SecondLife and Spam On The Web

I've been connecting the internet (through Drupal) and SecondLife in quite a few different ways. Most of these connections are not public yet (keep an eye on Your2ndPlace.com), mainly because there is a lot of beta testing involved and underway.

One thing I found - while using Drupal's Troll module and using the Linden Scripting Language's llHTTPRequest - was that at least some of Linden Lab's simulator server IP addresses are... blacklisted. Which blacklist? I'm not sure, I didn't dig too deep - but it struck me: What a brilliant way to spam people using Linden Lab servers for almost nothing.

One 16 m² plot could have 3 objects with email addresses in notecards, just firing out spam emails (and perhaps lagging the sim). Or posting spam comments on websites, or any manner of strange things. There are no rules against it - and the rules for spam are a big point of contention on an international level. Most people accept spam as a part of life, but if you asked a lot of people whether they would like to get rid of it - the answer would be 'yes'.

So here's one for internet governance - how does a virtual world figure into internet governance in the 'traditional' sense - with things like spam? Of course, WSIS was as effective as intellectual onanism.

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