Financial Times - 3d Worlds need better security
May 1, 2008 by Roderick Jones
Good piece in the FT by David Wortley on business use of 3-D worlds. He specifically mentions the need for enhanced security as a prerequisite for wider adoption of virtual environments by business,
“For commercial operations to settle with confidence into virtual worlds, far more work is going to be needed on security. It is virtually impossible to find out the real identity of people behind the avatars - meaning they have no responsibility for what they do.
Web visitors to company sites are similarly anonymous, but they do not have the same opportunity to abuse staff, band together to organise protest raids, or generally upset other visitors.
Some form of digital signature will be needed to ensure avatars are held to account for their actions, just as they would be in the real world.
In many ways, the growth of virtual worlds is like the frontier towns of the Wild West, where new social forms were worked out messily and in public. In the same way, new codes of behaviour will eventually be adopted.”
