How risky is your social network?

Hat tip to Kristan Wheatan at Mercyhurst for posting first.

Interesting ‘risk analysis tool’ for evaluating your social networking habits:

Social Networking: Action and Privacy Risk Methodology

Social Networks are, lest we forget, there own virtual worlds….

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Bots in Second Life – AI?

The UK based company Daden has a pretty interesting demo of a Second Life based bot available on YouTube.

SLurl to Daden’s inworld offices.

The bot on display is more than simply a chat-bot and is able to emote and ‘learn’ within the Second Life environment.

One of the more impressive features is how the bot is able to answer questions by accessing wikipedia or amazon.com and therefore, its knowledge base is not limited.  This could be a useful everyday tool and could also be adapted for use by specialist virtual world users within government with bots scraping information from classified databases.

However, as impressive as this bot is – it still doesn’t replace the need for human investigation of virtual spaces (V-HUMINT).

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Wired for War

Use of Robots in warfare – interesting interview with P.W. Singer on NPR.

Link here.

Made me wonder about networking military robots with vitual worlds…..

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Report by the Euro Information and Security Agency

The European Network and Information Security Agency published a report in December 08 entitled,

Virtual Worlds, Real Money: Security and Privacy in Massively-Multiplayer Online Games and Social and Corporate Virtual Worlds.

Link here.

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Gaza, Information War and Second Life

There is little doubt that Israel is putting substantial effort into its information posture during the military action in Gaza, with dedicated efforts on Twitter and You Tube.  Therefore, although winning an information war is hard to measure (and in fact is in itself an important question) Israel does seem to be ahead in terms of getting its message out first and certainly in the USA having its message regurgitated by the 24-hr news media.

Virtual worlds have been left mostly to their own devices and the picture is somewhat different with no overt ‘official’ presence from the Israeli government or Hamas.  Both sides of the conflict are therefore, represented in Second Life by, Second Life Israel and the Palestinian Holocaust Memorial Museum (slurl) hosted by the IslamOnline site.  Second Life Israel (slurl) has been the focus of some limited protest within Second Life, while the Palestinian Holocaust Memorial Museum is much more of an information hub.

Palestinian Holocaust Memorial Museum – hosted by IslamOnline within Second Life

In this sense the Palestinian side of the Gaza war is better presented in Second Life and is a further demonstration of how useful 3-d spaces can be in presenting information – especially if avatars are present to answer questions in real-time.

Second Life Israel

In-World demonstrations have occurred and will likely continue around this subject.

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Twitter and War in Gaza

As the bloody events unfold in Gaza Israel began the information war early with foray’s into both YouTube and Twitter.  Its hard to know how to measure the effectiveness of this information campaign.

This chart  from Twist provides one possible answer showing the number of tweets referencing Israel, Hamas, Gaza or Palestine.

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