Second Life is the name of a new online game that offers players the ability to lead a second life online, controlling every element of their character's destiny in a created online world. It is like Everquest, Warcraft and the other online role playing games, except that in Second Life you play a character based in a world more like reality and less like fantasy.

You can become somebody else as you see fit, and the best part is that at the end of the day your actions and choices stay with your Second Life character, not you. Without question, one of the most attractive features the internet offers is anonymity. Chat programs, online games and blogs are just a few places people can go and be heard but not necessarily seen.

Anonymity allows for people to open up in new ways by providing a venue for free speech without persecution or humiliation. Anonymity, as it turns out, is also profitable.

Just try typing "anonymity" into any search engine, and dozens of services pop up offering you ways to remain anonymous on the internet. One web site, ultimate-anonymity.com, offers everything you need to be a complete stealth ninja on the net.

The hook these web sites use is that internet anonymity is a safer way to surf. They may be right. Online invisibility can help to prevent spam and identity theft. Sounds good, but like everything else, it depends on the way this anonymity is used. After all, the spammers, thieves, and con artists rely on the anonymous factor to protect them.

I can't begin to count the number of e-mails concerning stocks, drugs and pornography, all with e-mail address that read something like ffgjky@hheno.com or ft3i4n@fgro2m.com. Crime through spam is only getting worse, and it's not going away anytime soon.

An August 2005 article from Wired magazine, "Nigerian Net Grifters Doing Fine," reports about whole Nigerian communities based around internet scams and cons, where these entrepreneurial thieves of the internet rely on anonymity as their shroud of protection to scheme and steal. These guys are professional crooks, and they will take as much money as they can get.

At some point it might seem as if internet anonymity is a necessary tool to stay hidden from the other anonymous people who want to rip you off or crash your computer. That's circular logic though, isn't it? Anonymity to fight anonymity?

You don't have too look far to see the undulations from waves of internet anonymity popping up here and there in the news. A February 2004 New York Times article reports a "glitch" that the company Amazon.com had run into concerning some of the books for sale online.

Authors, under anonymous names, posted brilliant reviews about their own books for sale on amazon. If that wasn't enough, some authors were posting critical attacks on books by rival authors.

As it turns out, Amazon's reader review section is very popular and used by many customers to look for potential books to buy. Amazon fixed the glitch by revealing the identities of anonymous reviewers.

In a July issue of Time magazine, writer Lev Grossman explains another internet anonymity Snafu in his article "The Price of Anonymity." It seems an anonymous user under the handle Rahodeb posted comments about the company Whole Foods on Yahoo's finance boards. Rahodeb praised Whole Foods CEO John Mackey and seemed to despise Whole Foods competitors, Wild Oats.

In February, Whole Foods made an offer to buy Wild Oats for $565 million, catching the attention of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).

The FTC is investigating the merger and may stop it under antitrust laws. One fact that has come to light is that Rahodeb is actually CEO Mackey himself, launching an investigation into whether Mackey as Rahodeb said too much about Whole Foods.

Another case of anonymity poisoning shows up in Wikipedia's recent troubles with some of their contributors lacking the credentials they claimed. Big surprise.

A lot of people like to use the common sense approach, which is that each person should approach every situation with a critical eye and look for warning signs, but the internet is a new world and our old common sense rules may not be enough.

The lines have been drawn in the sand. On one side are those who believe that anonymity is a threat and that people should fess up to who and what they are and should not hide behind an alias. In other words you should stand proud and visible next to your actions.

On the other side are those who believe that preserving anonymity is of the utmost important. Lev Grossman points to the city Xiamen in China where the government is attempting to eliminate anonymous web posting after a recent protest was organized on the net.

The arguments for anonymity are many. In Amazon's case some say that anonymous reviews encourage discussion among readers that might not other wise take place.

Total anonymity seems to be a majority versus minority issue. In other words should we allow a minority of theft and scams since the majority appreciates anonymity? Is it actually appropriate to deem scams and cons as the minority of internet abuse when 80 percent of all e-mail is spam?

Are we willing to allow the internet to become laden with masked criminals from all over the globe simply so we can keep our Second Life a secret?

For now, internet anonymity is a compromise; which way we will compromise is yet to be decided. Should we continue , allowing widespread abuses of the protection anonymity provides as a trade off for the benefits, or should we stop gap all this alias stuff.

So, is anonymity a cloak for troublemakers or is it protection for activist? We need to think about accountability and responsibility. Some suggest psuedo-anonymity as a solution. Psuedo-anonymity involves a third party that holds all the information of its users who are allowed to take on aliases. The users do not know each other but the third party does.

Ebay offers psuedo-anonymity, a lot of places do, mostly companies that require user subscription, but the internet as a whole does not. Not yet anyway.