Emerald Viewer Mutiny – Fractured Crystal Thrown To Sharks
by Pixeleen Mistral on 23/08/10 at 4:35 am
Second Life Emerald Viewer + DDOS Platform Ownership Changes Hands
The scandal-plagued Emerald viewer development team has undergone radical change with the resignation of Fractured Crystal Sunday morning. Although Mr. Crystal had previously controlled the web site distributing the Emerald viewer, he was forced out in what appears to have been a mutiny by other Emerald team members during the last 24 hours.
Fractured Crystal now swims with the sharks
Trouble stared with revelations that the viewer was being used for a distributed denial of service attack on a rival web site – an attack that accounted for approximately 800 gigabytes of traffic on the iheartanime.com site, accord to Hazim Gazov. Denial of service attacks are a violation of the Linden Lab third party viewer policy – and illegal in the United States, where Mr. Crystal resides.
Attempts to spin the attack as childish shenanigans by Arabella Steadham – who reminds us she does not lie – fell flat, and as word spread and alarmed players uninstalled the Emerald software. With the Emerald’s initial PR efforts failing to quiet the public outcry, there was a clear need for more radical action than opaque assurances that a team member had been “disciplined”.
What followed was apparently a game of chicken within the development team. Arabella Steadham told the Herald she and other members quit and began plans to start an independent effort. Shortly afterward, Fractured Crystal posted his resignation, saying, “I am not attempting to justify my mistakes, merely to explain them. As you might guess, if anyone else had done this, it would be unforgivable, and the same applies to me… I am voluntarily removing myself from the project. I will be transferring control of the primary webserver to Arabella Steadham as soon as is possible”.
As of this writing, the Emerald viewer is no longer listed on the Linden Lab third party viewer page – but why? I contacted Emerald developer Skills Hak for comment:
Pixeleen Mistral: I understand you asked to have Emerald removed from the third party viewer directory – can you explain why?
Skills Hak: because it was registered to fractured
Skills Hak: and we asked fractured to step down
Pixeleen Mistral: so this has nothing to do with being out of compliance with the TPV policy?
Pixeleen Mistral: its just a name transfer?
Skills Hak: probably a bit of both, LL isn’t happy at all of course
Skills Hak: well we kind of booted fractured
Skills Hak: bought a new server, domain
Skills Hak: restructuring everything atm
Skills Hak: i bought the sim and he oficially resigned
Pixeleen Mistral: what will the new domain be?
Skills Hak: not sure if i can say that yet :p
Pixeleen Mistral: so you now own Emerald Point?
Skills Hak: tomorrow probably
Pixeleen Mistral: oh yeah – the transfer would take some time
Skills Hak: why waste a good sandbox
Pixeleen Mistral: any idea when Emerald might get back on the TPV list?
Skills Hak: no idea, that’s up to Joe [Linden] and the rest, if at all
Pixeleen Mistral: right – Soft Linden sounded concerned on the mailing list entry I saw – the DDOS is an open and shut case for a violation
Skills Hak: yeah understandably
Skills Hak: >.>
I asked Arabella Steadham how she ended up with the modularsystems web site, and a picture of hardball negotiations within the team emerges.
Pixeleen Mistral: so I am under the impression that you *did* quit or threaten to quit at some point, but then Fractured gave in
Arabella Steadham: no, let me tell you the events in order
Arabella Steadham: I left the EMDEV team last night
Arabella Steadham: I advised Treet tv I could not do the interview on this basis
Arabella Steadham: paisley [Paisley Beebe - Tweet TV personality] twitted that, which is probably where Tateru heard
Arabella Steadham: Apparently following my departure, most of the remainder of the team also left
Arabella Steadham: shortly after this, a very small group of us met to see what we could do
Arabella Steadham: about 2 hours after that, jay [Fractured Crystal] made his post
Arabella Steadham: I am now doing the treet thing again
Pixeleen Mistral: so effectively nearly everyone left and marrooned Fractured, then he gave in
Pixeleen Mistral: now the contradictory posts are making sense
Arabella Steadham: the thing is, there are only so many hours in the day, waking hours. We are scattered across the globe too, so not all is always coordinated. what seems like a smooth trail of events to me can easily look disjointed to others
Arabella Steadham won’t lie, but will remain pseudonymous – now do you trust her viewer?
Ms. Steadham was interviewed on Treet TV this evening, but was unwilling to provide real life contact information for herself or other members of the Emerald team, claiming that Linden Lab knows who she is and that is good enough. But will this restore player trust in Emerald?
The most interesting dialog is over the next few days is likely to be inside Linden Lab as the game gods consider whether the Emerald viewer will make it back onto the third party viewer page – or if the viewer should be blocked from access to Second Life.
Restoring the Lab’s trust in the shamed development group may be difficult, particularly when Emerald developer Lonely Bluebird refuses to acknowledge that the attack on the iheartanime.com site was a DDOS attempt – as was the case in group chat after the Treet TV event. A lack of action on the part of the Lab would render the Third Party Viewer policy toothless, but forcing users to change viewers could result in more departures from the Philip Linden’s walled garden of cyber delights – a serious issue for player retention. Caught on the horns of this dilemma, will Lab decide that the Emerald viewer is simply "too popular to fail"?
Crystal
Aug 24th, 2010
iheartanime.com?
LOL
Look at them people go to imprudence.
Hey people, it’s your fault for using 3rd party viewers. Don’t blame yourself whenever things like this happen. You trust them or you don’t. You use the viewers, or you don’t.
SL community is slow to realize that. No one’s going to save your computer’s arse. You people rely on shady stuff too much. And I don’t expect Emerald to be my SL lifesaver anyways.
pefton
Aug 24th, 2010
If any of you really feel that because of one 18 y o boy’s bad way of treating his own business (whether out of inexperience with business or out of adolescent sillyness ) means you should be throwing stones at the effort of the ENTIRE Emerald team based on write-ups by semi-informed SL-ers who open handedly wait to crap on anyone who does something wrong – consider yourselves and what stupid shit YOU did when you were 18 years old.
The person responsible for what happened QUIT Emerald team with a fat apology and there is no reason to continue kicking the Emerald team while they are down at these times.
Remember one thing – ALL of you who use Emerald viewer – you use it because it is BETTER than what LL invested MILLIONS into (2.0) and it was made by a group of ingenious KIDS who started the project and carried it out before they even turned to be legal on the grid.
Is this the way you’d treat your kid that fucked up?
This is NO WAY to treat this situation, it is being blown out of proportion. If this developer wanted to do something malicious to YOU, he could have…but HE DID NOT.
There is a lot to be said for Emerald team and their efforts to write thousands of lines of code for FREE for our asses to enjoy the viewer.
So, before you so readily point fingers and justify it as some kind of super grandiose breach of whatever trust (seems like a popular expression these days) – remember what crap you put up with when it came to Linden Lab – the land prices, the homestead sims and actually stuff that affected you directly.
So, go ahead, if you must, throw stones – but really ask yourselves what it makes you really feel like when you become aware that you are campaigning against a group of kids who (now minus one kid) gave you a fantastic product for free.
Hazim Gazov
Aug 24th, 2010
Stop turning every comment section into a Woodbury debate, you asshats; Nobody cares, and you’re not getting your sim back.
Nelson Jenkins
Aug 24th, 2010
@ pefton
Behind your textwall shows your ignorance.
Skills Hak and Phox are still on the team.
They are no better than Fractured.
I wish people would do a little research before commenting here.
In any case, here’s the timeline for you guys that are just reading about this, before you make fools of yourself posting “oh emerld did nothin u guis r mean and distrot truths”:
– Fractured collected IP addresses linked to avatars in the Emerald Point sim and the RegAPI. This allowed Emerald devs (most of which used the system regularly) to geolocate specific SL users, among other things one can do with an IP address.
– Someone (let’s call them the third party) discovered this system. Phox and Fractured then hacked their voice account so they couldn’t use SL voice. They then stalked him from sim to sim (without map rights).
– Phox threatened to burglarize the third party’s house and steal his actual computer.
– Fractured illegally distributed chat logs of the third party, laughing at how he trolled him.
– Phox called a phone number that was listed in the third party’s Linden Lab user account. It turned out to be fake, and he only called the parent of a student. Unfortunately, harassment charges weren’t filed.
– The third party confronted Fractured and threatened to release the entire contents of the datamine to the public. They reached a compromise: Fractured would release the names of the accounts listed in the datamine and the people who had access to it, but no other information (such as IP addresses), in addition to removing it entirely from his servers. However, the contents were eventually released in full, and the names of those listed in the datamine were posted to the Herald a few months back:
http://alphavilleherald.com/2010/05/emerald-devs-modular-systems-data-mine-tracks-16740-avatars.html
– Phox and Fractured both conspire to get the third party’s ISP to cancel their service because of the leak, which they also did numerous times to the creator of the NeilLife viewer, but were ultimately unsuccessful. However, Phox still claims he was successful, and brags regularly about it.
– Fractured and several other Emerald devs (which are still on the team) begin work on the Onyx project, an entirely malicious viewer designed to find security holes in SL. It was also designed to harass and stalk users; however, this functionality was not discovered until its source code was leaked. The devs quickly claimed that it was an old copy and that the newer builds didn’t have those features, until the newest source code was revealed, causing the entire Onyx project to stop and the site to be taken offline. The Onyx viewer is still used, but only by spoofing the Emerald tag and channel name.
– Skills Hak begins selling the Gemini CDS Ban Relay, a system similar to BanLink, but instead it is fully automatic. It uses a QuickTime exploit to determine a user’s identifying information (which is technically illegal per SL policies) and hosts the data on the Gemini server, not unlike the incident with Fractured and Phox way back in the beginning. It’s still being sold, and false positives are being reported, despite Skills’s claims. The system has been cloned repeatedly, proving that it’s not a hard exploit, and that Skills is mostly just conning people by exploiting their fear of copybot.
– The emkdu.dll file, a driver that speeds up texture loading times similar to the llkdu.dll file, was discovered to leak information regarding any Emerald user’s window title and installation directory. (This was not original functionality in the licensed copy.) This allowed anyone that knew how to decrypt the simple encryption to view one’s installation directory, which (depending on the user’s Windows username) revealed one’s real life name. It also allowed users to determine which version of Emerald one was using, and, if it was another client based off of Emerald, what client it was (for example, Onyx).
– The Emerald devs claimed to have removed this functionality. However, they only strengthened the encryption, which was also eventually cracked to reveal that nothing had changed. The encryption was changed one more time, and has not yet been decrypted. With the dismissal of Fracture, Arabella claimed that the emkdu.dll file was replaced with the slower, open-source openjpeg library. It has not been determined whether the openjpeg library also includes similar functionality.
– Because of the entire emkdu.dll fiasco, LordGregGreg, a core Emerald dev, decided to voluntarily leave the project. He has since compiled his own viewer, Emergence, based off of the latest Emerald source code, evading any shady additions they may have put into the Emerald binaries as well. The Emerald team disparaged his position within the devs when he left and went on to defame his character, both officially and unofficially.
– Fractured decided to add 32 hidden iframes in a single pixel that loaded a little over 4.3 MB of data from that third party’s website that I mentioned before every time someone opened the Emerald viewer. In total, an estimate based on the number of hits the third party received placed the bandwidth stolen at 2.1 TB, not including the bandwidth stolen from the users (which would also total up to 2.1 TB). This code was inserted into the actual page on their website that all Emerald clients load on startup, so all stable and beta versions of Emerald were affected. This turned the entire Emerald userbase into an unknowing botnet to carry out a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on said third party’s server. It ultimately failed, which prompted Arabella to claim it was not a DDoS (because apparently, an attempted DDoS is not a DDoS in her eyes) and she released news articles stating such. Due to the nature of the DDoS, the server could have sent malware to the Emerald viewer if the webmaster desired, which was very possible since the Emerald devs claimed the website hosted malicious software. The Emerald devs, particularly Arabella, denounced the third party as malicious and a criminal, and refused to issue an apology for their attack. They still haven’t.
– Philip and Soft Linden begin discussing banning Emerald entirely from accessing the grid. The downside would be approximately 20% of Second Life users would be unable to connect to the grid, which may cause problems.
– Two more core Emerald devs left the team. Arabella claims to leave the team as well, however, she never officially does.
– Arabella continues posting to the Modular Systems blog, claiming it was done only by Fractured, and he was disciplined. She also starts up the story that it was only done to boast about Emerald traffic to the third party. Some Emerald users begin circulating the rumor that it was actually done to increase the third party’s website’s traffic, which is an even worse explanation. She also continues deleting comments on the Modular Systems blog that she deems as “negative”, i.e. they tell the truth. This was recorded on a YouTube video.
– Another YouTube video recording reveals that the entire Emerald dev team knew Fractured had been planning on adding the DDoS code, but did nothing to stop him until it was discovered. Arabella herself didn’t want to “scare the users”, so she made up the story about traffic.
– Yet another YouTube video recording shows Arabella debating whether or not to delete Pathfinder Linden’s comment (who is no longer a Linden due to the cuts). The comment asked some critical questions and she deemed it “negative”, but she decided to release (post) the comment and respond to it, confirming the jacked-up story she posted originally.
– Emerald is removed from the Third Party Viewer Directory. The Directory is a voluntary list of third-party viewers that conform to the TPV Policy. Emerald users (or perhaps the Emerald devs) began circulating the rumor that it was only removed to faciliate the change in ownership to Arabella, even though it was removed before that occured.
– Arabella is given ownership of the Emerald Viewer project from Fractured, who resigned from the project with a long blog post explaining how he was sorry for what had happened. Arabella continues to censor comments on this blog post as well.
– Arabella and Jessica (the project leader and support director, respectively) appear on treet.tv’s live streaming show, Tonight Live with Paisley Beebe. Nothing important is really discussed, except for how Emerald will now be in Arabella’s pseudo-control and that it is being totally restructured for transparency between devs (supposedly) and a more democratic system for code changes. The interviewer, Paisley, asks no critical questions, instead opting for “what is going on?” and “how do you feel about this?”. Jessica read from a script most of the time and started to cry near the end of the program, and Arabella seemed angry and vengeful. She continued to beg for mindless faith from her customers. The IRC server was attacked three times by an Emerald supporter, who disconnected everyone not using a standalone IRC client 3 times during the program.
So, you see, the Emerald deam – not just Fractured – has quite a colorful history, and Arabella is definitely not as trustworthy as she wants you to think she is. So please, to those of you that don’t know exactly what is going on, READ THE ABOVE.
Bubblesort Triskaidekaphobia
Aug 24th, 2010
@ Hazim: This is directly related to Woodbury. Modular Systems had their entire university banned from SL because they did the same thing you did, only they did it a few months earlier, and they released their findings on YouTube and in the Herald. This vindicates them, and LL owes them an apology for it.
@ pefton: “there is no reason to continue kicking the Emerald team while they are down at these times”
Actually, yes there is. The entire emerald team knew about this and the entire emerald team is responsible. They need to be permanently hardware banned, and if they violate that ban then they need to be prosecuted. Not only for this, but for everything that came before, including being underage on Linden Labs’s grid.
They aren’t hardware banned yet? That only means that LL hasn’t been humiliated enough over it, which means we haven’t bitched about it enough. Granted, LL has an extremely high tolerance for humiliation, but eventually they will need to do something to make people happy. I know, it’s crazy, but I have faith that someday LL will do something and I’ll smile and say “that was the right thing to do”. Banning each and every member of Modular Systems will do that. I hope it will happen soon. Maybe it will be their Christmas present to us.
At0m0 Beerbaum
Aug 24th, 2010
Actually, if Woodbury got its sims back, I’d be somewhat disappointed, because tbh, LL doesnt deserve Woodbury’s money at this point. Yeah it’d be cool that there’d be a place worth visiting in SL again, but at the same time, it’d be a loss for woodbury because it would be the equivalent of going back to an abusive relationship thinking “okay maybe if I wear more lipstick and look prettier he’ll not hit me as hard this time”
Let SL die, Woodbury is done in SL, I’m just glad to see that the assholes who led to it being nuked finally slipped up and fucked up massively. The best revenge is when you sit back and watch the person who fucked you over get theirs by their own actions.
At this point, LL doesnt deserve anyone’s money, after all, they enabled Emerald to become this way, left it unchecked, and rather than match the client in features to attract people to the main client, they let this situation fester. Also, LL could have also told the emerald devs to fuck off when it came to someone outing them.
Linden labs is just as guilty as the emerald devs are. They might as well have been leading DDoS attacks. They empower all of the wrong people, and abuse all of the right ones.
John Life Smith
Aug 24th, 2010
@Nelson Jenkins
Thank you for the great breakdown on what has happened with the Emerald Developers.
Lindens need to Remove them from Secondlife and Ban the viewer.
Honestly people still supporting these developers deserve to have interuption in their Secondlife.
Lindens Needs to Hardware Ban them. What they have done is against their own TOS and CS seems lindens can not follow their own TOS with this Group. This group has been given to many chances. Time to be done with them.
Selene Putzo
Aug 24th, 2010
LL took Woodbury out of the grid for reasons known only to LL. I am not going to question or argue with that decision.
We are told LL have taken Emerald off the TPV list. If Emerald returns to that page, that again is a decision to be made by LL.
This is Linden Labs grid. It does not belong to any group of residents or any supplier of software. Linden Labs cannot be held to ransom, if they don’t want you on their grid, or supplying software they do not approve of to their customers (you, me, everyone else) that will be the end of the story.
Its not rocket science, all LL has to do is send an e-mail to their customers saying Emerald is no longer approved for use in the grid and direct them to the TPV page or straight to their own viewer download page. That message can go out on MotD for a few days too. Linden Labs will not panic because a few thousand of their customers won’t be able to log in for less than an hour, providing LL has quickly communicated a solution to them.
Some people will be crying in their coffee in the morning when they wake up and realise they are a customer and not the owner of the company who runs the grid. To you bully-boy teen retards… off you go to another grid and have a go at throwing your weight about in Meta7, BlueMars or elsewhere.
Fractured Crystal would be lucky to remain in SL grid for pulling that “I’m bored so I will try to do a DDoS attack using this Emerald log-in” trick. He was in a position of responsibility in the Emerald Team and he failed dreadfully. I will not touch Emerald with a ten foot barge pole and I have always had my reservations using that viewer simply because of the reputation of the Emerald Team. There is no amount of public relations spin to repair this damage. If ex-Lindens want to join up with that Emerald Team, they will be tarred with the same brush. You swim with sharks, you are a shark.
J
Aug 24th, 2010
Arabella and Jessica are just as corrupt as the others. When’s the real dirt going to come out?
had enough
Aug 24th, 2010
Phillip and Soft don’t even have a hair on their asses. They will sit and hope this all blows over(remember the we are not responsible clause). Fractored will be back as an alt (if he isn’t already) and either emerald will still go along it’s usual path or they will change the viewers name and keep pulling the same stunts they have been pulling before. It would be really easy to say ” well I don’t use emerald, so this doesn’t affect me” but the problem is with what these little fur fags have done.The emerald team still invades your RL privacy using the cds or their little spybots to glean information from people who are simply going about their business in SL without a clue of what is going on. I sure as hell did not give any of those little fur fags permission to snoop around my computer or use some exploit to hack into it. Oh but thats ok, they have two ex lindens who have joined their team. Ok this is two ex employees who were betrayed by LL and forced to start all over again somewhere else when jobs are hard to find. Can’t you just feel the love flowing from them towards LL? I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if one or both of these ” yay we have two ex lindens on our team” didn’t have their hand in this as a way to get back at the people who betrayed them and threw them out into the cold. Hell if i had been fired like that, I know I might be tempted to do something to cripple my ex employer. So all of these little fur fag fans or fur fag lovers seem to think this is ok and try to defend the emerald team.
Well sorry, the little fur fags have been off their leashes to long and emerald along with their team has to go. They messed up and can never be trusted again.
Sitearm
Aug 24th, 2010
Hm… people are enraged that the viewer they liked is supported by a group of people who are all too human. If I were the Viewer 2 team, I’d be cheering the Viewer-Formerly-Known-as-Emerald team on, and to “hang in there!” If Fractured has indeed “been thrown to the sharks,” it appears that we have met the sharks and they are US.
On the positive side, the Herald’s having a field day. I don’t usually read it for the expose articles… I like Pappy Enoch and the occasional Grrrrl pic. But this last series has been provocative and interesting. Well done, Pixeleen!
PS Pixeleen, might we please also have a Booooy pic series?
PPS Arabella, please be sure to keep the bouncing bosoms viewer option in whatever Emerald becomes next
PPPS Fractured, please reincarnate as your next alt soon, and keep coming up with your fantastic ideas. The mob is fickle and loves a contrite bad boy (or girl) as much as it loves a hero. Throughout history, it’s been hard to tell the difference.
PPPPS Not that I am calling myself or faithful Herald readers a mob *coff*
PPPPPS Not that I like boys any more than I like girls um… I mean, men any more than women… it’s just that I need some ideas for my different alts, and pictures rock. Also, we need after seeing Pappy’s avatar in his stories, I need to see another male avatar somewhere on the page to get over the shock
At0m0 Beerbaum
Aug 24th, 2010
amazing how many emerald apologists are coming out of the woodwork.
“see you really shouldnt be mad at emerald, and should in fact, embrace them! you should feel bad for being mad at them for doing bad things, it’s quite okay!”
compared to “OMG THEY STOOD ON MY E-LAWN, HUB OF GRIEFERS THEY NEED TO BE BANNED”
Degenerates tend to stick together, that or alts for emerald
Slayer
Aug 24th, 2010
No shit. Ok gee whiz he is just an 18 year old kid playing a little prank. Oh ok, that makes it ok to take control of a persons computer and try to do harm to someone else.. Griefers griefing Second life are just little kids playing a little prank crashing sims. I guess that is ok because it was just a prank. It’s ok when the little kids copybot, after all they are just kids and it’s a prank.
That’s a pretting fucking lame excuse. This guy knew what he was doing and he knew it was illegal.
Yes At0m0, these more than likely are alts of the emerald team trying to drum up fake support for their malware infested program and try to downplay what they have done. I have seen people perma banned from SL for less than this.
Second Life is watching Phillip, if you do not get rid of these hackers and griefers, I think you will be getting rid of any trust or credibility that your customers have for you.
Hell by letting this slide you are saying ” this is ok”. and ” I do not care about my customers security while using my service.”
General Drama
Aug 24th, 2010
FWIW, I lean in favor of LL refunding Woodbury their money rather than giving them their sims back. Woodbury seems to be doing just fine outside SL, and SL is all the poorer for it.
We’re just waiting for Pixeleen to move the Herald’s HQ from SL to another VW.
Nelson Jenkins
Aug 24th, 2010
@ General Drama
I lean in favor of you giving up this silly fight. Woodbury is very, very old news, and the grid is more or less indifferent about their departure. Stop bringing in Woodbury to every single conversation on AH. It’s got absolutely nothing to do with this article.
ɀ
Aug 24th, 2010
@Nelson
The individual attacked by Emerald was a founding member of Woodbury University, and also the person that compiled the incriminating documents submitted to Soft and Joe which lead to Woodbury’s demise back in April.
It has everything to do with it.
J
Aug 24th, 2010
Er, actually, it’s got a lot to do with the recent incident. The attack by the Emerald developers was against a prominent member of Woodbury University. Emerald was probably also responsible for the unjust Woodbury ban, due to the same, prominent Woodbury member uncovering Emerald abuse. LL should have banned Emerald, not Woodbury University.
General Drama
Aug 24th, 2010
Nelson,
Evidently, you are outvoted.
Nelson Jenkins
Aug 24th, 2010
@ General Drama and the others
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again.
WU is dead. The Lab isn’t going to do anything further about it. Accept this and move on.
I’m related to this article myself, because I’m posting in it. I’m also part-German. Hitler was German. So, in essence, Hitler must be related to this article as well, no?
Tux
Aug 24th, 2010
It’s all PR bullshit so the sheeple head through the MS gates again. Factured will appear to hit the shit, only to bounce back in a new alt (as he has previously).
Emerald will publically assure sheeples that all is fine now (anyone subjected to their ‘secret’ conversations knows just how many share J’s FU’d plans).
EmDev will gain a new member.
But, J fails to be able to hide himself as his arrogance is so bloated he actually runs slower than the fat viewer. It wont be long before he shows himself.
I can’t help but laugh at the sheeple believing the EmDevs. It takes very little looking to see them for what they are.
Still, I thank EmDev for some highly memorable moments, you guys had me laughing my nuts off!
And . . .
buh bye!
Kiddoh
Aug 24th, 2010
“I’m related to this article myself, because I’m posting in it. I’m also part-German. Hitler was German. So, in essence, Hitler must be related to this article as well, no?”
Hitler is related to every article. There isn’t a single article that does not have a Hitler reference… after Glenn Beck joined the scene that is~.
Nelson Jenkins
Aug 24th, 2010
Damnit… uh… I’m… gay? So we should talk about gay rights, because they’re related.
Kiddoh
Aug 24th, 2010
“Damnit… uh… I’m… gay? So we should talk about gay rights, because they’re related.”
You know who else talked about gay rights?
Hitler!
Nelson Jenkins
Aug 24th, 2010
No… no, he didn’t.
II Singh
Aug 24th, 2010
@Nelson…… Bravo man, excellent post. AH needs you as a reporter instead. I have yet to see a post or an article that comes close to covering the extent of the “bad smell” emanating from the aptly named Emerald “ranks”.
Nelson Jenkins
Aug 24th, 2010
@ II Singh
I usually don’t care much for AH (the Post 6′s and Pappy stuff generally bores me to death), but I’ve got a few friends in high places and I’ve grown sick and tired of Emerald’s antics, so I figured I’d do what I can to help.
Millennium Sands
Aug 24th, 2010
It’s old news by now (some hours mean an eternity in this ongoing story
), but everybody was so occupied with posting and reading post that you probably forgot to read your e-mails. 
YOU’VE GOT MAIL FROM PHILLIP; ALL OF YOU!
And he also posted that mail in the SL blogs.
Kiddoh
Aug 24th, 2010
@Nelson:
“Nazi forces engaged in numerous violent acts during the war, including the systematic murder of as many as 17 million civilians,[3] an estimated six million of whom were Jews targeted in the Holocaust and between 500,000 and 1,500,000 were Romanis.[4] Others targeted included ethnic Poles, Soviet civilians, Soviet prisoners of war, people with disabilities, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and other political and religious opponents.”
“Soviet prisoners of war, people with disabilities, –>homosexuals<–, Jehovah's Witnesses, and other political and religious opponents."
:3
General Drama
Aug 24th, 2010
>Soviet prisoners of war< = Woodbury
Glenn Beck
Aug 24th, 2010
You know who else suffered a mutiny?
…Hitler
Charity Stohr
Aug 24th, 2010
“Late last week, we discovered a denial-of-service attack that was being served through the widely distributed Emerald third-party viewer. This is in direct violation of our third-party viewer policy (part 2, section d, paragraph iii).
We have removed Emerald from the list of third-party viewers, and are now in touch with the Emerald team to discuss what can happen next. We did this to do our best to protect the safety and security of Second Life users. We will not tolerate a viewer that includes malicious code, nor will we tolerate development teams with a history of violating users’ trust or disrupting their lives.” – Phillip Linden
So this makes Skills Hak a liar then. No wait. This is another example of Skills Hak lying. fix’d
Willard47
Aug 25th, 2010
yu know? I had to look up DDOS. I read quite a bit about it and how it was used to crash Iranian prime ministers site and other political or student protest stunts and how you can get 10 years in prison in the UK or 6 in the USA. It is a serious crime therefore the Em Devs are crimnials not to mention the breach of trust with Emerald viewer users. Limdon Labs should definately ban that viewer no matter how good it seems to be or how many residents have to swap to another viewer. Standards of behaviour need to be set and maintained. Silly little boys and girls need to be spanked. Like there isn’t already enough ordinary day to day problems for residents to be concerned with? Off with thier heads!
Acridity
Aug 25th, 2010
Totally against using the 2.0 viewer, so I have some limited options.
Those taking a stand against unsavory practices and uninstalling Emerald should probably also uninstall Windows as well. If you’re gonna do something, may as well do something right.
SL is not without their own unsavory practices as well. Right now, Philip seems hell-bent on increasing traffic and numbers to SL when the infrastructure can’t even handle what it has now, You’d think AOL’s example would have stuck. More people = more lag, less database response time, and lower performance. It’s as if Philip wants to mount an AOL-like scenario to SL. Get as many people in and to hell with anyone who can’t connect, has lag, or can’t rez any objects. Great business plan there. Gold star.
To be honest, I’m pretty sick of the whole thing right now… it reminds me of a bunch of preschoolers pointing fingers, including the folks at Linden Lab. If it’s found that it was a true DDOS attack, he should face whatever’s coming to him, of course. However, this whole issue of “trust” is a bit sketchy. I can trust LL to ignore just about any ticket I submit, any JIRA vote I cast, and any AR I file. I can also trust the SL servers to eat all my nocopy items, to crash on a whim, and to rubberband me to oblivion. Not much else to trust out there, rather than the almighty BSOD. The issue of trust on the internet is a kind of joke. Who am I? Is that really Glenn Beck? Can you really trust anything you read on this site, or any other site for that matter?
Good luck with those Windows uninstalls…
Willard47
Aug 25th, 2010
@Acridity
Funny how a criminal offence suddenly becomes unsavoury behaviour? and you are trying to say that it isn’t clear that a ddos attack was carried out when it is very clear it was. As far as lag is concerned in sl? That very much depends where you are at any given tme and the number of avatars connected to the sim. The grid itself is well within its limits. It seems to me that your points if you actually have any are either unresearched or unclear or both. When it comes to finger pointing I can only agree with you except you need to include yourself in that catagory and btw I am no preschooler the name I am using is a good indicater of the advancement of years I have. Finally. Everyone is entitled to thier opinion be it right or wrong and that is the point of a blog. Here is another opinion of mine. You need to do your homework and cheerup mate.
John Life Smith
Aug 25th, 2010
I am very annoyed at Lindens for “having a talk” with the Dev of Emerald. They do not deserve anymore chances.
Lindens needs to remove the Viewer all together.
Lindens is now supporting the people who do malicious coding.
They have known this for a long time and only reason they are doing they TALKED to them is cause the team got caught with a real life criminal activity.
Gundel Gaukelei
Aug 26th, 2010
$ host emeraldviewer.net
emeraldviewer.net has address 178.63.78.66
$host modularsystems.sl
modularsystems.sl has address 178.63.78.66
The very same lighttpd, running at the same box over there at the Hetzner datacenter.
Yeah, modularsystems is so totally not associated with emerald anymore. LOL!
Nelson Jenkins
Aug 26th, 2010
@ Gundel Gaukelei
I can’t actually get to the blog through emeraldviewer.net.
Gundel Gaukelei
Aug 26th, 2010
;; ANSWER SECTION:
blog.modularsystems.sl. 85 IN A 76.74.254.120
and
$ host 76.74.254.120
120.254.74.76.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer wordpress.com
while
;; ANSWER SECTION:
blog.emeraldviewer.net. 14400 IN CNAME emeraldviewer.net.
emeraldviewer.net. 12472 IN A 178.63.78.66
Thats why.
Willard47
Aug 26th, 2010
@pefton
What apology?
Why are you defending criminal behaviour?
Meh
Aug 26th, 2010
“@ Hazim: This is directly related to Woodbury. Modular Systems had their entire university banned from SL because they did the same thing you did, only they did it a few months earlier, and they released their findings on YouTube and in the Herald. This vindicates them, and LL owes them an apology for it.”
I had to read that a couple times before I figured out what you mean, Trisk, but no, just because Woodbury did it before Modular Systems did it does not make WU right and MS wrong. It just means they both screwed up, they both got caught, and they both went down. Whee.
There are no martyrs here. Only hackers hacking each other’s servers and accounts and anybody else who gets in their way. Both WU and MS deserved what they’re getting at the very least.
Kiddoh
Aug 26th, 2010
@Meh: You are full of shit taking a post that makes absolutely no sense and trying to twist it in your favor. All WU did was sit there and look pretty. It was the WRONG HANDS that actually did anything which was at most, Recording Conversations and putting them on Youtube. The hacking was done by Hazim and Hazim alone, it was neither an act of WU or the Wrong Hands.
Seriously, it makes me
seeing you guys be so wrong all the time.
Willard47
Aug 26th, 2010
@Kiddoh
If you can’t make your point without being abusive or personal one would think you don’t have a point to make? Meh does have a point even if the details are a bit confused. Two wrongs do not make a right.
Meh
Aug 26th, 2010
Meh. The Lindens must have had something serious on you or you wouldn’t all be banned. Seriously, you’re all righteous and “we did this great stuff” and bla bla bla until somebody points out that you did crazy shit you’d be arrested for if you got caught doing it, then you’re all “Oh, that wasn’t us.”
Either it was, or it wasn’t, Kiddoh, you can’t have it both ways.
Also The Wrong Hands are all – ALL – banned now, except Tux, and I hear he’s on the short list and going soon too.
Meh
Aug 26th, 2010
Also, everybody knows The Wrong Hands as Woodbury was the same exact people, so I’m calling this a severe case of bullshit.
General Drama
Aug 26th, 2010
Willard47,
This is the herald, where scatological aspersions are literature (Prokofy got her curse filled start here).
“Meh” is, in fact, full of shit, literally, and has proven it repeatedly with his/her/its utter inability to get any facts straight. Thats not an ad hominem, that’s a diagnosis.
Kiddoh’s point was that all the Wrong Hands did was record a public conversation, which is perfectly legal in most all jurisdictions, given that there is no legal presumption of privacy in public. Hazim’s “hacking” involved being a member of the Emerald dev team, accessing the emdev server, and whistleblowing on their criminal activities that he discovered. The response of the Emerald team to Hazims whistleblowing constituted racketeering, conspiracy, among other criminal offenses.
So, there were not any ‘two wrongs’ done here.
Roger Roger
Aug 26th, 2010
Except that Hazim, Woodbury, and the Wrong Hands are all the same people. You can’t just put on a different afro wig and call yourself something else and say it wasn’t you.
Meh’s right, and you’re a bullshitter like the rest of them.
Yet another Emerald blog post | sweet f.a.
Aug 26th, 2010
[...] rest of the team moved swiftly disassociate themselves from these actions. According to Skills Hak, they asked that Emerald be removed from the list of TVPs. According to Philip Linden’s [...]
Willard47
Aug 26th, 2010
General Drama
OK I may be missing the point here? I am more familiar with the recent goings on at Emarald. Not so well informed with the Hazim story but things are becoming clear. I am guilty of judging the comments mostly on thier own merit and so may have picked up the wrong end of the stick in a manner of speaking. As far as I am aware? Scatology is humour in the realms of literary pisstaking rather than full on direct abuse. So maybe you mean it is ok to be insulting in the Herald if you know someone has a rep for talking shit? I wasn’t trying to defend Meh. I was only drawing attention to the venom of the response. hence the comment two wrongs don’t make a right, but if as you suggest it is ok to be insulting in the herald? Then you are also correct in your assertion that there arn’t any two wrongs.
Tux
Aug 31st, 2010
@ Meh
‘Also The Wrong Hands are all – ALL – banned now, except Tux, and I hear he’s on the short list and going soon too.’
Wrong and wrong, lol.
I have nothing to do with TWH. never have. Nor much with WU aside from sharing a little interest here and there. As for being on a short list. who knows, or even cares. But I doubt it. My account is in good standing and haven’t even have a linden sniff my tail in a while.
Thanks for the name drop though, I hadn’t been following much!
Kiddoh
Sep 1st, 2010
@Roger Roger: I think your comment entitles you to get mathed in the face.
Based on your logic, 1 = 3 because three can be made up through the addition of three ones; however you neglect to treat the three ones as individual numbers.
1 = Wrong Hands
0.5 = Hazim
1.5 = The rest of WU
3 = WU
1 =/= 3 (The Wrong Hands =/= WU)
0.5 =/= 3 (Hazim =/= WU)
1.5 =/= 3 (A portion of WU =/= all of WU)
1 + 0.5 = 1.5 =/= 3 (Wrong Hands + Hazim =/= WU)
1 + 1.5 = 2.5 =/= 3 (Wrong Hands + Rest =/= WU)
0.5 + 1.5 = 2 =/= 3 (Hazim + Rest =/= WU)
1.5 + 1 + 0.5 = 3 (Wrong Hands + Hazim + Rest = WU)
Simply put: You’re Wrong.