Potential RL-identity exploit with Avatars United

For those of you using their RL-email for their SL-avatar, using the default settings of Avatars United might pose a risk of unintentional exposing the address!

Snickers Snook posted an insightful article about "Spam via Avatars United", where she explained that since joining AU she receives significantly more spam on her supposedly undisclosed email address. She dug a bit into the settings and found that the default is that even non-installed AU-widgets can access certain data and send emails.

While Snickers primarily saw the spam problem, my friend Zonja Capalini pointed out that while being spammed is a nuisance, the bigger threat lies in the unsolicited disclosure of a potential RL email address and thus disclosure of the RL identity.

So if this concerns you, do two things:

1. Read Snickers article and adjust your Avatars United settings
2. Go and finally get a GMail/Yahoo/Hotmail/whatever address for your avatar

The 2500 prim skeleton

Approximately 2500 prims were used for the huge Leviathan skeleton on the new Ahab's Haunt sim. Of those 2500 prims, quite literally only a handful are sculpts. All the other prims are regular prims. Not a single prim I found is larger than 10x10x10 meters or - in other words - this humongous build was constructed without a single megaprim.

The skeleton was built by "moles" - content creators contracted by Linden Lab. It is a safe assumption that the moles know what megaprims are, and how to use them. At the same time finding a Linden build (or Linden contracted build) that uses megaprims is like searching a needle in a haystack.

I am not a pro builder, but my guess is that the leviathan skeleton could probably be built with 75% less prims if megaprims could have been used. And probably with 90% less prims if sculpted megaprims would have been an option. This means the asset browser, the SL databases and the viewers of everybody coming close to that island would only need to store, transmit and render about 250-350 prims, instead of 2500.

To understand the (I assume deliberate) decision to not use megaprims, we need to take a step back. Megaprims were never regularly available in Second Life. Initially, the SL viewer limited the maximum size of a prim, and some clever person managed to circumvent this restriction and injected the first batch of megaprims which then got handed down from builder to builder. As a result, the check for the prim dimension was included in the server side, and megaprims could not be generated anymore. A while ago, a bug in the server code made the creation of megaprims possible again, and the second wave of prims became available. At the time of this writing, there are about 36,000 megaprims known and available in SL.

There is all kinds of rumours regarding megaprims. They allegedly cause lag. They allegedly steal sim resources. They allegedly influence the physics model badly. They allegedly are illegal and can get you banned using them. Indeed, the status of megaprims is a fuzzy one. Linden Lab never outright forbid their use. Neither did they take technical steps to restrict the usage. But also they never gave the "green light" for their usage. Megaprims are tolerated, but not loved. And because of this, Linden Lab will be careful not to set a precedent and use these prims in their own builds.

Update February 8:

[11:24] Silent Mole: It's true! Mole builds don't use megaprims.
[11:26] Peter Stindberg: Thanks! Can I quote this?
[11:27] Silent Mole: Yep.
[11:29] Silent Mole: Andrew Linden is the company expert on megaprims. His office hours are at Denby (213/45/34) 11:00 - 12:00 Tuesdays and 16:00 - 17:00 Fridays.

Web based Megaprim Search Engine

A few days ago I was talking with Katharine Berry and a person whose name I forgot about Megaprims and the SALT HUD when I mentioned that a web based solution to "order" megaprims would be nice since it could offer a graphical preview. Katharine liked the idea and started to code and in only two days finished megaprim.sl - a full featured graphical web based megaprim search engine.
On the first screen you enter the desired dimensions for the megaprim with the option to search for prims with exact matching dimensions, or megas that are smaller or larger. You can also account for a certain flexibility in the results. The permutation setting allows you to search for prims that match the query by means of rotating it - this is useful in some cases but needs to be switched off in cases where you want to convert the prim type to e.g. cylinder or where the center of the prim would be outside your parcel.


After submitting your query the website displays a list of matching prims. Via "get it" you can have the prim delivered to you. In order to prevent spamming/abuse, the in-world server sends you a confirmation link first - once per session (i.e. as long as you don't close your browser session).

Megaprim.sl is a fast and efficient way to get megaprims delivered, and has many advantages over the SALT HUD. For feedback and suggestions please comment on Katharines blogpost.

Interpreting statistics in your favour - Second Stindberg boosted Snowglobe success

Today, Philip Linden posted a nifty little graph showing how many users use the Snowglobe viewer - a project initiated by him.

On June 23 I blogged about the Snowglobe viewer and announced it on Plurk - now look closely at that graph. Doesn't it make a significant jump from the 23rd on?

Truth to be told, on June 24 there was the official announcement of version 1.0 on the Second Life blog. And as much as I like the idea that my blogpost and Plurk had a little to with that sudden pike, the effect I had would be most likely dwarfed by the effect the official post had.

But this is a nice example how you can interpret statistics in your favor...

Running SL on extreme hardware

A couple of years ago I was a strong vocalist for regular PC's, defending their "horsepower" and versatility as superior to any laptop or notebook. Until I embraced the liberty a laptop gives you. For a while I smiled at the people with small and lightweight notebooks, loving my IBM ThinkPad with its nVidia graphics card and fast processor. However the laptop did not like being transported twice a day on the bicycle much, and also my upcoming vacation made me wonder if there is something ... well... lightweight.

A lot of people suggested I should get an iPhone. However Apple chose the least desirable provider in my country, and the monthly rates were more than I wanted (and in fact could) afford. I toyed for a while with an iPod touch which has wireless LAN built in, until my friend Rika Watanabe suggested the Asus Eee PC for the first time.

It still took me a couple of months more, during which I pondered and investigated, but finally I was back at Rika's suggestion and looked into the Asus Eee PC range again. There is quite a lot of models, with and without harddrive, and with various processor types and configurations. In terms of durability and battery life, soon the Asus Eee PC 901 range presented itself as best solution. The lack of a regular harddrive and the Intel Atom processor both guarantee a pretty long battery runtime (about 8 hours). It runs a regular Windows XP Home, and USB ports, Bluetooth and Draft-n WLAN make it literally connect to everything.

New devices are still rather expensive, but I checked on eBay where there was ample supply of the various machines. I settled for a price range I was willing to pay and started to bid, and finally ended up with a model with 1GB memory and 12GB solid state disk for approx 280 US$.

What I need to maintain my digital existence is mostly only a browser to access the various Google services where Peter Stindberg "lives": Google Mail, Google Talk, Google Docs and Google Reader, along with Flickr and Plurk. On top of that I installed Open Office, Notepad++, two text-only SL viewers (OMVviewer ligh and SLLiteChat). And then the question was - does Second Life itself run?

Again following Rika's suggestion I installed the pre-Windlight CoolViewer by Boy Lane, which is based on Second Life 1.19. Tuning all the graphics settings down as far as possible, I get a whopping 3 frames per second. That is not thrilling, however I can walk around, access objects, work with my inventory, script, pay people, deliver notecards and interact socially.

I must say I am impressed. I never cared much for the LOOK of my computers, but the Eee PC looks elegant, is lean and incredibly small (the photo shows it next to a regular cellphone). It runs SL better than I had expected, and it is definitely more than a last resort backup. The browser functionality is of course not affected by the comparably slow processor - even YoutTube videos work acceptable.

If you look at a portable apartment for your digital life, looking at a netbook in general and the Eee PC in particular would be a good idea.

Update: in 800x600 fullscreen mode I get 5-7fps which definitely gives a halfway "fluent" feel.

First Look: SL Dashboard

When I checked the transaction history for the store alt, I got an invite to test the new SL Dashboard. The first impression is graphically appealing and reasonable fast.

The single elements can not be moved around as one would expect. Also the opened/closed setting is not persistant between sessions.

What I like is the direct integration of Xstreet SL under "Merchant Tools". What I dislike is that the Transaction History takes a lot more screen real estate.

If it would be possible to permanently delete elements and move elements it could actually quite useful.

If you want to test the dashboard yourself, but did not get an invite so far, simply add /my/ to the URL or click here: https://secure-web2.secondlife.com/my/

Snowglobe - a first look

Yesterday my SL sister Trinity Dechou mentioned the "Snowglobe" project to me, an open source approach initiated by Philip Linden. While the regular viewers are open source too, it takes rather long until fixes and extensions added by the community find their way into the official viewers. This causes quite a lot of frustration in the community and contributes to the perception of the Lab being "slow" or "uninterested", but basically has to do with the quality assurance procedures behind the scenes. The slowness of the Lab to adapt community fixes and expansions has led to a whole culture of alternative viewers for the more tech savvy residents: Gemini, Imprudence, Kirsten's Shadow Viewer and Rainbow Viewer among the most popular ones and even some old Nicholaz viewers still in use.

Project Snowglobe tries to shorten this process and to establish a very close cooperation between selected open source developers and developers from Linden Lab. This is intended to basically implement quality assurance on a submission level and a planned/steered development process. Instead of checking submitted patches and see the impact, a roadmap for development is used.

I have not used an official viewer in ages. I think during the 1.12 or 1.13 viewer release I switched to the Nicholaz Viewers which I would happily still use if not for the annoying sculpt bugs. So after that I switched to Imprudence, the viewer I liked best so far. Imprudence uses a very strict no-3rd-party-components approach, and as a consequence the graphic library used is significantly slower than in any other viewer. So reluctantly I switched to Boy Lane's Rainbow Viewer (previously known as Cool Viewer) - the viewer I primarily use these days. I have yet to check the Gemini viewer, which gets advertised for power users and has some promising features.

Getting back to an official viewer (or at least a Linden Lab released viewer) after that many months is strange. The viewer feels odd, and a lot of known functionality from 3rd party viewers is missing. However during my test-run I did not run into any issues.

What I can tell is that this viewer is fast. Right now Snowglobe has two major areas of change compared to a regular viewer: texture download via HTTP instead of UDP (and thus making textures being cachable in the net infrastructure itself) and a completely revamped map interface. The map is blazingly fast. The island screenshots come up in full resolution in instants. The reason for this is that the map tiles do not get queried from the SL servers, but gets cached on the worldwide internet backbone of Amazon (yes, the book guys). Texture rezzing seemed very fast as well, however I have no idea how much of this is the effect of a cleaned cache - I have to run experiments.

The overall impression was good, and I will certainly test it a bit more. It's too early for me to give a final verdict, and I am dearly missing some features I get with CoolViewer. But I encourage you to try it for yourself.

You can download the Snowglobe viewer from the project website.

ARC and lag revisited

I wrote about lag and the myths regarding ARC a lot of times in the past, and often referred to Gwyneth Llewelyn's one year old article on the issue. Today, Gwyneth has made an update to the article. Read "Anatomy of Lag" as a guest post on Ana Lutetia's blog.

Personally, I want to once again point out that the introduction of the "Avatar Rendering Cost" display was one of the worst things Linden Lab ever did. The ARC display has a certain informational character, however the (completely arbitrary) red/yellow/green tinting, and the way it was publicized turned it quickly into a tool for discriminating fellow residents. The ARC display does not tell ANYTHING about lag, not even anything about the capacity of the sim, but SOLELY about your own computer. However, seeing a red ARC number for a fellow resident makes some people... well... see red, and makes them feel entitled to criticize and even insult.

Would I be cynic or indulge in conspiracy theories, I would say the ARC readings and especially the color coding was made on purpose to distract from the real issues behind the scenes. But I don't believe that, I believe it was simply not thought through enough, and nobody estimated the sociological consequences a public discriminating feature would have.

More than ever I am convinced that Linden Lab would be well advised to get a sociologist into their team and run decisions by them and ask for advice.

Anyways, if you believe in ARC, read Gwyneth's article. And if you want tricks to reduce lag, read it too.

REZpectable: Donut Launcher

[REZpectable is a blog dedicated to gadgets and gimmicks in SL. I co-founded it together with Shockwave Plasma and Rick Pfalz a while ago, in the meantime Nissa Nightfire has joned the team of authors. Here is a teaser to my most recent article - read the full post on the REZpectable blog.]

The combat potential of baked goods has been grossly neglected over the milennia. Countless times a hard and dry breadroll or ciabatta has saved a life during a melee fight. And also the French baguette gets underestimated in its clubbing capacities. Only the custard pie gets recognized as a means of combat, but lacks the insignia of a 21st century weapon in terms of range and fast reloading.

Continue reading at REZpectable, the SL gadget blog.

Potential Privacy issue with XStreet SL dropboxes

... and for that matter with any other dropboxes, be it Hippo, Apez, Deliverator, Subscribe-o-Matic, DSN or similar dropboxes. Whenever an object sends inventory to an avatar who is offline, the system sends a message along those lines:

The object 'Xstreet SL Magic Box v3.0.10' in Second Life has offered you inventory.
Log in to accept or decline this inventory.
= Xstreet SL Magic Box v3.0.10 is owned by Xxxxx Yyyyyy
= http://slurl.com/secondlife/MyFancySim/129/70/2004

As you can see, the location of the dropbox itself gets shown in that message. In this (faked) example the dropbox is on the sim "MyFancySim" at the coordinates 129,70,2004. A dropbox in an altitude of 2004 meters will most likely be on a skyplatform used as personal home or workshop. I know some (designer) friends carefully guard the locations of their homes and workshops in the sky, mostly because of the wish for privacy, but also as security measure against prying eyes regarding the things they work on. As normal as it may seem to place your dropboxes at your personal place, as much devastating is it for your privacy.

If you turn this around, there is a good argument to be made to place your dropbox(es) into your shop. With the same information someone could find out about your personal skyplatform, they can also find out about the location of your shop. Also most dropboxes give out a weblink when touched by someone else than the owner.

Finally, it should be noted that some dropboxes can be placed multiple times. You can take a full Xstreet dropbox to inventory and place a second copy on a different sim. That way, one acts as backup for the other, and deliveries can still be made when one box should be inaccessible.

Mr. Puffy Chin and Mr. Striped Face

Please meet my two nemeses as of late, Mr. Striped Face and Mr. Puffy Chin. Mr. Striped Face has been haunting me and friends on and off for a while, often accompanied by his friend Mr. Striped Body. However for about 10 days their visits became very frequent. And Mr. Striped Body seems to get some pervert pleasure from displaying my IM window all over my avatar body.
Mr. Puffy Chin introduced himself to me about a year ago, making my face (and only my face) swell and my chin making Jay Leno green from envy. I got rid of Mr. Puffy Chin by adjusting various parts in my shape by one notch and re-save the shape. However during the recent attack of both, that does not help. Multiple rebaking gets rid of Mr. Striped Face, but after the next teleport he is back with a vengeance. Switching into a different shape sometimes gets rid of the nasty bugger, rebaking sometimes helps as well. Relogging drives Mr. Puffy Chin away as well - but not everytime. Usually simply waiting helps.
The two haunt me almost daily, costing me nerves, annoying me. I wish I could get rid of them, but even ritually cleaning the cache does not help. What's up? Anybody out there able to help me?

P.S. I should mention that my video card driver is unchanged for ages.

Laying some pipe

Got your attention? Good! Recently I used the "Yahoo Pipes" tool for the first time, and all I can say is "W-o-w!". Yahoo Pipes is the answer to many questions, and I highly recommend you to use it.

I subscribe to three major fashion newsfeeds for SL: the massive fashion.WorldOfSL feed, Kesserett Steeplechase' Metavirtual.us feed and the relatively new fashionfeedofsl.com. Scanning those three, I think I cover about 90% of the fashion blogging community. The problem is that more and more authors crosspost their blogposts, so in worst case I get the same post up to 4 times. A minor problem is that certain topics like hair or skin do simply not interest me. I looked for a dupecheck solution, but did not find any, until finally a forum post somewhere pointed me into the direction of Yahoo Pipes.



Yahoo Pipes is a toolset that takes feeds as input, manipulates them according to rules, and creates a new feed as output. The pipe gets constructed by connecting graphical boxes containing rules and conditions wiht some sort of ribbon, thus creating a flow of data from input and output. The pipe constructions themselves are by default open - everybody can not only view how a pipe is built, but can actually clone a pipe and use it as basis for their own pipes.

The first pipe I built adressed the topic of the dupes in the fashion feed. For this it takes the three feeds as input and applies a few filters to get rid of unwanted content (for example posts without images). In the next step, three filters check for potential duplicte postings. And in a final step the headlines of the individual posts get changed so that the originating blog is easily visible. The result is stunning. From 240 posts fed into the pipe, only 42 remained after all those manipulations! You can subscribe to this pipe with any feed reader here. In case you actually do like to see skin and hair related posts, feel free to clone the pipe and remove the filters.

The second pipe I built scans the new item feeds from OnRez and Xstreet SL for freshly created freebies. While OnRez had a special feed for freebies (which just needed some rinsing), the problem with Xstreet SL was to decide whether it is a freebie or not depending on the item title. For both shopping portals obvious demo items got deleted from the feed as well as items without picture or without description. Finally the source - OnRez or Xstreet - gets added to the title. You can subscribe to the freebie feed here.

Apart from those public pipes I created some personal pipes - not visible to anybody - for special purposes. You do not need a software development background for them although it does help. The visual interface makes it easy though to combine things.

Have fun while laying pipe! ;-)

The truth about temporary prims - a fun experiment

In the recent discussion about OpenSpace/Void sims, one argument heard often is that people abuse these kind of sims with so-called "temprezzers". There are several extra attributes a prim can have:

• Physical: the prim gets affected by gravity and impacts with other prims
• Phantom: the prim can be permeated by other prims abd avatars
• Temporary: the prim will get deleted without trace after a short while

Temporary prims do get counted on the parcels primcount, but do not get limited by the parcels prim limit. So if a parcel has a prim capacity of 400 prims, you can still have temporary prims exceeding this limit.

The main intended use for temporary prims is to have an object rez props that are only needed for a short time. Many of you have seen palmtrees where every now and then a coconut falls out. The coconut is usually a temporary (and physical) prim, so it vanishes by itself after a short time without littering the parcel and without the need to manually clear it up. Another use for temporary prims are projectiles from weapons like arrows or bullets - again not caring about the parcels prim allotment and not needing to clean up are the main reasons.

However due do the tight prim economy, a second use for temporary prims was found, the so called "temprezzers". A temprezzer consists of a 1-prim base of a regular prim, and then rezzes a complex object (a tree, a yacuzi, a boat - you name it) as a temporary object. As soon as this object gets cleaned up by the simulaor, the temprezzer rezzes a new instance of it. With a temprezzer it is easy to rez way more objects than the parcel prim allotment would otherwise allow.

Now where do these extram prims come from? A full sim has a prim limit of 15000 prims, an OpenSpace/Void sim has a prim limit of 3750 prims. My understanding so far was that a temprezzer "loans" (other people say "steals") free prims from the sim's prim allotment. So if the sim has 14000 of the 15000 prims used, a temprezzer could use a maximum of 1000 prims until it meets the hard limit of the sim's prim allotment.
SL artist and blogger Raul Crimson has a different opinion. He claims that there is an unlimited amount of temporary prims (very much like there is an unlimited amount of prims avatars can have attached to themselves regardless how full the sim is), and that this is one of the problems encountered with OpenSpace abuse.

Time for a test, it seems. Together with Ivanova we logged into the Beta Grid and found an empty sandbox with 15000 prims available. The next question was how to rez 15000 prims. Ivanova experimented a bit with self replicating prims, and we were discussing how a "kill switch" could be implemented since 150000 channel listeners would probably lag a sim down to a halt. Recursive rezzing however proved to be quite mind boggling, and while she still had her head in the script, I started to rez and duplicate cubes. It turned out that by always doubling rezzed cubes, fairly quickly I was able to have piles of 2048 prims so the prim allotment could be used quickly.


Finally we had 14999 prims rezzed and therefore only 1 prim available. The last remaining prim we turned temporary, and then there were two options:

1. We would not be able to duplicate a second temporary prim (the 15001 on the sim), thus proving me right and Raul wrong.
2. We would be able to rez more than 15000 prims using temporary prims, thus proving Raul right.

With some suspense, I selected Edit on the temporary prim, and shift-dragged it in order to produce a copy. And to my huge surprise, I was able to make a copy thus having effectively 15001 prims on the sim.
However what was strange is that I could not shift-drag two temporary prims in order to go to 15003 prims. I could make many many surplus prims by shift-dragging a single temporary prim, but I was not able to create bulks of temporary prims. Further investigation would be needed how this affects temprezzers. But fact is: you can have more than 15000 prims on a full sim.


It is interesting to note that the 15000 prims produced quite some lag. Especially mass editing huge piles of prims slowed down operation significantly, not only getting the prims into edit mode, but especially moving and duplicating them. After Ivanova has left, I took on the task to clean up the sandbox (I did not want to have 15000 prims returned to my Lost+Found). So I thought it would be a neat idea to turn them physical (and temporary).


The effect was kind of neat, the piles collapsing in slow motion like in a Matrix movie, with cubes even get propelled away in slo-mo, however the lag was pretty severe. Still, it was fun.

I was pretty surprised that you can in fact exceed a sim's prim allotment with temporary prims. While I considered temprezzers up to now - dependng on their use - as unfair to the sim neighbours as it "steals" their prims, I can see now that they might even pose a real problem by exceeding simulator limits multiple times. However, further investigation is needed. Still the experiment was a lot of fun.