Lost Rambling

Lost has a lot of potential, but doesn’t apply himself.

Wednesday, March 07, 2007

When I open my mouth, I manage to insert my foot.

A reposting of comment that I made at Terra Nova
Given Al-Qaeda's very nature/principal of being against western influences on the Islamic religion/nations/culture. I find it hard to believe that they would use Second Life, which its core embraces the counter culture. And only goes to show how unknowledgeable people are of the beliefs that these people are willing to kill and die for. We want/need to demonism these people in order to make sense of it, believing that they will do anything to meet their goals, while forgetting that those goals are based on extreme fundamental beliefs. That is not say it isn’t possible that they would use it to hide their activity, just highly unlikely.

As suggested by others, there are more secure ways to communicate the same types of information (private server in friendly/weakly policed country). Also as Dr. Cat said "Any transportation or communication technology is potentially usefully..." and should be part of the discussion "the use of the internet" for terrorism.
As to the money laundering, this could be said about many games. While it might have been slowed by the changes in eBay policies, there would be nothing to stop me from buying X amount of gold in UO/WoW/EQ/etc and giving it to another who then resell it for cash to be used for terrorist activities.

Focusing the spotlight on Second Life as the next hotbed of terrorist activity is short sighted and a case of using the current media/public scapegoat.
I'm not a fan of Second Life, but the original subject matter just short sighed.