“I see this as a virtual version of the hawala or hundi system,” said Johnson, who heads risk management firm TRMG, referring to the informal money transfer network that is commonly used through the Middle East, Asia and Africa.

“It’s trust based — I give you 1,000, you give someone else 1,000 — it serves to move money from A to B to C to D while obscuring the trail.” Link —>

Science fiction authors are some of the most interesting people to watch with regards to futurism in the unparalleled completely unstructured sense.  Charles Stross is no exception.  Worth a read if you’ve got 10 minutes to spare today.

Total history — a term I’d like to coin, by analogy to total war — is something we haven’t experienced yet. I’m really not sure what its implications are, but then, I’m one of the odd primitive shadows just visible at one edge of the archive: I expect to live long enough to be lifelogging, but my first forty or fifty years are going to be very poorly documented, mere gigabytes of text and audio to document decades of experience. What I can be fairly sure of is that our descendants’ relationship with their history is going to be very different from our own, because they will be able to see it with a level of depth and clarity that nobody has ever experienced before.

Meet your descendants. They don’t know what it’s like to be involuntarily lost, don’t understand what we mean by the word “privacy”, and will have access (sooner or later) to a historical representation of our species that defies understanding. They live in a world where history has a sharply-drawn start line, and everything they individually do or say will sooner or later be visible to everyone who comes after them, forever. They are incredibly alien to us.  Link —>

Thanks for Haft of the Spear for the link.

Steven Phillipsohn, a fraud litigation solicitor and chairman of the FAP’s cybercrime working group, said: “There’s nothing virtual about online crime, it is all too real. It is time government took this seriously.

“The legitimate benefits of virtual communities will prove enormous, but people need to be aware that this cutting-edge technology has a darker side.

“Money laundering is the obvious risk. There will be a migration of fraudsters into these sites when they see all of the opportunities.”  Link —>

In my home office, I have a preserved set of the Apple Think Different poster series as inspiration, but I realized that I did not have any books on my bookshelf about the individuals honored in this advertising campaign.

I put together this list at Amazon for the Think Different series which I plan to read in these chairs that sit under my poster collection.

It would appear I am not alone with my lost inventory items in SL. Some folks have lost thousands of dollars in virtual property. My losses are really only in the hundred dollar range, but still represent something I bought and owned.

The official Linden Labs response is pathetic and unacceptable.

[12:16] Cory Linden shouts: As is spelled out in the terms of service, you do create content at your own risk in SL. We are making every effort to reduce that loss and I am sorry that it has occurred…

It is also interesting to note that the same Linden Labs crew that will do nothing about fraud in SL has decided to ban “gambling” words from property descriptions. The offending word in my description was “blackjack”. Now if users actually want to host games for the sake of playing and socializing (not gambling) you can’t attract traffic. If they are going to ban games, maybe they should ban tringo, trivia and dance contest too.