Second Life is an online virtual world consisting of hundreds of interconnected large-scale areas populated by interactive avatars, whose players may choose to take any form they can create or purchase. The major form of short-distance transportation is flight, while transportation between areas is typically performed through teleportation; both abilities are innate. The "main grid" is restricted to those 18 or over, as some regions contain strong violence or sexual content. A teen version for those 13 to 17 is also available.

Second Life has over 642,000 registered users and 282,000 active users as of September 8, 2006; logged-in users range from 3,000 to 8,000 at any one time. The system is funded through a combination of account subscriptions and "tier" (a form of land value tax). Users have the option to own or rent land parcels in a variety of sizes - as in real life, some owners may zone their land to restrict certain activities, such as commercial development. Business in the game's virtual currency (exchangeable for real-world funds) is encouraged by the Linden Research, and a variety of content vendors have sprung up to meet demand.

The furry fandom has a major presence in Second Life, with multiple areas devoted to providing accommodation, entertainment and creative services specifically for members of the furry community. Themes range from the pedestrian to the bizarre, although trees are common in furry haunts. Each user can create their own objects from the inbuilt primitives, but the majority of users rely in part on objects created and sold by others. These include body parts for avatars, accessories, vehicles (which may be purely aesthetic or provide extra functionality), toys, pose balls for avatar animation, and scripts to provide extra features (like "push" and "shield" defensive/offensive capabilities).

On September 8th 2006, Linden Lab reported via a security bulletin (which was also emailed to all SL users) that the servers holding player account information had been attacked using a zero-day exploit. According to Linden Labs, this attack on the servers may have begun as early as September 3rd and they only noticed an increase in activity on the 6th which they then quickly locked out. Their investigation showed that the attack allowed a significant amount of customer account information to be downloaded such as credit card numbers, PayPal transaction ID's, real life names, Second Life names, account passwords, and contact information.

As part of their effort to improve the security of their servers, Linden Lab had invalidated the passwords (assuming they were already compromised) of all Second Life users and has required said users to reset their passwords. Linden Lab further mentioned that while the compromised payment information was encrypted, no encryption is unbreakable given enough time and computing power. They had thus stated that if any SL user believed themselves to be the victim of credit card fraud, they (the user) should contact their credit card company.

The short form of the bulletin in available at http://secondlife.com/corporate/bulletin.php

Comments (1)

Subscribe to this comment's feed

¿como me registro en second life???
written by Felipe, agosto 19, 2007

e estado intentando registrarme en second life pero al momento de entrar al juego me dice que desactive el caps lock pero este ya esta desactivado y tambien me dice q la contraseña es incorrecta pero la he copiado muy bien.
por favor diganme como entrar a second life quiero empezar a jugar ya por favor ayudenme o mandenme un correo con la respuesta por favor

This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Name

Email

Website

Title

Comment

Add Comment