Picks in Profiles.

[Selene Gregoire]

3 hours ago, Phil Deakins said:

Your memory is good - except that IE was the most used browser at the time

I do have a preference for the originals as standards, and I am very down on the idea that 'my <whatever it is> is used by a lot of people that I know, therefore it is the most used one in the world. I have yet to be presented with evidence that Firestorm is used by more people than all the others put together. I see (biased) statements, but I don't see evidence.

Like I said ask Jessica Lyon for the info. As head of the whole FS team she is the one who receives that info from Linden Lab. LL doesn't give that info out to just anyone same as they don't publish a lot of the info they used to publish.

[Selene Gregoire]

1 hour ago, Sid Nagy said:

Hey, meet Sid Nagy. Always on the LL browser.
I tried about 15 minutes the FS one, but no, nope.

Why would I trust my login and password to a third party.
Wasn't there that emerald thingy in the past?

 

Remember Fractured Crystal? Yeah, he's the one and only one responsible for the DDoS attack on that website.

[Selene Gregoire]

double post

Edited March 27, 2021 by Selene Gregoire

[Phil Deakins]

On 3/27/2021 at 6:23 PM, Sid Nagy said:

Hey, meet Sid Nagy. Always on the LL browser.
I tried about 15 minutes the FS one, but no, nope.

Why would I trust my login and password to a third party.
Wasn't there that emerald thingy in the past?

Hey Sid, meet Phil Deakins :)

I stayed with the LL viewer too, except for the idiotic V2 period. I'm using Alchemy just now, purely for its speed, because the speed is currently necessary. When I no longer need the speed, I'll go back to the standard viewer - the LL one. They are all LL viewers, of course, most with some mods, that's all, but I'll go back to the standard LL viewer.

And yes, there was "that emerald thingy in the past", which hasn't yet been shaken off.

[Phil Deakins]

On 3/27/2021 at 8:15 PM, Selene Gregoire said:

Like I said ask Jessica Lyon for the info. As head of the whole FS team she is the one who receives that info from Linden Lab. LL doesn't give that info out to just anyone same as they don't publish a lot of the info they used to publish.

I don't need to ask anyone. People here made claims without evidence. They are the ones who need to show that what they claimed is true. I haven't claimed anything one way or the other, so I don't need to make enquiries.

Edited March 29, 2021 by Phil Deakins

[Phil Deakins]

On 3/27/2021 at 8:17 PM, Selene Gregoire said:

Remember Fractured Crystal? Yeah, he's the one and only one responsible for the DDoS attack on that website.

He's the one who gave Emerald, and its successors, a bad name, which hasn't yet been outgrown.

[Gabriele Graves]

If you don't trust Official TPV's then you also don't trust LL which gives them their blessing.  The fact that Emerald was eventually dealt with, albeit slowly, shows that LL wants their TPVs to be considered trustworthy.

[Phil Deakins]

There is a difference between trusting a company and trusting a private individual.

[Selene Gregoire]

2 hours ago, Phil Deakins said:

I don't need to ask anyone. People here made claims without evidence. They are the ones who need to show that what they claimed is true. I haven't claimed anything one way or the other, so I don't need to make enquiries.

Are you calling me a liar? Because if you are, you are most sadly mistaken.

 

2 hours ago, Phil Deakins said:

He's the one who gave Emerald, and its successors, a bad name, which hasn't yet been outgrown.

If you know this why are you punishing everyone else for the actions of one?

 

I think I'm going to go back to just reading the forum and shaking my head because, frankly, humans are a bad joke.

[Phil Deakins]

On 3/29/2021 at 4:09 PM, Selene Gregoire said:

re you calling me a liar? Because if you are, you are most sadly mistaken.

No I am not calling you a liar. I haven't said that anyone is wrong. I've said that I don't accept the claims that have been made. That's all. I don't know if you are right or wrong. I am pretty sure that you are not in a position to know, though, and that you are just repeating what you've heard. So I simply don't accept what is claimed.

 

On 3/29/2021 at 4:09 PM, Selene Gregoire said:

If you know this why are you punishing everyone else for the actions of one?

I'm not punishing anyone. How can I? What Emerald showed was that not everyone is trustworthy, and that some are positively unscrupulous. It is no different today. When we run a private person's software on our computers, we take a risk. What happened with Emerald, the forerunner of Firestorm, demonstrated it every clearly. It is not surprising that some people feel they can trust a company more than private individuals who they don't know.

When I say "a private person's software", none of the full 3rd party viewers fall into that category, because they are ALL LL viewers with some modifications. They didn't create the viewers. But those private individuals have had access to all of the LL code, so the risk is just the same.

Different people have different views on things

 

Edited April 1, 2021 by Phil Deakins

[Love Zhaoying]

On 3/29/2021 at 11:09 AM, Selene Gregoire said:

Are you calling me a liar? Because if you are, you are most sadly mistaken.

Miss you! And here you are!

 

[Selene Gregoire]

2 hours ago, Phil Deakins said:

No I am not calling you a liar. I haven't said that anyone is wrong. I've said that I don't accept the claims that have been made. That's all. I don't know if you are right or wrong. I am pretty sure that you are not in a position to know, though, and that you are just repeating what you've heard. So I simply don't accept what is claimed.

 

I'm not punishing anyone. How can I? What Emerald showed was that not everyone is trustworthy, and that some are positively unscrupulous. It is no different today. When we run a private person's software on our computers, we take a risk. What happened with Emerald, the forerunner of Firestorm, demonstrated it every clearly. It is not surprising that some people feel they can trust a company more than private individuals who they don't know.

When I say "a private person's software", none of the full 3rd party viewers fall into that category, because they are ALL LL viewers with some modifications. They didn't create the viewers. But those private individuals have had access to all of the LL code, so the risk is just the same.

Different people have different views on things

 

Understood.

Forgot I had this in my old bookmarks. It's from 2012 but it backs up what I was saying about FS being the most popular for many years.

Quote

Third party viewer developer Tonya Souther recently pointed out a very important March interview on Treet TV with Linden Lab's Open Development director Scott "Oz Linden" Lawrence, which includes a crucial passage I initially missed. It's so important, it needs to be highlighted here. At about 33 minutes into the conversation, Lawrence says this in relationship to the official Second Life viewer as compred with Phoenix and Firestorm, which are third party SL viewers made by The Phoenix Viewer Project team, a large consortium of SL users (none of whom are well known by their real names):

"Our own viewer users are a minority. A significant minority -- we're the number three viewer behind, behind the two... Phoenix is far and away the number one viewer, although it's quite steadily losing market share these days, has been for some months now. And Firestorm is the newer technology viewer from your project, is the number two, and it's gaining market share... And our viewer is number three behind Firestorm."

This admission came in March, as I said, so I checked with Linden Lab if it remained true:

"The 'market shares' of various Viewers isn't a data point we're currently sharing," spokesman Peter Gray told me. Still, it's unlikely the shares have changed drastically in two months, and based on what Oz says, along with what some SL insiders have suggested elsewhere, I think the following is a very plausible estimate:

 

 

Up to 65-75% of SLers are now using Phoenix or Firestorm, and 65-85% of total SL user minutes are on those viewers.

 

https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2012/05/second-life-viewer-usage-dominated-third-party-.html

FS has since far surpassed EM and PH in number of users since 2012. If you don't believe that, do the research yourself or pay me $100USD per hour to do it for you.

And in case you forgot, I was on the EM/PH/FS support team for more than 5 years so I did have access to information regular residents aren't privy to. All I had to do was ask.

Edited April 1, 2021 by Selene Gregoire

[Selene Gregoire]

2 hours ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Miss you! And here you are!

 

 

AWWW

[Qie Niangao]

1 hour ago, Selene Gregoire said:

FS has since far surpassed EM and PH in number of users since 2012. If you don't believe that, do the research yourself or pay me $100USD per hour to do it for you.

How is such research done? I understood that as of some years ago viewers were no longer permitted to reveal this information except directly to the servers, but I guess the Lab may publish it—but where?

[Selene Gregoire]

1 hour ago, Qie Niangao said:

How is such research done? I understood that as of some years ago viewers were no longer permitted to reveal this information except directly to the servers, but I guess the Lab may publish it—but where?

 

3 hours ago, Selene Gregoire said:

And in case you forgot, I was on the EM/PH/FS support team for more than 5 years so I did have access to information regular residents aren't privy to. All I had to do was ask.

 

Hopefully Phil will realize I was not being serious with the "pay me $100USD" bit.

[Qie Niangao]

Oh, yeah, now I realize EM and PH were Emerald and Phoenix, so wouldn't be surprising the Firestorm team would be able to see how many users logged in with those viewers. (I was still thinking about the comparison to the Linden viewer, and also mistakenly generalizing to others.)

[Prokofy Neva]

On 3/27/2021 at 2:23 PM, Sid Nagy said:

Hey, meet Sid Nagy. Always on the LL browser.
I tried about 15 minutes the FS one, but no, nope.

Why would I trust my login and password to a third party.
Wasn't there that emerald thingy in the past?

Bless you!

[Whirly Fizzle]

On 4/1/2021 at 4:34 PM, Qie Niangao said:

How is such research done? I understood that as of some years ago viewers were no longer permitted to reveal this information except directly to the servers, but I guess the Lab may publish it—but where?

LL send the TPVs listed on the TPV directory regular stats showing viewer versions, number of sessions, number of users, hours online, average session times, median session times, and crash rates.

[Pussycat Catnap]

On 3/25/2021 at 8:09 AM, Arduenn Schwartzman said:

Hi Shnucks (lovely name),

I'd assume that the majority of SL residents uses the Firestorm (FS) viewer, and that most profile picks are viewed in that type of viewer in-world. FS uses the profile old style (version 1.x). So the answer would be 16:9.

So it really depends whom you want to cater: the default (4:3), or the majority of SL users (16:9).

How do you even get Firestorm to use 16:9.

It is and always has been 4:3 for me.

 

[Arduenn Schwartzman]

19 minutes ago, Pussycat Catnap said:

How do you even get Firestorm to use 16:9.

It is and always has been 4:3 for me.

On my Firestorm with default UI setting, it looks like this:

Firestorm Profile 2nd Life, 218 px : 155 px = 1.406 (4 : 3 = 1.333 )

Firestorm Profile Picks, 284 px : 155 px = 1.832 ( 16 : 9 = 1.778 )

[Phil Deakins]

On 4/1/2021 at 3:03 PM, Selene Gregoire said:

And in case you forgot, I was on the EM/PH/FS support team for more than 5 years so I did have access to information regular residents aren't privy to. All I had to do was ask.

First you wrongly suggested that I was calling you a liar, and now you wrongly suggest that I might have forgotten something about you. I don't know you from Eve. Your name is not one that I am familiar with, and I had no idea about your involvement with the Emerald, etc. setup, so I can hardly have forgotten it. But it does indicate why you are so defensive about the Emerald etc. viewers.

I can accept that what you quoted was true in 2012. Things have changed since 9 years ago. I also think that unscrupulous things, such as what happened with Emerald, can still happen with any 3rd party viewer. It's not just that I think it. It's that I know it. We all know it. So it's up to each person to decide for themselves whether or not they want to trust unknown people running programmes in their computers, where all sorts of private stuff is, including usernames and passwords, and often where their online banking is done. "Unknown people" because they are known only by their avatar names. In the real world, where unscrupulous things can happen, they are totally anonymous.

 

On 4/1/2021 at 3:03 PM, Selene Gregoire said:

If you don't believe that, do the research yourself or pay me $100USD per hour to do it for you.

One person makes a claim about something. Another person doesn't accept that the claim is correct. If the first person wants the claim to be believed, it is up to him/her to show it, and not up to the second person to research it for him/herself. So I don't want you to do any research for me. I am perfectly happy not knowing one way or the other. It's up to the one(s) who made the claim to prove what they claimed is actually true.

 

Edited April 3, 2021 by Phil Deakins

[Phil Deakins]

On 3/29/2021 at 2:01 PM, Gabriele Graves said:

If you don't trust Official TPV's then you also don't trust LL which gives them their blessing.  The fact that Emerald was eventually dealt with, albeit slowly, shows that LL wants their TPVs to be considered trustworthy.

LL listing a TPV is no guarantee whatsoever that the TPV is trustable. LL was fine with Emerald, and probably delighted with it since TPVs are the reason they open-sourced the code, and look what happened with that one. Things can be changed/added and, if nobody realises it, then programmes can be getting away with something for a very long time. And remember that the people behind the TPVs are anonymous. Sorry, but LL's TPV list does not mean that TPVs on it are trustable.

This is what Linden Lab says about them - in a red warning box at the top of the page:-

Warning: The viewers listed here are not developed nor distributed by Linden Lab. Being listed here means only that the developers of the viewer have represented that they comply with the Policy on Third-Party Viewers and the Second Life Terms of Service. You are responsible for evaluating whether you want to use and share information with them.

Read the second sentence carefully. Even LL does not say that the listed viewers are trustable. And LL does not say that they have examined them and found nothing untoward in their code. LL says that the only reason are listed is because each of them has told LL that they comply with the rules. The listings are are NOT an indication of trustworthiness. LL does NOT give them their blessing.

 

Edited April 3, 2021 by Phil Deakins

[Gabriele Graves]

I never said LL gave any guarantees nor did I say LL had examined the TPV code.  Regardless of what it says there, LL does give it's blessing to TPVs and expects them to follow the policy.  It trusts them enough that their code is allowed to connect to it's services, fosters a TPV community and that by extension says to us residents "We are trusting them to the degree that they abide by the policy" and that is a blessing or endorsement.  If this were not true then it wouldn't list them, wouldn't have a policy to govern them, in fact it wouldn't allow them at all.  LL could close the source and change the way logins work so that only the LL viewer could connect.  Those are just weasel words to cover themselves legally.

If a TPV proves to be untrustworthy, it is expected that LL will deal with them.  It happened before and would happen again.  This is expected to keep everyone obeying the policy and generally it seems to.  The community seems to have enough eyes on each other's code to spot major problems at some point.

I'm surprised to see that someone who feels this way, is in fact trusting them anyway and poking his details into a TPV though.

Edited April 3, 2021 by Gabriele Graves

[Phil Deakins]

I normally use the LL viewer for the reasons I've mentioned. I'm currently using Alchemy because I need its speed. That won't last too long, and then I'll go back to the LL viewer. It doesn't mean that I trust TPVs though. It means that I am currently willing to risk it, that's all.

You can say what you want about what LL means by the statement, but I prefer to believe what LL actually says in it. I have no need to make my own interpretations. I have no objections to you doing it though.

 

[Gabriele Graves]

And I tend to believe actions speak louder than words on a page.