What's Wrong With the Emerald Viewer

Of course, we're not supposed to EVER criticize the Emerald viewer or any of the other groovy opensourced hacked viewers of Second Life -- without become subjected to violent harassment inworld, destruction of property (chicken killing, sim crashing) and streams of invective and wishes to commit suicide on one's blog comments, but hey, I won't let that stop me : )

I won't deal with the code of these hacked stone-soup chef d'oeuvres, but instead look briefly at some of the organizing principles which, by their very nature, are destructive and/or violative of privacy and perhaps more, like copyright and intellectual property rights.

Go here, to see the list of features and browse all the other "cool viewers" which have the same built-in nihilistic and destructive features which privilege everything about the hacked viewer user's security, and destroy everything about the security of the *viewed world and other users*.

Some features in the list:

o Shows name, age, payment info, current activity -- while this is in principle also viewable on each individual profile, making it easily scannable, by making is mass-scrapable, and also by not specifying what "current activity" means (online? offline? moving? AFK?) it multiplies the capacity for exploitation of the information including in hostile ways.

o Ability to open and display the owner and location of objects that IM you -- a two-edged sword, as in one sense, you can in principle get this same information from anything spamming you in world (such as griefers spam me from sandboxes to disrupt my chat view) by going offline and letting the messages connect in your offline email attached to IMS, again, to have it inworld in a multiplyable capacity means that people not necessarily spamming, but just sending an object perhaps updating something you bought or whatever, could also face you invading their sim as if they had you on map privileges

o Clothing layer protection (prevents sending of individual clothing textures to other clients, ensuring they can't copy the clothing) -- yeah, and...not preventing you, the user of this viewer, from doing this to other people by the same token? or?

o Fly can be set to always enabled, even with Admin menu closed  -- well, does this override the no-fly settings someone else has put on their parcel? These are the sort of things it is perfectly fine to ask about and question strenuously.

o Can turn your avatar 'visually phantom'  -- so, um, 15,000 users *cough* all need to uh, make high-heel shoes. See, this capacity is largely used for griefing and surveillance, and not design. Building it into a viewer is a destructive statement, enabling crime, not creation.

o Chatbar as a command line for rezzing platforms, teleporting to coordinates or sims, or teleporting to particular heights.  Again, we'll have to hear endlessl about how this is a builders' boon, furry sandbox fun booster, blah blah. But also enables great ease of invasion of privacy of other people's skyboxes by circumventing their teleporters, which may be locked or may be staged -- it makes skybox hopping easier and privacy violation easier, and I think that's ok to question.

o Free uploading of "temporary" textures (sim-local and disappear on relog)  sooooooo is this other people's textures that you don't want other people to be able to so freely grab when they're on *you*? Again, I refuse to accept any slew of hatred and withering comments of tekkie superiority on things like this that might explain their innocuous meaning ("you have to copy it to render it") or the putative non-exploitative properties ("we need to 'learn how things work'") because *we all need to ask lots of questions of these viewers, and no question is inappropriate given their impact on US AND OUR PROPERTY*.

o Notification when a friendship ends -- Facebook goes out of its way NOT to provide or enable or allow such a feature because not only does it violate privacy and free choice, it sets people up to be harassed if they resist aggressive friending for any reason. This is an invasion of privacy.

o Detection of cooperating alternative viewers  -- well, is this ok? Again, it needs to be *debated* and not achieved by coercive engineering fiat. Should everyone's viewer type always be available to be known? On the one hand, this is a boon to stop griefing and block known griefing viewers -- a good thing. On the other hand, it could be used to detect, say, RL localization viewers or language viewers and discriminate against people.

o Profiles show agent key -- Again, no end of snark and withering scorn to hear about this, and claims that this is "already" in public dbases blah blah (because w-hat scraped it and put it there, of course). yes, certain things in world already grab this. But...again, it's a privacy issue, and more to the point, it's about making data available to be scraped and manipulated in mass quantities that become a problem. It needs to be debated, and not achieved by aggressive engineering fiat.

o More minimap dot colors, blue for lindens, grey for muted, and purple for friended lindens -- this strikes me as stupid and of course gives us a heads up of the fanboyz status of these purple-Linden friends but I wonder about anything that imposes on the Lindens identifiers that they themselves didn't chose. Just a thought.

And so on. There are other issues, in this viewer and the many others listed with their many aggressive, scrapey, violative features that any individual hacker-user finds he wishes to maximalize with hedonic and even malicious glee, but which, in a community, with the capacity for scraping and exploiting, become a problem.

I think the essential spirit of "aggressive engineering by fiat to maximum hacker advantage" is obvious in this and other viewers' lists of features, and I question that, as well I should.

I reject the idea that these features cannot be debated and even stopped, and that this "but just because you can, you can" notion should triumph.

Who said YOU get to dictate your optimal set of features on the whole world, to their detriment and your advantage?

A virtual world community depends on a lot of shared assumptions and markers and signals about things being what they seem or having limits. So, for example, if you are in a world where you feel safe de-friending somebody you don't want to hear from anymore, because they won't get a notification of it, if your world is suddenly disrupted by a new viewer that can stream that information "just because it can" to that person, well are social consequences and it's ok to debate the feature and ask that it be removed or mitigated. Of course, hackers don't recognize restraint and eventually it may have to be applied to them forcibly.

Comments

[Hemms Osterham]

You seem to have many of these features wrong Prokofy, as an emerald user let me clarify for you:

Radar "activity" simply displays whether they're emitting sound, rezzing objects, emitting particles, moving, or talking on voice. It isn't possible for the radar to display offline avatars.

The clicking on an object to get the location only works on OBJECTS sending you IMs, not people. If you hand someone an object, there is no way for them to map you with that information.

Clothing layer protection simply protects your textures, Emerald doesn't allow you to steal other people's textures in any way. Anyone using clothing protection is safe from ANY viewer trying to steal their textures.

Fly always enabled is already possible by enabling "View admin options" in the advanced menu, it just makes it easier for newbies to find if it's in the Emerald menu.

Visually phantom doesn't hide your avatar in any way, it simply makes it "phantom" the same way a prim is phantom. It just means you can't be pushed or orbitted.

Temporary textures doesn't let you steal anything, it allows you to UPLOAD A TEXTURE from your HARD DRIVE, for free temporarily. It doesn't have anything to do with other people's textures, it just lets you try out a sculptmap, or a clothing texture in world before you pay 10L$ to upload it. You already have to have a copy of the texture on your hard drive to use this.

(This next paragraph is personal opinion, not fact like those above.)
The notification for when a person removes you from their friend's list isn't really an invasion of privacy, it's simply letting you know that someone who was on your list has deleted you. You'd already notice this because they're not on your list anymore.

Detection of cooperating alternative viewers simply means that anyone with clothing protection can be detected because in order for clothing protection to work, it hides the individual clothing textures with a grey texture, by comparing the key of this grey texture to a list, you can identify which viewer someone is using. Clothing protection is set up in this way intentionally to allow for tagging viewers. This doesn't allow you to collect any additional information about a person, it simply displays the viewer name next to their tag.

[twitter.com/edwardvirtually]

Please explain about this "turn[ing] your avatar 'visually phantom'". That is not supposed to be possible, and thus suggest a failure in the protocol Linden Labs needs to fix. It should be impossible for clients to do illegal operations.

[Hemms Osterham]

The Emerald team is doing an amazing job, they've fixed bugs and added features that people have been asking for on the JIRA for years now, the fact that 15 people can make a viewer so good that a third of the grid flocks to it in under a month is just amazing.

They've improved my SecondLife considerably, and they're not even getting paid, they do this for the community and I think LL should start paying attention and offering contracts to get work done to these programmers, because they get things done at an awesome rate.

Edward: Visually phantom means phantom like a prim, it DOES NOT make you invisible as Prokofy suggested. It simply prevents you from being pushed.

[Prokofy Neva]

The Emerald team isn't doing an amazing job, that's propagandistic bullshit.

I don't have "many things wrong". I have many questions about destructive fucktards who think they win an argument by killing chickens and harassing me, that's what.

Apparently the insolent, impudent hackerish spirit of your lovely product is opaque to you, and you don't sense what it wrong with an arrogant claim to protect the user's own clothing, without addressing the problem of theft of the other. The claim is more sophisticated than your dumb, literal geeky take on my comment. The claim isn't that the ability to mask your own textures gives you the ability to steal others; the claim is that making viewers that protect you and don't show the same concern for others is the ultimate in fuck-you hedonism.

Preventing you from being pushed isn't something that I think is legitimate, as that should be achieved in the normal way by turning off push on the land menu, and, if you then use that feature to shoot me and then prevent being shot yourself, you've obtained an exploit. Again, the snotty little entitlement hacker mentality shines through abundantly with something like this.

I'm not sure that the upload for free concept isn't a workaround to the $10 sink that ultimately will not be temporary but a permanent hack around the $10 sinkn. Again, it's the constant sense of entitlement hackery and defiance of all the community checks and balances built into the original viewer that have to be questioned, not whether you "can" do this or that or whether it doesn't in theory have damages.

Of course notifying that someone has defriended you is an invasion of privacy, and a creation of a vulnerability to harassment, and that's why a more grownup platform provider like Facebook, no angel he, when it comes to privacy, even has to respect it.

Again, gathering information about viewer use in any way, shape or fashion opens up problems of privacy and exploitation.

Um, I got it that objects, not people are ostensibly identified, but...since the capacity in IMs offline is "object owned by ABC is sending you XYZ" I have to QUESTION this.

Ultimately, the more Emerald Viewer owners answer questions in this know-it-all, "more science, we bring good things to life" sort of agitprop manner, the more questions they raise about their character and motives.

Again, the literalism and stupidity of these geeks is on parade here, as they can't understand the difference between *asking a question to elucidate the truth about something* and *making a false claim about it*. Furthermore, they can't take responsibility for explaining things to the inquiring public without blasting anyone questioning their hubris as a technical incompetent.

It's not true that you will notice someone if they are no longer on your list, as with hundreds -- thousands -- of cards you wouldn't. It's making a statement to have this info delivered.

Again, the Emerald Viewer comes from a place that screams: "I get to do what I want and fuck you". I don't think it's an organizing principle for the world, and I don't think questioning each and every feature growning out of that sense of entitlement is illegitimate; in fact, I think much more of it is sorely needed.

[Hemms Osterham]

I would like to note that I am not an Emerald developer, I don't own this client, all I do is use it, I had never heard of any of the developers until a friend showed me Emerald.

How do you suppose Emerald could protect OTHER people against texture theft? They can't force protection on people who don't want it. By using Emerald YOUR textures are protected, ANYONE can use Emerald and have that same benefit. How are the Emerald devs supposed to protect people who aren't using the software? They're offering protection to those who want it, and you're trying to make something negative out of that, it's just wrong on your part.

Phantom does more than protect you against llPushObject, it also stops orbiters and physical prim weapons. It's a purely DEFENSIVE addition, if you're being griefed by push weapons, you shouldn't be shooting back, you should be banning and reporting the person, so them being phantom wouldn't somehow make them able to grief any better. What it DOES allow for, is typical residents to quickly toggle it on while building in a sandbox so they're not disturbed.

The temporary uploads are just that: Temporary.
They're uploaded in the same way as an avatar's baked texture layers, they disappear in a day or so. Some viewers have the ability to upload for free, but that is against the TOS and Emerald does not have that as a feature. In fact, there's a post on the Emerald forums where they asked a linden about this feature, and were told that as long as they were just temporary uploads, it wasn't a problem.

Anyone who doesn't want people to identify which viewer they're using can simply turn it off. Emerald even offers "stealth mode" which turns off all the features that other residents could use to identify the viewer I'm using.

I'm not some "geek" in fact I can't even script, much less code in whatever language Emerald is written in. I've just asked questions and had the inner workings of these features explained to me by people who do. I'm just a typical user, who's done nothing to you, so I don't understand why you're attacking me like this, all I wanted to do was share the facts here, since you didn't seem to understand all the features.

[Prokofy Neva]

I don't care if you are not an Emerald developer. That doesn't give you some special luster or credibility. I notice there's an AWFUL LOT of that around the Emerald viewer -- people defending it like obsessive little fanboyz and telling you the whole time they aren't devs or they don't have anything to do with it (like Escaped Phelan) they just defend it because...um...it's a self-evident proposition.

There are many ways people have discussed protection against texture theft, and the hardcore copyleftists always point out that you can elude these barriers. And...we got it the first million times we heard this point being made.

The point isn't to demand that you protect others; again, some points are too sophisticated for tech-thugs. The point is that the Emerald devs make a big point of protecting their own clothing from being ripped, even as they refuse to acknowledge that checks should be put on thieves. It's indicative of a mentality. It's like how hordes of anonymous thugs tell you that you can't hide anything about yourself on the Internet, but then use anonymizers themselves lol.

It's not wrong on my part to point out that these tribalists force people into a dependence on their viewer as to gain this "protection".

It's another variation of the "code as law" concept. Of course being able to protect yourself in an armed assault is part of war-hardening to make you a better, safer warrior, not only a safer civilian.

Once again: I think there is something violative about the temp upload because it pushes towards free uploads. I don't care that some Linden has blessed it. That's hardly an advertisement, they are constantly cynical about their own official viewers' restrictions and others eluding them.

This idea that no one can criticize this viewer, or critique the fanboy defense of it, without being told they are "making an attack" is part and parce of the mentality here. Whiney self-entitlement.

This self-righteous tone and posturing that "I'm not a geek" doesn't sanitize these issues.

I understand the features, and elaborating this or that point isn't undoing *my* point about *the spirit in which this viewer is made*.

"Emerald even offers "stealth mode" which turns off all the features that other residents could use to identify the viewer I'm using." -- now there we go, that's helpful to know lol.

A reminder that you have to use a recognizable first and last SL name to post here, or recognizable RL or blogger name.

So somebody named "liquidator Neximus" with absolutely nothing in their profile, clearly an alt, doesn't get to post.

[Maklin Deckard]

Personally, other than the 'cheat mode' capabilities (free test uploads, phantom, etc), I see no real reason for this to even exist. Tried it, two different PC's...like every other hack client, its slower than the LL one.

Same position/facing/avatar on my home sim - 42-47FPS with LL, 30-35 with Emerald. Crowded Club (even worse results) - 15-21 LL, 7-15 Emerald.

Similar result (within +/-2 FPS) on second PC. So, its slower, requires a second file download...what is the attraction for non-geeks (beyond 'getting on the bandwagon' or 'anti-LL')?

And the fact that the source is available aids hackers...It is far harder to write an exporter than to disable permission check routines....basically Emerald did the heavy lifting for those that want a ripper client.

Poorer performance, providing tools to hackers...Combine that with the smug arrogance I've seen here from a few of the emerald code-monkeys that have posted in past entries, I avoid Emerald like the plague.

[DeNasty Tigerpaw]

I'm confused. How is setting an avatar fully phantom a bad thing? Disabling push is not and has never been 100% effective. There are plenty of scripted objects capable of orbiting and pushing in sims that have push disabled. And you can also just walk and push another avatar by walking into them. That isn't stopped by push-disabling. Setting your avatar phantom would be 100% effective.

How again is that bad? Do you ever research this stuff, or just spout?

[Hemms Osterham]

Many people (Including myself) have better FPS on Emerald.

Not to mention all of the bugs they've fixed. I haven't crashed AT ALL since I started using Emerald, not once, and this was almost a month ago.

21,000 users can't be wrong.

[korwyn.myopenid.com]

I'm sorry Prok, but you're not fully correct on a lot of things about this. Being on a laptop for most of my day, Emerald is a boon to me and my friends who build.

I'm in now way associated with them, other then I recently left rp in Insilico due to... well issues with the Admin/GM team that I didn't agree with.

For one:

Avatar Keys: these are not private information. YOu can get them with a simple few lines of script for anyone. They are needed for most things that you'd use for employment of clubs and that if you use an automatic payment system. Yes llName2Key can work with the name, but it fails more often then not. Having their key helps in this, and it is NOT a private thing. If you bring your avatar into a sim, that key is the same as your name when it comes to the database. And that's avatar name, not real name.

Temp Texture Upload: this allows you to view a texture in the viewer BEFORE wasting the lindens on a bad texture when it converts to jpg2000. So no wasting money on multiple uploads and that if you MAKE YOUR OWN.

Not other people's textures.

In fact, I have not encountered any items in Emerald that allows for breaking any rules, and once skills came on board and merged her Gemini viewer project with it, it got much better. My FPS is higher in Emerald, and my bandwidth usage is less. Things rez faster.

It's an improvement on the code that everyone cries about being clunky in the normal SL viewer.

Can it be used for ill with the double click teleports and that? Yes.

But it's a tool. I can use a hammer to build a new porch for an old lady, or I can use it for harming someone. Both uses fit, it's the intent of the USER not the tool's fault.

Yes, some people on the Emerald Project have been associated with other viewers that were fully intended to do bad.

I can't vouch for what you've seen of Skills Hak, when I met her on her sim, she was cool and all. On her own Twitter page linked to Insilico's ning, she's had issues finding people using Cryolife to steal her own amazing builds. Insilico is all her work and it's been featured on even national TV.

BUT... mind you, I personally think her choice in some of her staff there leaves a lot to be desired and she's pretty much hands off on her sim's direction and roleplay.

I've heard bad things about her all over though. All I can do is shrug. But you're targetting one or two people on the Emerald team, a team of programmers.

There are people on the Emerald team who do a lot of good work, always do well.

Targetting them as a group is a severe misjustice. Yeah, some of the Emerald team might also be with this Woodbury, might be invovled with Corsi, or maybe even with the PN.

They might even have a linden in their pocket.

But that doesn't make EVERYONE on the team a bad person. That's like saying that because I used to be in the roleplay groups for Insilico, I'm a chicken killer or whatever just cause it is owned by Skills, even though I've never been to one of your sims, or otherwise.

To some extent, you give them too much fuel to deal with.

But sometimes you have to fight fire with fire.

Just think you're being too broad in your counter-attacks.

[Maklin Deckard]

"21,000 users can't be wrong."

Ahhh, herd mentality at its finest. Quite often mass groups of people are completely and utterly wrong. But go ahead and join in the OS group-think, you rebel you! :)

BTW, I haven't crashed in the LL either in several months. So not crashing in a client that is most likely 95+ % LL code is HARDLY a ringing endorsement for Emerald.

[Prokofsky Ninja]

Stop posting with your alts prok, you ugly git.

[Desmond Shang]

Maklin isn't Prok's alt. Different people entirely.

[Hemms Osterham]

I use other clients along with Emerald, I've tried many, and so far Emerald is the most stable for me, not to mention the awesome features it has. OTR alone is great, all IMs are encrypted so I don't have to worry about people snooping.

[Prokofy Neva]

Let's go over this again for all the thuggish dimwits: you get to ask questions about a viewer that has questionable features, and spawns even worse viewers. Hello? This is America, even if you are living in Thugs Lyfe in the Russian GULAG yourself.

I will go on questioning, regularly and often, and thuggish threats and claims that I am "wrong" and need "FAQs" will be rebutted, over and over again, because there isn't an issue where I am "misinformed" or "misguided" or "spreading FUD".

Maklin summed up the problem neatly, himself a tekkie:

"And the fact that the source is available aids hackers...It is far harder to write an exporter than to disable permission check routines....basically Emerald did the heavy lifting for those that want a ripper client."

Bingo.

I'll answer Korwyn one time, and inform him that "openID" is NOT repeat NOT acceptable here as some kind of "verifiable" ID as any idiot can make an anonymous openID. a FIRST AND LAST RECOGNIZABLE SL NAME or RL or blogger name are required here, full stop.

Furthermore, for participating in the justifying and apologizing for the Emerald viewer in this manner, even knowing of its harmfulness and its spawns' harmfulness, he is banned here because this group objectively causes damages to me.

Korwyn is likely just another Woodbury/b-tard and is therefore ducking and hiding with this fake openid crap:

1. DUH can you nits READ? I wrote in the first post that avatar keys are "available". That is, w-hat scrapes and posts them using a prim device inworld that scrapes them "just because they can" because they relish with malicious glee the grabbing of people's information "because they can" and posting it "because they can" to "make a point". Juvenile deliquency. All kinds of things scrape them, yes. Duh, much?! Tellers, vendors, rentomatics. Just because those things scrape them inworld in legitimate transactions is no reason to grab them and punish them and use them to stalk and harass people in some way.

The literalizing and repeating about how these functions are taken; what they mean and the fact that they are aliases; this is all BESIDE the point.

Just because something "can" be scraped doesn't mean you "must" then scrape it and legitimize every scraping of it. I see no social benefit or individual benefit to the possessor of an avatar key to have his key publicized and available to Emerald Viewer. Keys are useful *when there is a business transaction for them* or some other inworld action that produces some expected benefit.

Um, what is the "benefit" to be had by Emerald Viewer users (gosh, 20,000 of them! *cough*) grabbing everybody's keys? What ARE they going to be DOING with these keys? Tracking people? Selling to them? Following their activities for 96 m2 on a sim? or what? Let's here the USE CASES for "needing" to extract keys from every other person on a sim in your range. Would LOVE to hear them.

2. Gosh, problems in Insilico? How can that be?!

3. Temp texture upload is a cheat to avoid paying $10, the way most people need to do if their eyeballing of a texture in Paint or Photoshop is not enough for them.

DUH, we got it that it is a "boon" for "designers". But...it also opens up a slope, just like the BuilderBot pathway was freedup up by the "builders boon" of having "mass permissions", that begins to erode the distinctions of why you need to pay $10 for a sink in the first place (as part of the balancing of the economy).

If you defeat the purpose of balancing the economy, it will only cause it to have to be balanced elsewhere, and Lindens would see that load on the servers, the defeating of their system, and would, being the hippie extremists they are, would likely put the load-balancing needs somewhere else that will be detrimental to the world, rather than curb their devil spawn Emerald Viewer -- and worse -- users.

I'm unmoved by the idea that somebody "making their own texture" is special by contrast to someone loading from the Internet. The sink is $10 and agnostic as to your special snowflake status.

4. Once you get out of the Kool-aid drinking/fan belt of the Emerald viewer, you find people reporting that the viewer either lags or doesn't improve their experience. So claims to the contrary from fanboyz are yawns and provoke disbelief.

5. Can it be used for ill with the double click teleports and that? Yes.

Thanks! We needed that. I'm glad we're getting a CONFESSION that this infernal viewer CAN BE USED FOR ILL with double click teleports, chat movement to high altitudes, and such that interfere with privacy and are primarily used for stalking and griefing, from everything we can see of their USE CASES in world.

>But it's a tool. I can use a hammer to build a new porch for an old lady, or I can use it for harming someone. Both uses fit, it's the intent of the USER not the tool's fault.

Naaah. I've handily debunked this "it's only a tool so as a tool myself being an asshole I can do anything I want and argue back from tool's neutral status to sanctify anything I feel like doing."

Tools *already* contain the maker's intent; it is baked in. It's not like this appears "later". The "used for ill" is baked in and used for ill *indeed*. So the Emerald tool makers *have to take responsibliity* for this.

6. >Yes, some people on the Emerald Project have been associated with other viewers that were fully intended to do bad.

Glad we got that documented from even a fanboy, too! Absolutely! and they refuse to take responsibility for this or connect up the dots. That's why I'm here connecting up the dots and will go on doing so.

7. I can't vouch for what you've seen of Skills Hak, when I met her on her sim, she was cool and all. On her own Twitter page linked to Insilico's ning, she's had issues finding people using Cryolife to steal her own amazing builds. Insilico is all her work and it's been featured on even national TV.

I don't care if Skills Hak is the King of Siam or himself fell victim to the devil spawn for which Emerald needs to take responsibility. That doesn't make it right.

8. >BUT... mind you, I personally think her choice in some of her staff there leaves a lot to be desired and she's pretty much hands off on her sim's direction and roleplay.

I've heard bad things about her all over though. All I can do is shrug. But you're targetting one or two people on the Emerald team, a team of programmers.

Skills Hack is a documented griefer.

Skills Hack is a documented very big friend of Rodney Linden, even building his house.

Therefore Skills Hack's bad character/bad actions mean more than the average bear.

>There are people on the Emerald team who do a lot of good work, always do well.

Oh, pullleeeeeze. It's all bullshit. None of this is taking responsibility for code, all of it is arrogant bullshit. The Linens need to rein this in.

>Targetting them as a group is a severe misjustice. Yeah, some of the Emerald team might also be with this Woodbury, might be invovled with Corsi, or maybe even with the PN.

Uh-uh. Collective responsibility is very much in order in a group where most of the officers have personally, hands-on, come to grief and harass me and kill chickens, driven away tenants, and create griefing incidents with particles, replicators, etc.
If all the main officers of a group behave in this way, their individual group members aren't somehow exempt due to lack of particpiation or lack of knowledge. I fight this kind of massive public irresponsibility with a very concerted refusal to provide rentals to this group with these officers -- full stop. That's what it takes. And more people are devising ways to detect and block Emerald viewer on their sims. That's what it takes.

It's about rubbing puppies noses in their piss until they get that they can't piss on the rug anymore.

>They might even have a linden in their pocket.

Somehow, "Linden in My Pocket" sounds like a parody song that Foolish Frost might do on YouTube. Can't wait!

>But that doesn't make EVERYONE on the team a bad person. That's like saying that because I used to be in the roleplay groups for Insilico, I'm a chicken killer or whatever just cause it is owned by Skills, even though I've never been to one of your sims, or otherwise.

Um, no sale. You're blocked, banned, and out of here just like the rest of your group for serving as an apologist to them. Bye!

>To some extent, you give them too much fuel to deal with.

But sometimes you have to fight fire with fire.

Just think you're being too broad in your counter-attacks.

No. Not at all. These people need to be slammed hard because we as consumers in SL are harmed by them in general, and I personally merely for raising legitimate criticism and concerns about their hackery and made a target.

When more and more people can get into the mode of "enough is a enough" here, we'll get somewhere.

If I see Melody Regent appear one more time on the concierge list whining and wheeping that she can't get griefers to get gone because the ban won't work on them, and yet smugly telling us all that she uses the Emerald Viewer, I will puke. She, like many, doesn't connect up the dots of sustaining criminality by sustaining third-party hacked viewers that refuse to police, disable, cease enabling of, and disassociating from, rogue viewers that go even further than their own rogue viewers which, as we've heard just now from this fanboy CAN BE USED FOR ILL.

[Hemms Osterham]

Oh well, rant away Prokofy, rant away.

From what I've seen here and what I've heard inworld, you're pretty much a joke no one takes seriously anyway. I won't bother posting here anymore.

[Lum Lumley]

It's good to see you raising actual concerns instead of FUD and guilt-by-proxy. I'll hit my opinions on them point by point, then explain something I think you may miss.

1) Shows name, age, payment info, current activity for everyone in zone (I presume you meant that last qualifier, since as you noted you can see that for any avatar already) - most of this is already available with other tools (such as Mystitool) and in fact is a bit easier on sims since it isn't polling the server to get this information.

2) Ability to ID objects that IM you - I've already used this many times to mute spamming objects. It's a handy defensive measure.

3) Clothing layer protection - I'm fairly certain that this is actually being built into the next official viewer version. It's an anti-copybot measure. The only reason you'd need individual textures from an object you were viewing (as opposed to the final assembled texture) would be to reproduce it.

4) Always-on flying - this is purely automating hitting the "fly" button. Server/land settings will always override this.

5) 'visually phantom' - as has been pointed out, this isn't some form of cloaking device. It probably needs to be named better.

6) Command-line chatbar commands for teleporting/rezzing/etc - again nothing that isn't already being done using in-world tools (or the simple expedient of sitting on a prim and editing its X/Y/Z), just being routed through the client instead of a server-side script.

7) Free uploading of "temporary" textures - as pointed out, this is so content creators can see what something looks like and experiment before pressing the upload button and sending it to the server. The reason LL charges $10L isn't "to balance the economy" - how much is 10L, 1c? 1/2c? It's to prevent people from uploading textures to the server freely (or even automating it) thus putting load on the server. Temp textures never go to the server - thus, no load (and also only the author can see them, until they are uploaded normally).

8) Friendship ending notifications - I bow to your superior insight and knowledge of SL drama. :) Of course unless you have thousands of friends, you usually notice if someone disappears from the list anyway.

9) "Detection of cooperating alternative viewers -- well, is this ok?" Um, why wouldn't it be? I don't think anyone cares if I use Emerald (well, save you) or Snowglobe or whatever. As for "discrimination based on viewer", well, I discriminate based on not being able to spell "you" and "are". Virtual discrimination and cliques are part of life, and this seems an odd place to make a stand against it.

10) "Profiles show agent key" - not sure what purpose this serves. In fact I rather wish I could turn it off. It wastes space.

11) Colored mini-map dots - simply parsing data that already exists elsewhere in a different way. It's like saying you dislike that someone has a color-coded friends list.

Most of these objections you raise, I think, illustrate that you confuse the server and the client. One of Raph Koster's most famous sayings, which I think you would agree with, is "the client is in the hands of the enemy". What this means is that you can't trust the client to be responsible. If you allow the client to do something irresponsible, like, say, delete someone else's objects, that is a failure of the server to properly enforce what can and can't be done. You cannot simply assume no one will write a client that will do that. Because someone will. It doesn't matter whether or not an open-sourced version of the client exists - if they don't, people will reverse engineer the data stream between the client and the server and come up with their own anyway. Complaining about this may be justified, but it solves nothing. The responsibility is on the side of the server to act as the gatekeeper - to 'sanity-check' any commands from a client, and ensure that clients only gain information that they should have.

All third party clients like Emerald do is take information that's already made available from the SL servers and present it slightly differently. There's no hackery or wizardry involved. It's just another printing of the same book. And if they are capable of doing something that in LL's eyes should not be done, then LL can quite easily stop it, by simply ensuring the server disallows it.

[Prokofy Neva]

Lum, what's a picnic without ants, and what's a day without you on my blog?

Um, FUD is what you geeks are guilty of as people increasingly question your goofy domain and your criminalized mismanagement of it (I mean the "collective you" of the "Internets").

The public has a right to know, a right to criticize, etc.

Guilt by association is a very, very necessary thing when you are dealing with a group of serial hands-on criminals who keep recruiting new alts of old banned accounts into their group. In fact, it's not the much-maligned "guilt by association" when you document, oh, criminal conspiracy which is what it is called by law. RICO is not accused of engaging in "guilt by association". That you think I am is because you are giving a pass to asshole griefers in your code and gamer guild because you think they can do no wrong, evidently.

1. How many times do I have to say DUH I KNOW THAT about the fact that other viewers, other tools, even the SL viewers ALREADY HAS SOME OF THIS SAME INFORMATION DUH A THOUSAND TIMES DUH.

But...I raise it as a problem of data-scraping by unscrupulous parties. What will THEY do with the information? How will THEY benefit from it. What is THEIR use case to grab avatar keys. Etc.

If you can't grasp that logic, which is about "tools plus intent because intent is in fact baked into tools " in the nexus of a virtual world where this is very easy to see (a viewer design contains a worldview in it, not just a view on the world), then perhaps you're not as intelligent as I thought. It's one thing to say "I don't agree with you" but this incessant "because I don't agree with you, you're stupid and mired in FUD" is beneath you, or so I thought.

If you have a known problem of griefer groups exploiting even legal capacities of the legal viewer then...why make it easier for them to do even more of this? See, YOU don't have a plan for how to stop crime except um...let's see...were you expecting someone to mount a successful civil lawsuit against a griefer in RL before you'd do something?

2. Your notion that because something is useful to the sandbox code kiddy favouring this viewer (I'm going to assume they spam each other as much as they spam me) or useful to any random citizen -- that therefore we're not to question it -- is just whack. You get more information about people sending messages. That's what I question. Yes, it helps defeat griefers. But yes, it also makes it possible to stalk every fashion diva who sends you a magazine issue, etc. So *I question that, and that's ok*.

Every single feature of the viewers HAS to be questioned not for its surface value as a boon, but as a tool in the hands of a known, hands-on, documented enemy.

3. Gosh, COULD IT BE that the Lindens ARE ACTUALLY ENGINEERING TO STOP COPYRIGHT THEFT? ?????? BUT WE HAVE BEEN TOLD 10 TRILLION TIMES THAT THIS IS NOT POSSIBLE TO DO AND IF YOU CAN SEE IT YOU CAN COPY IT!!! NNNNNOOOOOESSSSS11111

I get all that, Lum. My point here is that this is about MENTALITY. That these chums of yours at the Emerald Viewer, your fellow geek guild members, are thinking of measures to protect THEMSELVES and THEIR WORK from copyright theft in this engineering way, even as they are the ones who screech the loudest that we are ignorant FUD-filled know-nothings because we criticize Rezzable's BuilderBot by Jonathan Himoff or John Hurliman's Copybot So I cry foul on this, because it's a mentality "no business but my business" -- "fix it for me, don't fix it for other people" etc.

4. Fly is always on anyway in SL -- until it is overriden by land settings of other people.

5. No, visually phantom *is* indeed about cloaking for those who use it for cloaking. It doesn't matter if in fact an avatar name tag hovers, if you can see it on render transparency, etc. etc.If there is some *two* things here being discussed that are on phantom, that's fine, but the issue of invisibility for avatars is ALSO an issue for Emerald. The ability to be masked from avatar radar is also at issue.

6. You're providing the usual self-serving narrow-minded geeky jutsifications here. Not only the Mom-Bridge arguments ("everybody is doing it") but the "all tools all the time" argument that "all tools can already do this so they already can do this all the time" -- when...the way they've evolved is that they are not used in this way. If Mystitool were used for griefing instead of protection from griefers, its owner would not have a good reputation and would not be missed when absent from world. And so on...

In this case, you can't sit on a prim you've rezzed on land where...you aren't with build privileges because non-group build is turned off or all build is turned off.

So your ability to type coordinates and rocket up to the sky to go skybox hopping instantly is an invasion of someone's privacy.

What do you need this for? To go to your own skybox? But you can go to *that* by putting your parcel landing point up in the air or using "teleport home" to a home setpoint.

Arguments that amount to "just because you can, we will" don't persuade, they only illustrate immorality further.

7. Again -- duh -- we all got it about this, er, designer's boon that has to override $10 try-mes. We get all that the first million times it was pointed out.

You're wrong, wrong, wrong that the Lindens "don't balance the economy" this way. OF COURSE they balance the economy this way because it is a SINK, and and important one. You seem not to grasp that sinks have to be matched to actual loss of their resources -- but it's how they've evolved this, because the alternative is to charge real money for it and have those sandbox code kiddies as well as merchants screech at them on the forums that they are already charging for tier, or they already offered free accounts, conversely, and now they are going against their word and their six-year tradition, which they need for ideological reasons because they need to say that online creativity in the digital realm "has no production costs". It's a central staple of the technocommunist shtick that there are "no costs" because you don't have to manufacture physical copies.

That in fact the digital realm DOES take its toll on resources and DOES load down servers and IS an actual cost is something they don't want to bite the bullet on, morally or philosophically. So they hide it as a sink. If there are less sinks, however, they're still stuck with the cost of all these new freeloaders on the servers with their try-mes that STILL put a load on the server while being viewed even if not stored.

So it still creates a cost for the making of an object and overrides the Linden effort at recouping that cost. So then if they see that all of a sudden texture upload $10 fees are way down, and server load is way up due to freeloading try-mes, they will have to:

o sell more Supply Linden lindens and further devalue/inflationize the value of the Linden
o raise the price of tier
o do something else we can't know about now

8. You can study your lists and try to figure out who has dumped you, or try IMing them or mapping them when you could before and find now you can't because they've dumped you, but if you have hundreds of friends, it's a losing proposition. Once again, Lum, TRY TO HEAR IT: Facebook, a larger more mature and financed business that Linden Lab, in its wisdom, does not provide that information and promises not to invade privacy with that information. That should tell you something: hey, it might just be considered a good business practice not to violate privacy.

9) I think it's hilarious that people slamming me for "discriminating" against the marked group of Emerald Users and Devs, population 450 or whatever it is, because its officers have griefed me, are screaming about my guilt by association, yet built into this viewer is the ability to find out somebody else's viewer, and...discriminate and block them. Ultimate in irony.

10) the kiddies' fascination with the avatar key is in part their thrill they've grabbed something that is private for the most part and "outed" it. It's something that is...grabbed by all kinds of things in world already as I said a million times, like rentomatics which even display it on the rentomatic then. Their point is that they can then put it in ban lists, or weapons, or whatever it is they do. It is used to track avatars. For example, an ATM for one of these "banks" would also see if that avatar then bought on that sim in the stores there, and would see, did they stay long, what did they buy, etc. It's scraping data, and...people should be notified of this and it's more than fine to question what it is these Emerald people are doing with all the scraped data.

11. Making Lindens a different colour on the map helps griefers avoid sims where they might see Linden policing, say. I think the Lindens may not appreciate this function that reduces their effectiveness.

Er, I don't confuse client and server.

I know Raph Koster's saying, and Raph Koster is right, and in the SL context, more right than he knows, because the Lindens have put out not a company proprietary coded client, of the type Raph used to code for his games and obfuscate or block in some way against hackers; they've put out an opensourced hackable exploitable viewer into the hands of a lot of irresponsible, arrogant, abusive and even criminal hackers.

Enemy doesn't even begin to describe it.

That you fail to see the moral dimensions of this problem, is, of course, not a surprise at this picnic with these ants.

I've heard a zillion times, including from the old Sheep data scraper "Grid Shepherd" caper, that "it's all available anyway so why can't we just scrape it more efficiently".

And the answer is: because people haven't opted out. Because it was not intended for your personal griefing/commercial/whatever use. Because there need to be checks and balances restraining your arrogant and exploitative approach to the grid as if it yours for the taking.

It isn't "just another printing of the same book". It's "Steal this Book" or worse.

I'm clutching my sides with laughter at the notion of this: "LL can quite easily stop it, by simply ensuring the server disallows it."

You also are from the gaming industry and evidently have coded games and make viewers of *proprietary* code ANd you maintain servers where you "disallow stuff". That isn't the Lindens' mantra or stance. Their attitude is, allow it in, test it, see what emergent behaviour comes from it, let it grief Prokofy, let it grief FurNation and hundreds of other sims and then, if it seems like our shareholders/board members finally begin to cock an eyebrow at all the bad press we're getting, THEN we MIGHT have our server disallow it, but what's much more likely is that we'll just have a safety screen pop up or do "user education" on the blog or something.

We're told on the qui vive that LL *does* stop viewers or block some people with them or...something. It's not documented or demonstrated in any public, deterring way, but is "just something they do" we're told. Perhaps their ability to stop bad viewers and bad activity hinges on their keeping their rep as hippies and laissez-faire libertarians on this issue so that no one expects the banhammer coming down on them when it does, which makes it more effective.

Are you like the Lindens, Lum, never meeting a script you didn't like?

or do you think game gods can script/code viewers to block certain things that harm YOUR business, but you can't concede that in an open world like SL with an opensource viewer (which you no doubt applaud) some steps should be taken to protect IP and private property, even in digital form?

When you write this sort of thing, do you realize that we've already heard this argumentation about 10 million times in Second Life, from CTO Cory Linden and others? I mean, where have you been?!

" You cannot simply assume no one will write a client that will do that. Because someone will. It doesn't matter whether or not an open-sourced version of the client exists - if they don't, people will reverse engineer the data stream between the client and the server and come up with their own anyway. Complaining about this may be justified, but it solves nothing. The responsibility is on the side of the server to act as the gatekeeper - to 'sanity-check' any commands from a client, and ensure that clients only gain information that they should have."

This is like...news?!

This is like...an insight after five years of hearing this? Please.

I mean, have you read my blog from like 4 years ago? The townhall with Cory? for which I was banned? When all these points were made and overturned and where the persistent question remains: but Cory, why are you letting THESE GRIEFERS reverse engineer your code?! It's one thing to say "we should let people reverse engineer because we can't stop them". But it's another to allow THIS GROUP to keep griefing and also reverse-engineering.

What would be YOUR plan, Lum Lumley, if you were dealing with a group of irresponsible coders who REFUSED TO SANITY CHECK?

You say all responsibility has to be on the server side. What do you do if THERE the people are IRRESPONSIBLE?

what then?

[Lum Lumley]

* Demand better responsibility/governance (an act not unknown to you).

* If it fails to improve, vote with your dollars/feet.

[Lum Lumley]

Also some tangents, mostly on freebie temporary uploads:

- 10L is not free. Most people (including me) don't bother to camp or sell things or whatever. L$ is simply a currency that is exchanged for US$ every so often.

- Any service provider that, out of "technocommunism" or whatever, ignored the very real costs of server maintenance and bandwidth would be out of business. LL's premium server hosting masquerading as estate sales is actually a fairly self-sustaining business model.

- The burden to LL's bandwidth and servers from temporary texture 'uploads' - zero. Because a temporary upload is actually not uploaded at all, but remains on the user's client, unseen by any but the content creator. The only complaint you have which isn't mistaken is the denying LL their 10L for uploading a misshapen texture. If LL is that desperate that they require 10L upload fees as gold sinks (and yes, as an MMO designer of those games you often denigrate, I am familiar with the concept) then the economy has worse issues.

- Charming that you consider my comments the equivalent of picnic ants. If you don't care for dissenting feedback on your posts, simply say so.

[Prokofy Neva]

Lum, you are advocating the same old geeky "forced migration" concept "vote for your feet" blah blah. No. That's not what you do. You try to change something you have a stake in for the better.

I didn't say $10 was free. I said it was a *sink*. And if you deprive the Linden economy of sinks, it will have to offset elsewhere.

You're still failing to grasp and admit this public responsibility here. If Emerald forces the Lindens to lose X amount in sinks because they make it possible to "try before you buy" which isn't possible now, then it will merely be offset elsewhere and we will still lose as a result.

I'm not sure that an upload that is temporary does not impact the Lindens' servers.

Linden isn't "desperate" in creating sinks out of the texture uploads; they've incorporated that as part of the system of the whole economy. You can't seem to look past this one facet to understand it as interactive and interdependent.

I said "what's a picnic without ants" not "I will never have a picnic because of the ants". You're like an ant in making nit-picking tiny attacks that in fact are misplaced because I got all those points ages ago and you don't want to hear the larger issues I'm posing here.

You would think the Lindens would have to forsake technocommunism even if they embrace it intellectually, but, they don't, because they put their own money in. They aren't as hungry as some shoe-strap start-ups.

[Ann Otoole]

double click teleport is in snowglobe on it's way to the LL viewer. Most likely a lot of OS features will be making their way in. But what I don't get is the viewer detection thing. Why is it emerald can only detect emerald and cryolife? All the other viewers just show as ?. There is a major difference in rendering time. Snowglobe blasts everything at you all at once while in emerald you get to watch hair rez one prim at a time. Not really important except obviously emerald could improve. But so can snowglobe since when it misses a texture you have to relog to load it.

What I am really curious about is SL09. SL09 will make everything obsolete. I really must wonder how that one will play out. Is LL sharing it in advance with the OS community? I see nothing on sldev mailing list.

There is nothing anyone can do about what is going on viewerwise. 2009 is interesting but 2010 will have something solid to eat with new policies and a new viewer and new policies even on the web part of the network that pushes all the thug behavior off to third party forums and blogs. Second Life appears to be in the process of getting an enema. I guess we will see how it all works out.

In the meantime I visited metaplace and laughed at the 50,000 "coin" outfits. Talk about over priced. Twinity is incredibly rough right now but the spirit is in the right place for creating a place for entertainment venues. Blue Mars is nothing but high school aged looking avatars and massive hype. looks like LL can do as they please and remain king of the hill.

Adapt or leave would seem to be the key phrase going forward. SL is going to grow up. The oldbies can change their miscreant behavior or leave by choice or by force. That is how it is shaping up and the oldbies are very unhappy about it. The collateral damage is clearly acceptable to LL as LL is concentrating on attracting people that don't even know what forums are.

2010 will be an interesting year indeed.

[Prokofy Neva]

Oh, can I get a new avatar at Metaplace with my coins now? I'll have to see that.

And...how do you know all this stuff about the enema and all that, Ann?

[Net Antwerp]

Doubt that Linden 'Botox' is going to last long, Ann. It never does.

[irene pienaar]

Prokofy, I think there are a few misunderstandings here about features of the emerald viewer, merely by badly chosen names !

1. "visually phantom" has nothing at all to do with invisibility; rather read it as "a phantom that is visible". It makes you phantom in the same way as objects can be phantom: you remain visible but people can walk through you. I don't see opportunities for griefing here; actually I dont think it to be a very useful feature; it protects you against physical griefing, but merely sitting does too; perhaps it can be handy while building, since your avi wont "occupy space".

2. A "temporary upload" is not an upload at all ! Your textures remain on your client; the world around you cannot see them; so no impact on the servers. A useful feature ! Compare it to previewing a document or photo, before printing it.

One remark about viewer detection: it doesnt work correctly ! I have seen bots, claiming to use Emerald, which is nonsense of course, since they dont use a viewer at all.