Real & Second Life Tidbits

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Direct Messages

More blogs are noticing that Messages sent from My.SecondLife.com (Direct Messages) are not working. See: Second and Real Life Tidbits 2014. We have no clue from the Lab that the feature will or won’t return at some point.

It should be easy and possible to block non-resident users from using the web site’s message feature. If that is the problem, then I expect to see the feature return. I suspect the problem is how to block and limit residents that are spamming. If that is the problem, we may see the permanent removal of the feature. But, it shouldn’t be all that hard to limit messages sent. So, I have hope the feature will return.

Virus

Honour has a post Protecting My Second Life From the Tricksters with some great images of a Japanese-themed sim: Yokai. Honour is on about the ransom-ware thing called CyrptoLocker. A piece of malware that has been prevalent in Europe for some time and that came to the USA in late 2013. To learn more about it see: Virus Warning. This is a devious bit of malware best protected against by a good backup strategy with the backups being separated from your computer. If the CryptoLocker Trojan can find a file on your system, usb and network drives included, it will encrypt them. 

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Second and Real Life Tidbits 2014

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It is early in the year and not much is happening at Linden Lab. I see the SL-blogosphere covering all sorts of things. Even the Subscrib-O-matic’s seem to be sending out old stuff. So, I’m skimming news and watching for anything interesting in between playing with Blender and Avastar. A few of the things I think are interesting:

Inara has a post up about Profile feeds direct messaging: Lab confirms “turned off”. If you have used the web site My.SecondLife.com  to send IM’s, you won’t be able to do that anymore. Peter Gray of Linden Lab confirmed to Inara the feature has been turned off due to spammers.

Honour Mcmillan has posted and article asking for volunteers to help with her primary focus in of creating and growing a corps of LEA Volunteers. For details and the type of volunteers needed see: Calling for Volunteers in Second Life. 

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Win L$10k

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There is a new contest that Linden Lab is running. The Lab wants to see how your avatar has evolved from 2013 to 2014. Get pictures. They are to chow the change from 2013 to 2014. Then visit Second Life’s Facebook page, like it, and look for the contest button.

The contest rules are here. Other details are there as well.

For the official announcement see: Enter the Second Life – New Year – New You Contest for a Chance to Win L$10,000

You may have a good chance to win this one… seems most of the entries are not following the rules, they do NOT show the progression from ’13 to ’14.

Avastar Fitted Mesh Tutorial

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Gaia Clary released a new tutorial for using Avastar to make Fitted Mesh clothes. The video tutorial was published December 24th on YouTube.

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This tutorial gives you a quick education on how Avastar is intended to be used. I think it also clearly shows that weighting is going to be a more complex task. Using the old bones, old as in pre-Fitted Mesh era, and weighting one could kind of get by using just the avatar’s skin weights and a rudimentary understanding of weighting. That meant for a short skirt one was focusing only on the mPelvis, mHipLeft, and mHipRight bones.

Now we will also be considering the Butt, Belly, Right_Handle, Left_Handle, and Lower_Back. That gives us a total of 8 additional bones to consider. Weighting was complicated enough with 3 bones. 

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CreatorVerse Android

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Goofing around with my new phone I decided to check out CreatorVerse. I tend to have a problem with the permissions I have to hand out to load some apps. Since January 2013 it has become illegal to root a smart phone. So, I am not allowed to control my phone. You cannot do as you want with a phone you purchase. Gotta love big government that is in the pocket of special interests… Whatever.

Check out this permission on the Android app CreatorVerse:

CreatorVerse Permissions
CreatorVerse Permissions

If you get a Linden’s attention and can get an answer about this, you will likely find out there is a reason for needing this permission so that CreatorVerse can connect to its user base and possibly other social networks. Of course the Lab would never collect all your other account information or misuse it. At least something similar is what ESET told me when I asked about why they needed access to my contacts list for their free anti-virus program. We are just supposed to trust they won’t do what the app’s permissions allow them to do.

Each of us has to decide how much we can trust corporations. Especially after the Snowden leaks have lead to revealing Google’s, RSA’s, and Microsoft’s involvement with NSA when the most transparent administration ever has won more Pinocchios this year and has more people and agencies under simultaneous investigation than any other administration in history. So, I’m not feeling overly trusting.