The Client Is In The Compiler Of The Enemy

Beware gemstones bearing gifts.

Diary of a Second Life trainwreck:

Late 2006: Enterprising programmers begin trying to reverse engineer the Second Life client, with Linden Lab’s blessing. This work is promptly leveraged by equally enterprising and far less moral programmers to introduce content dupes which devastate the Second Life economy.

January 2007: Linden Lab releases the source code for the Second Life client, and encourages its community to help with further development.

“We feel we may already have a bigger group of people writing code than any shared project in history, including Linux,” says Rosedale. While this is often elementary code, it means, he says, that “we have an army of people waiting to work on this.” Adds CTO Cory Ondrejka: “Why wouldn’t we leverage our community and give them the opportunity to make Second Life what they want it to be?”

Over the next couple of years, a few projects move forward, including a client specifically designed for BDSM aficionados who want to give other people control over their freedom of movement and clients that are designed to connect to alternate servers or “grids”. Black-hat programmers also continue to release clients that are designed to copy content, crash servers, harass users, and other such charming uses.

May 2009: A new alternative client, called Greenlife Emerald, is released. It quickly becomes very popular due to a rich set of features which aren’t present in the official SL client or most of its derivatives.

October 2009: Greenlife Emerald adds a new feature: a simple physics model which causes the breasts of female avatars to ‘jiggle’ in a somewhat realistic manner when the avatar moves.

In a complete coincidence, Greenlife Emerald immediately becomes the most popular client in Second Life.

As Emerald (as it is renamed due to Linden Lab insisting its “Second Life” trademark be removed from most third-party applications) becomes ubiquitous, rumors begin to swirl of its maintainers’ roots in the darker side of the SL hacking community. Prokofy Neva, SL commentator/scourge, frequently rails against Emerald’s creators, beginning with those rumors of black-hat association, and moving rapidly into everything from showing how the client itself is evil to how the developers kill her chickens (this makes sense, really).

February 2010: Linden Lab releases the next iteration in the Second Life client, Viewer 2. It is generally seen by most as bloated and difficult to use. Most SL users continue to use Emerald.

April 2010: The “Wrong Hands”, a group of “social engineers” associated with Woodbury University who previously engineered an infiltration and data dump of a group of users who roleplayed privacy-violating superheroes, release a Youtube video of members interrogating Fractured Crystal, leader of the Emerald project, who unashamedly admits to being involved in black-hat client projects.

The Wrong Hands then release files taken from Emerald’s web host which attempts to show that Emerald is trying to track IP addresses and geolocation data for Second Life users. Also included are emails between Emerald staff and Linden Lab, attempting to show a pattern of collusion.

Almost immediately afterwards, Woodbury University is banned from Second Life. Members of the Wrong Hands immediately claim a conspiracy involving Emerald and Linden Lab is responsible. Left unspoken is the assumption that thanks to most of Linden Lab’s customers using Emerald, Emerald has undue influence within Linden Lab by definition.

July 2010: Hazim Gazov, author of, by his own admission, a black-hat Second Life client, publishes proof that Emerald is encoding information about its users’ computers into textures that are uploaded into Second Life, which can then be harvested for further data mining purposes.

Karl Stiefvater, a well-known 3D programmer at Linden Lab (known as Qarl LInden) is laid off, and immediately joins the Emerald project, further blurring the lines between Linden and Emerald.

August 2010: Emerald uses a feature of the Second Life client – the initial welcome screen that is actually served from a web server – to embed dozens of hidden links in Emerald’s welcome screen to Hazim Gazov’s web server. Given that hundreds of thousands of people use Emerald on a daily basis, this is effectively a denial of service attack on Gazov. After initially claiming that this was simply a practical joke, the head of Emerald who was responsible for the attack resigns and turns over control of the Emerald project.

Today: Linden Lab removes Emerald from the list of approved third-party clients and sends an email to all users warning them not to use Emerald.

Late last week, we discovered a denial-of-service attack that was being served through the widely distributed Emerald third-party viewer. This is in direct violation of our third-party viewer policy (part 2, section d, paragraph iii).

We have removed Emerald from the list of third-party viewers, and are now in touch with the Emerald team to discuss what can happen next. We did this to do our best to protect the safety and security of Second Life users. We will not tolerate a viewer that includes malicious code, nor will we tolerate development teams with a history of violating users’ trust or disrupting their lives.

We take privacy, safety, and security very seriously, and we will act to the best of our abilities to protect it. We have not yet disabled logins via the Emerald viewer, but will do so if we feel the software and the team behind it is not able to meet the standards we’ve set. While Emerald is currently the focus of our attention because of what happened recently, all third-party viewers are held to the same standard, and must comply with the third-party viewer policy.

Wagner James Au, noted SL blogger and former Linden, estimates that now half of all traffic within Second Life uses the Emerald client.

Prokofy Neva, whose years of invective against Emerald was essentially proven correct, goes on to assert that the act of writing computer programs is corrupt by definition.

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  • http://Website J.

    How does any of this nonsense make anyone any money?

  • http://idempot.net/blog/ Matthew Weigel


    J.:

    How does any of this nonsense make anyone any money?

    I’m just trying to figure out when it starts making sense…

  • http://luminance.org/ Kevin Gadd


    J.:

    How does any of this nonsense make anyone any money?

    Making money isn’t part of the business model.

  • http://Website Syntrix

    Hahaha second life, these articles are always great. “For when you fail at First Life”.

    These are always interesting reads, Lum, but damn some people take their pseudo-games to seriously.

    That and Prokofy.. *insert correct personal pronoun here* needs to invest in some TL;DR lines, I try every time you link an article but I can’t get through 25% of the giant text walls before realizing I don’t care nearly that much.. and that Prokofy posts as much to here *same pronoun*self talk as it is to provide news.

    News, heh.

  • http://Website J.


    Kevin Gadd:

    Making money isn’t part of the business model.

    Fine, but why has it gone on for so long? Was that the problem with APB, that people just expected money?

  • http://geldonsgaming.blogspot.com/ geldonyetich

    Part of me respects Linden Labs for being so behind the idea of open-source development and trying to forward the idea of allowing users to develop and sell their own content.

    Part of me considers Linden Labs a bunch of naive morons to allow people to take their software and make it closed source and to take their offers of making and selling content and turn them into a virtual prostitution ring, because it’s not like there was really any incentive to do anything else.

  • http://Website dartwick

    So Woodbury were teh good guys all along?

    Im so happy that “Second Life” exists just so we can have this stuff to read from time to time.

  • http://Website mitha

    Assuming the lum read all those links himself and so many pages more: respect. After reading two or three of them my head explodes and i have to make a little pause to regenerate…

  • http://blog.fantasyheartbreaker.com Russell Bailey

    I think Prokofy Neva is profoundly wrong on this point. Virtual world developers do take on a lot of responsibility, and we shouldn’t shirk it, but writing computer programs is, by itself, a morally neutral act.

    Now, game systems design? Hardly inherently evil, but pretty much every rule you write is a statement of some kind. About you, or who you think the user is, or how you think the world should be.

  • http://Website Aufero

    Reading about Second Life drama is like playing Call of Cthulhu. Certain links (pretty much anything to do with PN) can reduce your sanity score to the point where you start frothing at the mouth and babbling about tentacles and internet chickens.

  • http://Website Informis

    Ooh, I haven’t read a good Prokofy Neva post in a long time. I’m glad to see her most gloriously ironic quirk — that of despising programmers — still persists.

  • http://Website Joe

    Wow, even when Profoky’s proven right, that post contains some serious weapons-grade insanity.

    Also, SL is pretty much the worst thing ever.

  • http:/./ds180.net/specialk klaitu

    I’m really surprised that people still play Second Life. I was done with it after about 10 minutes.

  • http://Website Dave

    The first party viewers are the most popular. Linden Lab has detailed statistics about everything that logs in. Ir’s probably the most popular third party viewer.

  • vermifax

    (Makes broad generalization about large group of people based on small sample and tells you all I am not making this up it is the truth)

  • http://Website Harper

    I actually thought Prokofy had some good points. *ducks* Regardless of the whole saga, recounted to us by Scott through some links to rather dubious “journalism,” the real question is how did Linden Lab allow a group of kids write a more consumer-appealing viewer and overtake their market? While they were working on 2.0, weren’t they paying any attention to what their consumers were finding appealing in the Emerald viewer (beyond jiggling boobs)?

  • http://Website Freakazoid

    Please let this be the end. Jiggly breasts are not worth this shit. You can get plenty of that with an oblivion mod or two, without the hidden tracking and drama.

  • http://Website gyrus

    I think many of you are completely missing the point?

    YOU have a better understanding security.
    YOU don’t care about jiggly breasts.
    YOU might not every use anything but an official client.

    But in the real world, if you offer something of ‘value’ many users will use it.
    How many of you have used Mods and third party programmes in support of an MMO?

    How do you know your Oblivion Mods don’t include “the hidden tracking and drama”?

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  • http://Website John Smith

    You don’t. Just like you can never know if that bakery fresh slice of bread contains rat poison put in by a disgruntled employee who is off their meds. You just gotta take a bite and hope for the best if you want those furry purple elf titties in the gothic lolita dress welding lightsabers and riding a shark.

  • http://unsubject.wordpress.com UnSub

    This really is a pretty big deal and will further erode dev confidence in allowing player developed mods for their titles.

    @Harper: sometimes it is easier for an outsider to come in and develop something neater than if you did it in-house. I can think of a number of third party applications that do things in a much more efficient manner because (in some cases) they can look at the existing product and avoid those mistakes / remove unneccessary features.

  • Alec

    Perhaps I misinterpreted this story, but where’s the outrage at Emerald for this DOS mess?

  • http://Website nb

    Mmm. Mmm. That was some fine crazy. The part where she says VW builders as a professional class are some kind of supervillains was delicious.

    I feel a little bad about clicking the links and raising her hit count, though. By providing an audience, we’re enabling her delusions.

  • http://Website JuJutsu

    “You just gotta take a bite and hope for the best if you want those furry purple elf titties in the gothic lolita dress welding lightsabers and riding a shark.”

    Please post the name of your baker.

  • http://Website Freakazoid


    gyrus:

    How do you know your Oblivion Mods don’t include “the hidden tracking and drama”?

    Because they’ve been around longer than emerald has and no one has said a word?

    Generally, the gamers that stand out and make noise are also more paranoid about computer security. You’d think by now someone would have said something, mentioned something suspicious, like internet activity in a single player game with no online capability.

  • http://secondthoughts.typepad.com Prokofy Neva

    Um, this isn’t a story about Prokofy. It’s a story about malicious coders who have been around for more than a year, on various alts, and who are finally being brought to heel by the Lindens. It was long time in coming. While killing my tenants’ chickens might seem like merely fodder for lots of geeky guffaws, it’s destruction of property. Hackers don’t get to do that on the Internet without the law fighting back. That’s ok.

    Why Lum has to turn it into yet another round of berating and belittling and scolding me I guess speaks to the degree to which he’s unsettled by me merely asking if he believes in God or not.

    I’m glad at least a few people in this thread get it that coders of virtual worlds and games — and social media — have an awful lot of control over other human beings and are very much in god-mode.

    They aren’t known for their ethics in this regard.

    Should I revise my thesis about absolute coding corrupting absolutely to be limited only to the class of those who code virtual worlds, MMORPGs, and social media platforms? I’ll think about it.

    OK, I thought about it.

    And the answer is: no.

    Open source is the worse, too, for the unethical.

    Lum leaves out a very important piece of this history.

    The original perverse engineers who reverse engineered the SL client and spent the next years claiming they had done no such thing (which of course they had indeed) were in the group libsecondlife which was chock full of griefers.

    Libsl were the people who brought you first god-mode stalking; then megaprims which were used not just for the IBM build but for spreading over entire sims and putting people’s RL pictures on them (like they did to me and my sims); it was also used for the notorious copybot. Lum knows that. That’s why his portrayal of this first round as somehow merely “engineers” is silly. They are criminals. They are griefers. They are Plastic Duck or Gene Replacement. Trying to bend and break every rule and pretend that this is sometimes “helping” to find exploits (the usual script kiddy grey-hat argumentation).

    There are a number of direct links between/among libsl-Woodbury-Emerald.

    One hypothesis I’ve had is that these skiddies are griefers are just the stalking horse of industrial sabotage, that big IT companies or groups of investors or whatever your conspiracy might conceive are using these people to disrupt SL while they get their competitive platform ready.

    For example, Intel started making a virtual world of their own and bragged about it forawhile, and stole away from libsl/Second Life Eddy Stryker, whose girlfriend was even a Linden — and who was it that worked on the Interoperability project but Eddy. What do you know. Now you never hear about Intel’s world. What became of it? Is it more secret or more dead?

    The purpose of Google’s Livly — named a lot like Second Life — was to prove that virtual worlds would fail — so as to buy time until the better one could be made. Google isn’t stupid.

    There’s some other important skewings of the story here as Lum tells it:

    1. Hazim Gazov is a notorious griefer, in cahoots with Woodbury, part of the b-tards or whatever the hell (I call all these ever-shifting groups “the w-hoods” to signify how they all came out from under W-hat’s overcoat genetically).

    Hazim regularly crashed my sim, raped my tenants by barging in on them with giant cocks or jumping on their pose balls and scaring them, spewed obscene particles around the sims, etc. etc. Among his favourite gimmicks was to join an open group for Jews in SL that would give him the title “Jew in SL” and go around and deliberately harass people, so that they would then “the Jews are to blame”. He would appear in blackface and spew racist chat spam or pictures. The whole gambit.

    So this long-time serial hands-on griefer who makes a malicious viewer out of Emerald code is then savaged by one of the griefer Emerald devs. This is thieves’ world. This is Russia. This is not about black and white.

    2. Lum also seems to lack curiosity about what it means when disgruntled former Lindens, one of who openly blogged about his being fired and was very resentful and hurt about it, joins this big competitive viewer’s team, and then shortly after, there’s a huge DNS incident like this. He’s apparently not involved, but he didn’t stop it, either. Just like some of those white hats in libsl who always acted purer than the driven snow, only driven by scientific and engineering inquiries into the code, but who never stopped the griefing, and who laughed in the IRC channel about it.

    The hacker class is ethics-free and writing of code is the beginning of all their evil.

  • http://Website gyrus

    @Freakazoid
    No…. you are still missing what I think is the point here.
    That is that anytime you install anything on your computer you take a certain risk?
    The risk you take is up to you… but installing a Client by Blizzard, or Turbine, or NC Soft or any known developer carries far less risk than by a group of modders or some poster caller “1337h4kz0r_phat”

    While allowing a community to develop for games has advantages – it also carries risk.
    LL benefited here but also exposed their ‘customers’ to a risk which was beyond their control.

  • http://cnn.com ubvman

    Faced with the massive wall of text of soap opera, I believe second life is the second life of soap opera.

    It rhymes if you repeat it several times.

    Oh, to Lum and the irresponsible commentators on this blog – You’ve said her name 3 times! Now she is HERE! What are you all going to do about it…

  • http://Website VPellen

    I love this industry.

  • http://Website Larry Lard


    Prokofy Neva:

    Um, this isn’t a story about Prokofy
    …
    Why Lum has to turn it into yet another round of berating and belittling and scolding me

    You’re right, it’s not about you, hence the first sentence: “Diary of a Second Life trainwreck”. Also, as an relatively uninterested reader, I didn’t notice any particular berating etc, but I guess you have too much skin in the game to accept that.

  • http://www.antipwn.com/blog/ IainC


    Prokofy Neva:

    Should I revise my thesis about absolute coding corrupting absolutely to be limited only to the class of those who code virtual worlds, MMORPGs, and social media platforms? I’ll think about it.

    How about ‘should you revise your thesis about absolute coding corrupting absolutely’ to be limited to those who are coding something that is intended to be a political or socio-economic statement?

    This will be difficult for you to grasp as clearly you are someone to whom everything is a political or socio-economic statement but, for the majority of us who make games or virtual worlds, this is not the case. My political and spiritual views are irrelevant to the games that I make and my experience of games designers is that this attitude is almost universal.

  • http://Website Not One Of Us

    Reading all that hurt my brain.

  • http://Website JuJutsu

    “Oh, to Lum and the irresponsible commentators on this blog – You’ve said her name 3 times! Now she is HERE! What are you all going to do about it…”

    It was inevitable. The only thing that can be done is to practice mental hygiene: when you see her name on a post quickly avert your eyes, scroll a long way down to the next post, and then resume reading. Eventually she will return to Neva-Neva Land.

  • http://www.gawaintheblind.com GTB

    Tomorrow: The official client gets a boob physics patch.

  • http://Website Gx1080

    Lessons:

    “The client is in hands of the enemy. Never EVER forget this”.

    Being different to the rest of the MMOG’s doesn’t make you immune to the above.

    Although I agree that atheists (or worse, Randroids) are more easily found in geeky/high IQ professions, calling them “evil” is exaggerated.

    Clueless about human nature is more accurate.

    And most coders don’t have the luxury to be in a converting-to-religion agenda. That are more worried about what will be good enough to be sold.

    (And that is a job, feeding a family and all that).

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  • Anticorium

    Shorter Prok:

    Samizdat is far too disruptive to the social order to be allowed to stand.

  • http://Website Joe

    I say we stick Prokofy Neva and Derek Smart in a jar and shake the jar until they fight.

  • http://Website Peter S.


    Gx1080:

    Although I agree that atheists (or worse, Randroids) are more easily found in geeky/high IQ professions, calling them “evil” is exaggerated.
    Clueless about human nature is more accurate.

    Arguably, there is a certain cluelessness inherent to presuming that people that have read a particular book default to being more moral or ethical. This isn’t borne out in actual studies of behavior.

    Stating this only in order to say to Prokofy: this part’s the part you’re getting some beratement about. You were right when it came to *what* was going on, even vindicated, but you aren’t right where you hypothesize about *why*, and it distracts terribly from the news itself.

    Ultimately, though, I think you’re reading the article too personally. It isn’t about you. I absolutely sympathize with the griefing that takes place in SL, all too similar in attitude to what could be found in UO but with the addition of more blatant hacking and more visual vulgarity. But what can I do, as little more than a text blurb on the internet, beyond agreeing nebulously that something ought to be done about that? And isn’t that tangential (though clearly related) to the larger issue of client integrity?

  • http://Website doc

    uff, why did you have to mention prokofy?
    prok was never right.
    She was just griefed by some guys that used emerald, and bang:
    EMERALD IS A EVIL GRIEFER CLIENT MADE BY EVIL GRIEFERS FOR EVIL GRIEFERS, AND EVRYONE USING IT IS A EVIL GRIEFER. ALSO THEY ARE ALL COMMUNISTS. WOODBURY WOODBURY WOODBURY.
    thats basicly what she said.

    If someone writes continuously such walls of text, its easy to find one true thing in all that crap.

    she still lives in her fantasyworld where everyone she doesnt like is a communist or a nihilist, and what ever other *.IST she can think of…

    anyways, emerald is gone, and i hope its stays away. If not, im sure that the left over devs will do something dumb again, and someone will make it public again.
    The people that stayed in the project, have the same colorfull history as jcool, and are dumb enough to shoot themselfs in the foot one more time.

    @prok, if you need to aswer this, make it short or i wont read it.

  • http://beafraid.com hellfire


    Joe:

    I say we stick Prokofy Neva and Derek Smart in a jar and shake the jar until they fight.

    I would be worried that it would lead to some sort of supermutant offspring that could potentially unravel the very fabric of our universe.

  • http://geldonsgaming.blogspot.com/ geldonyetich


    gyrus:

    How many of you have used Mods and third party programmes in support of an MMO?
    How do you know your Oblivion Mods don’t include “the hidden tracking and drama”?

    Completely different scenario.

    Handing out the Second Life source code allows them to modify anything while still connecting to a shared online service where being able to do anything is potentially harmful.

    An Oblivion mod is generally quite safe because all you’re doing is using a plugin that modifies a very fixed set of parameters. Unless there was some kind of buffer overflow glitch in Oblivion itself, that’s quite safe.

    Granted, sometimes a mod is introduced that introduces code that actually changes the way a game runs, but you can usually tell if this is the case because there’s a whole lot more than a plugin file coming along with the mod.

    EverQuest and World of Warcraft interfaces are usually relatively safe on the grounds that they just modify the XML of the interface. However, ones that make you log in through them, or keep a third party program running while you’re running the game, are very suspect.

  • http://Website Harper

    @nb You didn’t have to click.. you got the wall of text here.

    Regardless, this is all a big overblown pile of drama and still begs the question, why wasn’t LL looking for and implementing the kind of features that made Emerald so popular (beyond the griefy/paranoid radar ones).

    @UnSub I take your point but on the other hand, 2.0 is SO off the mark I wonder if any of the Linden developers actually USE their product. I know a few do, but not enough.

    I would be incredibly surprised if someone told me LL didn’t have tracking in their client. It’s just LL is not an 18 years old individual and LL has legal liability, which Modular Systems never really had. So they do their tracking more discreetly.

  • http://tremayneslaw.wordpress.com/ Tremayne

    This is all missing the most important point.

    If APB had used the Emerald client, would they still be in business?

  • http://geldonsgaming.blogspot.com/ geldonyetich


    Tremayne:

    If APB had used the Emerald client, would they still be in business?

    Yeah, because third parties have been nothing but benevolent to APB, a little bouncy titty could have redeemed all that.

  • http://secondthoughts.typepad.com Prokofy Neva

    “Samizdat is far too disruptive to the social order to be allowed to stand.”

    Um, samizdat isn’t crime.

    Malicious code is crime.

  • http://Website Freakazoid


    gyrus:

    @FreakazoidNo…. you are still missing what I think is the point here.That is that anytime you install anything on your computer you take a certain risk?The risk you take is up to you… but installing a Client by Blizzard, or Turbine, or NC Soft or any known developer carries far less risk than by a group of modders or some poster caller “1337h4kz0r_phat”
    While allowing a community to develop for games has advantages – it also carries risk.LL benefited here but also exposed their ‘customers’ to a risk which was beyond their control.

    This is an incredibly shallow point, since everything anybody does carries risk.

    You’re trying to justify downloading what is obviously a huge target for underhanded shit by trying to equate it to the inherent risk in everything anybody does, but if you’re not an utter moron, you can see that a third party program that does more than just make boobs jiggle is going to carry a higher risk factor than an oblivion mod that changes some textures.

    If you have to defend emerald’s usage, at least pick something more obvious, like linden approving if its use. That’s seriously incompetent on their part, unless they were able to secretly aquire kickbacks from the data mining, which would be scummy as hell.

  • http://Website Peter S.

    They wouldn’t need kickbacks to benefit. A better interface makes their program more popular. With the right type of naivete, Emerald is exactly what Linden’s open-source program was aiming for: a better-than-in-house client with strong popularity, developed and promoted for “free”.

    TANSTAAFL, sadly. Those in control of the client decided to use it how they wanted, not how Linden would have wanted. Foreseeable, and there’s a certain thankfulness that the backdoor was made visible through a relatively* harmless action. (*relative to mass leeching of credit card and bank account numbers, for example)

    I live by the creed to never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence. One can give Linden the benefit of the doubt and call them extremely naive, and frankly, SL is itself a world whose genesis lies in blind (and blinding bright) naivete.

    They now know better. The shift to bring the client back in-house, away from open source to a top-down, internally-developed, professional-grade client will be huge and costly; though it needs to be done, I’d be surprised if they actually do it. I’d be surprised if they even *can* do it. We’ll see.

  • http://Website gyrus

    Hmmm… seems my communication skills are really not up to scratch this week?
    (Both Freakazoid and geldonyetich seem to have taken the opposite point from my comments that I intended?)
    One more go maybe?
    Linden Labs created Second Life as a sandbox with no rules under the utopian ideal that people could be trusted to police themselves?
    Since then, they have learnt that this is not true. (Good social experiment!)

    I seem to remember some maxim about “the client is in the hands of the enemy”?
    Linden took this one step further.
    Not only was the client in the hands of the enemy – it was written by the enemy.

    In a perfect world – this was a great idea.

    But as second life has shown us in the past – some people just cannot be trusted.

    I am sure many of the Emerald users knew this too… but they downloaded it anyway… and continued to use it even when rumors(?) emerged that there may be issues? After all, they were already using it, it gave them something they wanted, they ‘needed’ it to continue to play SL.

    Why? Because Linden Labs said it was okay?
    OR because it had jiggly breasts?
    OR maybe a bit of both?

  • http://Website winter

    Prokofy comes across as yet another psycho religious nutbag.

    Writing code is the root of all evil. Hah! Reminds me of the persecution of Galileo by the church. Knowledge in and of itself is not evil (except by some crazy book’s standard where ignorance is bliss), rather what you do with that knowledge determines whether it is a good action or evil action.

    The real people at fault in this story appear to be Linden Labs as the design of their system is inherently insecure and open to abuse.

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