Militant Geek Custom Shirts

Diligent surfers of this site may have noticed that over the weekend we put a slick eBay widget in the sidebar. Sometimes the best geek t-shirts aren’t new but the vintage stuff off in someone’s closet. Whether antique corporate shwag, handmade tech homages, or kitschy promotions gone bad our ‘Today on eBay’ piece will highlight those T’s that we’ve linked to in our sidebar.

• The first is a great Star Wars inspired T-Shirt. ‘Come to the Dark Side. We have cookies.’ Less than 10 hours remaining.
• The next shirt is a vintage shirt from when Apple still had ‘Computers’ in its name. Auction ends in two days.
• The final eBay shirt for today is ‘Not on MySpace’. Given today’s news how Newscorp is trying to dump the property on a hapless Yahoo this shirt might be a great shirt for the Fox employee in your life. Bidding is open for two more days.

As announced on several different sites eBay is removing all sales that have to do with virtual reality worlds. How big is the digital loot business? Apparently several hundred million dollars, according to Daniel Terdiman’s CNet story. eBay is willing to shun all the fanboys selling imaginary leather braziers because “we want people to have good user experiences on the site.”

Oddly missing from eBay’s ban is the virtual world of Second Life. There are vast differences in the Second Life license agreement and those found in other online games (of which World of Warcraft is the largest). In Second Life the ‘players’ own their creations while all World of Warcraft time sinks remain the sole possession of Blizzard, the parent company. However, terms of use agreements were not cited as the reason eBay made its decision; protecting itself from having to deal with online fraud was. Nothing in or out of Second Life would protect users more than its banned virtual game world counterparts.

Kotaku posits that eBay may not believe Second Life to be a game. That statement, however, does not address how Second Life auctions ‘protect users’.

Perhaps its more about ‘protecting investments’ than ‘protecting users’. As Clickable Culture’s Tony Walsh points out it could very well be because eBay has a financial stake in Second Life’s success. From Tony:

…two eBay board members are also indirect investors in Linden Lab, the virtual world’s maker and maintainer. Benchmark Capital lead $8M in financing of Linden Lab in 2004, with the participation of Omidyar Network and others. eBay board member Robert Kagle is a member of Benchmark Capital. Pierre Omidyar is eBay’s founder, a current eBay board member, and leads Omidyar Network.

Ah, Martin Luther King Jr. Day. The struggle for civil rights and the ultimate triumphant of peaceful protest over bigotry is something we can all drink to, geek or not. Given that the assembled team or monkeys and I are still working through our post-Martin malaise here’s the important stuff from last week that just didn’t quite warrant its own post.

• A little company out of California announced a new cellphone, or something.
• Actually, futher examining the iPhone exposes Apple’s business model for what it is: a roach motel where: “customers check in, but they can’t check out”. From Boing Boing, Illustration by Christophe Vorlet
• But if your business model is based on customer lock in how do you keep the word from spreading? Why, bullying bloggers, of course. As Geek & Poke deliciously declare “Someday you’ll have to decide: Do you want freedom of the press or this really cool phone?”
• Just to remind people that things non-Apple related still do happen we thought we’d let you know that Napster bought AOL music. We also thought we’d let you know that an AOL music service with an awesome factor of 0 times anything is still zero.
• The news about Vista just keeps getting better:
  

  if your computer detects erroneous data in its registers, or voltage fluctuations (both of which are typical of PCs whose parts have been manufactured by dozens of companies), it will restart major subsystems, hanging up while it flushes all your data — just in case those errors were part of a hack-attack on the system.

  Meanwhile John Carmack, quasi-famous game developer (Quake, Doom), rocketeer, and quote machine says that Vista leaves him cold:

  Nothing is going to help a new game by going to a new operating system. There were some clear wins going from Windows 95 to Windows XP for games, but there really aren’t any for Vista… They’re really grasping at straws for reasons to upgrade the operating system. I suspect I could run XP for a great many more years without having a problem with it.

• The Pirate Bay, a legion of swiss hackers who thumb their nose at copyright and have become a political party, are looking to buy an Island. They’re raising money for Sealand, a decrypt platform and pseudo sovereign nation six miles off the coast of the U.K. The owners are asking nearly $1 billion for a WWII concrete slab that was largely damaged last June in a fire. They’ve raised $15,000 so far and have started negotiations. Pr0n fiends the world over begin giggling uncontrollably.
• eBay buys StubHub, a ticket reselling site, for $310 million. eBay already had a ticket marketplace but I guess they have aspirations of Yahoo like redundancies.
• Sprint is laying off 5,000 people. Even over a phone the sound of sudden anxiety was as clear as a pin drop.
• MyBlogLog, a five person distributed operation, is sold to Yahoo for $10 million. The founders promise to spend their new windfall on a classier set of pajamas to wear to work.
• Second Life’s client software goes open source. Which might be cool if it was anything other than Second Life. As Valleywag says ‘Unless you’re a sexual deviant, its as boring as hell’.

Sure, there are a lot of silly puns that run through my head when I heard that the Ebay/PayPal offices in San Jose were bombed. However, there’s just something about actual physical violence that just isn’t funny now-days. Maybe the Militant Geek is getting soft in his old(er) age. Oh well. Glad to hear that there weren’t any geeks out in online auction land that got hurt.