Yeah, like the last thing you wanted to read today was another post on the Emerald viewer.
It’s starting to feel like the Lab has given the Emerald team a two-week deadline for compliance. It’s not stated explicitly anywhere, but from various readings (like this deleted post) and a comment from the Lab, it is starting to feel like the Lab has given the team a deadline and conditions to meet otherwise the viewer channel will be disabled.
Here’s what the Lab had to say:
We may remove viewers from the Third-Party Viewer Directory when they violate our Policy on Third-Party Viewers. The Policy prohibits the distribution of harmful functionality like denial-of-service attacks or griefing attacks. It also requires a published Privacy Policy that specifically describes what user data the third-party viewer collects, stores, and uses and how it uses, displays or shares that data.
As a result of multiple violations of the Policy, we have removed the listing of the Emerald viewer from the Third Party Viewer Directory.
We have insisted that the Emerald development team make transparent to the Second Life community the functionality of its viewer code and the user data that the Emerald viewer collects. We strongly urge all Residents who continue to use the Emerald viewer to make these demands as well. We also caution Residents of the potential risks involved in using certain versions of the Emerald viewer. Although we have not at this time disallowed use of the Emerald viewer entirely, we may do so if the problems with the viewer are not appropriately remedied by the Emerald development team.
[Emphasis mine]
Does that mean the clock is ticking? It sure feels like it.
Update: Apparently there is a deadline and it is Friday, 3 September.
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This is kind of ironic…
Well the part about removing a file from the viewer directory that helps it’s performance. I personally left Emerald for other viewers specifically because the performance wasn’t good enough for *me* at that time. Now they are being required to actually slow it down more (meaning they’ll have to speed it up some other way – I’m not a coder).
I’m not for or against Emerald, the outcome really doesn’t make much difference to me. But I wonder if the new Emerald team will be able to pull this off. I would think the devs there would start by opening up the information line: beginning with some real world names and contact information, perhaps?
I choose Imprudence for the same reason you have previously expressed, Tateru: the transparency and effort on part of the devs to stay within licensing and transparency.
Well, the grid was overdue for another round of good drama. Pedophilia and casinos are such old news and the banks are barely a memory and the landbots have all but disappeared and copybot and come and gone and come again and gone again and… and… and…
hopefully if they take out emerald’s griefing and privacy invading code, it will speed the viewer up and make it less buggy…
well the new emerald dev team still has the hackers responsible for the hidden DDOS coding on board ( Fractured crystal is in using a diffrent name = CONFIRMED/ phox aka lonely bluebird aka patteh phox = CONFIRMED there is one more person that is back in the EMDEV team who was also one of the people responsible for hacking the linden labs account server in 2005 in the EMDEV team.
these people are self confessed hackers and what thy did was illegal and i wouldent be surprised if someone lawyers up and sue’s the ass off them all.
how can you trust the team behind emerald after what they did.
i mean they have there own database of all the people that used emerald, they have there login name, ip address, real life name and address, these people have been data mineing which under current uk law is a cybercrime and which is funny because the usa is currently extraditing a man from the uk from doing exactly what the EMDEV team did and that guy is looking at 50 YEARS MINIMUM.
the EMdev team needs to be made accountable for what they did and i feel they should be arrested, charged and jailed
Interesting that they have to drop KDU because of GPL incompatibility. But is it *L*GPL-incompatible? Because that’s what the post-2.1.1 viewer is under.
disappointed fractured isnt banned after he admitted what he did.
It shows once again a completely toothless policy.
If a secondlife resident can use thousands of other resident’s computers to commit a criminal act and still not get a ban, something is seriously wrong at the lab….
Sergal, do you have any evidence to back up your claims? Without proof, they are worthless.
One thing is true: Phox is still on the team ( to the best of my knowledge). LL is well aware of that, as Joe Linden noted last night during the interview.
But the rest? Evidence please.
[...] third-party viewers — estimated to be used by as many as half of all players — has fallen out of favor with Linden Labs and is no longer an officially endorsed option. Scott Jennings has posted a full [...]