e dot dot dot
a mostly about the Internet blog by

December 2021
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
     
 


A Grope In Meta's Space

Furnished content.


Horizon Worlds is a VR (virtual reality) social space and world building game created by Facebook. In early December, a beta tester wrote about being virtually groped by another Horizon Worlds user. A few weeks later, The Verge and other outlets published stories about the incident. However, their coverage omits key details from the victim’s account. As a result, it presents the assault as a failure of user operated moderation tools rather than the limits of top-down moderation. Nevertheless, this VR groping illustrates the difficulty of moderating VR, and the enduring value of tools that let users solve problems for themselves.The user explains that they reported and blocked the groper, and a Facebook “guide”, an experienced user trained and certified by Facebook, failed to intervene. They write, “I think what made it worse, was even after I reported, and eventually blocked the assaulter, the guide in the plaza did and said nothing.” In the interest of transparency, I have republished the beta user’s post in full, sans identifying information, here;

**Trigger Warning** Sexual Harassment. My apologies for the long post: Feel free to move on.Good morning,I rarely wake up with a heavy heart and a feeling of anger to start a fresh new day, but that is how I feel this morning. I want to be seen and heard. I reach out to my fellow community members in hopes of understanding and reassurance that they will be proactive in supporting victims and eliminating certain types of behavior in horizon worlds. My expectations as a creator in horizon worlds aren't unreasonable and I'm sure many will agree.You see this isn't the first time, I'm sure it won't be the last time that someone has sexually harassed me in virtual reality. Sexual harassment is no joke on the regular Internet but being in VR adds another layer that makes the event more intense. Not only was I groped last night, but there were other people there who supported this behavior which made me feel isolated in the Plaza. I think what made it worse, was even after I reported, and eventually blocked the assaulter, the guide in the plaza did and said nothing. He moved himself far across the map as if to say, you're on your now.Even though my physical body was far removed from the event, my brain is tricked into thinking it's real, because.....you know......Virtual REALITY. We can't tout VR's realness and then lay claim that it is not a real assault. Mind you, this all happened within one minute of arriving in the plaza, I hadn't spoken a word yet and could have possibly been a 12-year-old girl.MY ASK:I would like a personal bubble that will force people away from my avatar and I would like to be able to upload my own recording with my harassment ticket. I would also like that all guides are given sensitivity training on this specific subject, so they will understand what is expected. If META won't give guides tools that will allow them to remove a player immediately from a situation, at least train them to deal with it and not run away.Rant over, I'm still mad, but I will sort through and process. I love this community and the thought of leaving it makes me deeply sad. So I am hopeful we can evolve as a community and foster behaviors that support collaboration, understand, and a willingness to speak out against gross behaviors.
Initial coverage in The Verge did not mention the victim’s use of the block feature, even as the user describes using it in the post above. Instead, reporter Alex Heath relayed Facebook’s account of the incident, saying “the company determined that the beta tester didn’t utilize the safety features built into Horizon Worlds, including the ability to block someone from interacting with you.”These details are important because subsequent writing about the incident builds on the false, but purported non-use of the blocking feature to make the case that offering users tools to control their virtual experience is “unfair and doesn’t work.” In Technology Review, Tanya Basu makes hay of the user’s failure to use the “safe zone” feature, which temporarily removes users from their surroundings. Yet this is a red herring. The user might not have immediately disappeared into her safe zone, but she used the block feature to do away with her assailant.In reality, contra Basu or Facebook’s description of events, it seems that user-directed blocking put a stop to the harm while the platform provided community guide failed to intervene. VR groping is a serious issue, but it is not one that will be solved from the top-down. Inaccurate reporting that casts user-operated moderation tools as ineffective may spur platforms to pursue less effective solutions to sexual harassment in VR.Implications of the incident’s misreporting aside, it provides a useful case study in the difficulties of moderating VR. One suggestion put forward by the user and backed by University of Washington Professor Katherine Cross warrants discussion. Closer inspection of their proposals illustrates the careful tradeoffs that inform the current safe zone and blocking tools offered to Horizon users.They request a “personal bubble that will force people away from my avatar” or “automatic personal distance unless two people mutually agreed to be closer.” This might make some groping harder, but it creates other opportunities for abuse.If players’ avatars can take up physical space and block movement, keeping others at bay, then they can block doorways and trap other players in corners or against other parts of world. Player collision could render abuse inescapable or allow players to hold others’ avatars prisoner.MMOs (Massively Multiplayer Online games) have long struggled with this problem – “holding the door” is only a contextually heroic action. Player collision makes gameplay more realistic, but allows some players to limit everyone else’s access to important buildings by loitering in the doorway.Currently, players’ avatars in Horizon may pass through one another. They can retreat into a safe zone, disappearing from the world. They can also “block” other users – preventing both the blocked and blocking users from seeing one another. Even through a block, they can still see one each other’s nametags – total invisibility created problems I covered here. As such, the current suite of user moderation tools strikes a good balance between empowering users and minimizing new opportunities for misuse.Finally, given the similarity of the transgression, it is worth recalling Julian Dibbell’s “A Rape in Cyberspace”, one of the first serious accounts of community governance online. In this Village Voice article, Dibbell relates how users of role-playing chatroom LambdaMOO (the best virtual reality to be had in 1993) responded to a string of virtual sexual assaults. After fruitless deliberation, a LambdaMOO coder banned the offending user. After the incident, LambdaMOO established democratic procedures for banning abusive users, and created a “boot” command allowing users to temporarily remove troublemakers.As the internet has developed content moderation has centralized. Today, users are usually expected to let platforms moderate for them. However, just as in the web’s early days, empowering users remains the best solution to interpersonal abuse. The tools they need to keep themselves safe may be different, but in virtual reality as in role-playing chat, those closest to abuse are best positioned to address it. Users being harassed should not be expected to wait for the mods.Will Duffield is a Policy Analyst at the Cato Institute

Read more here

posted at: 12:00am on 29-Dec-2021
path: /Policy | permalink | edit (requires password)

0 comments, click here to add the first



Former US Intelligence Analysts Sued For Hacking A Saudi Activist's Phone On Behalf Of The United Arab Emirates

Furnished content.


In early 2019, a whistleblower revealed some ugliness emanating from the United Arab Emirates: former NSA analysts working for a private company hired to perform counterterrorism work for the government were spying on journalists, activists, and the occasional American citizen on behalf of their royal benefactors.Why these analysts were working for known human rights abusers was unclear. Why they decided this work should involve targeting people who weren't terrorists, but rather critics of the UAE government, was similarly left unexplained. The program was called Project Raven and former employee Lori Stroud was the only person involved willing to speak publicly about its activities. Everyone else -- from the NSA to the UAE government -- refused to comment.More than two years later, the harms perpetrated by these former analysts were given a price tag. Three former US intelligence community analysts (two of which worked for the NSA) were fined $1.68 million for utilizing powerful hacking tools to target dissidents, activists, journalists, and the occasional American citizen for the UAE government. The tools used included "Karma," which was capable of remotely compromising targets' phones without any interaction from phone owners, allowing for wholesale collection of photos, emails, text messages and location information.Over the years covered in the indictment (which resulted in the fines mentioned above), the analysts began with Project Raven, which migrated from Cyberpoint (a company associated with Italy's infamous Hacking Team), before finally ending up as a wholly-UAE-owned company called Darkmatter.It's this company that's now being sued by one of its targets, a Saudi activist represented by the EFF.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a lawsuit today on behalf of prominent Saudi human rights activist Loujain AlHathloul against spying software maker DarkMatter Group and three of its former executives for illegally hacking her iPhone to secretly track her communications and whereabouts.AlHathloul is among the victims of an illegal spying program created and run by former U.S. intelligence operatives, including the three defendants named in the lawsuit, who worked for a U.S. company hired by United Arab Emirates (UAE) in the wake of the Arab Spring protests to identify and monitor activists, journalists, rival foreign leaders, and perceived political enemies.
The defendants include Darkmatter, the UAE-owned company that acted on behalf of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Also named are the three former US Intelligence Community analysts who were fined $1.68 million by the federal government in September 2021.A lot of what's alleged mirrors what we've been seeing over the past several months emanating from Israel malware manufacturer, NSO Group: powerful phone hacking tools, authoritarian governments, and the targeting of government critics, political opponents, and journalists. We've heard plenty about who's been targeted. We don't often hear what happens to those targeted when the governments targeting them finally catch up to them. AlHathoul's lawsuit [PDF] details the end result of her targeting by former NSA analysts working for Project Raven and Darkmatter.
[AlHathloul's] phone was initially hacked in 2017, gaining access to her texts, email messages, and real-time location data. Later, AlHathloul was driving on the highway in Abu Dhabi when she was arrested by UAE security services, and forcibly taken by plane to the KSA, where she was imprisoned twice, including at a secret prison where she was subject to electric shocks, flogging, and threats of rape and death.
I'm sure the named analysts would prefer not to know the human misery their work for the UAE and KSA (Kingdom of Saudi Arabia) resulted in. It's always easier to think of targets in the abstract: an identifier devoid of personal agency, compromised and controlled by ones and zeroes similarly devoid of personality. This lawsuit will force them to confront what they enabled and, possibly, compensate this activist for the harms they enabled.

Read more here

posted at: 12:00am on 29-Dec-2021
path: /Policy | permalink | edit (requires password)

0 comments, click here to add the first



December 2021
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
     
 







RSS (site)  RSS (path)

ATOM (site)  ATOM (path)

Categories
 - blog home

 - Announcements  (0)
 - Annoyances  (0)
 - Career_Advice  (0)
 - Domains  (0)
 - Downloads  (3)
 - Ecommerce  (0)
 - Fitness  (0)
 - Home_and_Garden  (0)
     - Cooking  (0)
     - Tools  (0)
 - Humor  (0)
 - Notices  (0)
 - Observations  (1)
 - Oddities  (2)
 - Online_Marketing  (0)
     - Affiliates  (1)
     - Merchants  (1)
 - Policy  (3743)
 - Programming  (0)
     - Bookmarklets  (1)
     - Browsers  (1)
     - DHTML  (0)
     - Javascript  (3)
     - PHP  (0)
     - PayPal  (1)
     - Perl  (37)
          - blosxom  (0)
     - Unidata_Universe  (22)
 - Random_Advice  (1)
 - Reading  (0)
     - Books  (0)
     - Ebooks  (0)
     - Magazines  (0)
     - Online_Articles  (5)
 - Resume_or_CV  (1)
 - Reviews  (2)
 - Rhode_Island_USA  (0)
     - Providence  (1)
 - Shop  (0)
 - Sports  (0)
     - Football  (0)
          - Cowboys  (0)
          - Patriots  (0)
     - Futbol  (0)
          - The_Rest  (0)
          - USA  (0)
 - Technology  (1049)
 - Windows  (1)
 - Woodworking  (0)


Archives
 -2024  March  (164)
 -2024  February  (168)
 -2024  January  (146)
 -2023  December  (140)
 -2023  November  (174)
 -2023  October  (156)
 -2023  September  (161)
 -2023  August  (49)
 -2023  July  (40)
 -2023  June  (44)
 -2023  May  (45)
 -2023  April  (45)
 -2023  March  (53)
 -2023  February  (40)


My Sites

 - Millennium3Publishing.com

 - SponsorWorks.net

 - ListBug.com

 - TextEx.net

 - FindAdsHere.com

 - VisitLater.com