Second Life

Things about SL

SL Community Forums Update Week 19

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It seems the worlds greatest pass-time is complaining. The new Answers, Blogs, Forums, and Knowledge Base are certainly something residents complain about. Often with good reason. There are a number of things that are being corrected and changed on the AnBlorumledge… eck… forum.

One thing is those pesky emoticons. They are displaying wrong, mis-positioned, and that delayed a number of other fixes being rolled out, which sounds odd to me. But, whatever. I don’t work with Lithium, the forum software.

Answers

You may have noticed there is a place for comments in the Answers section. It seems those are not supposed to be there. They managed to get rid of the comments button but not the comments box. So, I suppose we should avoid using comments in Answers.

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Kirsten Viewer S21(7a) Review Continued

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I’ve been able to use the viewer for a time now. My experience with it follows.

Download & Install

The download (29mb) and install is standard for the KirstenLee Viewer. It uninstalls the previous version in the process. The cache and settings locations are retained. The settings are kept.

Anna's Many Murders
Anna's Many Murders

Experience

No reboot needed. Viewer cranked up and ran well. In my cottage I get 27 to 32 FPS. In Celtic Myst I get 17 to 21 FPS. This is with Lighting & Shadows + Ambient Occlusion enabled and Sun/Moon shadows off.

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Kirsten Viewer S21(7a) Release Review

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KirstenLee S20 Logo
Kirsten S21(7)

Today (5/11) the release of S21(7a) or 2.7.8.7 came out. This is version 7a because the Lab alerted viewer developers that an exploit was found in the Second Life System. Unpatched viewers are vulnerable to the exploit. Kirsten’s 7a has the patch and is safe from this exploit. If you downloaded (7), go back and get (7a).

Build 7 has a load of new features and fixes. I’ll touch on those I find interesting. The list of them is here: Kirsten Viewer Release Notes. These are not necessarily the first appearance of these features. Some will be familiar to you if you have used the 7 RC’s.

Kirsten’s code includes SL 2.6.8 code items. My latest development viewer from SL only shows 2.6.7. So, this may be the most leading edge viewer available.

This version has Enhanced Avatar Physics. In other words; Boobies Bounce.

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Warning Will Roger!!!

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WARNING!!!

In Second Life we have a minor crisis today. There is an exploit that someone figured out. They are griefing the grid with it now. It is unclear how long this exploit has been around. You need to take action now.

The Problem

Red Hat Security Advisory is out. See: https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2009-1561.html This is an old issue as it was first found 2009. I suppose it just recently came to the Linden’s attention when someone figured out how to implement the exploit in SL.

If you are not a Linux user, you may not know that Red Hat is a flavor of Linux. They broke the news on the exploit.

The problem is in a part of the viewer code library libvorbis. It has runtime libraries for programs that support Ogg Vorbis. A type of sound file compression that SL uses. Presumably Windows users are the primary risk. But, the exploit door is in a library that Windows, Mac, and Linux use.

Multiple flaws were found in the libvorbis library. A specially-crafted Ogg Vorbis media format file (Ogg) could cause an application using libvorbis to crash or, possibly, execute arbitrary code when opened. (CVE-2009-3379)

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The SL World is About to Change

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Yesterday we got word that by the end of the month we will have the time table for mesh release. Along with mesh we have other features that will arrive too. Some we know about. Others we have only had hints of. But, there are significant changes coming to Second Life.

Changing Second Life
Changing Worlds - By Paul J Everett @ Flickr

I’ve told you about the coming changes I’ve discovered over the past weeks. I doubt I’ve discovered them all. The Linden’s in the various teams hint at other coming changes and new features. We obviously are only being told about the changes the Lab feels will directly affect merchants or the economy.

The Big Change

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