The assets of Teleplace are being liquidated after the business-oriented 3D virtual meeting place hit a financial singularity which prevents the venture's continued operation, according to a mailing sent to potential creditors - including the Alphaville Herald's own part time typist/technical advisor Mark McCahill. 

Mr. McCahill provided the Herald with copies of the liquidation notification but pointed out that the Teleplace software was recently open sourced as Open QWAQ, so the software will live on indefinitely -- despite the apparent demise of Teleplace, Inc.

seeking a more fluid situation

While opponents of open source may be dismayed at this development, software immortality is good news for the members of the Turing Church Online. The group had been holding their transhumanist services at a virtual venue hosted by Teleplace, but have now moved to another hosting service running the Open QWAQ software. Is it any wonder Second Life conspiracy theorists fear a  transhumanist tropism for open source systems?

Unfortunately, the Teleplace and transhumanist news cut short the Herald staffs' well-earned break from the virtual world news beat. After dusting the cobwebs off our virtual printing press and consulting the staff directory,  I was able to arrange a meeting with Mr. McCahill at the fashionable Martinis and Power - an after work club favored by Herald reporters despite having almost nothing in common with Philip Rosedale's new Coffee and Power work club.

Pixeleen Mistral: Hi Mark! Sorry to interrupt your vacation but what's this about Teleplace being shut down?  
Mark McCahill: Way back in the day - back when QWAQ was just getting started - I spent a couple days talking with them and they put me in their rolodex. Eventually QWAQ turned into Teleplace, and the rolodex must have made it through the transition. Now it looks like they are notifying everyone who might possibly be a creditor, and so a couple weeks ago, I got this notice. It sure looks like they are selling everything off. Here are the papers - what does it look like to you?

calling all creditors

Pixeleen Mistral: Hmmm. Looks like game over. That's a shame. Were you surprised to see Teleplace go into liquidation?
Mark McCahill: Not exactly. I knew something was up when Teleplace open sourced their code after a long run as a proprietary branch of the Open Croquet project.

It breaks down like this. David Smith and Andreas Raab worked on the Open Croquet project. They are some of the best software engineers I have ever seen - so they have really great tech - but its not just about the tech. David and Andreas went on to form QWAQ after funding for Open Cobalt got tight, which happened once Carly Fiorina left HP and Mark Hurd took over and started cost-cutting. At that point Alan Kay's research group was wound down, so David and Andreas needed to find a new home for their work. In the end, the people at the universities kept working on Croquet and David and Andreas formed a startup based on the Croquet code. That was the genesis of QWAQ, and eventually QWAQ changed its name to Teleplace.

But the business-oriented virtual meeting place market is really crowded, so a shakeout was inevitable. Look at what happened to Linden Lab - they took a huge hit and laid off 30% of their staff after Mark Kingdon pursued the business meeting place biz. So when the Teleplace code was open sourced, it seemed to be a sign that a change in direction was coming. It was ironic that the code was released under the GPL, but I imagine it was the best they could do.

Pixeleen Mistral: How was releasing the code under the GPL license ironic?
Mark McCahill: Teleplace is based on Open Croquet, and Open Croquet was released under the MIT license. This means that you could do pretty much anything with derivative works, including take them closed source and proprietary. GPL is different - and viral. GPL says that all derivative works have to remain open source. That is a big turn-off for companies that want to sell proprietary systems. Now, if I'm at a university working on a research project like Croquet, I want the widest possible impact for that research, so I prefer the MIT license. On the other hand, I imagine the only way the Teleplace guys could convince their board to release the code was under GPL, because the board was probably worried someone else might take the code and compete with them - so they wanted to see any changes made to the code. Unfortunately, this fragments the open source development community.

Pixeleen Mistral: How so?
Mark McCahill: We can't add any of the Teleplace code to MIT-licensed projects like Open Croquet or Open Cobalt without those projects getting infected with a GPL license, and we don't want a GPL license. So we have to be very careful to keep Teleplace code out of Open Cobalt. There is a way around this mess, which would be for the rights holders of the Teleplace code to dual-license it.

Pixeleen Mistral: what do you mean by dual license?
Mark McCahill: Make it available under both the MIT and GPL license and allow people to choose the license that suits their needs. I imagine that they will be selling the rights to the Teleplace code as part of the liquidation of assets. I wonder who will end up with the rights? Maybe they will also release it under an MIT license. 

Pixeleen Mistral: Where do you see the virtual meeting space for business software going next?
Mark McCahill: Onto mobile devices like the iPad and Android tablets. WebEx works really well on an iPad and I see a ton of tablets going out to corporate salespeople. To get anywhere in the corporate market, a 3D meeting space will need to be better than WebEx or Google+ video hangouts and work on tablets - and also do something WebEx and Google+ doesn't do.

Looking at the way the virtual meeting place market has played out you can see why Linden Lab bailed on marketing Second Life for business meetings. But as you keep reminding me, there is money in the babyfur and My LIttle Pony/Brony markets - and not much competition, so Second Life for fancy dress party socializing still makes sense.

Pixeleen Mistral: Never underestimate the power of cute, at least outside a business context.
Mark McCahill: If anyone would know, it's you Pix.

The venture capital arm of General Electric and NBC Universal, aka "Peacock Equity" has invested $2 million in Second Life voice chat provider Vivox. Vivox provides voice chat services to 30 million users, with corporate clients CCP Games, Nexon, Linden Lab, Sony Online Entertainment, and many others. Vivox will use the new funds to expand into new markets and services like presence, text, virtual goods and audio advertising.

In a recent press release Brian Keil, Managing Director of Peacock Equity is quoted as saying, “With vibrant online communities already in place for much of NBC Universal’s content, we have some compelling opportunities to implement Vivox voice chat services to create a higher level of engagement among fans.” [Imagine where SL would be today without high levels of engagement thanks to Vivox - the Editrix]

No word on whether Linden Lab will be abandoning its badly borked and unscalable text chat system in favor of Vivox services. The "virtual goods" comment may imply that Vivox avatar cell phones may be coming to a sim near you. Expect the Vivox v-iPhone Hype Machine to reach full force at SLCC.

Other investors in Vivox include Benchmark Capital, Canaan Partners, GrandBanks Capital and IDG Ventures.

After exploring the room, the subject is placed in a first person view from the girl’s perspective as her arm is stroked at the same time the subject’s arm is stroked in real life to reinforced the illusion. After giving the men a chance to acclimate to their new virtual identity,  the formerly friendly woman suddenly bitch slaps the girl three times as the men observe the virtual catfight from a third person perspective.

The narrator for the New Scientist video points out that after observing their newly adopted avatar being slapped, the men’s heart rates were affected as if they felt somehow threatened. Clearly, sitting in a lab wearing VR goggles and being stroked should have put the men totally at ease, so the best explanation is that the men have been turned into virtual girls!

Look for various groups in the Second Life Gorean and BDSM community to field test these important findings – although the more adventurous might ask how women might be turned into virtual men – simply reverse the slapping and stroking process, perhaps?

[hat tip to Bubblesort Triskaidekaphobia for pointing out this scientific breakthrough]

Posting the piece while the Herald yacht put in to port to stock up on blood oranges and Cristal – none of that Moët crap here at the Herald – Urizenus chose to use his real life identity (Peter Ludlow of Northwestern University) to discuss similar patterns of emergent behavior across game worlds including The Sims Online, Habbo Hotel, and Second Life.

JLU vigilantes start seeing griefers everywhere

Particularly interesting are the parallels between the Sims Shadow Government paramilitary of TSO Second Life’s Justice League Unlimited. Both groups maintained close contacts with employees of the game company, and utilized those relationships in filing abuse reports against other players. But as Ludlow points out, the game soon turned ugly as the would-be cops go unchecked.

"What perhaps began as a fun exercise in roleplay soon began to go awry. Overzealous Justice League members began abuse reporting heavily, and also began picking fights with unlikely groups within Second Life. For example, the Justice League was banned from Furnation (an area inside Second Life dedicated to players that like to don anthropomorphized animal costumes), because of their excessive vigilantism".

In time, the vigilantes become paranoid and nearly everyone appears to be a griefer.

"It wasn’t just their competitors that were marked as griefers; the Alphaville Herald, which had been reporting on griefers in virtual worlds since 2003, was a griefer media organ in Kalels eyes. The Herald’s editor, an avatar Pixeleen Mistral was therefore also a griefer. Kalel came to falsely believe that Pixeleen was identical with me, and so I must be a griefer too. There were griefers everywhere, it seemed".

Look for this must-read series to continue soon – Cristal and blood oranges never last long on the Herald yacht and the catering staff is already preparing to replenish the galley while Uri uploads part 2 of the series.

Tizzers Foxchase got in the last word in Metaplace Central -  “POOLS CLOSED DUE TO AIDS” – and seconds later Raph Koster’s user generated virtual world creation service closed permanently last weekend. What went wrong – and how did the end of the virtual world affect the community?

Informed analysis has been in short supply since Koster announced the end of the virtual world. Eager to file stories and get on with the holidays, Metaplace tourists role-playing new media pundits shook their heads sadly and offered superficial analysis – Metaplace is teh fail because the avatars weren't realistic enough! 2.5 D fixed perspective is not immersive enough!!  Flash based games are everywhere – and Metaplace was too late!!! Blue Mars!!!! Farmville and YoVille on Facebook!!!!!!

Perhaps this is the best that can be expected with the less than exquisite timing of the December 21st Metaplace announcement and New Years day apocalypse. Players seriously engaged in Metaplace scrambled to establish alternate connections to preserve the community and salvage what content they could from the platform. Meanwhile, those with minimal connections to the world indulged in a bit of smug Schadenfreud.

SL fanboi and drive-by pundit Hamlet Au's Metaplace world had exactly one visitor in 7 months – Hamlet

I  joined the Metaplace closed beta in February 2009,  intent on watching an incomplete world grow, and spent a quarter of my virtual world gameplay time in Metaplace as the world morphed from a promising game-creator-centric environment dominated by creative adults, to a community struggling to assimilate a wave of 11 year olds pretending to be 14 year olds mostly interested in going on e-dates with teh hawt nu bf / gf they <3’ed based on avatar style and SMS-text speak convo.

Had Raph Koster’s company underestimated the impact of the e-party and e-dating scene?

I didn’t see much of an immersion problem for the teen crowd – and given the visual style of the world, a wave of young teens was to be expected. Once in open beta, Metaplace was apparently trying several promotion strategies and ad placements to attract players, and some were surprisingly successful at attracting girls desperately seeking e-boyfriendz. MP Central suddenly became a very social space – but not necessarily in a good way.

It is hard to believe that Metaplace was not positioning itself as an alternative to the 15 million player strong Habbo. But to get there, the company would need both content consumers and creators. The tensions between these two groups played out in Metaplace Central, the meeting space where new players entered the world and where old players compared notes and hung out with Metaplace staff.

Once Metaplace went into open beta, the e-libidos of the kids washing through Metaplace Central grew to became a powerful force – at times it seemed that the game gods had lost control of the user experience in their showcase town square. Where was the Metaverse ModSquad when you needed them? How could Metaplace afford to police MP Central 24 x 7 and continue to develop the platform?

level 101 players holds a throne sit-in at the beginning of the MP farewell celebration

By summer it was clear the Metaplace staff would need the help of volunteer moderators to keep things from getting entirely out of hand in MP Central after the game gods went home – but there was a problem. The volunteer moderators came from the ranks of the content creators who really should have been creating more compelling games and worlds to draw in a larger community to their own worlds and promoting Metaplace on their own – the sort of viral growth VC’s dream about.

With volunteer player moderators in place the swearing and chat spam was brought under control, but cries of “I’m bored – I need a boyfriend” from avatars with names like HotBabe11 or CuteGirl1998 were still all too common. The MP game gods tried appeasement with a dating game called PerfectMatch which gave the kids a way to see how compatible they were – and move them out of the center of the town square. The balance of power in MP Central was restored.

New You store drama: "what happened 2 ur girl she waz my best friend r u cheating on her?"

PerfectMatch was a fun game – by answering a fast paced series of questions your compatibility with other players was ranked. But players who wanted to earn money from their gameplay wondered why the MP game gods were creating more games for Metaplace Central instead of improving the avatar system for user-generated pixel clothes and avatar adornments to drive the virtual world economy.

Volunteers entrusted with kick and ban powers grew restless – when would they be able to monetize their work and get away from policing tweens? Where was the in-game RMT? While experience point-based “coins” could be used to purchase goods from a web page based store, Metaplace staff had promised a second in-game currency that could be converted to real money, but this was delayed by security concerns.

The original in-game XP “coins” were – for a short while – directly transferable between players, but an upgrade removed this capability with the promise that it would return later. It never did – although a player named KStarfire refused to update his Metaplace world, which then became the only place that person-to-person coin barter was possible.

I finally buy my pink spaghetti strap tank top on the day Metaplace closes

On the day Metaplace was to close, I went on a totally self-indulgent shopping spree at the New You store where game god designed clothes were sold for XP-based coins – my clothes shopping lust set free after KStarfire gave me 1 million coins. I finally bought the pink top I’d had my eye on and could be buried in style – but why weren’t there any UGC clothes for sale? From this girl’s perspective, pixel clothes should the first priority in an avatar-based world and more fashion choices are always a good thing.

Hearts, minds, and wallets of content creators

Developing for a new platform takes a leap of faith, and for those motivated by something other than platonic love of creating virtual art, money plays a role – as does hedging your bets.

Metaplace sold high concurrent access user worlds  for special events or popular games. For the company this made sense – free worlds give players a taste, but the more advanced would pay for premium service. However, without an in-game micro-payment system or real money trade there was no easy way to set out tip jars to or charge admission – so the “make real money in the virtual world” dream that Philip Linden flogged in Second Life was not an option in MP. Without tip jars to help pay for streaming audio feeds, it was difficult for most musicians and DJs to justify playing Metaplace. I enjoyed some great concerts by J9 and Raph Koster, but the economics were an issue for most of the music community.

Without a clear picture of when they might see some income, DJs, musicians, and content creators who were not true believers sat on their hands, true believers were pressed into service as game moderators, and the viral growth remained out of reach. Had the venture capitalists funding MP set too short a timeline? Was the weak real world economy to to blame – or the lack of an in-world economy with RMT?

J9 sings money makes the world go 'round – LunarRaid says money ends the world when you run out

For those who bought into the Metaplace dream, tools allowing anyone to create worlds were a compelling goal. If virtual worlds and online social spaces are the new media, democratizing the tools to create and understand the rhetoric of these spaces is a worthwhile pusuit – and necessary to allow the diversity of viewpoint that is unlikely to emerge from mega-media conglomerate dominated environments. Sadly, we will never know if the Metaplace I lived in for almost a year could have been viable, because despite the best efforts of the MP game gods, the incomplete world did not tip into viral growth fast enough.

Will the next iteration of Metaplace fare better? Freed from running their virtual world service, the Metaplace crew now head back to the drawing board, stranding players’ creations in the doomed environment. The lesson for virtual world content creators is to keep your assets mobile and beware of monopolies and centralized control – the plug could be pulled with very short notice.

I console Urizenus as he contemplates the demise of his multi-media egghead mashup world

saying goodbye to the Mary and Mary bots and shuttering the Metaplace Herald offices

by Pixeleen Mistral, National Affairs desk

The new Try All Your Chance blog details the frightening extent of the BanLink security problems that led to the Second Life ban list sharing site's apparent demise – and suggests that BanLink user passwords might as well have been stored in plain text given the lack of site security.

"Names, passwords, email addresses; 100% of the data the site had,anyone could view and even modify. Even without access to the membersarea of the site."

BanLink was a popular shared Second Life ban list service that was ultimately neglected by its creators and afflicted with fundamental serious security issues – a story the Herald broke in September after being tipped to the fact that certain URLs caused the BanLink site to share supposedly secret ban information with  world+dog on teh interwebs.

The Try All Your Chance coverage is notable for a lucid discussion of the moral dilemma that is responsible disclosure of exploits – followed by a hands-on detective story that explains exactly how poorly protected BanLink user passwords were and how the BanLink web site was ultimately put in perma-maintenance mode.

When data is at risk and the administrators are missing, it can be hardto figure out a moral course of action. Ignoring it and doing nothingleaves all the users unknowingly at risk, but disclosing it publiclypotentially exposes them to even more risk. Even when theadministrators aren't missing, it can be hard to spur them into actionwithout hard evidence of a serious problem. I knew that word wasalready spreading, and that the Herald was about to go public with theinformation, so I set out to see how much I could get the site to giveme.

The philosophical discussion is followed by a step-by-step how-to guide illustrating worst practices in web site security. By crafting URLs with embedded database queries – a technique known as SQL injection – the author deduces the database structure, locates the table with user accounts, e-mail addresses, and passwords. With access to the password table, the weak encryption is almost immediately broken by use of pre-computed password hashes known as rainbow tables.

"BanLink stored unsalted MD5 hashes of passwords, which is about as good as storing them in plain text."

Wrapping up the cautionary tale with practical advice, Try All Your Chance points out that using the password for your e-mail account for any other service is a very bad idea – since most sites will reset passwords by sending a message to your e-mail.

With practical, lucid of coverage of interwebs and metaverse deep tech, Try All Your Chance is a must-read blog for 2010.

by Pixeleen Mistral, National Affairs desk

While I was visiting Soviet Woodbury Saturday, the resident communists took time away from building their new workers’ paradise to rez a brightly colored dance floor and an impromptu worker’s dance party took place to an audio stream from http://www.maxxhitsbootlegs.com – a French mashup site that seems to be  on the way to becoming the metaverse soundtrack of choice for both Second Life and Metaplace. At the Metaplace Fashion Show event on Friday we were also dancing to a stream from the site, and I can confirm maxxhitsbootlegs is an in-theme choice for user-generated content worlds in either 2.5D or 3D.

I've begun to wonder if audio mashups are the aural equivalent of the W-Hat goons' and Woodbury /b/tard's builds – unexpected juxtapositions of diverse elements to create a new and typically ironic work – sometimes for fun and sometimes as social commentary. A mashup like Black Butterfly Busters combining Smashing Pumpkins – Bullet with Butterfly Wings + Ram Jam – Black Betty + Ray Parker Jr. – Ghostbusters seems to be saying something, but can the copyright laws and the sampled content creators keep up?

brought to you by the Copyright Bureau of Resistance?

With mashup artists like ToToM intentionally pushing the copyright envelop it is unclear how sustainable this is  – but as Larry Lessig pointed out at TED last year, balancing the rights of creators, remixers, and consumers is in everyone’s long term interest if we are to have more than a read-only consumer world.

by Pixeleen Mistral, National Affairs desk

If the name of the game in MMOs is to grow the user population in preparation for an eventual IPO, Metaplacetook a significant step forward this week by allowing Metaplace spaces tobe inserted into players' web sites. For example, the Herald's Metaplace offices are embedded below, and can be freely explored – after logging into the service – without leaving this page.

Enter the world, find the television and click to see Larry Lessig YouTube video embedded in Herald Metaplace offices embedded in Herald web page

Why is this move significant? First, it has the potential to harness viral marketing forces.  To see the Metaplace worlds, visitors to websites with embedded MP spaces need to have an MP account — and each web site with an MP embedded space becomes an advertisement for Metaplace.

Embeddable MP spaces may also help jumpstart acceptance of Metaplace now that existingweb-based advertising and payment mechanisms can be used alongside MP spaces. We expect to see MP game designers, musicians, and DJs employ PayPal tipjars on their web pages along with Google AdSence in an attempt to monetize their gameplay.

For the training and education sector, inserting a live environment into their web pages should also be appealing – as arethe minimal hardware requirements to run Metaplace. But the training and education sector is not where the real money is – various forms of Internet-enabled commerce seem more likely to be they key to virtual world viability – but this is where Metaplace still has some work to do.

It is understandable that real world commerce is not Metaplace's strength today – the world has only been in open beta for a few months, so a number of promised features remain promises. This creates some tension for early adopters.

Although the Metaplace designers have a real money trade virtual currency planned for the future, players who hope to host large scale events in Metaplace need either deep pockets or a revenue source to help pay for high concurrency spaces in MP. Web pages with MP spaces partially address this issues with the possibility of web-based revenue.

The revenue issue is acute for those hoping to host large events on a regular basis. The trial spaces given to free account holders are enough to get started, but part of the MP business model is charging players to increase their concurrent visitor limit for large scale events – typically with $9.95 USD day passes that allow for up to 100 concurrent users in a space. Anything that helps world creators develop revenue streams has the potential to help MP's bottom line by allowing players to more easily pay for these high concurrency spaces for games, concerts, and lectures.

How does it work?

The Metaplace wiki describes several approaches to embedding a space, and for those who are comfortable with working in HTML, an example the embed code for the Herald space is:

To get a feel for being in more than one place at a time – if not being transworld omnigendered – visit some of our favorite places:

stunning shadows

Paris cafe society

Gin n Juice in the 'hood

Raph Koster is expressing a kind of jaded been-there-done-that-saw-it-coming attitude about what he is seeing at the Game Developers Conference this year, and I’m not surprised. One year you are the crazy nut describing the future to an audience of twelve other nuts, and the next year the room is full of hundreds of suited up, panting, business people who just last year were marketing Band-Aids and motor oil and are now world-wide experts on the great promise of virtual worlds.

But even in the face of this dreary spectacle of suits in rut, Raph can barely disguise his glee over recent developments in the development of 3D browser technology. And who can blame him? The infrastructure of Metaplace is lying there waiting for web based technology to bring it with the 3D. When that happens then life gets very interesting indeed.While virtual worlds like Second Life have proved the concept of 3D virtual worlds, they are still not “of the web”. What happens when robust 3D  virtual worlds accessible through a web browser? When the only application you need is Firefox? We’ve seen attempts to push "of the web" virtual worlds before before (remember Trevor Smith’s Ogoglio project?), but now things are heating up.

 According to this report in CNet we are getting very close:

The Web is gradually becoming a better foundation for applications with splashy, sophisticated interfaces, but 3D graphics on the Web remain primitive. Now, though, Mozilla, the group behind the Firefox browser, and Khronos, the consortium that oversees the widely used OpenGL graphics interface technology, are trying to jointly create a standard for accelerated 3D graphics on the Web.In response to a Mozilla proposal, Khronos established an Accelerated 3D on Web working group to create a royalty-free specification. The goal is to produce a first public version within 12 months, Khronos said in an announcement at the Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco.

Then there is this, from Mozilla's Vladimir Vukicevic, in an article entitled “3D On the Web: It’s Go Time”: 

In the hall of mirrors that is the interwebs, separating hype from reality can be difficult, but this is starting to look like the real deal.

by Kris Dibou, part-time bot

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CopyBot – external links section includes open source copybot

So you've visited some of the big stores in SL, and noticed the models who look exactly like avatars, but never say anything; in fact, they may even have a tag over their heads saying 'Bot'.  How do they do that?

I am no expert, but through my research I have found that bot programs and similar programs such as SecondInventory, seem to be based on the same program. 

What is a bot?

The first thing you need to realize is that a bot is just an avatar.  Usually it is an alt and 'bot' status is not necessarily permanent.  Hypothetically, you could log into SL on your regular account, turn off the inactivity switch and walk away.  Suddenly, you are a bot. 

Easiest Course of Action

Of course, you will want to have a bot while you are doing other things with your main character.  You can log two or more avs in on your computer if you have the power and memory to handle it all.  Simply go to your SL icon, right click and go to properties, and go into the target line.  At the end of the target line add a space, two dashes and the word multiple.  I will look like this- " –multiple".  Now you can open more than one instance of SL on your computer.  The downside is massive use of your resources.  This brings us to the bot programs.

Another Approach

You need something to run these alts without using up all your resources.  This means, generally, no view screen for the bot.  There is a program a young lady wrote called AjaxSL which allows you to view SL through a web page and seems to have similar functionality of a bot program; however, she has taken the site down in protest of SL not fixing the TeenGrid ( she was 15 when she wrote the program); so scratch that one.  Then there is one called SLeek.  Apparently it is possible to modify this, although I haven't gotten that far, but you can login to SL without a screen and stand there, tp, talk, etc, without being able to see anything.

A.I.

If you want to give your bot artificial intelligence you can purchase bot access through Thoy's Bots for $2,000 an avatar, and he has made it possible to connect to pandorabots.com through it, so your avatar can talk on its own.  This doesn't work for MAC's tho…

Making Your Free Bot the Wikipedia Way

Step I:
    Follow this link to a wikipedia page

Step II:
    Go to the references section at the bottom of the page and click on Copybot 4.0

    This will download the program to your computer.

Step III:
    Open SLBots, the program that downloaded.  It will first give you a 'you are not registered' error, but open anyway.

Step IV:
    Login your Alt(s) and list your main avatar as their master.  Then login to SL with your main alt and type 'help' in the bots IM line to get the commands.

Happy botting!

Notice to those that have 'eyes':  There is much power hidden here – be cautious. Note also that software you download from the Internet may have all sorts of dangerous side effects – viruses, trojans, and other scarey stuff, and the Linden Lab TOS forbids copying other people's intellectual property.