Dodgy Second Life viewer doing the rounds
We'd like to caution our Second Life readers about a dodgy Second Life viewer that's currently doing the rounds under rather dubious circumstances. The viewer is calling itself Neil Life, and purports to include some content-ripping features over and above those normally available to users.
One particular feature of the viewer, apparently related to a permissions exploit, appears to have triggered Linden Lab to perform an emergency update to Second Life to close the exploit last week.
The viewer was widely advertised last week with distributed notecard advertisements in-world which purported to have been created by famed resident, Gwyneth Llewelyn. In actual fact, a copy of one of her existing notecards had simply had the text replaced so that it appeared that she had authored it.
(This is one of the main reasons we don't generally accept the provenance of notecards in Second Life)
The author of Neil Life has admitted to the scam, and claims to be quitting Second Life (over that and another wrong-doing) and the download has been removed, but some few copies of the viewer are still circulating in the wild.
Our advice is not to touch them. The whole scam of advertising the viewer with Llewelyn's name leads us to believe that it is highly likely that the viewer snags or steals login credentials. That would be consistent with the method of promotion of the viewer (and, we think, likely the only reason that such a method might have been chosen).
As always, think twice (or even three times) about the origin of binaries that you install on your system. Online accounts are all too easy to steal, and often very hard to recover.
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