Avatar seducers and beggars

Ashley Madison' Sensuous Kitten, Gizmodo

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A New World Notes post today was titled: With Ashley Madison's Babe Bots, Life (Once Again) Imitates Second Life. If you'll remember Second Life is that virtual world that seems to have faded into obscurity. It hasn't died yet, though. It still has residents, around 43 million of them, not all necessarily actively playing.

Keeper of New World Notes, Wagner James Au, in his article links to Annalee Newitz's How Ashley Madison Hid Its Fembot Con From Users and Investigators. She writes:

The developers at Ashley Madison created their first artificial woman sometime in early 2002. Her nickname was Sensuous Kitten, and she is listed as the tenth member of Ashley Madison in the company’s leaked user database. On her profile, she announces: “I’m having trouble with my computer ... send a message!”

Sensuous Kitten was the vanguard of a robot army. As I reported last week, Ashley Madison created tens of thousands of fembots to lure men into paying for credits on the “have an affair” site. When men signed up for a free account, they would immediately be shown profiles of what internal documents call “Angels,” or fake women whose details and photos had been batch-generated using specially designed software. To bring the fake women to life, the company’s developers also created software bots to animate these Angels, sending email and chat messages on their behalf.

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Second Life: Sign at a high traffic shop, New World Notes

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And speaking of avatars that act as decoys meant to suck your money, take a look at beggar bots in Second Life (aka flatterbots). Here's a sample:

James Au: I didn't reply [to Flatterbot1] or give her any money, she just ran through her script from start to finish, even after I'd left the area. Now compare the speech above with this snippet from the second flatterbot I dealt with that day:
Flatterbot2: don't you be pushin me!
Flatterbot2: I'm just kidding but we can be bumper car avatars!
Flatterbot2: holy crap you have an amazing avatar!
Flatterbot2: I am art retarded, I never make good avatars! Did you make yours?
Flatterbot2: I just got back to SL from a long break, omfg everything is so different
Flatterbot2: you look like you have been in SL for a long time, have you?
Flatterbot2: being back here after so long I don't remember anything about the sliders at all, I keep making a chubby round face lol

Apparently, while some scripts are automated, some are being run by a person at a keyboard. James reports on Flatterbot3:

This morning I popped over to a store with a heavy bot presence and while I received the same tired story from today's bot-du-jour, she was simultaneously arguing with a customer in local chat who had presumably called her out:
Flatterbot3: I can just tell by what you say that SL is all you have
Flatterbot3: that is reserved for fat people who are quite invested in a subreality
Flatterbot3: because they can't make stuff happen irl

This is a virtual world that simply mirrors "real life (rl)."

-- Marge

Heads up, folks: the Glass Brain

It appears our brains are about to be hacked, which is not necessarily a bad thing...

"Second Life founder creates Glass Brain, a system that lets you explore your brain in real-time" is a headline from Neurogadget.  According to the article,

[Philip] Rosedale made his wife a cap studded with electroencephalogram (EEG) electrodes that measure differences in electric potential in order to record brain activity, while he wore a virtual reality headset to explore her brain in 3D, as flashes of light displayed her brain activity from the EEG.

For an idea of what he saw, here's a Glass Brain flythrough:

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This visualization was done in Unity3D; it allows the user to fly around and through the brain with a game pad while seeing real-time live brain activity from someone wearing an EEG cap. Rosedale collaborated with the Neuroscape Lab in San Francisco to produce the Glass Brain.  However, his main project at present is High Fidelity, which is:

...building a new virtual world enabling rich avatar interactions driven by sensor-equipped hardware, simulated and served by devices (phones, tablets and laptops/desktops) contributed by end-users.

Surf on over to the page to see what he means by "contributed by end-users." You're invited by Rosedale and his team to sign up for alpha and will be notified when it's available.

A related article found at Neurogadget is Brain-Machine-Brain Interface (BMBI).

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Miguel Nicolelis, monkey brain-machine brain (BMBI)

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Credit goes to Wagner James Au at New World Notes for his introductory post on the Glass Brain topic (Note: the site is currently offline, as of 11:50 AM AKDT).

More on the topic of brain-computer interfacing Wednesday.

 -- Marge

The WELL: story of an online community reborn

"WELL Community Members Create For-Profit Corporation in Bid to Buy The WELL," an article by Wagner James Au, talks about user/members of the Well, who bought their community in order to keep it alive. In an essay Wagner wrote for Internet Evolution -- What Went Wrong With the WELL & Why It Matters -- he explains:

Once called "the world's most influential online community" on the cover of Wired magazine, at its peak the WELL counted users like the sci-fi authors Neal Stephenson and Cory Doctorow; visionaries like the musician Brian Eno and the virtual community expert Howard Rheingold; EFF founders John Perry Barlow, John Gilmore, and Mitch Kapor; and even rock stars like Billy Idol and David Crosby. The quality of its users' posts -- smart, funny, creative, and provocative on every imaginable subject -- inspired countless Internet entrepreneurs and thinkers.

The previous owner of the WELL, Salon Media Group, publishes the site Salon. To know more about Salon check this Wikipedia entry.

The WELL's site is somewhat barebones. You must join and pay for a membership to view conversations, as well as participate. According to the Conferences page "Conferences are the heart of The WELL:"

Conferences are where we gather - the heart of The WELL. A vibrant community emerges from thousands of conversations in hundreds of ongoing forums traditionally known as conferences.

Each gathering place has a distinct flavor. A few are open to the world. Most are open to all members. Some limit access to a private group. Others are not listed here by request of their founders. Participants check in frequently at one, five or more conferences, to offer expertise, dissect one another's best ideas and indulge in gossip, mutual aid and general banter.

There are two conferences open to non-members -- Inkwell.vue and Deadsongs.vue -- that you can participate in by emailing the conference hosts.  Click on the "How to participate" link at each for details.

Looks like these conferences might actually be fun.

-- Marge