SL Viewer Dramas

So i got permabanned again last monday, second time in a month, apparently for multiple reasons. All my regions have been shut down and probably some of my alt accounts too, some of which were premium members as well. Inventory worth thousands of USD, around 1000$ USD in cash and my regions i paid around 200k$ USD for in tier over the years. All in all that isn’t really a big loss to me, considering i never paid a single dollar for this game. That’s right, when my account Skills Hax got banned in 2008 (later unbanned in 2013) i made a new account the next day, spent thousand dollars on a full sim and have never used any RL money again on SL since that day. In fact SL was paying some of my real life bills for years, CDS even helped me to finance my new apartment a few years ago. So i guess i should be thankful after all, it was a lot of work sometimes, but huge fun and probably sooner rather than later all of us will lose everything anyways. Even though SL has been getting rather slow lately, INSILICO has always been able to keep itself afloat since the first month and was even profitable enough that i could add 4 more regions to it. INSILICO rentals, my own content sales, custom jobs and then CDS generated enough money to buy and sustain regions dedicated to viewer testing and griefer sandboxes like Emerald Point, CVNT, Yiff Yiff, or Poop aka Cumboy Canyon aka Purge or just personal hangouts like MEOW, Mindcandy and others.

Frankly, it is in Linden Lab’s best interest to keep INSILICO alive, given its icon status as one of the few sims that got people actually interested in Second Life and made them stay over the years. Hell, they’ve got a picture of the sim on the back of their business cards and have been promoting their service with our work countless times. I encouraged Abe and Stark, two of the INSILICO GMs to come forward and discuss a transfer of ownership of the regions and gave Linden Lab my OK, My content is all yours to play with. The community website with its 2600+ accounts will probably change ownership too shortly, as well as the inworld groups with 6k+ members. LL kept the INSILICO estate locked for the past week and thankfully they have been very cooperative in regards to the sims so far, let’s hope it all works out. I would like to thank all the renters, players, donors and staff who have been running this place for the past 5 years without my involvement, you guys rock. I’m very confident that the INSILICO adminstration will continue to do their best for the sim and community, although it is going to be very hard financially, so there will likely be cutbacks.

INSILICO has always been a spearhead of innovation and i have been using many different hacks while i was still working on it, probably the first sim above 800 meters, first sim surround, first windlight, almost entirely built with megaprims everyone considered “laggy”, NPC bots, sim wide IRC, lots of custom scripting, etc etc. LL still seems to use it to test performance and other things judging by the frequent “Tester” accounts. I always went beyond limits of what was possible on SL so getting into viewer coding while building INSILICO was just the way to go. It wouldn’t have been possible to build a whole city alone in such a short time with any of the standard viewers, some of the things i made needed a “hacked” viewer to bypass restrictions like upload limits, linking rules etc. I work as project manager so i’m not really a coder, but learning C++ to write silly Secondlife viewers like Gemini, Emerald and especially Onyx helped me in my real job immensely and i think i got pretty good at it over the years. I’m a curious cat and always enjoyed breaking and improving things, i had sooo much fun with exploits. Like breaking experience permissions, force-teleporting whole welcome areas full of people screaming at each other to my place, making them dance. Mesh hax that was finally patched after 3 years last winter which would allow me to duplicate any mesh object, including rigging info without reupload on the fly, making mesh objects with only 1 LI no matter how complex, even bigger than 64m. Inverting or flipping mesh assets to only name a few. Soooo many voice related exploits, tools to roll back regions, hundreds of useful features that LL simply won’t give you because they could be abused. I never shared the bad stuff since i didn’t want to harm Secondlife as a whole (more recent Onyx leaks or mesh hax would have been a disaster for example). CDS was about raising awareness and getting ignorant people off bad viewers, and i guess it worked. When was the last time you heard about a copybot scandal? For the past few years i have been unlisting many people who got caught in 2010 and contacted me about it, because a lot of Linden water has passed under the bridge now. I still regret that my beta script was leaked, which was used by zFire Xue and others to create Redzone and other griefing tools. Ash, the other creator of CDS told me he is interested in taking over the system, so it might be continued as well, maybe even free. Think what you want, there have always been a lot of rumors about me, i thought it was funny and even encouraged some of them, because i liked to see how far it would go. Many people have tried to find dirt on me over the years and realized there really isn’t that much. There was not a single copybotted item in any of my sims, you can’t crash sims with voice and what other lame theories certain angry anons come up with.

I am still not sure what exactly caused my ban, maybe i knew too much or maybe they got mad they couldn’t break my IM encryption. Or that backdoored copybot viewer some guy made that IMs me the user’s whole info without their knowledge if i am in range, in plain text and for every Linden to see, in an effort to frame me or w/e. As you can see, i guess i am not completely innocent, have been skirting the rules for years and some of the things i was involved in sparked serious grid-wide controversies, while LL turned a blind eye.. think Emerald/Onyx or CDS. Most of those were based on FUD but it was certainly bad PR for Linden Lab and i don’t blame them for hating me a little. In fact, some of the stuff i did was pretty fucking bad so honestly LL is in their full right to remove me from the game. Whatever Linden employee thought it would be a good idea to kill me, Thank You. I think that the chances of finding out what’s actually happened are absurdly low so i’ll just move on. I’d much rather be happy than right any day.

I heard some dramatic news person mention how i am terrible and it is my fault that thousands of people have nowhere to play now because i am a “highly controversial” figure and other FUD he scooped up somewhere. I created INSILICO, the idea, the brand, style, the websites, the basic rules and roleplay lore, the regions, countless builds, items, avatars, scripts and textures, it was my baby. Granted i burned out on it after 3 years and found some very creative and smart people like Stark, Jodie, Abe, Betz, Zero, Alexx, Cinn, Risa, Perri and others, to keep up my legacy, adding amazing mesh builds and fleshing out the roleplay lore. But it was still my intellectual property and i have been providing it to people for free all this time, despite the usual drama that comes with owning a roleplay sim. For 8 years.

I’m a rather private person and always preferred to stay behind the scenes, just make the game for others and only interfer when needed, not just with INSILICO but many of my other projects, as well. Not because i want to be some sort of game god but because i like watching people having fun with my ideas. Advertising for LL never was my job, i liked the attention in the beginning but it’s not like we got any kind of special treatment ever.

Clearly the times when a dozen of Lindens a day would come to my sims to hang out and shoot shit or talk like normal human beings are long over. I used to build offices for Linden friends, nowadays there aren’t even real office hours any more. The layoffs at LL in 2010 when i lost many good friends, the dark times with many bad decisions and years of cold shoulder treatment of the Kingdon era, later Rod Humble and now Ebbe completely ruined my trust and sympathy for LL, I still think SL is an amazing thing but simply in the hands of the wrong company. Not all of you of course, you know who.

I put the autoresponse feature in Emerald because people would overload my IM box while i was trying to build INSILICO back in more active times. Now SL is dying and has been for a while, it’s a ghost town, TP around on the map and you will notice most of the groups of dots are traffic bots, unless there’s a shopping event. Most of the sims seem emtpy, great builds are being taken offline because the number of visitors are dropping to near zero, while LL still happily charges 300$ USD a month to keep a simulator online (which probably doesn’t cost them more than 50$ USD). I grew tired of it and the only reason i stayed around was you guys really, making stuff with you, talking to friends and shopping was always the most fun to me. I have no hopes for Sansar, it’s made by a company that doesn’t understand their own userbase. It will just be a new Patterns, VR buzzwords won’t be enough to give it much traction and my main pet peeve with it is it being closed source. Even Lindens commented to me that they are rather underwhelmed. I still wish you guys the best with it.

I’ve witnessed all the good and terrible things that make SL what it is: the furries, neckbeard trannies, memers, mutant goons, blender nerds, ageplayer vampire families, femboys, shopaholics, fashionistas, the brazilians, hairy gay hulks, linden alts, stalkers, breedables, botox lip findommes, unfunny youtubers, banbox collectors, undertales, cloacas, bling, woodburies, mesh butts, boob physics, latex bondage ponygirls, gfx crashers, copybutters, anti-copybutters, anti-anti-copybutters, anti-griefers, sandbox-foxes, thirsty beta males, escorts, cucklords, creepy daddies, the army of bots, L$ beggars, group spammers, knowitalls, virtual weed dealers, sonic pedos, weebs, permanoobs, cowboys, angry bikers, dick pics, redlining violets, the 1337 hax0rs, the obsessive script kiddies, spergs, the angsty anons, brown nosers, the namedroppers, people who say they know me who have never talked to me, the people who scream “I got your IP bitch!”, the Linden suckups, the newfags, the oldfags, the alts, the opensourcerers, the SLU pitchfork hivemind, the BBCs, SJWs, BFFs, JLUs, ARs, HUDs, W-HATs, MLPs, YCBs, TWHs, DWs, NEETs and FICs. I played through all the levels, even the bonus level and the secret maps, seen all the cheats and easter eggs, it’s game over.

I started from scratch with new alts a few times when i got bored, for some reason i often ended up as sim owner again, building new communites, but now without my L$ it would be too much work and i am honestly kind of done with the game too. My SL folder is 90 GB big, not counting video and audio recordings, i will keep all the memories and will still stay in touch with the people close to me like the INSILICO gang, the Cumboys/TWH/whatever and all my other friends, actually we have been spending most of the time outside of SL anyways for the past years, playing games or watching movies together. If you want to add me on Skype, my username is chillnesse.

Unlike last month’s “permaban” i prooooobably won’t come back, at least not as Skills Hak. I got suspended and banned many times before, in fact the Hak account was a ban evasion itself so i could build INSILICO. The cure for boredom is curiosity, there is no cure for curiosity. I got into trouble usually during those times when i was off work for longer periods of time, like right now, i haven’t been working for the past 3 months. An idle mind is the devil’s playground as they say. I reached the top of the pyramid and have spent my last days as exhausted hacker overlord endboss, surrounded by my most trusted men in the mighty empire that was the region of Poop, giggling at Second Life and having the most fun ever in this game.

I had a good run. 8 years on this account and the timing of my ban couldn’t have been better. In fact my boyfriend was really happy to hear about my final ban since i am spending too much time at the computer and i am going to be a mommy soon.

It was a wild ride, thanks for everything ♥

Linden Lab’s security and customer support are probably the worst i have seen in my ~20 years online time. Today i was messaged by a hacked Linden account. Tia Linden who was laid off in 2010 during the big purge. No joke. (Last time i’ve seen that happen was 2008 and it was just a hacked name, no actual Linden account). Tia Linden is now gone from search apparently, as usual the only thing LL has to say about this is canned standard responses from “Scouts”, in fact that is all people get from LL these days.

I wonder if the person tricked the geniuses at LL support into resetting the password by providing basic RL info, like it is being done to countless other accounts, without LL doing much about it. It happens every day and happened to dozens of people i know. It’s trivial to do, apparently even if you ask LL to add a second password question or PIN as an additional layer of security (which they only grant if you are a premium account, lol), because the people who work in support just don’t know about it / are new / etc. So basically *any* SL account is fair game. Usually people who compromise accounts delete inventory irreversibly and send any $L in the account to other people. Often it is creators or land owner accounts in good standing with a lot of money in them, you can send that money to other people in large quantities in order to trigger the automated fraud detection system and get them banned too, at least temporarily, Great right?

What’s more important though is, if whoever hacked this Linden account had access to the CSR database and other stuff too. What else is there, people’s real life names registered on the accounts, billing info, logs etc. LL keeps a lot of detailed info on residents, like PINs on how to reset their account passwords :^)

If someone can hack a Linden account this easily, i think many people won’t feel comfortable about being premium members any more. I’m not concerned about my real life info, people know my name and other info already due to similar shit and now silly SL stuff pops up if you google my real name. But when it comes to banking info that’s where the fun stops. Or my 120k items inventory, or my regions which have been a lot of work, my other accounts i pay premium for, the list goes on. Considering i’ve made LL like 200k $US in tier alone over the past years i think i’d deserve a higher level of security.