bumping up average tickets of dirt-world goods.

Let me name a few: reduced costs, enhanced presence and team building of disparate units, fast prototyping, pleasurable, exciting and novel changes to work…the list goes on.

John Chambers, CEO of Cisco is jumping right in and I am a little biased being from his homeland. I have a lot of respect for Chambers and some regional nationalism. He grew up about 30 minutes from my my city in Huntington, WV and has dyslexia- plus he liked to fish. Despite the dyslexia he pilots a true powerhouse. With a disorder like dyslexia it is obvious why someone like Chambers would embrace virtual worlds. 

As I mentioned earlier a colleague had tested their telepresence technology and they were impressed. I hope to have more details for you.

Learn more at CISCO’s blog http://blogs.cisco.com/virtualworlds/

SECOND LIFE

Second Life is a virtual world with millions of square meters of virtual lands (server space), more than 13 million “residents,” (although how many are active is up for debate) and a real economy based on Lindens. Large numbers of colleges and universities—or, in some cases, individual departments or faculty—are active in Second Life, not only for academic purposes but also for campus visits, recruiting activities for prospective students, and fundraising. We even took many on tours to the Vietnam Memorial we created- one many had never seen because of cost, disability or lack of opportunity to name a few reasons. When you heard the reading of the names of those who lost their lives you got an idea how powerful even “virtual worlds and reality can be.”

Let us also not forget recreation. Hang gliding, surfing, horseback riding, fencing, and other things I have no inkling about. Does it replace the real world?

No.

But it can kindle that spark or that interest in new things.

SUNNY IN SECOND LIFE

Sun Microsystems, which makes computer servers and software, operates seven islands in Second Life, two of which are open to the public. The rest are used for training sessions and meetings. During its biggest event, a twelve-hour corporate meeting held in April, 14 of Santa Clara-based Sun’s top executives mixed with hundreds of employees- weird. Skiing, car racing, live jazz and a sandbox were also part of the event. …you start to get the idea. People’s race, religion, sex, etc all fall away and people interact as people. Human beings…and hey not all are dressed as humans. These things really aren’t important- being human is important.

Sun decided to hold the event after it acquired software company MySQL, which tracks its employees by the 110 airports they live near, rather than their actual locations. Sun was looking for a way to introduce the MySQL employees to their Sun colleagues, and Second Life seemed the best solution.

In our far flung world this is a big deal. Having worked with research teams in Bangalore India, Foster City, CA and Huntington, West Virginia I have no doubt that virtual interaction, be it in Second Life or another platform, would have been an important bonding experience and would have saved time and increased esprit de corp.

CIGNA HEALTHCARE

Hoping to make healthcare education hip and hot, Cigna Healthcare announced it has created a virtual environment in the Second Life virtual world to educate people on how to improve their health. I think success will be predicated on how much “fun” they let people have, but this is a good step. Imagination is a good thing. Nothing everything needs to be measured in immediate direct marketing ROI.

SECOND LIFE HAS FLAWS

No it is not perfect- far from it. It has trouble scaling and takes a certain level of indoctrination to learn the ropes…but this is just an early example of what the world we know will produce. It is going to get even more exciting and you can literally fly to the future. Yes it has flaws, but so do humans and that is one of the reasons being human is so great.

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Call me dissapointed or perhaps simply jaded but I am not so sure nonhierarchical news sites, despite their promises, are really what they are cracked up to be. I caught up with Joe Petvisashvili, creator of Jaanix.com, and an expert at tackling the problems.

In short, is there anyway to stop the system gaming that threatens to turn “citizen powered media” and free choice into marginalized popularity contests?

Wayne: Why did you start Jaanix?

Joe: I asked myself were there any alternatives to the problem you cited? Is there any way to have a community that can aggregate stories interesting to their users, and one that doesn’t encourage group think and trolling? Is it possible to create a destination that encourages different opinions even those not mainstream, and where the marginal opinions are not shut down and blocked out by trolls?

Wayne: Ok I have worked with Jaanix for awhile, after our conversations on Whuffie, so how is it different?

Joe: For starters there is no front page, there’s no karma, nor points to gain. In my vision users should value quality information and accurate news for the sake of quality and accuracy. This is something that is not only missing in nonhierarchical news sites, but in much of mainstream media. The Internet was supposed to liberate information!

Wayne: O.k. that is a lofty goal so how does it work then?

Joe: There is AI [artificical intelligence] behind the scenes that tries to learn what you find interesting, and tries to make a calculated guess to what’s important for you.

Wayne: I have eclectic tastes Joe. How would it know what’s important to me?

Joe: You’re not alone in the world Wayne, there are other people, and some of have similar interests- this is a matter of simple statistics. By comparing the patterns of likes, clicks and other activity with our technology it can find what is common between you and others and recommend accordingly.

Wayne: Why hasn’t Jaanix become as popular or mainstream as you like. Is it a matter of time, or are there other factors?

Joe: The plethora of other social news out there that have completely discredited the idea of social recommendations. There is no accountability and it is hard to stop group think.

Wayne: Can you give me an some examples or opinions?

Joe: Sure, reddit claims to be offer personalized recommendations while it is really employing simplistic vote counting. This is merely a popularity contest.

Wayne: How about the powerhouse- Digg. I have even managed to get a few stories, in my malware hunting days, on the front page.

Joe: It started out strong but now the front page is totally controlled by a tiny clique of power users while claiming to be a “democracy”. Perhaps the biggest loss is Hacker News – it was the last refuge for the reddit elite is now turning into “dictatorship” of sorts.

Wayne: O.K. Joe what can Jaanix offer users?

Joe: Jaanix is all about empowerment, stewardship and giving you back what you deserve. The more feedback you give - the more valuable information you receive. And there are so many ways you can give feedback: clicking only on things you like is already enough for the recommendation technology to know you, but you can also adjust your preferences dynamically with fast and easy to use sliders. You can even post and save things that you care about into your personal sub-jaanix.

Wayne: Cool. I will be giving it more attention. Thanks for your time Joe and good luck on your mission.

Users who haven’t checked out Jaanix might want to give it a try as an alternative to the household names of recommendation sites. Information is power and money in a virtual world and you are far better off if you are getting the best information. Quality beats quantity anyday in my book. Surf to: http://www.jaanix.com

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THE CONVERSATION CONTINUES

As I mentioned earlier I have been talking about the Phorm and NebuAd lately. The original post about the controversy plus the comments can be found here. Other relevant posts: Twelve Questions for Phorm, more on Phorm, some more and Phorm’s response to me. In addition Brad Waller of Revenews talks about the Coalition to fight NeBuAd and whether Deep Packet Injection is Trademark Infringement. Lastly, in an insightful repost of some of Kellie Steven’s (AffiliateFairPlay) comments from one of my posts I found out that UK citizens were planning a protest.

On July 16th 2008 there will be a protest rally at The Barbican Centre (The Barbican Theatre) in London.  The purpose of the event is to protest against plans by BT Group PLC, Virgin Media and Car Phone Warehouse to deploy intrusive technology across their broadband networks for the purpose of profiling the behaviour of their customers which is then sold to Phorm Inc. (formerly 121Media) and used for their Open Internet Exchange (OIX) service.

It seems they make good on their promises. Read on for excerpts of the coverage…and perhaps a lesson.

I have taken the liberty of quoting some of the more poignant wrap-up material, I suggest concerned parties read each article.

Protest at the Barbican - A Summary

Now for a little bit of a rant, not enough people turned up (not even all the peopole who said they would be attending turned up).  I shouldn’t need to remind people how much work went into this event and I certainly shouldn’t need to remind people how important it is for everyone to stand up for their rights and attending the protest would have been a step towards that.  The protest was announced 2 months ago and it would have been nice for people to arrange a day off from work and make the effort to attend.  I don’t use an ISP who are interested in Phorm (quite the opposite) so I personally have nothing to gain from the literally thousands of hours I have dedicated to trying to protect you guys from this sinister technology and whereas I appreciate the thanks and support I recieve from people this is not about me, it is about everyone and it is a very serious issue, so I was a little disappointed to see so few people turn up.

theregister.co.uk

The European Commission has sent a message to the British government, and it reads something like this: “If you don’t deal with Phorm, we will.”

Earlier this month, according to Dow Jones, the European Union commissioner for information society and media sent a “pre-warning letter” to UK authorities, voicing her concern over Phorm, the behavioral ad targeter poised to track user activity on Britain’s three largest ISPs: BT, Carphone Warehouse, and Virgin Media.

BT has already conducted two trials with Phorm - and web surfers were not notified.

“It is very clear in E.U. directives that unless someone specifically gives authorization (to track consumer activity on the Web) then you don’t have the right to do that,” EU commissioner Viviane Reding said. If UK government does not deal with the issue, Dow Jones says, the EC could take action in the European Court of Justice.

dephormation.org.uk

I think that was probably as bad an AGM as BT could possibly have hoped for. It was completely dominated by Webwise, and the directors were made to look extremely uncomfortable.

I know some online will be unhappy I didn’t challenge them more aggressively; the reality is I would never have prevailed so I didn’t try very hard. BT Shareholders are a genteel bunch, I didn’t want to make myself the villain of the piece.

Curious thing; Ian Livingston answered not one single question that I put to the board, and the words Webwise or Phorm did not pass his lips once during the AGM.

One thing I did learn from shareholders was how great a concern phishing is to some people, particularly people who are relying on savings and investments for income. Its important we get the message across that filtering (as occurs already for child abuse sites) does not require advertising or mass surveillance. The two are completely separate and independent. If people do want network phishing filters, and choose to opt in to that as a service, why not? I think that’s a great idea if that’s what people want. Everything else about Phorm is vile, evil, and repels me to the core.

My Own Conclusion

Perhaps people who dislike the way things are going on in the world or certain issues that raise their hackles should take a clue from the playback across the pond. For example- predatory advertising practices. Concerted and coordinated action can cause pressure and pressure often causes change.

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THE CONVERSATION CONTINUES

I have been talking about the Phorm and NebuAd lately and I received a very insightful comment from Kellie Stevens from AffiliateFairPlay.com Kellie has my utmost respect in terms of chasing the money trails and is a modern day click sleuth…I have paraphrased her comment and made a few spelling corrections and bolded a few key sentences. The original post about the controversy plus the comments can be found here. Other relevant posts: Twelve Questions for Phorm, more on Phorm, some more and Phorm’s response to me.

Kellie writes:

These are indeed very important issues emerging around NebuAd and Phorm. On a side note, it should not come as a surprise that some of the execs at NeBuAd are former execs from Claria/Gator. It is similar data tracking but only at a potentially much larger scale.

INAL so I’m not sure how strong of a legal case the Intellectual Property angle may be. It didn’t work that well in the past with lawsuits involving adware. But then a split hair can make all the legal difference at times.

I do think that there other issues surrounding this aside from consumer privacy rights and concerns. As if that isn’t enough in and of itself. ISP’s willingness to use both Phorm and NebuAd (until the stuff hit the fan) follows the same track as other practices I’ve observed by ISPs, which are flat out browser hijacks for their own profit IMO. With ISPs facing more competition these days and are looking at online advertising as a revenue source they need to understand what types of practices are and are not fair game. If certain practices have been deemed as unacceptable by software, why can an ISP engage in the practice? As an end user, I’m not any more happy when my browser doesn’t go where I’ve specifically intended for it to or my user preferences have been overridden. It doesn’t matter to me if it’s a piece of software or my ISP that has done it. I’m actually more disturbed when it’s my ISP because I view them (whether it’s correct or not to do so) as a public service provider such as other media providers. Indeed cable companies have been regulated by Public Service Commissions in the past, although that regulation seems to pretty fragmented now. Regardless, I have expectations of a higher level of responsibility from my ISP (which may well be providing my TV and telephone service as well in the case of companies like Charter).

I also think that this brings up another issue that I don’t think has ever been adequately addressed when looking such data collection by software applications on the end user’s computer. Even if the end user does agree to opt in to tracking such as by NebuAd and Phorm, where is the line drawn about what type of information can be collected and how it can be used. Online businesses need to have their rights to fair competition and protection of proprietary information protected along the same lines as in the brick and mortar world. The boundaries seem not as clearly defined online as they are offline.

I brought this issue to the FBI in the past in the form of a formal complaint when I saw the type of data a particular adware application was collecting and sending back to their servers. Coincidentally (?) the behavior disappeared from the adware a few weeks later. Of course some forms of behavioral tracking with consent has long been considered acceptable. Hence Nielsen ratings.

Thanks for the great commentary Kellie. It was too good to lose your thoughts in my terrible commenting system…I will fix that eventually…Keep up your fantastic analysis.

ON WITH THE PROTEST

Some people are not taking it sitting down either- they are having a protest. The people across the pond take their privacy very seriously. Good for them!

On July 16th 2008 there will be a protest rally at The Barbican Centre (The Barbican Theatre) in London.  The purpose of the event is to protest against plans by BT Group PLC, Virgin Media and Car Phone Warehouse to deploy intrusive technology across their broadband networks for the purpose of profiling the behaviour of their customers which is then sold to Phorm Inc. (formerly 121Media) and used for their Open Internet Exchange (OIX) service.

You can read updates regarding the event on the following web page: https://nodpi.org/category/events/

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Everyone is excited about Google’s Lively, a browser-based 3D client. Some are calling it a Second Life killer. I agree Second Life is not the most secure platform out there, however Timeless Prototype spotted a potentially problematic issue around Lively and DEP.

But, if you’re running 32-bit Vista, you’ll find you might have to disable Data Execution Prevention (if you’re like me who enables it by default for all programs) for Lively’s client.exe just to get it to run. *cough*

Erm, that says to all hackers out there “target for buffer overflows” in big red writing

Cough indeed.

Data Execution Prevention (DEP) is a security feature included in modern Microsoft Windows operating systems that is intended to prevent an application or service from executing code from a non-executable memory region.

Data Execution Prevention goes a long way to mitigate buffer overflow exploits. Combined with Address Space Location Randomization the odds are heavily against the attacker’s code working successfully and will probably only result in the application crashing as opposed to the computer becoming under the control of the attacker.

It will be interesting to see Google’s response to this one. As I have learned in security work it usually just a matter of time. I do not recommend turning off DEP.

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NebuAd in the U.S. and Phorm (formerly 121 Media) in the U.K. have both been accused of deep packet inspection of user traffic without consent with the lofty goal of tracking behaviour to target ads. I posted a dozen questions for Phorm and while I know they have followed the entries, they declined to answer the dirty dozen. For what it is worth I also invite NebuAd to answer them as well- these are the questions that need to be asked. (So that it is clear Phorm and NebuAd are seperate companies and not related.)

The fundamental issue is pretty clear- permission needs to be obtained, it needs to be obvious and in easy-to-understand language. This means fifty page EULA’s written by lawyers are NOT the answer either. Bypassing consent is a deal killer.

I want to call attention to Brad Waller’s recent entry on Deep Packet Injection / Trademark Infringement and NebuAd which looks at the issue from an Intellectual Property perspective.

…compares the NebuAd process to serving some other cola to a customer who asks for a “Coke.” He argues that when the NebuAd cookie is injected by your ISP into a page they serve you, that the page is no longer the exact page you asked for. He says ” When your ISP delivers you a page with a NebuAd cookie injected, the statement that this is the page you asked for is false. The ISP is passing off the NebuAd cookie as being from Amazon. It’s not.” This seems like a bit of a stretch to me, but I’m not an intellectual property attorney. He argues that since the cookie is used to sell you goods that it would be close enough to be an issue.

Talk about splitting hairs and cookie crumbs!

A coalition has formed to tackle NebuAd. (This is good!) The groups at this stage in the game include heavy-weights like the: Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), the Center for Digital Democracy (CDD), Public Knowledge, and Free Press.

As other security guns have reported Charter Communications has cancelled a pilot of the NebuAd advertising system and apparently CenturyTel is cutting NebuAd loose as well. MediaPost reports that the CDT plans to present to the Senate Commerce Committee that NebuAd’s methodology may violate federal wiretapping laws due to how communications are intercepted. The title of their June report: “NebuAd and Partner ISPs: Wiretapping, Forgery and Browser Hijacking.” leaves nothing to the imagination.

The state of online security is wobbly enough, the last thing people need is yet another incursion that erodes their privacy. While privacy and security are different they are related…I really feel this needs to be nipped in the bud so make your voice known.

Ironically some people might already know…this quote from Art Brodsky a spokesman for Public Knowledge on NebuAd’s CEO’s claims is pretty startling:

“We have seen video of the NebuAd CEO saying, ‘Google knows what they do on your site, but we know everywhere you go, the sites you stop at and ads you see.‘ The problem is there’s no opt-in or opt-out to these types of services.”

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