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?

Phox
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>/ issue

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

113 Responses to “Emerald Developer Lonely Bluebird Interview”

  1. Noor Loam

    Sep 3rd, 2010

    I appreciate all the @Noor Loam comments …
    However some of this BULLSHIT and that’s what it is – BULLSHIT, you silly woodbury’s spit on on here is so out of context.

    Is anyone making any of you use Emerald?! Do you all honestly think anyone will conquer you pron you got on your PC and sell it to
    to the highest bidder?!

    This is by no mean any fan girlism. It is a client I like. The rest is garbage and I wont use it. The personal beef some of you may have with individuals – that’s none of my concern and jock hanging is so 1996.
    I mean seriously, you stinkers come to EP, record any and everything ( even used MY house pic in the latest recording ) … whats this all about, smear media sensationalism?!

    How about you ” hitler lulz’ers ” STFU, turn the PC/ MAC off and quit this stalking and defaming of indivduals?! It is getting old, no one has been banned no one is going anywhere and that’s what it is. None any of you can do jack about it.

  2. Nelson Jenkins

    Sep 3rd, 2010

    @ Noor Loam

    “[flame] [rage] [stupidity]”

    You know, you could just go back to Emerald Point and live in blissful ignorance like the rest of the gem-heads. But no, you have to post your rage on here.

    “However some of this BULLSHIT and that’s what it is – BULLSHIT, you silly woodbury’s spit on on here is so out of context.”

    What? I’m not part of WU.

    “Is anyone making any of you use Emerald?! Do you all honestly think anyone will conquer you pron you got on your PC and sell it to
    to the highest bidder?!”

    What? I’m not using Emerald. i’m using A

    “This is by no mean any fan girlism.”

    Oh, okay.

    “It is a client I like. The rest is garbage and I wont use it.”

    Oh, okay. So it is fangirlism. (You know, because there are literally dozens of Emerald spin-offs that have more features, less bugs, and no malware.)

    “The personal beef some of you may have with individuals – that’s none of my concern and jock hanging is so 1996.”

    Nope. Would you like to use a Linux distribution that has malware packed in the installer that was coded by criminals who lied about everything they did wrong?

    “I mean seriously, you stinkers come to EP, record any and everything ( even used MY house pic in the latest recording ) … whats this all about, smear media sensationalism?!”

    No, it’s called proof. If it wasn’t for those recordings, Arabella might have been able to re-strengthen her image and fool everyone again.

    “How about you ” hitler lulz’ers ” STFU, turn the PC/ MAC off and quit this stalking and defaming of indivduals?”

    Defamation? It’s not really defamation if what you’re accusing is actually true. That’s like calling me gay. Oh, man, you got me, I suck dick. You’re so mean and defamatory for observing who I am.

    “It is getting old, no one has been banned no one is going anywhere and that’s what it is. None any of you can do jack about it.”

    Yeah, no, y’see, Philip’s put out a bounty on Fractured, Skills, Phox, and Discrete… and Arabella may also be in the sights as well. Oh, and CDS is gonna be shut down as well. Of course, Emerald will be banned, too. So, y’know, enjoy spoofing your channel ID and violating the TOS.

  3. Nelson Jenkins

    Sep 3rd, 2010

    @ [myself]

    “What? I’m not using Emerald. i’m using A”

    That should be “I’m using Ascent.”

  4. Orion

    Sep 3rd, 2010

    @Noor –
    “Do you all honestly think anyone will conquer you pron you got on your PC and sell it to
    to the highest bidder?!”

    Obviously as you’re someone who still uses Emerald, it doesn’t concern you in the least bit that these guys were only one tier away from baking any saved passwords, credit card numbers, bank account numbers, contact information, etc. that you may have stored on your pc into your SL clothing textures?

    I’m not just talking word documents and spreadsheets, but the kind of stuff that all of your applications save internally. Turbo Tax, H&R Block, home accounting software, online access to your bank account, your credit cards, even your electric and phone bills if you pay them online. These guys were literally one “../” away from all of that!

    All they needed to do was add three extra characters to their code and you could have gone walking around your virtual little playground literally broadcasting every single bit of your personal identity. Forget your RL name, try tattooing your social security number on your forehead and go walking around some noobie sex sim.

    Seriously, do yourself a favour and forget the whole OMG this is a Linden Woodbury griefer conspiracy to get me to use Viewer 2. This is about a bunch of pissed off people who realize and know full on the potential for what these guys could have and did do.

    But no, go on with your whole conspiracy theory I want my bouncing pixel boobs gig. I’m sure in another couple of months I’ll be posting “Told ya so!” once again to some Herald article the likes of “SHOCK! Former Emerald developers arrested for selling SL user’s social security numbers on the black market!”

    GACH! You people are thick headed!

  5. Nelson Jenkins

    Sep 3rd, 2010

    @ Orion

    Just give up. She doesn’t understand computers.

  6. Orion

    Sep 3rd, 2010

    @Nelson –
    I’m done. There’s no point in trying to enlighten those who just don’t want to know. The whole allegory of the cave thing. They’re chained down, facing the wall of shadows by fuck knows what. As a programmer and someone who’s working on building a grid it seriously just pisses me off to no end.

    I’ve got better things to do then watch these idiots full on and knowingly expose themselves.

  7. Bubblesort Triskaidekaphobia

    Sep 3rd, 2010

    @Nelson: I never heard of Ascent before. I checked it out on source forge and noticed the creator’s comment on Hazim’s blog but that’s all I have on it. I can’t find any download links. Where did you get it?

    This is what I am looking at:
    http://sourceforge.net/projects/ascent-client/files/

  8. Nelson Jenkins

    Sep 3rd, 2010

    @ Bubblesort Triskasomethingfuckit

    http://ascent.balseraph.org/

  9. V

    Sep 3rd, 2010

    Actually, LGG’s Emergence Viewer seems to be the TPV many (Windows users) are flocking to since it’s a near clone of Emerald. Nearly 18,000 downloads since August 25th.. though a new version got put up now.

    Can’t say it was a huge surprise, though. It’s a clean clone of Emerald 25xx.

  10. Persephone Bolero

    Sep 3rd, 2010

    @We “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.”

    We, did I hurt your feelings? I’m sorry. Okay, fine. I won’t base my opinion on the opposite of the side you’re on. I have to say, though, it was a really good time-saving measure.

  11. Charity Stohr

    Sep 3rd, 2010

    @Noor Loam

    A dramatic reading of your last comment. Enjoy.
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcXVZ5iSek4

  12. Gaara Sandalwood

    Sep 3rd, 2010

    ah….good stuff, Charity.

    I got bored a couple days ago and made my own article on a blogspot I have that I almost never update. I figured, what the hell, I got ten minutes to kill and I could use a break from packing shit for the move I’m about to make.

    http://sammichandstew.blogspot.com/2010/09/look-into-second-life-part-1-emerald.html

  13. Ajax Manatiso

    Sep 3rd, 2010

    Did I misunderstand or is there a viewer called “WE” ?

  14. Meh

    Sep 3rd, 2010

    That’s just a temporary effect, though, since Emergence is not going to be maintained. It’ll work for a little while, but most people are moving to Imprudence, or just back to the plain vanilla viewer.

  15. Little Lost Linden

    Sep 3rd, 2010

    Holy Moly. Today is the Day!

    (I just don’t know the time) :(

  16. Gaara Sandalwood

    Sep 3rd, 2010

    COUNT DOWN PEOPLE!

  17. Tracey Humphreys

    Sep 3rd, 2010

    @Little Lost Linden

    The last Linden announcment was Aug 24, 2010 9:59:04 AM so i expect in 5 minutes time…

  18. Persephone Bolero

    Sep 3rd, 2010

    @Ajax “Did I misunderstand or is there a viewer called ‘WE’ ?”

    No. We is another regular Alphaville commentor. He’s a guy who likes his sources unbiased and his viewers unemerald.

  19. Persephone Bolero

    Sep 3rd, 2010

    So, how does this work? If the Emerald development team doesn’t comply with Linden’s requests by today, LL will ban the Emerald viewer? Do I understand this?

    I used Imprudence once and it made colors look all funny. It also lacked most of the sky settings that come with Emerald, which I use all the time. I’m not sure if it supports boob bouncing or if I could get the feature to work if it does. If so, that would be pretty cool. But I really don’t want to learn to use a new viewer. This will so suck.

  20. Gaara Sandalwood

    Sep 3rd, 2010

    Not really. When I tried Emerald when it first came out I had to get used to it.

    All it really is is changing what viewer you use and taking a bit to get familiar with it(or just re-familiarize yourself with it). Last I heard Imprudence does have a lot of the much desired features Emerald did.

  21. Gaara Sandalwood

    Sep 3rd, 2010

    And actually, we still dunno just how well the client spoofer in the latest version will fair against a ban.

    We’ll have to wait for it to happen.

  22. Tracey Humphreys

    Sep 3rd, 2010

    @Persephone, it has bouncing boobies, skies, colours look fine. Radar is a little deifferent, but ok. Very stable.

  23. Persephone Bolero

    Sep 3rd, 2010

    @Tracey. Well, the colors definitely looked wrong on my system, which may not be the viewer. But what it really boils down to is that I just want my boobs to bounce. And I think in the end, that’s what we all really want.

  24. Nelson Jenkins

    Sep 3rd, 2010

    @ Persephone Bolero

    You are why we can’t have nice things.

  25. Tracey Humphreys

    Sep 3rd, 2010

    Jessica Lyon has announced the new Emerald, Pheonix.

    http://emeraldscandal.wordpress.com/2010/09/03/phoenix-viewer/

  26. Tracey Humphreys

    Sep 3rd, 2010

  27. We

    Sep 3rd, 2010

    @Persephone Bolero

    Just about all viewers include the “breast physics” thing, hell even the default viewer may be including them soon due to Snow Storm. If you want EXACTLY emerald you can try Emergence, it’s a fork of Emerald by LGG taking out all the things people had gripes with. Imprudence has breast physics and most of the features of Emerald, though is missing some here and there. Ascent is a new viewer that has just about all the features of Emerald including breast physics. Jessica Lyons also just announced today that she was forming a team to make the cheesily named “Phoenix Viewer”, which I imagine will have most of the features of Emerald.

    I figure I’ll tell you this to be nice, or you’ll simply avoid all my suggestions because I made them and make yourself miserable, so it’s win/win.

  28. Tracey Humphreys

    Sep 3rd, 2010

    Sorry, should have added to my above posts about Pheonix…

    WOOOOOOOO
    HOOOOOOOO!

    YES!!!

  29. Ted

    Sep 3rd, 2010

    A product and no leadership. Nothing to see here.

  30. Persephone Bolero

    Sep 3rd, 2010

    @We Breast physics? You and your political correctness. Just call it boobie bouncing like the rest of us.

  31. Little Lost Linden

    Sep 3rd, 2010

    “The last Linden announcment was Aug 24, 2010 9:59:04 AM so i expect in 5 minutes time…”

    I have been eagerly counting down these 5 minutes, however, they seem to have past. Has anyone logged in with Emerald in the last couple of minutes?

  32. Sigmund Leominster

    Sep 4th, 2010

    Am I reading these comments correctly? Is one of the key, critical, vital features of a TPV the level of jiggliness in boobies? Has anyone actually done a comparative study of jiggliness? If not, surely someone at the Herald would be game enough to do a little investigating. Methinks it sounds like a job for Jumpman Lane…

    Or is there a secret conspiracy by LL to restrict jiggliness by forcing people to use the less-to-none jiggly Viewer 2.?

    Inquiring minds need to know!

  33. General Drama

    Sep 4th, 2010

    oooh, renaming Emerald “Phoenix” is about as effective as LL renaming itself Linden Research to try to escape their F grade from the BBB.

    Different box, same heaping pile of shit.

  34. We

    Sep 4th, 2010

    @General Drama
    It’s mostly different people, the core problem people of Emerald were JCool, Phox, and maybe Skills. None of those people are on the Phoenix team. I don’t know a lot about the new members of the Phoenix team, but it has LGG on it (and one of the much touted new Linden members). Still, I’m wary about it, and probably won’t use it.

  35. AM Oderngrl

    Sep 4th, 2010

    Breast physics? OMG…get out of the basement, bubbas…and get a life.

  36. nbm

    Sep 4th, 2010

    @General Drama
    It´s always better to open a box and take at least a short look inside before considering it as the same heaping pile of shit. But oh well, nomen est omen i guess ;-)

  37. AM Oderngrl

    Sep 4th, 2010

    BTW, nice work on all of this, MS Pixeleen.

  38. Ted

    Sep 4th, 2010

    Just re-read the leaked chat logs.

    “[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”

    This says quite a bit about Linden. Not that it’s shocking, it’s not. But it does go to show that what is not supported now, seems to have had encouragement from Linden early on.

    “[2010-03-18 16:45:33] Soft Linden: You could make something misleading like “encode parms” or w/e”

    Just the sound of it gives on shivers if indeed this text is legitimate.

  39. We

    Sep 5th, 2010

    @Ted

    Notice he said “End of the path”, the emkdu pathing would have said “../Emerald/Emerald.exe”, which isn’t a big deal.

    But really, I think it’s a legitimate log but the purpose of it was different than everyone is taking it. Soft wasn’t being nice to vet him, he was being nice to get him to talk about what they were doing. At that time, Onyx was still a secret, there were only rumors that it was a full blown ripper client, which the emerald team denied completely. The best way to get people like that to spill details on secret projects? Be nice to them. They’re ego-driven, and if they think you’re trust worthy in the smallest, they can’t help but brag about the hacks they’d done.

    Soft Linden was the one who had been pushing for things to be done about emerald, and you can find his post on the Open Source Dev list recommending that Emerald get removed from the TPV registry after they did their DDoS.

    Consider where the log came from too: from Phox. Why would he release something like that? Cause he’s trying to drag the guy down with him, probably because he knows Soft was a big part of why they went down.

    Don’t fall for Phox’s trick.

  40. Ted

    Sep 5th, 2010

    @We

    Good points. Something to keep in mind when reading for sure.

  41. Little Lost Linden

    Sep 5th, 2010

    What’s the new word on the Emerald ban? Most sources thought it was Friday and now Tuesday or Wednesday.

    Pix, any official word from Linden Lab? I sold tickets to this event and now I may have to offer a refund. :(

    Hopefully Hitler doesn’t find out about this. Lately, whenever I think of Hitler, I am reminded of Arabella. The voices are very similar in terms of scariness.

  42. doc

    Sep 5th, 2010

    “Hopefully Hitler doesn’t find out about this. Lately, whenever I think of Hitler, I am reminded of Arabella. The voices are very similar in terms of scariness.”

    To me she sounds much more like “Muhammad as-Sahhaf” or “Kim Jong Il”

  43. Fingerer

    Sep 6th, 2010

    As an Australian, I take great offense that she says that’s “how we talk”.
    Granted, we do like to back the underdog but Ph0x Vs Jessica??
    My bookmaker would have slapped me around the ear, told me I was as mad as a cut snake and told me to have a fair shake of the savaloy.

  44. Gaga Gracious

    Sep 6th, 2010

    I used Emerald once ages ago because a bf wanted to see my boobs bounce. I never liked it. I just had a bad feeling about it and dumped it soon after along with the bf. Call me physic but it felt like a load of hacks and that was before it really started to be hacked. But what worries me most now is that regardless of the negative blogging and news reports, the Emerald code is re-emerging with new labels and members of the same dev team as Emerald went under. And so quickly!

    It seems there has been a history if infighting within the dev team and, apparently, all the devs and even Lindens knew about this stuff even if they were not responsible themselves. Some of the devs were known hackers yet other devs worked with them and are now the same people so rapidly producing Emerald clones.

    Even worse is that Lindens talked to known hackers and appear to have given the thumbs up to one of them. Lindens even sat in meetings with Emerald devs with all the known hackers present.

    I have to trust Linden Labs even if their integrity is shown to be hopelessly wanting but I would be damned if I would trust any single member now of the Emerald team for they either did the hacking or knew about it and continued working with them for far too long before the beans got spilt.

    More fool anyone that risks clones that purport to be clean versions of Emerald.

  45. Jocelyn Pawpad

    Sep 6th, 2010

    @ Fingerer

    - “As an Australian, I take great offense that she says that’s “how we talk”.”

    Dame Edna Everage wouldn’t, she’d just call you “possum” and offer you another lamington. :D

  46. Jayd3n

    Sep 6th, 2010

    Well Here is the problem.

    Emerald has now gone rogue, even if Linden Lab blocks out Emerald 100% and all users, Emeral Developers have released a version of Emerald Despite Linden Lab decision which will allow users to spoof any viewer channel they want, and bypass all blocks. Therefore anyone can use Emeralds Source, and Copybot anything they like from anyones store. Also Skills Hak being part of the Development team was just as bad if not worse than Fractured, because he violates privacy, and deserves to be removed from Second Life. He has accused many residents of copybotting with no evidence, banned many people from hundreds of users shops giving bad reputations about such people, while he and the Emerald Team tested copybot viewers the same as I did, and they did not ban themselves but they banned me for doing such, and others who have been here since 2006, never used an illegal viewer.

    The bad thing about Emerald is that as long as anyone is on an Emerald Viewer anywhere in a region, The Emerald Team, can easily see where any resident is in Second Life using PHP Scripts, so for example im on Standard SL, but one user has Emerald in my region, it would show exactly where I am, and any of their members could do harassment to me within Second Life, and no way to stop that. This could be hidden from the Open Sourced code, and this effects the entire public of Second Life.

    I have been given over a total of 3000+ Copybotted objects within Second Life, Skins, Textures, Armor, Weapons, ect. Abuse reported each of it, contacted quite a few of the creators of such content if it could be removed from Second Life. Some items like Skills Hak’s Premissions Exploited Items, TNT Sex Beds, FUR Rug, Quantum Core, and many other products can not be removed because they were premissions exploited, even some Genitals in Second Life. However this is why I encourage Users/Creators to do what Quantum Core creator did, and put disabler scripts in all their products they sale, so that it only can be used by people who have purchased the product, and it checks a database for that key, if it does not have it, then it wont work.

    The thing about Emerald is there are better illegal clients that do better things besides Emerald, and I dont mean copybot. For example Emerald has radar restrictions, while Other illegal clients do not have such restrictions to Draw Distance, Radar tracking distance, you can see 4-7 sims away in a cluster who is there, Emerald did not have this, so in the past Emerald was out developed. With the way Emerald is designed now as of 2010, it is very easy for any copybotter to use their Source, and Make new copybot clients with it, and again LL cannot block out Emerald, as it would require going closed source and such, and not allowing any third party viewers.

    Oh yeah, they now have voice chatbugs, so people can hear you across sims, or parcels without your knowledge..

  47. General Drama

    Sep 7th, 2010

    Gaga Gracious: “I have to trust Linden Labs”

    That was your first mistake.

  48. Duh

    Sep 7th, 2010

    All this drama is exactly why no one looking to do anything serious should bother with Emerald.

  49. James Larken Smith

    Sep 8th, 2010

    The hammer has come down from Lindenville. “As of 10am PT Wednesday, September 8, the Emerald Viewer will be blocked from logging in to Second Life as a result of violations of our Policy on Third Party Viewers. Residents who have been using any version of the Emerald Viewer will need to use a different Viewer to access Second Life. You can download the official Second Life Viewer, developed by Linden Lab, here. Or you can learn more about alternative Viewers, developed by third parties, here. There are several new Viewers listed in the TPV Directory, so there are many alternatives available to you”.

  50. Jayd3n

    Sep 9th, 2010

    Anyone notice that
    http://blog.modularsystems.sl/

    Lonely blueBird
    arabellasteadham
    Possibly Phox

    Some of these people if not all no longer appear in search.

    Did they all get the ban hammer, what about Skills Hak and the others still in violation of Real Life laws & Privacy Policy.

    http://treminarisecondlife.blogspot.com/2010/07/spywaretos-and-legal-violation-in.html?zx=12f743f4237b2a8e

    http://treminarisecondlife.blogspot.com/2010/09/in-reference-to-comment-of-previous.html

    IF these people asked people, and displayed a privacy policy, or sold a user a product, and used such services it would not be illegal, but not giving a user an option to opt out is.

    Oh well guys I guess money talks, those who are rich and can afford to pay Linden Lab over cost in stuff can stay in Second Life.

    Also If LL would invent new systems, and stop paying for license software, hire real lindens to develop for the communty, and leave all bans in control of the users of Second Life, not Linden Lab, add key protection so people cant steal textures and other assets using keys they dont have access to our grid would be -90% copybotting, and copybotters would have to re upload content therefore it could be black listed easily, dmca take down and such.

    Also if LL did not use third party junk software on their servers there would be less lag with real physics engines, Real support for customers and tier would cost less for sim owners, anything above $150 a month is insane, let alone $295 a month look at open sims they might not be as good but they are getting there.

    I think LL is going bankrupt and might not be here forever. And look at the Millions everyone has lost from everything they purchased in sl

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