Voodoo SL Ad Targets Reveal some data is illegally collected

You may of seen in my blog that I had previously investigated voodoo for use of the media exploit.... and called the results of my personal investigation inconclusive due to finding some recursive elements in the stream, but being unable to determine whether it was the voodoo system or a stream that clubs had used in common....

if you havent yet you can read it here:
http://treminarisecondlife.blogspot.com/2012/04/voodoo-blackmails-greenzone-users.html

after having visited some locations during my investigation and doing much as I could without breaking any gambling laws myself I decided I would click one of the sploders and it asked me to visit a page on the voodoo website.... using a proxy at the time I decided it would be safe for me to visit... upon visiting I was presented with the voodoo terms of service... I read over them checking for anything you couldnt legally put in the set of terms(I remember back in the days of zfire there was plenty of this)(though the whole thing is illegal anyways as it is part of a gambling product) and of course wanting to preserve my rights wholly and fully.... I never agreed to the terms Voodoo presented closing out the terms page without hitting the agree button

Something had been bothering me since and I think I got my answer.... it was an alternate account I visited in not listed in the greenzone users group.... but what had bothered me about voodoo having a set of terms was did they collect the verification data before or after your agreement? well the other night I got my answer... the alternate account I had visited the location of the voodoo system with... and "disagreed" with the terms I had read indeed recieved something from voodoo when all my other accounts which I avoid voodoo with like the plague had gotten nothing but threats.... the alternate I was investigating on received a notecard titled "Get free L$ from voodoo and get traffic to your land"

Obviously this account is in the voodoo database despite never having agreed to the terms.... so obviously voodoo collects its data on anyone visiting the page after having clicked the sploder.... before they've even clicked the I agree button

thus then.... VooDoo certainly does violate the business and professions code... exactly as zfires redzone did.

Also this invalidates all current agreements anyone may have with the voodoo Terms of service and heres why.... they are collecting a list of users who have supposedly agreed with their terms of service.... but are also adding to that list people who havent so much as clicked the agree button... in other words their list of persons simply implies consent... without having received the consent, as they collect the data just on a visit... and not on the clicking of the agree button, they have users that never agreed mixed in with users that have agreed mixed in the database of those whom have agreed supposedly... simply put for Voodoos terms to have any legal binding they would need to record only those who agree, not everyone whom visits the terms page and closes it out without agreeing.

Anyhow Ive made the main point I was going after in this post.... but there are other smaller points I cant look away from as well.....

they offer SL users a place to dodge around gambling laws further on in the notecard which I will display here... obviously they dont know what is and isnt legal as they say its a legal place to gamble outside SL, when legality of gambling is determined both by the living location of the gambler... and the locations of the service it takes place on and the location of the money being gambled

anyhow for those of you who havent seen it the advertisement goes as follows:



Start of voodoo Notecard
----------------------------
YOU ARE RECEIVING THIS NOTECARD BECAUSE YOU ARE SUBSCRIBED TO VOODOO NEWS.
If you would like to stop receiving News from Voodoo, visit the landmark below, and click UNSUBSCRIBE.
[]Voodoo SL Mainstore :: Unsubscribe
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
VOODOO SL ON MARKETPLACE: https://marketplace.secondlife.com/stores/40780

At some point in time you have interacted with us in order to be subscribed to our news.
We wanted to take this opportunity to remind you of the ways Voodoo can help you in Second Life, and introduce some new things on the horizon in the near future.

Come and visit []Voodoo Vice City our cool new urban themed sim.

GETTING L$
--------------
VOODOO SPLODERS: Since it's inception almost 2 years ago, the Voodoo Sploder network has never stopped growing, with more and more locations appearing on our tracker and Sploder pots increasing, now has never been a better time to follow the Sploders in your spare time to earn some L$.

Tracker: http://tracker.vudu.sl/

VOODOO RESELLER: We encourage shop owners to resell our high selling products through vendors with a high comission to the shop owner on each sale.

        Contest Board = L$199 on each sale.
        Sploders = L$100 on each sale.
        Anti-Bot = L$200 on each sale.

GETTING NOTICED
---------------------
VOODOO SPLODERS: Our sploders have a huge following, and the players are constantly monitored to ensure we have real individuals playing and not bots and multiple alts. Our Voodoo Sploder range has expanded recently to fit the theme of your location, and now we can create custom designs on request which vary in cost depending on complexity of the model.
       
        Standard Voodoo Sploder - 4 Prims
        Voodoo Club Sploder - 55 Prims
        Voodoo Mannequin Sploder - (including texture changer) 4 Prims
        Voodoo V-Engine Sploder - 5 Prims
        Voodoo Rose Sploder - 34 Prims
        Voodoo Rubik Sploder - 1 Prim
        Voodoo Gaming Sploder - 2 Prims
       
BANNER ADVERTISING: Our website http://vudu.sl has extremely high traffic from all over the world, at busy times our server logs show up to 10 web requests to the website every second. Many of these visitors are already in Second Life, and they might be interested in your SL location!

Voodoo has a creative team who can make your custom web banner to a very high standard and your specification, each banner comes in 3 different sizes to be displayed in different positions in our website randomly, we charge L$1500 per week to show your advertisment to thousands and you can use your banner on other websites or blogs.
Contact the Support Team @ []Voodoo SL :: http://vudu.sl :: Cordia for more information.
       
COMING SOON
------------------
               
CONTEST BOARD V1.2 - The long awaited update to our anti-cheat Contest Board is on its way, we are cleaning up some final bugs before its release. Some massive improvements can be expected!

VOODOO SPLODER V2.0 - The new Sploder is a few weeks from release. It is a ground breaking update, with a complete script rewrite and running with up to 4 times more free script memory and many new much needed features such as groups/fees shown on the tracker, resume and re-add players after a restart, trivia bonuses, real-time web based configuration and control, and a lot more. The Sploder goes into 2012!

VOODOOSTORM VIEWER - There is no solid release date yet and will be several months, but Voodoo will be releasing a viewer based on Firestorm with a built in Voodoo Tracker and other integrations into our systems that will be useful to the Voodoo community, such as the new upcoming Voodoo social network and Casino. The viewer will be open source and follow Linden Labs TPV Terms of Service, and we will apply to be added to the official Third Party Viewer Directory.

VOODOO CASINO - As gambling and particularly Poker is illegal in Second Life, we have created a casino outside of Second Life servers in a legal environment where you can safely and fairly play card games with your friends in a virtual environment, and we've integrated it all into our viewer! It's great fun and really feels like a night out!

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http://slurl.com/secondlife/Cordia/124/184/22

We are also in Apache.
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Apache%20Falls/135/103/21







THANKS!

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end of voodoo notecard




Anyhow first and foremost this shows that voodoo in the service of secondlife is a service that centers around gambling, and that alone I feel is more than reason enough Linden Labs should be banning Monkey Wonder with no questions asked... surely they've received enough abuse reports from people such as myself and many others that this is indeed illegal... the only reason I can think they dont is that voodoo's sploder system... isn't recognized by legal authorities as it takes place in a different format from games that are typically associated with gambling.... thus the difference in format skims under the eyes of the law and its not a truely legal system though accepted across the grid and is thus then ignored by Linden Labs... anyhow, point is that it isnt legal, it just isnt recognized and identified easily enough for law enforcement to go at it(do keep in mind despite being illegal secondlife in its earlier days was a gambling safe haven where in addition to sploders, slots and card games with wagering was common place... I really think Secondlife needs another visit from the FBI as the crackdowns seem to of let illegal wagering continue, so long as it is in a form law enforcement cant readily identify)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/outriders/2007/07/second_life_online_gambling_cr.shtml
http://news.777.com/2007-07/linden-lab-bans-gambling-in-second-life
http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2007/07/27/second-life-cracks-down-on-virtual-gambling/

while the point of this post was made before getting into the content of the notecard itself there are a couple more things within that bother me... in particular the voodoostorm viewer and voodoo casino advertised.... I really hope this is some kind of joke, but the voodoo casino part drives home that voodoo is a business based primarily on gambling, like the sploders but it goes on to say gambling is illegal in secondlife... and then goes on to name a particular game to draw attention away from that really gambling is illegal in the states its run in, its illegal to do it with the money that has been put in the secondlife system... and its illegal in the locations that many of secondlifes users reside in, while it is currently unsaid how this voodoo viewer will facilitate the gambling(its most likely based on opensim) the methods I can think of are mostly illegal given the above first off is it a seperate grid with its own transaction system and own viewer? that would be legal only if the users were of legal residence to use it.... or does it log in to secondlife grid to get an L$ balance and transfer money based on who wins and loses, in which case it would be illegal as it would be transfering money on the grid for the act of gambling and still be using the secondlife grid to do so, just the money would be on grid the games off grid.... even though the game takes place off grid it would still be the use of linden dollars to do so.... regardless of the method the current policy Linden Labs approves or dissaproves of various viewers, and yes rejection does actually happen, before I got into blogging here I had read a open complaint from the creator of "PAR" viewer about their viewer being rejected because it was a plugin based system where the functionality was in plugins rather than the viewer itself, also aside from that this does not conform to the new policy as it provides a function to track a specific set of objects which effects the shared user experience by giving certain users an advantage in this game of chance which shouldnt be allowed anyway by using a certain viewer, regardless I wouldnt trust such a viewer created by someone so low on ethic to be handling my passwords, so there likely wont be investigation into how this viewer in developement works, even if not using it I dont even want it installed on my system..... someone that sends out blackmail and threats and slander to a discussion group and acts on them and excuses their criminal activity likely isnt past stealing passwords.

back in the old days of secondlife, back before Emerald when I first started hearing about SLurls I used to read all the updates about the viewer, one of the updates back in those days was that malformed SLurls on websites could make the viewer send user passwords to websites had been fixed.... while this bug has long since been fixed, it indicates to me a password saved in the viewer isnt stored in the most secure form.... its stored in a form that could easily be either set in another viewer(some viewers you can load seperately and they will remember the saved password from the other, and be able to login with it), I wouldnt want a piece of software like that residing on my system where it could retrieve such senstive data.