Recent reports (for example, CNN 8/23/07, "Anarchy Online", and in September 2007 of New Scientist) raise the question of disruptive events in that virtual world by "griefers" and raise the question of whether Second Life is "doing enough to protect its members."

Another oft-cited example was the CNet interview, back in December 2006, with Anshe Chung (a strong female virtual world figure that is a lightning rod for some people's negative energy). I view that disruption as resulting from a lack of attention to basic security mechanisms (by CNet), analogous to an enterprise launching a public Web site from their corporate network without using a firewall. I have spent a bunch of time in SL over the past year and have never once run into a "griefer".

The SL system allows very quick-and-easy controls (takes a couple of seconds to check off an item in a dialog), which provide a range of security:

* you can restrict access to a location to only specific individuals, or to individuals who are members of a group (this is what we will be doing with the Gartner simulcast sessions in SL for Web Innovation Summit for more information on these SL simulcast sessions, click here)
* you can ban any individual from a parcel (if present, they are immediately ejected)
* you can disallow people from instantiating any kind of object on the parcel
* you can disallow people from flying over the property, or setting landmarks

These mechanisms seem pretty robust to me. I have not heard of anyone circumventing them, although, just as with network firewalls, there might be some little-publicized holes. However, if all else fails, one can always reboot the SIM.

Given the ability to button-down the security in an SL parcel, there remains a judgment call to be made by administrators regarding the degree of open-ness. This situation is analogous to allowing comments in a blog. Do you allow any person to add a comment and publish it immediately (and, if offensive, delete the comment after the fact)? Or do you add some prior restraint -- a degree of control, such as moderated comments, or only allowing comments by registered users? And if you have open comments, do you have automated filters and gateways such as Captchas? Likewise in SL, you can decide that the only people who will visit your parcel are those known to you, and you can control their behavior once they are on your land.

Some businesses in SL have to be open to anyone -- such as a store trying to sell goods to the public. Other locations do not have to be open. This is a decision driven by business objectives and not by limitations in the SL security model.

Rather than the specter of a lawless frontier, it seems to me that SL is heading very much away from the Wild West into a more ordered place. More and more landowners are choosing to implement controls such that it has become difficult for an unaffiliated person to fly through a SIM (you keep running into invisible walls at the boundary of locked-down parcels). There are more islands and other communities with their own covenants and administrators. Further, Linden Labs is in the process of adding a grid-wide third-party identity verification system, which some residents think is a long overdue improvement, and others think that it means the death of a free-wheeling culture.

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