Emerald Developer Lonely Bluebird Interview
by Alphaville Herald on 02/09/10 at 3:49 am
Soft Linden: I love that you guys are doing this — Lonely Bluebird: Saves you guys some work I guess
This evening, Emerald developer Lonely Bluebird – a.k.a. Phox – took time away from what has certainly been a difficult day, for an exclusive interview with the Herald in which he confirmed that a leaked chatlog at the SLUniverse forums is legitimate – but could be misinterpreted since it was taken out of context. Phox went on to tell me that Emerald remains popular despite the recent controversy and claimed to have seen over 114,000 logins over the last day. Can Linden Lab afford to ban Emerald?
Lonely Bluebird – a.k.a. _Phox
Our chat came after a wild day in which Jessica Lyons resigned from the Emerald group after a disagreement about how best to address Linden Lab concerns about the popular Second Life viewer. What maybe more noteworthy – if true – were the revelations on the SLUniverse forums of what are claimed to be chat logs in which Soft Linden encouraged the Emerald gang. According to Fleur Orchid, the chat logs date back to mid march – and are likely to raise eyebrows, while shedding light on the emkdu leaks that contributed to the Emeraldgate scandal.
In the chat, Soft Linden appears to encourage the Emerald developer to use the emkdu library to bake hidden information into avatar textures and jpeg images – despite the fact that including the emkdu libraries violated the GPL license under which the open source Second Life clients are made available. Including the emkdu library with the Emerald viewer is one of the third party viewer violations cited by Linden Lab as being unacceptable, according to Jessica Lyons. The chatlogs leaked by Fleur Orchid are appended to the end of this story.
Pixeleen Mistral: you are online
_Phox: I’m always online.
Pixeleen Mistral: I have a few questions
Pixeleen Mistral: are you guys getting a lot of downloads for the new version of the viewer?
_Phox: http://emeraldviewer.net/downloads.shtml
_Phox: Click on "More" to see all versions
_Phox: For mac just click the button
_Phox: It shows download counts for all versions, 2600 went up about an hour and a half ago?
Pixeleen Mistral: do you expect Linden Lab to attempt to ban Emerald? and will a ban work?
_Phox: I have no idea really.
_Phox: I don’t think they want to ban it, it would inconvenience so many people.
Pixeleen Mistral: well – if the Lab did ban the viewer – would it have much effect?
_Phox: Well yesterday 114k people logged in using emerald
_Phox: So I’d say that would be a pretty big effect.
_Phox: If you’re vaguely referring to the rumor that I made emerald "unblockable" then I can tell you that is false.
Pixeleen Mistral: Emerald has captured the imagination of the Second Life community – and I can see why – the jiggle boobs thing was pure genius – that really put you guys over the top
_Phox: Well, I think that certainly is what made it go viral, but there’s far more to it than that.
Pixeleen Mistral: I have a good friend who loves Emerald for building
_Phox: Yeah, there are a lot of scripters who rely on the script preprocessor for their products too.
Pixeleen Mistral: so I think your super power has been you actually play SL – and know what people want – unlike the LL staff
_Phox: It’s not just that, the project has a history of doing things that the users want, but LL refuse to do.
Pixeleen Mistral: why doesn’t LL do what user’s want?
_Phox: People have been asking for a client AO since 2006.
Pixeleen Mistral: right – client AO is a big deal – what is LL thinking ?
_Phox: I suspect it would vary on a case to case basis. I know that the breast physics stuff was discussed internally for example, it was "shot down" in favour of a more dynamic system for mesh physics, which while certainly better would take several years of development.
_Phox: Stuff like the build tools and preprocessor well, could be a lack of QA resources, they can’t release something like that without extensive testing.
_Phox: There was a pretty serious bug in the preprocessor that caused us to pull it from a version, and we got a bunch of complaints from people relying on it, so we put it back, albeit as a debug setting only…
Pixeleen Mistral: so looking ahead – what is next for you guys?
_Phox: As far as the emerald team goes?
Pixeleen Mistral: yes
_Phox: There’s nothing left.
Pixeleen Mistral: you can probably sell a special version
_Phox: I suspect various groups will fork and continue, and possibly a few entirely new people will join and make new projects to "replace" it, but it can’t happen.
Pixeleen Mistral: so the 2600 version is the end?
_Phox: Unless something major happens, yes.
Pixeleen Mistral: funny how it worked out to be 2600
_Phox: Emerald really can’t continue.
Pixeleen Mistral: if Emerald is over then what will you do next?
Pixeleen Mistral: please don’t say "spend more time with your family" or "pursue other interrests"
_Phox: Actually it wasn’t 2600, but the last svn revision was 2587, and the switch to hg meant we didn’t really have a revision number for the last one, so we decided to make it 2600.
_Phox: There are two popular references in the technology world for the number that I’m aware of.
Pixeleen Mistral: yes
_Phox: Anyway, what I do next probably won’t involve viewers.
Pixeleen Mistral: 2600 also means something to those interested in old-school phone hacking
_Phox: I have one viewer project I’m working on for a university, and after that I’m out.
_Phox: Well make that three then.
Pixeleen Mistral: so you used to have a lot of support from Linden Lab
Pixeleen Mistral: but they have turned on you
_Phox: We did.
Pixeleen Mistral: there are some chatlogs being circulated where Soft Linden is encouraging you to include info in the baked avatar textures
Pixeleen Mistral: are those real?
_Phox: If you’re referring to the two conversations from March posted on SLU yesterday, then yes, they are genuine, though I wouldn’t say he was encouraging anything, since I was simply informing him of what we were doing.
Pixeleen Mistral: Soft did say he "loved" what you were doing
_Phox: Yes, though it was certainly referring to the overall effort of the Onyx project in reducing the use of viewers with copybot or other malicious functionality.
Pixeleen Mistral: I guess that could be taken two ways
_Phox: Keep in mind, that these are two small parts of very long conversations.
Pixeleen Mistral: right
_Phox: He was in no way encouraging us to collect user data, in fact, he even came back to me to ask that I ensure the path on linux is cut down to only the containing folder because he was concerned about the /home/<username>
Pixeleen Mistral: you guys had a lot of access to Linden staff – did that give you an advantage over the other viewer developers?
_Phox: I couldn’t really speculate on that, but the support Linden Lab provided us was for our users, not for the development of the viewer itself, to which Linden Lab has always seen themselves as a competitor. The certainly weren’t helping us create new features.
Pixeleen Mistral: I heard that Linden Lab set things up so they would answer questions about Emerald with their support staff – was that true?
Pixeleen Mistral: that was in some of the leaked documents attributed to Fractured Crystal – but I was never sure of that was real or not
_Phox: No, that’s not the case. There were widespread issues of people being told to uninstall emerald for all sorts of issues, including obvious sim problems. There was a large focus on support because of that issue.
_Phox: In fact, LL support were instructed not to support users of any third party viewers at first.
Pixeleen Mistral: so – if Emerald is pretty at the end – and if you could do it all over again – what would you do differently?
Pixeleen Mistral: would you change anything?
_Phox: Well there were certainly some mistakes made along the way, but I’d say as a whole, Emerald itself, it went quite well.
Pixeleen Mistral: so – no regrets?
_Phox: Discounting of course the issues that happened as a result of developers involved in something else.
Pixeleen Mistral: so – anything else that the Herald readers should know? have I missed anything?
_Phox: I’m sure there are a lot of things Herald readers should know, but I don’t have any announcements to make at the time.
Pixeleen Mistral: thanks for talking
_Phox: No problem.
the leaked chatlogs between Soft Linden and Lonely Bluebird
[2010-03-18 16:43:19] Lonely <3: Ah, well, we needed some way to identify people using our kakadu library, we came up with something really clever: The Emkdu variant encodes the window title into the j2c comment.
[2010-03-18 16:43:32] Soft Linden: Nice!!!
[2010-03-18 16:43:41] Lonely <3: The OnyxKDU variant contains the other end of the cipher, and an exported function to retrieve said comment.
[2010-03-18 16:43:44] Soft Linden: I’d figured that library would be the place to hide things. So it shows up in their baked texture.
[2010-03-18 16:44:07] Lonely <3: Yup, Linux variants encode 128 characters of the path, since window title depends on window manager etc.
[2010-03-18 16:44:27] Lonely <3: I’ve got it nicely tied in to the radar here, it’s fun to see the various names I get when all I see on people is a shiny emerald tag.
[2010-03-18 16:44:45] Soft Linden: I’d look at other places you might store that. We were at least planning to start encoding some info there to help us with DMCA takedowns
[2010-03-18 16:44:56] Lonely <3: We caught the HXO/Sl Black edition creator that way.
[2010-03-18 16:45:11] Soft Linden: Does the jpeg2k format support arbitrary tag/value pairs?
[2010-03-18 16:45:12] Lonely <3: Hmm, well there are various places we could encode that.
[2010-03-18 16:45:21] Lonely <3: Yes
[2010-03-18 16:45:25] Lonely <3: At least I think it does
[2010-03-18 16:45:33] Soft Linden: You could make something misleading like "encode parms" or w/e
[2010-03-18 16:46:38] Lonely <3: Unless someone starts poking at it with a disassembler all they’ll find is a string of mixed printable and unprintable characters in the comment.
[2010-03-18 16:47:18] Lonely <3: We figured it was a good way to keep track of who’s using the proprietary library without a license, not to mention identifying those viewers that want to hide, which is always a goal.
[2010-03-18 16:47:29] Soft Linden: :3
[2010-03-18 16:47:33] Soft Linden: I love that you guys are doing this
[2010-03-18 16:47:55] Lonely <3: Saves you guys some work I guess.
[2010-03-18 16:49:01] Soft Linden: I’d also be inclined to get the end of the path for Windows & Mac builds too. Odds are people are going to rename the viewer filename, even if they don’t change the window title, etc
[2010-03-18 16:49:12] Lonely <3: Yeah that’s what I said >_>
[2010-03-18 16:49:15] Soft Linden: just w/e is in **argv
[2010-03-18 16:49:19] Lonely <3: Zwagoth and Fractured wanted the window title.
[2010-03-18 16:49:19] Soft Linden: I thought you said you just did it on Linux?
[2010-03-18 16:49:27] Soft Linden: Gotcha.
[2010-03-18 16:49:32] Soft Linden: Yeah, I’d shoot for both.
[2010-03-18 16:49:35] Lonely <3: Only because linux doesn’t offer a single function to grab the window title in all window managers.
[2010-03-18 16:49:55] Lonely <3: Yeah I know the path is more useful.
[2010-03-25 16:35:40] You sense a disturbance in the force… (Soft Linden is typing)
[2010-03-25 16:35:51] Soft Linden: Are the marked textures in the current release version?
[2010-03-25 16:36:01] Lonely <3: Yes
[2010-03-25 16:36:06] Soft Linden thumbsup
[2010-03-25 16:36:27] Lonely <3: After we spoke I decided to make a bit of a change to kdu
[2010-03-25 16:37:40] Lonely <3: I made it check the top corner of the image for transparent pixels, if it finds any it encodes the folder name like the linux lib originally did.
[2010-03-25 16:37:50] Lonely <3: If not it encodes the window title.
[2010-03-25 16:38:28] Soft Linden: ah cool hack :3
[2010-03-25 16:38:56] Lonely <3: That hasn’t been released yet, but it can go out at any time since the pack is seperate from the binary.
[2010-03-25 16:39:00] Soft Linden: the transparent pixels specifically – last I knew you were only doing the meta tag
[2010-03-25 16:39:04] Lonely <3: We are
[2010-03-25 16:39:08] Lonely <3: Just the image comment
[2010-03-25 16:39:14] Soft Linden: right
Nelson Jenkins
Sep 2nd, 2010
Pure fluff… just “now what?”
No apologies, no regrets, nothing.
Oh well. Bye Phox. See you in your next malicious endeavors.
Nidol
Sep 2nd, 2010
He actually said over voice that he added channel spoofing.
Hazim Gazov
Sep 2nd, 2010
Normally when something is “leaked”, it’s not released by the originating party and their friends. Arabella was giving out copies of the log to members of WU to try and fuel the fire.
Friend of all
Sep 2nd, 2010
You know Hazim, I told this to a few friends too.
One thing any dev can do is to encrypt shit inside the code. Like base64 all of the strings and let other people decrypt them itself.
It will be a painful to decrypt all encrypted strings, but as long as it compiles it will still stay tpv.
OTR did the same thing.
We
Sep 2nd, 2010
It should be noted that Soft wasn’t saying that they should include the full path, only the end of the path, which would have said something like Emerald/Emerald.exe. Nothing that could be a privacy violation there.
“[2010-03-18 16:49:01] Soft Linden: I’d also be inclined to get the end of the path for Windows & Mac builds too.”
Additionally, Soft was the one on the Open Source Dev list who supported the removal of Emerald from the TPV list due to the DDoS
I highly doubt he was vetting them, more likely he was being nice in the hopes of them spilling information on Onyx or some of the other shady stuff they did, and now Phox is trying to drag Soft down with him.
Friend of all
Sep 2nd, 2010
Phox already admitted to drag down emerald.
Nelson Jenkins
Sep 2nd, 2010
@ We
I was wondering about that. I was under the impression that Soft was generally against the Emerald project.
And does this surprise you that Phox would taunt the Lab, then believe he outwitted them, then just take down as many Lindens as possible in some big final blow.
Nelson Jenkins
Sep 2nd, 2010
I’m delighted to inform everyone that I just received word from a source within the Lab that bans will be issued for most of the Emerald devs and the Lab is currently in the process of reclaiming Emerald Point.
Oh Look
Sep 2nd, 2010
Instructions by phox on how to change the spoof the viewer channel on the final version of emerald.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ti3xc2K98s
Friend of all
Sep 2nd, 2010
No proof till its actually done.
doyo
Sep 2nd, 2010
lol, phox…
A good question would’ve been “you didn’t add the ability to make it unblockable? Then what did you add??”
This reads more like a pity interview or something.
Emerald Viewer DEAD!!! « Nalates' Things & Stuff Blog
Sep 2nd, 2010
[...] Alphaville Herald has more information in Emerald Developer Lonely Bluebird Interview. [...]
Lisa
Sep 2nd, 2010
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ti3xc2K98s Shows that Phox lied either on voice chat or to you in the review, like Nidol said, he did include that feature… But everyone running from Emerald so doubt anyone will try it.
Noor Loam
Sep 2nd, 2010
You people are so miserable… it is unreal
Oh Look
Sep 2nd, 2010
@Noor – umad?
Do you (going solely on faith) blindly deny that members of the Emerald team were involved in committing any of these accusations? Despite all the evidence to the contrary?
Lok Mistwalker
Sep 2nd, 2010
Noor Loam is a Secondlife (TM) Pimptress, Domme, Humiliatrix, Bish from Hell! Welcome to my World!
Some of you may have read what is going on with the Emerald Client. I am good friends with several awesome people of the Emerald Team…
*
Yeah ok…
Now go away
Everyone Else
Sep 2nd, 2010
You people are so miserable… it is unreal
Little Lost Linden
Sep 2nd, 2010
Holy Maccaroni and Cheese Balls!!
This is a most unbelievable event.
Only Hitler could have predicted something this amazing.
Rob "N3X15" Nelson
Sep 2nd, 2010
Why is the link up to the downloads page? That’s like linking to a shady Russian warez site in the new york times.
Fleur Orchid
Sep 2nd, 2010
From the Emerald Viewer group chat earlier:
[2010/09/02 00:06] Lonely Bluebird: I did not put a channel spoofer in, you’re welcome to check the channel yourself, it appears in “Help->About”
Yet another lie from phox aka lonely bluebird because he did put the spoofer into the 2600 build the debug setting emeraldchannel you can change the name of the viewer from “Emerald Viewer Release” to whatever you want to.
Glenn Beck
Sep 2nd, 2010
@Little Lost Linden
You know who else attributed events as only Hitler could predict?
…Hitler.
Little Lost Linden
Sep 2nd, 2010
There are really only a couple of words that come to mind during this type of monumental event:
1. Guten Tag!
2. Holy Moly!
http://thebotzone.net/2010/09/02/emerald-viewer-destroyed/
Adios Emerald!
We
Sep 2nd, 2010
@Noom Loam
“You people are so miserable… it is unreal”
I’d rather be “miserable” than a blind follower such as yourself. I read your blog post, I notice how you failed to mention any one example of the violations that formed the noose Emerald hung itself with, focusing instead on how Emerald has features you really like and that’s all it needs to be a trustworthy viewer.
You also posit that somehow Emerald will be the only viewer ever to have such features, apparently not realizing that many of Emerald’s features weren’t even made by them, but were simply appropriated from other viewers or from open source patches, and the ones that were made by them can be appropriated by other viewers in the same way.
What’s unreal is how misinformed people are and how viciously they defend a viewer from critiques they know nothing about, simply because they like the features it offers. It’s the kind of blind tenacity that forms cults.
You’ll be happy to know that I’ve already seen at least one new viewer that is going to be launched very soon that has all the features of Emerald and then some, is more stable, has less memory leaks, and most importantly isn’t lead by the scum of Second Life.
Friend of all
Sep 2nd, 2010
@Noor Loam.
You hang out at emerald point and your friends with the dev team. So your comments do not count.
Justin Trinity
Sep 2nd, 2010
Augh aughf auhgh uhhhng unf…Alphaville Herald gets me off so much I think I just jizzed in my pants. Oh god I’m cumming everywhere! Oh god it’s on your face! UUUNFH
Ajax Manatiso
Sep 2nd, 2010
The real story might have been about how the Emerald devs turned on one another as the ship went down. Lots of harsh words in various blogs from Emerald devs regarding their former peers
Glenn Beck
Sep 2nd, 2010
After days of this Emerald fallout I could use a beer. Fuck the wagon.
V
Sep 2nd, 2010
I’d be very interested to know this new viewer, We.
Tracey Humphreys
Sep 2nd, 2010
@Glenn Beck
You know who else was on the wagon?
…Hitler.
Jayd3n
Sep 2nd, 2010
I asked Emerald Developers to stop logging my information without my consent, and Skills Hak to remove me and my friends from CDS, We were ignored refused customer service, and info illegally stored, tracked without our consent. If they would have done so with some respect, and fixed their IP logging stuff to ask our consent before such I would have given Emerald a chance, but they refused. We were all bad people because we did the same thing Emerald did testing viewers that were not legal, or using one that was not 100% Legal before the new tos Because it was not certified by Emerald we were IP logged, banned, info stored outside SL without consent which was violation of LL Privacy Policy due to the fact none of us purchased from him.
Now the Tables have turned Emerald, what are you guys going to do about it. The reason LL did something about it is obvious all the illegal actions, and I really do wish they would Ban Skills, or remove his system from SL, as there is lots of proof of data mine, and all the debate all over the internet it does not help Linden Lab, and new customers who want to play SL all they hear is bad things which is why they did something about Emerald.
LOL and viewer spoofing. Prepare for the Real Grid War if he does this, this will do nothing but help content theft.
Danny Banjo
Sep 2nd, 2010
DING DONG THE WICKED WITCH IS DEEEEEAD!
Darien Caldwell
Sep 2nd, 2010
[2010-03-18 16:43:19] Lonely <3: Ah, well, we needed some way to identify people using our kakadu library, we came up with something really clever: The Emkdu variant encodes the window title into the j2c comment.
Wrong. It's nobody's business who's using what library. That's where this all went wrong. People thinking they have some right to spy on people that they do not have.
Frankly, I'm really surprised that LL did the right thing here. Surprised, but grateful.
Friend of all
Sep 2nd, 2010
Jayd3n will you be my friend. I hate CDS too.
Tracey Humphreys
Sep 2nd, 2010
This would make an amazing movie.
Who owns the film rights to all this? Hazim, I hope, and not the Lindens.
Casting might be difficult. Paris Hilton is suitably vacuous to play Arabella Steadham (an Aussie accent can always be dubbed on) but not sure who would play the furry freaks?
Orion
Sep 2nd, 2010
@Tracy –
OOH OOH! I know! Get the Bananna Splits to play the part!!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtD4mn9CeH4
WHY_Me
Sep 2nd, 2010
is 2600 working for everyone cuz, everytime i logg on it crashes..whats going on
Tracey Humphreys
Sep 2nd, 2010
@Orion
/me lols
Persephone Bolero
Sep 2nd, 2010
I had a lot of concerns about Emerald until I saw We’s position and his attacks on anyone suggesting this thing is blown out of proportion. That’s usually a pretty good indicator that one can dismiss the whole controversy.
We
Sep 2nd, 2010
@Persephone Bolero
“I had a lot of concerns about Emerald until I saw We’s position and his attacks on anyone suggesting this thing is blown out of proportion. That’s usually a pretty good indicator that one can dismiss the whole controversy.”
Haha is saying “You people are so miserable… it is unreal” comparable to politely suggesting that things are blown out of proportion now? Interesting that you’ll dismiss entire controversies over one statement though, it explains a lot about how you came to believe some of the ridiculous things that you do.
@V
“I’d be very interested to know this new viewer, We.”
http://ascent.balseraph.org/
General Drama
Sep 2nd, 2010
Persephone,
Just cause We has a position on something doesn’t make it inherently wrong, We actually showed sympathy for Woodbury yesterday, if you can believe it.
Glenn,
You know who else spied on everybody else’s voice chat?
Hitler…
Persephone Bolero
Sep 2nd, 2010
@We We’ve exchange enough that you can hardly claim that I base my decision on one single statement. For example, you’re the guy that claims that the sources I cite are too biased to even consider yet can’t name a single source you’d characterize as unbiased. That’s one example of many of why I generally consider your opinions to be wholly unreliable. So, on topics like programming for which I have little background, I default to whatever opinion you oppose.
Noor Loam
Sep 2nd, 2010
blah blah start
// remove skills ; remove ph0x ; remove lgg { oh no wait lgg is our friend now } ;
// blah blah end
Trolls I say. Forum twats edging each other on via hate speech.
Tea baggers, I kinda pity you fools.. but then again I may just not.
Glenn Beck
Sep 2nd, 2010
@Noor Loam
You know who else supported Modular Systems and Emerald?
…Hitler.
He also supported socialized healthcare. But you know what Hitler didn’t do? He didn’t keep coming back to check what the trolls were saying.
Judge Joker
Sep 2nd, 2010
@Noor Loam
Get your shit together, you’re coming off as a sore looser for a situation that deep down is only is only a handful of what you call “trolls” acting out a deep hatred for Emerald.
The rest of us are concerned and appalled at the situation that you yourself and others who use Emerald allowed to develop, you should be the ones calling for development safety & accountability and the fact you don’t when a large percent of your fellow users call out too is frankly baffling, but understandable if your only playing out the girlishness fanaticism of oh shiny!.
This is not anything to be proud of for anyone, least of all Linden Labs who gave them numerous chances which they squandered, they failed to live up to what was needed for such a critical project that is essentially a piece of primary infrastructure.
Developers of key infrastructure should have a strong team and strong morals to know residents come first, and understand the development of a great viewer is not something to be exploited, monetized or used to gain points against other developers or against Linden Labs.
This issue is not due to the actions of just one bad developer it’s a whole team and fan girls like you, who have not taken Emerald, Second Life residents and it’s legal and moral duty’s seriously, as with a car you have a moral duty to look under the hood and understand if it’s safe to drive.
We as concerned individuals never considered the new so called team anymore competent as it still contained developers with a bad reputation like Phox in particular, and so could have exposed future residents to further potential exploits, Linden Labs felt the same as did anyone else with half a brain.
Even if your under the impression people are holding imaginary joyous party’s at it’s demise, I assure you the rest of us are saddened that Phox and other individuals could be so callous as to not have the honor to step aside and let other developers carry the chalice with a good reputation.
Emerald failed because the “team” and it’s entire concept was crap, it had no solid foundation or leadership other than a spoiled brat with entitlement issues.
It was an every “script kiddo” for himself situation, with no regards for the consequences if something went wrong, as evident by the now “spoofing” he put in to the last client as a last ditch Fuck You attempt to Linden Labs.
Some of us feel this might ignite some kind of grid war born out of the on going dev war which Emerald Developers lavished themselves in like butter on dry bread.
But Phox’s priority’s were always clear to those who wished to look beyond their own idealized illusion of who he is, hes not a brilliantly misunderstood developer hes a morally decrepit individual, who’s on the path to becoming a sociopathic criminal as evident by his preying on what residents wanted and needed to fulfill what ever sub surface desires they had.
Either for money based on data harvesting for their inSL services or for the power over other residents, and of course that extra e-peen to compensate for what ever real world issues hes been suffering lately.
Charity Stohr
Sep 2nd, 2010
@Noor Loam
You’re right, it is our fault Emerald died. It was our comments that lead to the destruction of Emerald. If we haden’t pointed out that jcool was using the welcome page screen as a was to DDoS people as a violation of not just federal law but the TVP TOS, he’d still be here and running the show. If it wasn’t for us mentioning jcool and ph0x making public the installation path for Emerald publicly viewable and making available the user names for Mac and Linux users, we would still be jocking their nuts like you. If we hadn’t questioned the integrity of these guys they would still be using the datamine to track avatars. If it wasn’t for those darn internet trolls telling people that jcool and ph0x broke into Vivox to disable voice for people critical of them, we’d still have Emerald to thank for censoring them.
We are clearly bad people and must be taken out to pasture.
Orion
Sep 3rd, 2010
@Charity –
Ya know, I really am truly dumbfounded by all of this. 30 to 50% of SL’s users are told that the software they’re using to connect is dangerous. That its scanning their hard drives and encoding god knows what into their clothing textures, that its saving their IP address and usage habits to a central database and then linking it to their RL location, and to top it all off that its using their own personal internet connection to carry out the highly illegal act of crashing someone’s website.
Any sane and logical person would go and look up the facts, realize that the service provider (Linden) itself verified that these facts are true, and then uninstall the damned thing. But no, they just shrug it off and keep going on using it. Many, in fact will continue to use it even after its no longer allowed to connect thanks once more to a punk ass move of those same people who made the thing dangerous in the first place.
I just don’t get it. Where’s the logic? Is the whole of SL’s user base suffering from Stockholm Syndrome? Seriously, what the fuck?
We
Sep 3rd, 2010
@Persephone Bolero
“So, on topics like programming for which I have little background, I default to whatever opinion you oppose.”
Oh really? Do you have a lot of background in cliff-diving? I hear people are jumping off cliffs with no safety equipment, I’m completely opposed to that.
But good to know that you actually pick sides on a topic that you’re completely ignorant about, and base that side purely on hatred. I’m sure that’s a good tactic in life.
Little Lost Linden
Sep 3rd, 2010
Hey, does anyone know the countdown to when Emerald is banned? I think it’s tomorrow, however, I don’t know the exact time.
Think it would be nice to have a countdown party or something.
Gundel Gaukelei
Sep 3rd, 2010
@Noor Loam
So sorry we didn’t like the tapping as much as you.
Chester Babox
Sep 3rd, 2010
We are at war with Emerald.
We have always been at war with Emerald.
Viewer II is our ally.
Viewer II has always been our *choke-gasp*