LordGregGreg Exits Emerald Viewer Team
by Pixeleen Mistral on 15/08/10 at 8:10 pm
Developer concerned about stealth code in Emerald viewer
LordGregGreg announced his departure from the Emerald viewer development team, saying that he is unable to track code added by other developers, and can no longer to provide assurances that Emerald does not contain stealth user-tracking "features". This is the latest in a series of internal Emerald disagreements that have apparently taken the fun out of working on the popular third party Second Life viewer for LordGregGreg – a player who was instrumental in assembling the Emerald viewer team.
LordGregGreg
I chatted with LordGregGreg Saturday as he considered his options while sitting under a tree next to several pools of molten lava, appearing as his signature one-of-a-kind custom avatar. When asked what he plans to do next, he said, "Right now I do not have anything serious lined up for my free time, I will be looking for a way to make a few people smile, but probably on a much more private level for now on".
While LordGregGreg was reluctant to talk in detail, he agreed to allow the Herald to re-post his Emerald Reassessment post — apparently his reticence is due to concerns his departure may create more drama within the Emerald team.
But drama has plagued the group – most recently the Emerald developers have been at the center of a series of revelations that the Emerald viewer harvests the directory path from which the application is run and stores this in the baked avatar texture, where it can be retrieved by others. With some users running Emerald from their home directory, usernames and real life full names can be exposed via the avatar texture. While the directory path is encrypted, the encryption has been broken on two occasions to date.
LordGregGreg’s lair
Although it appears that only one of the Emerald developers – Phox – is responsible for this "feature", it is distressing that he has claimed to have removed the stealth collection of potentially player identifying information on several occasions, yet the information was later shown to still be present leading some to believe that Phox may not be entirely trustworthy.
Hazim Gazov neatly summarized the situation on the sluniverse forums saying,
A few people were working on decoding the messages encoded in the baked layers, and we spoke with LGG each time we found something. LGG spoke with the other Emerald developers at length about it, but it appears that they either didn’t care, or they wanted that information stored in the baked layers, in the case of "the three" that he mentioned.
The first time the encryption was broken, and it came out that paths and window titles were being disclosed for anyone with the right software to see, LGG spoke with Phox about it and Phox said the encryption would be changed to AES and any possibly identifying information other than what viewer was being run would be removed.
The encryption was broken again, the exact same things were left in from before, only the encryption had changed, LGG spoke with Phox again. Phox said the encryption would be changed, and identifying information other than what viewer was being run would be removed. You’ll notice there’s a pattern emerging here.
Likely they will now move the leak to some other component, but if they do decide to keep it in there and change the encryption, I’m sure people will work on it to break it again.
TL;DR lying to your own users is a shitty thing to do.
With a lack of trust within the team, unable to gain transparent access into the binary build process, and unhappy Phox’s "feature" was added to the Emerald viewer without his knowledge, it is not surprising LordGregGreg quit the team saying, "Unfortunately, I do not feel confident enough to support it any more, for a number of reasons. I did not realize at the time that emkdu was added, that it could be used to add in code I was not able to see. These things were done behind my back, it was found out by others that code was placed in that braodcasted your viewers title bar and executable path in a obfuscated manner. This was addressed, promised to be fixed, and (luckily) people broke through the now encrypted layer to find out that it was not."
The relationships within the team had apparently been strained for some time – LordGregGreg had fought for viewer controls over a hidden media exploit that can be used by Second Life landowners to silently harvest other players’ IP addresses – the basis for the CDS system — but was overruled.
The full text of LordGregGreg’s post is reproduced below:
This post is one I have needed to make a long time ago. This is totally in my eyes, my personal perception, as very few things were ever written down.
Emerald is no longer what It was for me, I have been dedicating a ridiculous amount of my time to this project for near two years now, and It’s been difficult to see it go the way it has.
It started off as a joint effort to bring talented people together to make something that people could really appreciate it, something that I could work on and give as a gift to my friends. All sorts of people have worked on it over the time, some people whom I trusted and respected, and some that I took things as they came. The similar thing was that it appeared that we were all working to be productive and helpful, to make an amazing viewer. Trust was never a critical point in the project, as everything that was done was transparent to everyone. Every code change was easily viewable by everyone, including the public, so there was really no issue with worrying about someone adding something nasty. Back when there were questions of the viewers integrity, I personally put my support behind it, promising that I would double and triple check code commits as much as I could to ensure that everyone was secure.
Unfortunately, I do not feel confident enough to support it any more, for a number of reasons. I did not realize at the time that emkdu was added, that it could be used to add in code I was not able to see. These things were done behind my back, it was found out by others that code was placed in that braodcasted your viewers title bar and executable path in a obfuscated manner. This was addressed, promised to be fixed, and (luckily) people broke through the now encrypted layer to find out that it was not. Of-course, it has been promised to be fixed a third time, but now with an encryption level too high to be broken. Although replacing or deleting emkdu would resolve this issue, I also have to consider that this was hidden in the code for months without anyone knowing..
Regardless of the intentions of those who placed this code there, It has made one thing inescapably clear. I am not able to double check everything any more. I tried to find a solution to resolve this matter, but it appears that most people do not care about this to the level that I do. I made sure the other emerald devs were aware of what is going on via this. As mentioned there, closed source, hidden designs and single developer licenses have no place in emerald. People can make mistakes, but it is important that others can double check without having to break through encryption. Nothing has changed however. This issue of being able to transparently check up on everyone is only to get worse in my opinion, as all new builds are planned to be done from a central build server, where access is cut off from the other developers. I consider trust issues with any binary of the highest importance, as even small library like this can have access to every file or memory on the computer, the same care must be taken with them as everything else.
Furthermore, there has been a issue with money, donations, advertisement profit, that has not been resolved how I felt that it should. Instead of the money being treated as a group project, and used appropriately (transparently to the other devs), it has been handled privately instead.
Additionally there has been some playful talk by a few developers to add services to emerald that would be used to profit certain developers. I have always felt that emerald should be a free project, both speech and beer, and that adding ways to make money off others free work was wrong in some way. Though, this is my personal opinion, and it is most defiantly not part of the GPL.
There have also been issues with public appearance and ignorant association. Although most intelligent people understand that the people who work on emerald do so separately, and that for the most part it is the only thing they work on together, this is not always clear, and there have been numerous times when I have had to fight to make it clear who participates in what, even on our own website. Before hand I could point out that what other devs have/are/will do is unrelated to me, but now even emerald now is moving in the direction they want it, to the extent that I feel it is important to distinguish myself from it.
I have had a few people ask me why I did not do something about this, something sooner, and the reason is that this is not my project more than it is all of the other developers, in my opinion. I have done my part to make sure that they are aware of this, but their decisions are their own. I would have said something sooner, but I was trying my hardest to get this resolved internally.
This seems to have mostly been a misunderstanding on my part. I had assumed emerald was what I wanted it to be, when now it is very clear that it is not on a number of issues. Therefore I feel that it is my responsibility to make a few points clear from now on.
-
Emerald is beyond my ability to verify the integrity of the code involved. For people concerned about spy-ware, adware, backdoors, etc, I strongly encore you to do your own research, as you should with every program you install, and make this decision yourself. I am aware of two instances of what I consider bad code in emkdu, and have given instructions on how to remove this part from emerald, however in the future even that will not be enough. A decent solution is to compile the viewer yourself, and only include components that you trust.
-
The money made by emerald has not, and will not ever go to me. It has always been important to me that my work has been completely for free on this project.
-
The actions behind emerald, and other developers other projects, and any implied moral implications have nothing to do with me. I personally disagree with the points in emerald that I have mentioned here, and for projects that I am unrelated in (like onyx, cds) I don’t have anything to do with them!
Furthermore, as you can probably guess, my involvement in emerald will be much less in the future, unless something is done to address these issues. I would still love to help people as I always have with emerald support, and I will still be adding any features I think would help people out to emerald (though i think a good patch for other viewers will also be provided), but as far as the direction emerald is going, I am out of it.
It is very distressful to have to sever some ties to a project I have put so much dedication and time behind.. it has postponed this decision for a long while, but there is a time for everything, and I think I can find new ways to be productive better than working on emerald.
To the people who have took my word on emerald’s credibility, I apologize deeply for my claims.
It’s been fun, I have learned allot from people who code better than I probably ever will be able to, and there are times when it has been great, thank you very much to all the other developers, and supporters. I hope you understand.
(edit: no, i really don’t feel like forking or doing my own builds or taking anyone’s money to do so, im quite sick of emerald right now, if one were to do so, the code you can see in the svn is clean last i checked, the rest, i don’t know)
(edit: for the people who believe that I am doing this to cause drama, or that I am trying to destroy emerald, please reconsider. This post was made to clear my conscience and bring the truth as best as I saw it to people who were relying on me. I wish no harm on anyone, I am sorry that things came to this, but it was all stuff I could have fixed long ago, I do not hate anyone. Please beware of people misquoting me or adding on to what I have said here, I have made this long an thorough for a reason, I do not need drama people corrupting it)
(edit: to be extremely clear, most devs in emerald do not have anything to do with emkdu. The code was for a single developer, and it was passed around to no more than 3 devs that I am aware of, the rest of them are all in a similar boat as me afaik)
(edit: so apparently someone got my access removed from the svn and a few other things for posting this, sorry to the people who have pointed out the few last minute things I should have fixed, looks like they will have to wait)
(edit: to the other developers who feel like I have betrayed you and was foolish by making this public, I am very affected and would please ask you to consider my position. I have tried every way I know of to get this resolved before hand, but I have been left in a position where I have people relying on my public words on this, keeping this to myself or trying to whisper it to all of them would have been betraying the rest of these people, and there wasn’t any other way to correct this)
Calif
Aug 15th, 2010
He was pushed out cause he’s a fanatic script kiddie. Rainbow particle beams, no thanks! He was paranoid and obsessed with privacy, and i mean in a really fanatic, dangerous way..
A1
Aug 15th, 2010
I rely on Emerald to build with and that’s pretty much all I do in SL is build stuff. I really don’t know how I could be as successful as I am building if I had to use the SL V2 viewer. Emerald is running on my high end computer with a ton of business, health, tax, ID information, card numbers and other sensitive personal information. If the Emerald team cannot make the source transparent so that their users can find out if our computers are being compromised, then its time Linden Research Inc. stepped in and on behalf of their customers banned this viewer from being used within Second Life. If there is even one corrupt developer working on this project with the evil intent of harvesting credit card numbers any other black market information, then for the good of the users in Second Life this viewer needs to be banned, the legal names of the open source developers need to be made public and legal action from State Attorneys need to be taken. Any software organization, open source or proprietary, that stands accused of attempting to harvest private data from their users computers should be investigated. Linden Labs needs to step up, demand that Emerald source pass Linden testing, or Emerald should be banned from Second Life.
Millennium Sands
Aug 15th, 2010
@Calif
So the Emerald team is NOT obsessed with privacy?
Quite enlightening. That’s what I’d call dangerous…
Baloo Uriza
Aug 15th, 2010
How can you be dangerously obsessed with privacy and security concerns? The world needs people like that.
A1
Aug 15th, 2010
What we have here with LordGregGreg is a Whistle Blower (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/whistle+blower) from within the ranks of Modular Systems LLC. Now sit back and see who demonizes LordGregGreg. Because as we have seen time and time again in the news, its the whistle blower who gets condemned the most, while the corporations hide the truth. Remember, one of the worse PR mistakes Linden Research Inc. could ever make, would be to allow the use of a malicious viewer on their system, and have users compromised by private data theft. Regardless of what TOS say, Linden has an obligation to protect their investors.
Bubblesort Triskaidekaphobia
Aug 15th, 2010
LGG is a great guy. I’ve spoken to him a few times before and he always struck me as a very competent adult, which I can’t say for anybody else I’ve met on the Emerald dev team. I think he was probably the one holding the project together, and the only reason I trusted emerald at all.
@Calif: Sounds like sour grapes to me. LGG had his proxy way before he started on emerald.
I’ve been using imprudence for a while now. It has better performance and better features than Emerald. Everybody on OS seems to be on it. Emerald is in decline. If LGG doesn’t trust emerald, that’s good enough for me.
Millennium Sands
Aug 15th, 2010
Here’s a news from the Emerald blog, posted by arabellasteadham on August 15, 2010
“Following on from yesterday’s news, it is with pleasure that I can now announce the addition of a new member to the Emerald Team.
Qarl Fizz, formerly known as Qarl Linden has joined us. We know you will join us in making Qarl welcome, and look forward to his contribution to the Project.”
I suppose we can only hope that Qarl is a LL undercover mole, checking in secrecy what the Emerald team is REALLY up to.
Uhm, well… I certainly don’t intend to seed paranoia among the Emerald team. But thinking about it, I don’t need to worry. People who obviously don’t give a damn about privacy rarely have a tendency to become paranoid.
Yep
Aug 16th, 2010
“Qarl Fizz, formerly known as Qarl Linden has joined us. We know you will join us in making Qarl welcome, and look forward to his contribution to the Project.””
Or a disgruntled employee with an axe to grind with LL who fired him.
Cinco Pizzicato
Aug 16th, 2010
Imprudence has weekly releases, you know… And build math and selective muting of gestures, and… A lot less drama.
A1
Aug 16th, 2010
@ Bubblesort
Thanks for the tip about Imprudence. Downloaded it, logged in, configured it, rebooted, and I have to say your right about the better performance, and better features than Emerald. There are a lot of good things to say about Imprudence. Emerald has been uninstalled.
Glenn Beck
Aug 16th, 2010
You know who else helped developed Emerald?
…Hitler.
General Drama
Aug 16th, 2010
Aaaand Karma’s Hammer swings again…. what is truly amusing is that it has taken the fanboi crowd so long to admit what they’d been warned about months ago by the Woodbury crew, but heck, everybody knows Woodbury U doesn’t know what its talking about… right?
Little Lost Linden
Aug 16th, 2010
I heard that Hitler had something to do with the Emerald build but I couldn’t prove it.
Now I know for sure. Thanks Glenn.
As Hitler sometimes says:
Guten Tag!!!
http://thebotzone.net/2010/07/07/linden-lab-search-and-nazi-yahtzee/
Saige Garden
Aug 16th, 2010
I bet Prokofy Neva is rubbing her/his hands together in glee over this bit of news.
Charity Stohr
Aug 16th, 2010
I find it amusing that people still trust Emerald after all the bullshit they keep pulling. They act like a mafia cult. They boast about their developers and their achievements when they are in and bash & shun them when they leave. They constantly are out for ways to destroy their perceived enemies, by attempting to get their dox, planning to break into their homes and steal their computers, or defaming them. Once they do get exposed they pull pages right out of the Scientology PR handling handbook by either ignoring it, attempting to silence dissenters or creating black PR those who speak out.
Why Linden Lab allows Fractured Crystal to post Emerald viewer on their 3rd party viewer directory even though the head developers are blatantly defying rule #1 is beyond me.
From http://viewerdirectory.secondlife.com/ :
“Rule #1: Your Second Life accounts must be in good standing, must not be suspended, and must not have been permanently banned or terminated.”
Tell me how many accounts has jcool/Fractured Crystal had that were permabanned for greifing and developing v-Life?
Relevant videos:
jcool acknowledge he maintains a grefier viewer and being permabanned. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRbV9SIbdCA
Ph0x saying he’s going to steak Hazim’s computer. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XnlYqJqLVI
Gundel Gaukelei
Aug 16th, 2010
@Charity Stohr:
There is really no reason to be worried at all, because the modular systems blog clearly states:
“You can be assured that Emerald will maintain it’s high standard of integrity, honesty and ethics that have contributed to it’s development thus far”
Don’t worry, be happy.
Danziel Lane
Aug 16th, 2010
@ Gundel
Sounds a bit like what those mails from NIgeria promise:
“You can be assured that the former minster has always been an example of integrity, honesty and ethics and will maintain his high standard during the transaction of his money to your bank account”
So, yes, I don’t worry, I’m happy.
But honestly: a bit more of evidence that there was, is and will be such a high standard would be nice.
We
Aug 16th, 2010
People act like Emerald or SLV2 are the only choices out there. There’s other TPV viewers, most as good or better than Emerald. Imprudence viewer is one of the latter. Stable, smooth viewer, has just about all the features of Emerald, without any of the shady douchebag devs or drama.
This should mention the ModularSystem’s Blog post they did about LordGreggreg leaving, which was snidely written and a general hissy fit. Ignoring LordGreggreg’s concerns about the emkdu and downplayed his work in Emerald, calling him a “Minor ex-dev”, while suggesting that he was being overly dramatic and leaving for stupid reasons. They were also actively deleting comments to the story, removing all the comments that pointed out the real reason for him leaving or other negative remarks regarding it.
Gundel Gaukelei
Aug 16th, 2010
And here comes Danziel the doubter.. Let not your heart be troubled…
When a truth is sufficiantly appreciated, ignorance goes by the name of faith, while evidence is considered an unsolicited source of irritation.
Blessed are the gullible, for they shall be deceived.
@We: the whole blog post felt like it was missing a “SCNR”.
Arrehn
Aug 16th, 2010
As a developer active with open source projects, I’ve been following third party viewer developments ongoing through the year.
I find it disturbing that LGG expressed a valid, substantiated *technical concern* about the content of a library, and the lack of transparency surrounding how it is built.
Instead of responding to the technical concern and process flaws, the post on the Modular Systems blog attempts to disparage LGG’s character, downplays his contributions, insinuates he may be doing something ‘illegitimate’, and only says he was ‘outvoted’, while conspicuously failing to mention that the subject of the ‘vote’ was user’s privacy expectations.
People will have to draw their own conclusions. For myself, I think this response speaks volumes.
The world needs more people like LGG.
David McNaughten
Aug 16th, 2010
Meh. Woodbury hacks into Modular Systems database, expects cookie, gets permatrashed down to the foundations instead. Game over.
Bubblesort Triskaidekaphobia
Aug 16th, 2010
I knew the name Hazim Garzov looked familiar, but it took me a little while to remember who he is. He’s the guy who makes the copybot client Inertia. It’s somewhat hobbled compared to other copybots (a lot of the export features are not supported by a corresponding import feature), but it’s still one of the more popular copybot clients.
I’m not judging the guy. In fact, I don’t think he’s doing anything wrong. I’m just not sure if he’s somebody you want to be arguing your case when you are trying to take the moral high ground like LGG is doing.
Kiddoh
Aug 16th, 2010
@Gundel: When did you become a priest? :O
Noisey
Aug 16th, 2010
I read the Emerald blog post re: LGG’s departure with some sadness and couldn’t help notice the sour grapes in the OP’s words.
I had no idea why LGG had apparently ‘lost it’ but I had used his PAR Pulgins pre Greenlife Emerald days and knew he was dedicated to security, privacy and a better SL experience.
When I first heard how Phox’s CDS system works and the personal information gathered from my PC (including names of Alts) I was wary that anyone who was prepared to commit a cyber crime (because that is what it is) was also working on the Emerald viewer.
My blog post on the modular systems site was not accepted by the moderator. It simply said;
“I’m sad to see LGG leave the Emerald team. It was his plug-ins that led me eventually to Greenlife Emerald that we now collectively call Emerald. I don’t know or care about the internal fractions that led to his departure but I know the guy is a very talented coder and a loss to the Emerald team. I’d like to take the opportunity to wish LGG all the best for the future.”
Now I have done my own research and discovered the real reasons LGG decided to quit, my much loved Emerald will be uninstalled and I will check out some other TPV’s that are truly open source and do not come with data miners, encrypted backdoors and drama.
The way the Emerald team have handled this from the moment LGG expressed his concerns is a huge PR disaster.
I was an Emerald fangrrl, it’s all I used but now with this news, no way!
Noisey
Aug 16th, 2010
edit : It was Skills’ CDS system not Phox – sorry about that
Baloo Uriza
Aug 16th, 2010
I bet Prokofy Neva is rubbing her/his hands together in glee over this bit of news.
If so, it would be the first time in recent memory that the Church of Proktology was right about something.
Gundel Gaukelei
Aug 16th, 2010
@Kiddoh:
I had to in order to understand the true nature of things. When I started seeing everything in the light of religion, I was getting much better results. The real truth is what people want to believe in, not what’s physical real. The great thing with this is that everyone can have his own truth plus it works great for politics, 419 scam and selling apple computers. Blue pills are longsellers.
Gundel Gaukelei
Aug 16th, 2010
PS: yes, also those sold by Pfizer
When words collide « Living in the Modem World
Aug 16th, 2010
[...] for leaving were pretty clearly stated, and have been widely reported by supporters of Emerald and snipers [...]
Emerald Viewer vs. Imprudence Viewer | Ancient Homelands
Aug 16th, 2010
[...] their senior guys, probably the guy who really was the cornerstone for the project resigned. On the Alphaville Herald there was an article covering his resignation and the events surrounding it. It turns out that the [...]
Millennium Sands
Aug 17th, 2010
@Noisey
it looks like your post was not the only one that wasn’t accepted by the Modular Systems operator.
While that issue is still discussed here, it seems to bother nobody there anymore. Most likely, because the thread is “closed” by a moderator who doesn’t accept new posts.
As a matter of fact, this attempt from the Emerald Team to harvest private data from their users was quite harmless, but maybe it was only a test balloon to harvest more sensitive data in the future. A balloon, testing what could be done without getting detected.
As a summary, you could say they had their experience, but the users of Emerald had theirs too!
Right now, when I check the folks around me, most of them use Emerald, or else they are noobs on 2.0/2.1.
However, I’ve never seen a team who was so eager to put a bullet into it’s head by ignoring the public voice. Modular Systems seems to be determined to outmatch even LL in this category. What they do is not simply bad PR, it’s suicide!
Three months from now, I expect to see Imprudence as the dominat client. In my opinion and concerning features, it’s not as good as Emerald , but it’s the only client left I could recommend to friends.
II Singh
Aug 17th, 2010
Imprudence is still missing many features I find handy. The double-click teleport and the gth chat features. I personally loathe emerald and coded my own viewer a one of a kind for only me. Other big missings from imprudence is the radar feature lacks a mute moderation option and a focus option. Frankly imprudence is only slightly better than hippo. I was more than disappointed with it since many of the features I rely on are not there. I believe it also doesn’t have the cntrl alt shift – clouds off feature as well.
I wouldn’t mind using it but frankly it holds little in the way of goodies over many of the simpler viewers.
Bubblesort Triskaidekaphobia
Aug 17th, 2010
@ Singh: Imprudence does have a radar. It’s part of the mini-map. It also lets you mute all gestures, which lets me actually enjoy clubs again. Double click teleport is on the input and camera tab, just select autopilot in the first drop down and teleport in the second. As far as kick/ban/mute, etc: I always find it easier to do admin actions on people’s profile pages with the admin options turned on, but that’s just how I do things.
At0m0 Beerbaum
Aug 17th, 2010
oh gee look, furries put spy code in their project, everyone ACT surprised!
This has been known since at least 2006 that furries have this strange urge to spy on others (probably to rid the grid of people who talk against them or may “fursecute” them)
remember the old stargate networks? bugged like no tomorrow, they listened in on local conversation, and not surprisingly, people who said the wrong words around them mysteriously ended up banned from SL.
Now we have furries developing a SL viewer they got a majority of SL users on, then they start slipping in code, trying to peer into the users’ computers themselves.
no real shock here, it’s what we warned against, and why woodbury ultimately got the axe in the end.
Sad when a bunch of people push this hard to control others in a fucking game. They cant just play, or enjoy things, they have to create their version of rules and try to grab some leverage over many people and get rid of those they do not like, and control the rest.
General Drama
Aug 17th, 2010
At0m0, this is a common tactic by content developers who want to build web traffic by hosting a big database of avatar keys for use by spy/weapon devices, security devices, etc.
Note that Angel Fluffy got w-hat to change the spelling of his name in their avatar key db to AngeL Fluffy (Large L at the end of AngeL) so that his key could not be found by scripted means or manual searches unless you knew of the intentional misspelling. This is how furrys like to have their cake and eat it too. Double standards and corruption all around.
Since the w-hat db is the most frequently referred key db…. used by most scripted radar systems, by banlink, and last time I checked, by JLU to populate their brainiac db (Kalolz, I’m in ur group, spillin’ ur sekrits). Sorry, Angel, but w-hat fixed that bug.
We
Aug 17th, 2010
@II Singh
Actually, of all the features you listed there, the only one that Imprudence doesn’t currently have is the gth command line feature. It has radar, it has double click teleports, it has turning off clouds, a “cam to” option for focusing on someone via the radar, all that stuff.
That’s really the biggest problem, there’s a lot of misconception about the other viewers, some think Emerald is the only one with any useful features, but the truth is pretty much all the other clients now have the important and useful features that Emerald has, in fact Emerald stole a few of them from other clients who made it and put it in theirs first.
Baloo Uriza
Aug 17th, 2010
“Stole” isn’t the word you’re looking for, since AFAICT, they’re giving the source code and attribution where it’s due. “Borrowed” is closer to what you’re looking for.
Baloo Uriza
Aug 17th, 2010
I see the /b/tard crowd is trying to stir trouble again.
We
Aug 17th, 2010
@Baloo Uriza
Fair enough.
Bubblesort Triskaidekaphobia
Aug 17th, 2010
Oh, I just thought of more things Imprudence can do that Emerald can not do:
1. Log in to open sim
2. Click the map button
3. If you are on Imprudence, this is where you look at the map. If you are on Emerald, this is where you stare at a blank page forever. The map tiles will never load on Emerald.
Also, if you want to fully rez textures in a reasonable amount of time then Imprudence does that better than Emerald.
The past few weeks in OpenSim I’ve probably seen 2 people with emerald viewers. Everybody else is on Imprudence.
II Singh
Aug 17th, 2010
@we I think I found another missing from the list of imprudence. I could be wrong most of the viewers have an option under advanced to limit (or better yet) turn off the limit to selection distance. I checked on the other features that bubblesort listed the locations of (thanks by the way), It is far better than my first few impressions made it out to be. For my own ways of doing things I do like the command line chat mode things an awful lot and select distance is rather useful on very large builds or checking perms or creator owner on an object across the sim or at least a significant distance away.
II Singh
Aug 17th, 2010
@Bubble if you are interested in annoying tricks/epic fails of emerald, try doing a gth 50000 in emerald and then doing a gth 30. Emerald’s cameras get hosed after a gth beyond the normal 5k or so. Pretty lame.
Emerald also seems to have an issue with muting conversations to groups you belong to. Occasionally spurious ims come through.
The mute chatter from particular groups is a nice feature. One that imprudence should implement. While I find belonging to certain groups useful, some of them are waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaayyy too chatty.
Bubblesort Triskaidekaphobia
Aug 17th, 2010
@Singh: Limit select distance and a lot of other useful build features are in tools > advanced build options. In that window you can move the pivot point of a prim, automatically rez using land group, fiddle with the ruler, etc. I think tools is a good location for that kind of thing.
I’d like to see somebody come up with a GUI development environment for viewer interface design. Interfaces seem to be mostly .xml files. Making an interface could be as easy as making a web page in front page. It would be even better if you could add and remove functions. I might say, “oh, I don’t need these selection beam features, I’ll just remove them, and the tab they’re on, then I want the radar in it’s own window instead of on the mini-map, so I’ll drag and drop that here and connect it to a new radar button at the bottom…” You see where I’m going with this. Eventually you could even download plugins just like for firefox. Why not install a backup (copybot) feature that only works on grids that do not ban that kind of thing? The metaverse is larger than SL now, so why let their TOS rule private grids?
Publish that for the new snowstorm code base and we could have all the 2.0 media features without the 2.0 interface. That could be important when they ship mesh.
We
Aug 17th, 2010
@II Singh
Actually, turning off the “limit select distance” is a default LL feature, which means unless they purposefully removed it (and why would they), every single client has it, Imprudence included.
I really liked the command line functions in emerald (well really just gth and rezplat, it’s all I ever used), but I’ve learned to work without them just fine. I’m hoping the Imprudence team will put them in at some point. They do updates every week and are pretty responsive on the forums, so it’s very possible.
slz
Aug 18th, 2010
The key problem here is Phox. He adds people to the Gemini CDS ban list if they speak out against him and he adds his own ‘spy code’ to Emerald. He’s known as a thief and a liar. Googling [elided], which is Phox’s real name, will give you an indication that he’s stolen from people.
Get rid of Phox, get rid of the so-called devs that also work on Gemini CDS and the emerald house would once again be clean. Until such a time, I’d recommend using Imprudence.
Hazim Gazov
Aug 18th, 2010
@Bubblesort Triskaidekaphobia
Considering LGG wouldn’t have known about the issue in the first place without the help of several “copybot viewer” developers, I don’t see how he had a choice in the matter.
He was arguing our case, not the other way around.
On the subject of Inertia, I would hardly call the viewer I work on “popular”, I’m going to take a wild guess and say it has 400 regular users. I’d rather idiots who are just looking to steal content stick with hex edited versions of neillife, but I’m also not going to restrict importing or exporting on account of complaints from people who aren’t even my users if it restricts usability.
At0m0 Beerbaum
Aug 18th, 2010
@baloo
not stirring trouble, I assume you meant me and general.
or maybe just me, and decided to be vague.
I’m simply pointing out reality. I have yet to see a viewer or project created by a furry that doesn’t secretly spy on its own users for whatever paranoid psychotic reasons furries have to spy on everyone else. (OMG THEY MIGHT BE TALKING AGAINST ME! I WILL HAVE THEM *RUINED*)
Baloo Uriza
Aug 18th, 2010
@At0m0: Legitimate question: What evidence do you have that the person you’re referring to is a furry and not running a false flag operation? I ask this, because most furries I know are more inclined to ignore the bullshit than bait it so flagrantly.
tatanya
Aug 18th, 2010
apologies for being completely off topic here but….
@baloo, look up macarthyism, homosexual agenda, persecution of jews, and a whole slew of other well blown out hysterics based on misconceptions and ignorance.
take your last paragraph and replace “furry/furries” with any social group and you have statements that are reminiscent of these.
With extraordinary claims comes the burden of extraordinary proof. To accept these statements with out the proof that they require, just adds to the hysteria. Where is the proof that every person in SL who wears an animal head is tracking you, is paranoid and is psychotic?
It’s behavior like this that really end any respect or glimmer of intelligence and ability to critically think that I might have assigned to you. And I hope society on the whole feels the same way.
Little Lost Linden
Aug 18th, 2010
Hitler just called, he wants his Emerald back.