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Second Life & WoW Terrorist Training Camps?
Tech.Luver writes "theinquirer reports that 'Aussie Security experts claim that Second Life and online games such as World of Warcraft are being used to train terrorists.
Apparently there are three jihadi terrorists registered and two elite jihadist terrorist groups in Second Life and they use the site for recruiting and training. This is on top of the Second Life Liberation Army.""
You have to wonder about how someone can live with themselves for typing up this garbage, they go to collage do all sorts of stuff... and then this? People are blowing up corporate crap in SL because they don't WANT you there. As for using weapons in WoW to train for Rl? Uh where's my exploding sheep? :P
Who has been *called* a Second Life terrorist to debunk this rumor.
The SLLA isn't a real "terrorist" organization. It's a bunch of unfunny people who think that exploding picture replicators near buildings in SL comprises some sort of Jacobin revolution. I'm serious. Look at their white paper.
As for real terrorists: frankly, I hope they're practicing in Second Life. Because with all the other, harder-to-track ways they could be communicating information--IRC channels, encrypted and hidden forums, custom IM software, etc--they choose to use a public program in which anyone can access anywhere by default and the company religiously logs any and all chats that pass through their network and make it a point to discipline people on the basis of chatlogs.
So we should be so lucky to have terrorists so stupid that they'd communicate using SL--a clunky graphically terrible product that can't even properly form eyebrows, much less a complex trigger mechanism--as opposed to, say, sending a real video over some other quicker undetectable means.
So that's why the bombs in London and the Glasgow airport attack the other week failed miserably.
They thought their spell of detonation and shield of fire protection worked outside the game too.
When we had the stories of criminalising people for fictional virtual pr0n in online environments, one of the responses to show how ludicrous this is was to suggest we start criminalising WoW players for virtual murder...
It's sad that everytime someone says "But you can't stop X, otherwise we might as well crack down on Y too, which would be silly", it's not long before Y becomes the Internet taboo which people also want to crack down upon...
Please tell me this story is just a parody?
But WoW would be useless for that, as compared to a game of "Capture the Flag" played out in the sticks, or even in the cities. It teaches you nothing about real-world communications problems, nothing about the real fear and uncertainty of being in the world, waiting for something to happen, nothing about tactics against humans.
WoW tactics boil down to tactics vs mobs, and tactics vs mobs. In the first you're fighting a bunch of simplistic AI, and in the second you're fighting a bunch of people who know they're not going to lose anything if they die, so they just do the lemming over and over until one side wins...It's a joke.
I can think of a thousand "games" that you could play in the real world that would actually get you useful skills, and useful training. Playing WoW, on the other hand, gives you the wrong kind of reflexes, zero physical conditioning, and no actual experience with moving around in the world.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Why use something as far removed from real life as WOW?
;-)
Try
-Counterstrike
-any multiplayer WW2 shooter like Day Of Defeat, Call Of Duty...
-America's Army (get your training sponsored by your enemy
Much better choices for terrorist training (and I'd still consider them inadequate unless you throw in some real life practice with guns)
C - the footgun of programming languages