Archive for June, 2007
SLelections: last campaigning day
June 30, 2007 9:48 am
As July 1st is awefully close now, the candidates make their final statements. Candidate Flintoff hands out copies of ‘Governance Monthly’ that just rolled down the presses and Candidate Volare got his flight degree so he could reach more Residents with his campaign message. Or was he using that airplane for other reasons, as Candidate Kaminski suggests?!
As the Concerned Residents forgot to write down a minimum age for running for SL Governor, Smiley Barry is our last-minute candidate representing the Teen Grid: ‘Second Life is so buggy lately, lagy, full of abuse issues, spam, and it seems the only ‘right’ grid is the Teen Grid… Teen Grid to the rescue! Vote Teen!’ I wonder if they come to our rescue, may we keep our Mature playgrounds? And what is Candidate Barry’s take on the Gorean sims, for example?
29.06.2007
PingPing Zhaoying’s account is canceled by the Linden Gods.
‘Today, 9 days later, and without any sign of LL my account was shut down, no more logging in possible, the rest of my inventory is gone, the work of one year virtual living gone. Thank you Linden!‘
30.06.2007
PingPing Zhaoying received the following mail from LL. Up to now this is their only response after 10 days, intercontinental phone calls, email and in-world IM.
Guy,
I have issued a refund of the charges that were fraudulently placed on your account. We’ll have the account returned to you, asap. We are responding to attacks like this as quickly as possible. Sorry for the trouble.
JP
03.07.2007
PingPing Zhaoying’s account is still not reactivated. Strange post about ‘password security and phishing’ on the official Second Life blog. I’m getting paranoid and really start to think LL is hiding ’security issues’ from it’s residents.
10.07.2007
Still no sign of PingPing Zhaoying on the grid. Of the two JIRA issues concerning the insecure passwords, one is closed because of being a duplicate, the other one disappears/is not accesible to normal residents anymore.
12.07.2007
PingPing Zhaoying gets back his 600 euros which they never charged him in the first place from Linden Labs. Champagne to all! Yet the account PingPing Zhaoying is still blocked.
Balloon Doggy Love
June 28, 2007 5:04 pm 
I instantly fell in love with this snapshot. Why? I think it’s the viewing angle. Hell, this is Second Life, we don’t need to crawl on a crane or ly down on our stomachs to get an interesting point of view. Yet we all tend to go with the ‘conservative First Life’ way of looking at things and taking our snapshots. Ok, rule of thirds works great in any Life, but we have that more possiblities we don’t use! Strange, isn’t it? And maybe it’s the ‘negative space’ plenty available. Or the limited color palet. *wants to see a ‘retake’ without the pink particles, if possible, but then I’m just nagging again* And also the feeling of ‘innocence’ that comes with the idea of balloon doggies.
Anyway, Aenea, I hope you had a wonderful rezzday, congratulations on that one, and thank you for putting this on Flickr under CC so I could actually show it here.
*Aenea, Vint Falken’s happy rezzday kiss would like to animate you. Is this OK?*
Export Bling to First Life
12:54 pm
Geeh. *start irony* Linden Labs allows people to sell First Life merchandise with the Second Life logo upon now? Philip, Jeska and Catherine Linden fully support this project, yet it was nowhere mentioned by them? I want one! I want one! *stops irony*
Geeh. Actually. It’s legit. *scratches ears*
And the ******* ******** even trademarked ‘Wear it in First Life’. LMAO.
More ‘geeh, this is strange’ about FirstBling.com at the SLinsider.
On the 7th of June 2007 I received an e-mail from SLexchange that my Coke outfit was in violation of Coca-Cola’s trademark and the listing was taken down from their website. I was a surprised, as I thought everybody must have know that with their Virtual Thirst campaign, Coke was actually calling out to the Second Life residents to create ‘Coke content’. I was to supply proof we could actually do so: ‘If you have permission to use the Coca-Cola trademark, please provide us with proof and we will reactivate your listings.’
I don’t know what had gotten into me at that time, but rather than posting an aggitated rant here about calling out to create Coke oriented content only to force it being taken down afterwards, I contacted C.C. Chapman - one of the person I met at the Virtual Thirst party - to ask if he could sort things out. He was as surprised by the news as I was - and probably worried too - and said he would try and sort things out.
June 22, SLexchange sends out the following: ‘ We have spoken to Coca-Cola and they have released their trademark to SL Merchants. Therefore, any of your items that were disabled on June 7, 2007 have been retrieved….’*
Now I was wondering, wouldn’t it be nice if Linden Labs creates a list on their website of all the real world companies - assuming that other companies are willing to do this too - that released their trademark as far as it comes to Second Life.
The benefits I see for this:
- Residents can create products based on that trademark without having to fear to get their pants layer sued off.
- The real world companies don’t need to worry about maintaining islands, making sure those are populated, etc. I am sure the residents that created content based on a trademark will take care of the promoting themselves. Or they could just create a shop that gathers all resident created content involving their brand, …
- They can watch which products residents create for that trademark. Maybe one of us really comes up with something ‘neat’.
Another possible approach if they want to control more what is created: Write out a contest for product creation for a certain trademark. The winner will then be allowed to sell virtual goods for that trademark in Second Life.
And I’m sure there are tons of other possibilities left.
* Strangely enough, not a word about the bottle of Evian that accompagnies the outfit. So actually, they should delist it again. *grins* Also the outfit has never been delisted from SLBoutique. Maybe the Electronic Sheep Company doesn’t really care about trademark violations**.
** Jade Lily in the comments: ‘We never received any DMCA complaint from Coca-Cola. :) Interesting news about the trademark release! I’m glad everything worked out.’
In the virtual world of Second Life objects can be built with the aid of primitives (cubes, cylinders etc). Objects can also be imported from CAD programmes (computer aided design) such as Autodesk Maya and 3DStudio using an ‘offline builder’. This tool, however, was unable to convert complex or existing models.
The TU Delft Second Life working group has now written an import function for doing this from Maya. So now all technically drawn objects such as buildings or cars can be converted in one go into Second Life.
TU Delft is going to deploy this import routine to let residents of Second Life see and experience the numerous eye-catching prototypes of TU Delft researchers and students. TU Delft will also make the script available to the Second Life community so that everyone can benefit from the import routine and pursue its further development anywhere in the world.
Import routines are also being developed for such packages as 3D-Max and AutoCAD. In addition, work is ongoing to facilitate the importation of textures. The behaviour of objects cannot be imported. So this remains to be programmed in Second Life.
TU Delft recently bought two islands in Second Life, which are scheduled for opening in September 2007. One the island will host this floating city.
Metaverse Constitution
June 27, 2007 11:39 pmUpdate III: PingPing gone. :(
Update IV: PingPing back still gone. :)
Imagine this happening to you:
You open your mailbox and see a mail from Linden Labs that you have just changed your Second Life password. Uh?! What? I did not do that?!!! *incoming mail sound* Another mail from Linden Labs telling you you just bought Linden Dollars on Exchange. *incoming mail sound* *incoming mail sound* *incoming mail sound* *incoming mail sound*: all mails telling you you bought Linden Dollars for 100USD. Eight such emails, for a total of 800 USD.
Of course, you go to the SecondLife.com as fast as you can, change your password again, you block your credit card and check your account and transfer history. Only to see that the Linden Dollars that not-you just purchased are already transfered to two other accounts: Ababdelghani Allen (130 000L$) and Jack Maslow (80 000 L$).
What do you do next? You e-mail help, you try to reach Linden Labs on phone, you IM Lindens at random? You send an IM and friendship request to the two avatars that now have your 800USD? You also Abuse Report those two avatars. After a week, no email reply. Of course not, Linden Labs does not reply to emails from non-premium members. Apparently not even when you just bought for 800USD Linden Dollars. Linden Labs on phone? A 15 minutes wait, a computer voice and no reply. Nobody in the office there during office hours? At all?! And Zee Linden? He tells you they have ’security issues’, you are in ‘the a queue’ and somebody will call you. That same somebody that after a week time still didn’t contact you. Ababdelghani Allen and Jack Maslow have repeatedly denied friendship request but never answered any IM. There accounts are still active as we speak.
This is what happened to Pingping Zhaoying.
Now you say: this will never happen to me! I have numbers, capital letters and the name of the teacher I had a crush on 15 years ago in my password. It’s safe. Apparently, it’s not!
Going to what Linden Labs calls a ’secure, verificated page’, namely https://secure-web4.secondlife.com/ss/verify.php?r=xxx where in xxx is an amount of numbers - which I see no logic behind although obviously some other people do see that logic - you get a page with questions. Linden Labs only requires you to answer one of the following 4 questions to change your password: ‘What street did you grow up in?’ ‘Name three friends with the following last names.’ ‘Last billed amount.’ or ‘SL home location.’ The last one is rather easy to solve if someone has his ‘home’ in his profile picks. And also the ‘Friends question’ is easy when you browse an avatar’s group’s member lists a bit. After answering one of these questions correct you someone can just change your password to whatever you they want. Linden Labs does not even email you a random generated one you can change later. Which would be more safe. No, they let you them pick one!*
And they are in. With your account. And if your credit card is linked to your avatar, they now only need to right click someone and pick pay, and voila, you they buy Linden Dollars with your credit card. Which they can distribtute to other avatars at will.
A short summary:
Pingping Zhaoying lost 800USD not because someone guessed his password correct, but because Linden Labs allowed someone to change his account’s password. Yet, Linden Lab does not even respond besides one short IM saying ‘we have security issues’. Geeh. I think Pingping already figured that out himself, including that they have support issues too.
- Why - after a week - did LL not contact Pingping Zhaoying back yet?
- Why - after a week - did LL not suspend Ababdelghani Allen and Jack Maslow’s accounts yet?
- Why do they have such a crappy password security system in the first place?
Remember, this ‘account theft’ happened on secondlife.com, as you can not change your password in-world. So Linden Lab can not claim ‘what happens in-world between residents is not our business’ on this one!
Update: Ababdelghani Allen just declined my friend request. Which means he can still access his account.
UpdateII: Screenshots of the ‘provide credentials’ procedure by Nock Forager:
*This is my idea of how they got to change Pingping Zhaoying’s password. If you know off a more easy way to do so, please leave a ‘how to’ or your contact information in the comments. Apparently Linden Labs does not respond to such things, so we can set up a nice scam together. ;)
