Facebook

This week in class we have been focusing on many of the security issues associated with Facebook and MySpace. We had multiple readings for Wednesday’s class from danah boyd that backed up this whole discussion. While I am not going to specifically focus on the readings from this week I am going to try to apply Facebook and security issues to my real life. We had some great conversation in class about how many of the security features have been found to have flaws and largely misunderstood by many of the users. There are such things as limited profiles, being able to see profiles of people that poke you (even without having to be friends with them, and more specific to my case are the pictures and wall posts that we have out there. Strange thing is I had a presentation in my S433 (Security) class after our lecture about just this issue, security in Facebook. It backed up many of the issues we had discussed in class as well as introduced many of the other security flaws and features we did not discuss. Needless to say I have a better understanding of this entire area now.

My main focus of this blog is how important it is to ensure that you have the proper setting on your Facebook to allow your friends to see material that is personal as opposed to that material that you would not want your parents or more importantly employers.

I am graduating here in two weeks and have been faced with a situation such as this, where I do not want future employers to see what my Facebook account entails. My first experience was when I found one of the partners of the CPA firm where I am going to work actually had an account of Facebook. I thought it would be cool to friend him on Facebook since he was one of the partners I enjoyed working with during my internship. I then got online to talk to another friend and the conversation turned into discussing, Facebook, very similar to Wednesdays class. Needless to say I had plenty of pictures of myself drunk as a skunk, doing things that older generations would not approve of and a plethora of wall posts where there was less than appealing language. I basically freaked out and went through my settings, pictures, wall posts and about me area and cleaned it up to make myself look professional. When I first became friends with the partner I did not even think anything about it, because my pictures did not involve me doing anything illegal, they just might have been looked down upon. It really hit home that I am going to be a professional and my profile cannot look like this. Since this time in February I have been keeping my profile free of pictures where I look like I am beyond drunk, and making sure that wall posts that contain foul language are deleted. This just goes to show a real life example where having a facebook profile that contains some of this stuff, could turn around a bit you in the ass.

Dibbell - Little 5 Special

PN YouTube Video

Dibbell once again opens our eyes to a new concepts in the online gaming world; griefers. We have discussed many different attacks on people in such worlds as Second Life and LamdaMOO, but we really have not touched on what these people are referred to. Dibbell, in her Wired article, defines griefers as, “as online version of the spoilsport – someone who takes please in shattering the world of play itself.” She then goes into saying that just because these griefers look to ruin your online experience, this does not necessarily mean that they hate the online world; they are just looking to get a rise out of the user and piss them off enough to accomplish their task.

Dibbell talks how griefing was started in the early 90s when it was used in such games as Counter-Strike. Teammates would kill each other with fragmentation grenades and kill other players that were much weaker than them. This goes to show that this type of behavior in the gaming world has been around for almost two decades now. It reminds me a bit of playing Halo with my roommates and neighbors. We usually attack those players that our weak, and when we are pissed off at a teammate for playing like crap, we turn on them and kill them, even if it means hurting the teams overall performance.

I believe this is where the discussion can be made on when griefing is going to far. The Patriotic Nigras, or the PN, have notoriously been known to cause havoc in Second Life. We watched some videos in class and the Dibbell article also talks about some of their attacks. A great video on YouTube shows some of these attacks in the past. I mean I understand that some of these attacks are meant to be funny, but when you are ruining the game play for other users then you are just being annoying and abusing your powers. In the example of my roommates and me playing Halo, when we go after each other for being weaker or killing our own players it is all in good fun, we all start a new game and continue playing like nothing happened. What PN and other groups are doing is creating an environment where others can’t enjoy their Second Life experience. I don’t know how far I can take my point or clarify it, because I myself have never been targeted in one of these attacks, nor have I even played Second Life. When you are causing servers to crash and accounts to be messed up I believe that you are taking things too far, and in some cases causing real life monetary damages (i.e. in the case of a server crashing). When you grief just to have some fun and be a “spoilsport” all within a reasonable limit, I believe this is just fine, but when it goes beyond this and into the realm of just being annoying, you have crossed the line.

Dibbell

O MY A LINK - HERE

Julian Dibbell introduced us to quite a topic with her reading for class on Wednesday, A Rape in Cyberspace. We have talked about LambdaMOO before when it comes to textual based MUDs and have also looked at it first hand through and example during class. Never did I think that all of this discussion of MUDs would I think it would lead to the discussion of rape. The basis of this article is about an avatar that called himself, Mr. Bungle. Mr. Bungle entered into LambdaMOO one day and stepped into the living room where he found two other avatars, Starsinger and Legba. Now the description that Mr. Bungle brought with him is something in itself; “he was at the time a fat, oleaginous, Bisquick-faced clown dressed in com-stained harlequin garb and girdles with a mistletoe-and hemlock belt whose buckle bore the quaint inscription “KISS ME UDER THIS, BITCH!” He had written a program that would make different avatars “say” that they were doing different acts. He was having them sexually service him and eventually turned his attacks to Legba and Starsinger in particular. He proceeded to make Legba eat his/her own pubic hair and Starsinger to violate herself with a piece of kitchen cutlery, all while laughing in the background. This obviously came at an outrage from the other people located in LambdaMOO and eventually the Wizard, Zippy, came to put Mr. Bungle into a cage.

What followed from this incident was outrage from the people that were involved with the incident and many days of discussing the event and what to do. While Mr. Bungle eventually got out of his cage he was then “toaded” after coming back as another avatar to sit back and watch as those who he had violated talked about him. This raises the question that we talked about so much in class, is this type of textual harassment to be considered rape? I definitely think that this is not a question that just one person can answer. I do know that in real life rape there is not only the emotional damage, but also physical damage so if anything I believe what has happened online in this “text” based world is no more than sexual harassment. Obviously there are many ways to approach this situation and to look at it, but in terms of this reader it is viewed as sexual harassment and not rape. The same type of argument is had about whether virtual cheating is like cheating in real life. WE have also discussed this “rape” in terms of a text based MUD, but what about a MUD similar to Second Life.

The article I have found that related to the Dibbell article is about rape in Second Life. The article is entitled, “Can ‘virtual rape’ in Second Life be a crime?” The article is talking about how the Belgian police are investigating an allegation of a rape in Second Life. They are trying to answer the question if a “pixilated” online game where you can exit at anytime if an activity such as this can be considered rape. They discuss how rape in real life is where the victim does not want it to happen and cannot stop it from happening and there is physical force involved. But in a MUD such as Second Life the victim is able to stop it from happening at anytime by simply signing off or unplugging or disconnecting. In this case the victim has power of the perpetrator. What needs to be understood is that the victim can stop it at any time. They discuss how that if the victim does not shut down what is happening, and then maybe they wanted it to happen to begin with??? The use of a MUD allows the user to experience something they might not otherwise be able to “experience” in real life. The Net allows for us all to do this. They leave you with the question…if you can unplug then, is it rape??? The question is out there for you to answer yourself…