Surveillance

Mainstream media is not reporting well on what the US government is doing.Much of the miss behavior is omitted from US news. Privacy is on the back burners. But, there are some celebrities that are starting to get involved. Reporting is shifting in the media, you will still have to dig for the truth.

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In Europe things are cooking on the front burners: Online privacy protection, and Words not enough: Berlin and Paris want a ‘no spy’ deal with Washington. There is even talk of a second Internet that the US won’t control. In the past the US was a leader of free speech and privacy and considered a protector of the Internet. The US has lost most of its reputation on those points in the last 3 years.

SWAT team raids investigative journalist’s home, seizes confidential files. More and more often American law enforcement is doing whatever it wants.

Firestorm 64-Bit Viewer?

Seems the Firestorm Development Team is thinking about a 64-bit version of the viewer. Jessica Lyon has placed a post on the Firestorm Viewer blog about a 64-bit viewer. See: Firestorm 64bit Viewer o.O.

Image by: DoctorWho80 - Flickr
Image by: DoctorWho80 – Flickr

There is a link to the explanation of what 64-bit software is and how it differs from 32-bit software. Unfortunately, the link leads to a Microsoft site. My experience is you need to be a graduate of some geek college to understand what they’re saying. So, I’ll give you the short version… well… at least a version with, I hope, understandable language. 

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Cloud Party TOS

Cloud Party hasn’t said much about their Terms of Service (ToS) lately. That changed as they pointed out the major difference between CP’s and LL’s ToS’s.

See: A quick review of our Terms of Service

This dramatically illustrates what is needed to operate a virtual world service and what a company thinks they can get away with. The free market allows competition. There is usually someone that will cater to people’s desires. In a free system they can do that. In this case CP is hungry for users. So, we ‘users’ get treated better.

I see it as the difference between big established companies verses small start ups. Management has different concerns.

castAR – Oculus Competition?

Check out the castAR VR system. This is now a funded, but still open, Kickstarter project.

[youtube RmHHGOBOUWA]

This is the one-ups-manship that the free market creates. This combines Oculus, Google Glasses, and shutter glasses.

I’m not sure about the claim of no motion sickness. I think that is likely true in the AR mode. When one changes over to the full VR lenses I would think they have the same problem as Oculus.

Also, I can’t really tell what resolution the glasses are providing.

Second Life News 2013-43

There was a roll to the main channel today. This is the package that ran on all the RC channels. This is mostly a bug-fix package.

The Bug Fixes:

  • Fixed “Group member access to parcels fails when ‘Sell passes to’ is enabled” (BUG-3992[c])
  • Fixed “‘Ghost’ avatars and vehicles sometimes appear to an observer at the sim border” (BUG-3872[c])
  • Extremely high Avatar Render Weights reported to the server are now capped at 500,000 (BUG-4010[c])
  • Fixed “Vehicles which exit a region with a passenger are incorrectly auto-returned and become ‘ghost shapes’ in the physics engine” (BUG-4024[c])
  • Fixed a performance issue with avatar loading speed in the experimental ‘viewer-interesting’ viewer

RC Channels

No new packages will roll to the RC’s. It is not clear if they are going to be restarted or not. The package they were testing is the package rolling to the main channel. The result is both the main and RC channels will run the same version this week. So, a restart is not needed in the RC channels as the package is already running.