Plurk hole: Privacy part 2

Your Plurk user name and identifying information are passed along every time you click a link embedded in a Plurk message from your timestream. Here is an example from my blog reports. I've inked out everyone but Codie.



Going from your user name to additional identifying information is just a click away. The next image shows that if you are at work or school, that information is also passed along. Wonder what someone at Microsoft was doing on my blog for 102 minutes? I think they're looking for a Jerry Seinfeld replacement for commercials and are considering Botgirl.



One more click and your physical location, operating system and other tidbits are revealed.



The key security flaw in Plurk, is that you view posts in a url that has your user name, for instance: http://www.plurk.com/user/botgirl. So when I click a link, my user name goes right along with it. Twitter doesn't have that problem because the browsing url is twitter.com/home.

There are two easy ways to avoid this issue if you care about it. First, don't click links. Instead, copy the link and paste it into a new browser tab. Another more sneaky way is to browse another user's timeline and click from there. That will send their user name along with your other information.

That's all here till Monday. I hope to meet some of you at the Identity Circus opening on Sunday.

Morphing all night long

I was up late, late again to finish the morphing part of the Dale-to-Dale Video, using Fantamorph. I have a lot to learn about morphing techniques, especially for tough sections such as Dale's left eye area that starts with glasses in the male avatar and ends being covered by hair in the female image. I cheated on it a little due to time constraints and did kind of a cross between a fade and a morph. Ideally, I would have gone into Photoshop and either morphed in multiple layers, or cleaned up the multiple frames one at a time. Here's an example of the orginal male avatar and a frame about halfway through the change.

This morning, I imported the series of still images from Fanatmorph into Motion so the video can include some camera moves. A first draft is about a third of the way through rendering after an hour of processing. It's taking so long because I started with very high resolution images so I could zoom around without artifacts. We'll see.

Cuddling with Jacek: Testing animations for art installation

Although my inner clock keeps ticking louder and faster, I am making good progress checking off to-do items for Sunday's show. One of the exhibits I'm most looking forward to will give atendees a chance to cuddle with my chatbot. Sharing a romantic animation with an attractive yet empty avatar is a great way to get a feel for the power virtuality has to induce an emotional or even physical response.

Trouble was that I'd put off selecting an animation until last night. I went to Bits and Bobs, an animation store Gabby recommended. The animations that seemed to hold most promise required two avatars to test. I put out a request on Plurk for assistance, and Jacek Antonelli, noted and geekalicious artist, builder, scripter, animator and instructor was kind enough to offer to help.

Although we hang out with eros-Goddess Codie, Jacek and I are a bit on the, well, Spockish site of the street. So I felt a bit awkward saying a brief hello to my barely-konwn acquaintence and then jumping onto some very hot poseballs and watching us very, very closely in order to evaluate the animations.

It was a lot of fun. This Goldilocks had to try more than three before finding one that was just right. We both agreed that the animation eventually selected was a clear winner. It was good enough to make each of us feel a bit embarrassed be so seemingly physically intimate. And dare I say stir up a little feeling?

Anyone interesting in beta testing the cuddle bot exhibit before we officially open should drop me a line or comment. :)

You're invited to the grand opening of Botgirl's Identity Circus

Botgirl's Identity Circus: Visual explorations of virtuality, will have a grand opening in the New Caerleon sim on Sunday, September 21, 2008 from 11am - 2pm SLT. The art exhibition will feature a variety of works including the premier of the "Night vs. Human" comic, the debut of a new avatar morphing video and an interactive "Cuddle With a Bot" installation.

The show will be hosted by New Caerleon, an open source university campus founded by Georg Janick, aka Gary Zabel, professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. It will be housed in a customized circus tent built specifically for the Identity Circus by Sabrinaa Nightfire.

Please stop by and help me celebrate my first-ever public show. Feel free to spam all of your lists, IM all your ex's, re-tweet, re-Plurk, re-Facebook...well, you get the idea.

The address in Second life is http://slurl.com/secondlife/New%20Caerleon/31/217/22

Reputation management of online identities: Privacy part 1

Controversy broke out Saturday in the Second Life Plurk community only a few days after my initial post on the topic. Codie had taken the threads from her very popular Bold Sex Question of the Day (BSQOTD) and posted them on her blog. The response was swift and urgently negative. At least from a few concerned Plurkers.

Although the original pages are accessible on Plurk to the 400+ people on Codie's friend and fan lists, some participants were concerned that the reputation of their pseudonymous virtual identity would be damaged if their participation was archived on search-engine accessible web pages. Codie graciously pulled the archive from her site within the hour.

The tempest in a teapot made me realize that many people care deeply about the reputation of their online identities. I thought it would be in the public interest to put out a little guide to managing virtual ID reputation, with a special emphasis on the spectrum of private and public communication and activity.

Since I'm in the final stretch of taking care of a million undone tasks for Sunday's 11AM SLT opening of my art exhibition in New Caerleon, (shameless plug) I'm going to take it slow. But I was all hot and bothered about this idea and just couldn't help myself from getting started.

Plurk, pseudonymity and the branding in weak ties

Micro-blogging services provide an interesting window into the social play of virtual identities. Although I consistently use ping.fm to announce blog posts on Twitter, Facebook and Plurk, I go back and forth on my level of active participation. Outside of trying to steer clear of the black hole of time such services can generate, I'm also wary of the blurry line between social and strategic communication.

Given that Botgirl is a carefully fabricated character it may seem odd that I have any qualms about the use of microblogging as a branding tool to shape others' perception of my virtual identity. But I do. Have qualms.

In a sense there are two Botgirls. One is a public persona who is a vehicle for creative exploration and expression. The public persona is not about the person, but about her creations. It's about interacting on a public stage with an audience aware of the theatrical setting. To me, being authentic in the public persona means being true to artistic vision, which sometimes includes very intentional activity to create specific impressions in the minds of an audience.

The other Botgirl is the personal persona who engages in social interactions with friends and acquaintances. Although we know each other only through pseudonymous identities, the content of communication is often intimately personal and can include deeply experienced emotions that ripple outside the bounds of the virtual ID. To me, being authentic in the personal persona means being as transparently open and honest as possible without a covert agenda. I may choose to withhold information, but don't fabricate RL information. For instance, I make no claims to age, gender, nationality, etc.

My struggle with microblogging beyond blog post announcements is that it is a strange mixture of public and private; especially Plurk with its near-realtime chat functions. So on one hand the communication can be very personal, on the other hand it is public. It is on a stage with a wide audience. It seems to me that some people are communicating as much for branding as for what I consider to be personally authentic communication. I catch myself doing the same thing sometimes. I don't like it.

I've reached no conclusions yet and will continue to muddle through for the time being. In the meantime, there have been a number of interesting posts recently related to the social aspects of virtual identity worth reading, including great commentaries by Vint Falken and Dandellion Kimban.

Please welcome my new collaborator Sabrinaa Nightfire

I am very lucky to have some incredible talent helping me prepare for the upcoming art exhibition that will be premiering on Sept. 20 in New Caerleon. I'll be gushing a bit about all of them between now and then. Tonight, I want to appreciate Sabrinaa Nightfire who is building the structure that will house the exhibits and provide the thematic atmosphere (which we're keeping under wraps for now.)

Sabrinaa is an artist who has several major art builds on the art SIM, New Caerleon. She is also a sculptor, photographer and clothes maker in Second Life. She as six shops in Second Life and her main store features her underwater sculpture garden. Sabrinaa's first major build in New Carleon is the 300m tall science fiction museum she created for real life science fiction writer Kueperpunk Korhonen. She loves to defy the laws of real life physics and to create things that have never been thought of before.

She's a very generous soul who offered to help out about five minutes after meeting me and hearing about the project. I laid a challenging design concept on her and she didn't bat an eye, but took it a step farther. I can't wait to see it come to life!