Cassie: Winter Cuteness from Inga Wind

Perfect for a day at the ski slopes or just wandering around in the snow! Cassie comes in gray, black, brown & red (shown). Price is $450L (10% group discount) and includes a full range of mesh sizes plus resizable boots!

SLURL to Inga Wind Clothing

Colbert tackles NSA spying in Second Life

Pretty funny stuff. Read the original post on Joystiq.com and watch the video cut via the linky below.

http://www.joystiq.com/2013/12/17/colbert-tackles-nsa-spying-in-second-life

As Massively commented, we can excuse the ancient and lame joke about Second Life participants not having a first life only because the rest of the bit is pretty funny. I only wish that voice actually sounded that good.

Spies infiltrate online games including Second Life

From the New York Times....

Not limiting their activities to the earthly realm, American and British spies have infiltrated the fantasy worlds of World of Warcraft and Second Life, conducting surveillance and scooping up data in the online games played by millions of people across the globe, according to newly disclosed classified documents.

So all those avatars with the last name "SecretSpy" may really be -- secret spies. But seriously, how much money can you really move through WoW or Second Life? Most people have a hard enough time getting their money out of SL into Paypal legitimately let alone doing it on the sly. :P

Full story here: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/10/world/spies-dragnet-reaches-a-playing-field-of-elves-and-trolls.html

Alpha Mask bug triaged by Linden Lab

The bug I reported via the JIRA (see link below) is apparently serious enough that it has been "triaged" by Alexa Linden. I believe that means it's a "must fix ASAP" sort of thing.

http://snickitty.blogspot.com/2013/11/weird-transparency-alpha-in-second-life.html

Weird transparency / alpha bug in Second Life

Second Life citizen, Tempus Heart, read an article on my blog that I wrote a long time ago about alpha channels, alpha sorting and transparency. He was experiencing odd behavior with some of his own creations where the alpha channel, instead of rendering at some % transparency, would go completely black. So, thinking I was an expert on the subject (big mistake LOL), he contacted me in-world.

After finally understanding what he was talking about and doing some of my own tests, I've confirmed that there's some sort of bug present in Second Life's rendering that's causing textures with very light transparency (say 10%) to lose that transparency and go completely black. But ONLY in the presence of 100% transparent pixels! Talk about esoteric.

To illustrate the problem, I put three boxes with different transparency texture samples in front of plywood cylinders with a dark blue solid background behind the whole mess. The textures on the prims were done in Photoshop as solid black layer shapes with each "band" having its own layer opacity setting and saved as PNG files. (Click on the image to see full size.)

The top box illustrates the problem. There are three bands in the box. From left to right they should be 100% black, 0% black (100% transparent) and 90% black (10% transparent). As you can see, the 90% band has gone completely black.

Now if we take away the 0% black (100% transparent)  band (2nd box), the 90% black band renders correctly.

Just for reference, I've added a stepped box at the bottom with bands ranging from 0% black to 100% black showing that with multiple transparencies, the box renders correctly.

Weird huh? Anyone have any clues as to what's going on? Tempus has tried various viewer settings (Firestorm) and lighting combos to no avail. It seems to be a server-side baking issue. I'm seeing the same behavior on Cool VL Viewer.

Reported as a JIRA bug here: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-4601

Judge OKs Second Life Virtual Money Class Action Settlement

OK, this is news! A friend of mine tipped me to the article (thanks Ravin!).

http://www.topclassactions.com/lawsuit-settlements/lawsuit-news/5293-judge-oks-second-life-virtual-money-class-action-settlement

I wonder if this is helping drive the recent changes to the Terms of Service?

Sentiments still hot against Linden Lab changes to SL TOS

In spite of Peter Linden's recent letter trying to spin away the recent changes to the Second Life Terms of Service, negative sentiment of creators remains high with no signs of letting up.

Some threads of interest:

First, two from Tateru Nino's Dwell On It blog. In both, she tries to explain why the TOS changes aren't that bad and why they make sense from a legal perspective. IMO, she kinda misses the point which is that the whole thing was one big "eff you" to the paying customers of Second Life. Read through the comments that follow to pick up the general tone.

http://dwellonit.taterunino.net/2013/10/31/second-lifes-new-tos-makes-perfect-sense/

http://dwellonit.taterunino.net/2013/11/04/thoughts-rights-linden-lab-need-tos/

I don't think Tateru expected the firestorm response she got. I think Desmond Shang's response is very telling and probably accurately represents the feelings of many creators in SL:

http://dwellonit.taterunino.net/2013/11/04/thoughts-rights-linden-lab-need-tos/#comment-1487990

Then there are these thread on Wagner James Au's blog:

http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2013/10/second-life-terms-of-service-uccsl-peter-gray.html

http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2013/10/second-life-terms-of-service.html

Like Tateru's threads, you need to read the comments to get the tone.

Further complicating the whole situation is what the heck Linden Lab is going to do with Desura. Many content creators are concerned that their items will suddenly get ported to Desura without their permission, intent or support. Thus, some of the preemptive strikes by removing existing content before whatever happens, happens.