Congressional Hearing on Virtual Worlds

By Roderick Jones

Today Congress held its first hearing on virtual worlds. I don’t have much to add to the summary already provided by Virtually Blind. Discussion did at one point turn to the use of Second Life by terrorists with Representative Jane Harman (D-California) reading from a very lazy article by the UK Sunday Times (owner News Corporation) published last August, which was a re-working of a horrendous hack job on the subject by The Australian the week before (owner News Corporation)! Sadly these two articles have infected the debate on the subject, I hope this is the last we see of them. As I have stated here and elsewhere it seems highly unlikely jihadi terrorists would use the Second Life platform in its current form. Although I do take issue with the Linden Lab CEO’s (Philip Rosedale) comment on the subject stating, “because we have a stronger recorded identity there, it is likely that virtual world activities are somewhat more policeable and the law is more enforceable there than it is on websites”. Last I looked you could sign on to Second Life with total anonymity, hence the platforms constant problems with ‘griefers’ disrupting the system - 'griefers' rely on anonymity.

It is the potential use of future virtual world platforms that is interesting. Such as, the recently announced collaboration between Forterra Systems and IBM to create virtual worlds for internal intelligence agency information sharing. This appears to be the way that virtual worlds are being developed - for single use applications. It doesn’t take much imagination to re-word the Forterra press release to see how this can be used in the other direction. Nevertheless, the fact that concerns surrounding the security implications of virtual world platforms now forms part of the discussion about this area of technology, is in itself encouraging.

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