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Is It Possible That The Official Second Life Viewer And/Or Third Party Viewers Use Users Personal Computers to Mine Cryptocurrency?

Paulsian

By Paulsian,
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Arielle Popstar

Arielle Popstar

Posted
Posted
25 minutes ago, LittleMe Jewell said:

Especially in something like SL where many machines are already struggling with performance.

Yes but struggle in what way? I only have a 1070 card but standing on my ground level parcel with graphics turned high  it is still only using 10% of the Gpu and about the same for the Cpu so seems like a fair bit of available resources to use for mining. Will assume these mining programs have a low priority setting so it doesn't take cycles when a main program needs it.

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animats

animats

Posted
Posted

OK. For new users who don't know this:

  • The Second Life viewer is open source. You can look at the source code yourself, and you can compile, build, and run it yourself.
  • Most of the third party viewers are open source. You can build them yourself from source.
  • Quite a few people, including me and two of the posters here, have worked on the source code of viewers, built them from source, and know what's inside.
  • If you watch system performance with a viewer running, you'll typically see one CPU at 100% and about half a CPU load or less spread over other CPUs. That's the main thread running flat out, and some other stuff such as asset downloading and decompression in the background. If you just stare at the same scene for a while, the other CPUs will stop using time once all downloading is done.. If something was cryptomining, you'd see all the CPUs and the GPU maxed out. Not happening.

So, no, the Second Life viewers are not doing crypto mining.

 

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shireena1

shireena1

Posted
Posted (edited)
23 hours ago, Rat Luv said:

 Yes...when you create a SL account, the TOS says you give permission for people to access your PC to mine crypto :/ 

Funnily enough, it wouldn't surprise me if it did mine crypto..

Edited by shireena1
Where's my share of it?
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Madelaine McMasters

Madelaine McMasters

Posted
Posted

Now that Quartz has gone to bed, I've raided his fridge. You won't believe what I found:

  • One twelve ounce bag of "Red Wriggler Organic Earthworms"
  • An opened box of "Flygrubs" dried mealworms, containing 85x more calcium than other brands.
  • Two opened 1.7oz cans of "Can O' Snails".
  • One pouch of "Erbies Edible Bugs Mixed Trail Mix"
  • One tin of "Friskies" mouse flavored cat food.

I wasn't expecting Quartz to actually be a mole, but there we have it.

Now I have even more questions...

Does he eat cat food, or does he have a cat?

If he has a cat, how does he keep it from eating him?

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Prokofy Neva

Prokofy Neva

Posted
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On 1/7/2022 at 8:39 PM, Paulsian said:

Just wondering.

If only Quartz would say that in every thread, instead of deleting some, the forums would be a different place.

So my son, who is on Second Life but rarely finds the time to log in now unless it's an emergency for me, had a period in his life where he mined crypto. See, he had this Russian emigre buddy of his who had taken the name George, who had the age of 14 had hacked into their school system and changed their grades, and he got into crypto early, made a fortune, and used it to fund a year at college out of state, before I guess the coin crashed.

Then he started another brand of coin and that didn't so so well, so he got into coding apps as one will do. So one year, he and his friends got into Start-Up Alley at TechCrunch with some app, and they put me on their team so I could get a pass, because TC had rejected my press pass request (I had come three years running as press and one year I won a ticket but then they didn't like my blog critical of tech).

So anyway, when the boys came after my apartment with these rigs I immediately put the kabosh on it because there was no way I was going to pay those electric bills, plus the management had already gotten wise to this sort of thing and sent eviction notices to some other people (and later they sent a threatening letter to us when my son plugged this electric motorcycle I won at TechCrunch into the garage, fearing its drainage of electricity). There is a longer story here but to cut to the chase...

So after my refusal to get behind this latter-day gold rush, my son and Grisha rented this basement in Brighton Beach off this kind of shady Russian guy and it turned out the basement was so damp and had leaks, that it threatened the computers. The mining operating wasn't making the riches as planned, and soon enough, all 14 of those rigs were on Craig's List, and not for what they paid for them. They were lucky they recouped some of that "investment". 

What I'm not seeing is how Second Life fits in. Like you could have Second Life open, on its viewer, but how would you tie that into bit-coin mining? I would follow attentively everything they would tell me about this mining operation, which I thought was TOTALLY for the birds, and I never once heard they say it was tied to SL. Just saying.

 

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QwiQ

QwiQ

Posted
Posted (edited)
9 hours ago, animats said:

OK. For new users who don't know this:

  • The Second Life viewer is open source. You can look at the source code yourself, and you can compile, build, and run it yourself.
  • Most of the third party viewers are open source. You can build them yourself from source.
  • Quite a few people, including me and two of the posters here, have worked on the source code of viewers, built them from source, and know what's inside.
  • If you watch system performance with a viewer running, you'll typically see one CPU at 100% and about half a CPU load or less spread over other CPUs. That's the main thread running flat out, and some other stuff such as asset downloading and decompression in the background. If you just stare at the same scene for a while, the other CPUs will stop using time once all downloading is done.. If something was cryptomining, you'd see all the CPUs and the GPU maxed out. Not happening.

So, no, the Second Life viewers are not doing crypto mining.

 

Hello People,

I can see this thread has gone a bit off track, and I can see my initial post attracted quite a lot of ridicule, worryingly even from someone involved with one of the TPVs.

Really I'm back just from the perspective of someone who wants to help and maybe give some hard won advice which you can sneer at and ignore if you want. All I can say is it comes from a genuinely good place - take it or leave it 🙂

Ok, so first thing is I (sort) of agree that the risks of any secretive embedded payload coming on purpose from LL are as close to zero as is worth thinking about - we do trust the guys.

The idea however that the LL viewer being open source somehow provides assurance that it could never deliver malware to your systems, isn't correct at all.

Whether anyone here wants to accept it or not, there is a whole raft of dependencies, workflow and processes which deliver the compiled viewer to your system. the code repo is only part of that process.

Just off the top of my head we have the following

  1. The code repo
  2. The Software Bill of Materials
  3. The DevOps pipeline
  4. The Dev/Build/Distribution environments
  5. The wider Software Supply Chain

As you can see then, the public code repo in itself, while reassuring, guarantees diddly in the grand scheme of things.

And by the way, any vendor who says they don't bother with any of that stuff (manual or automated) because it's "overkill" or "not warranted" really should earn your distrust. Even if they say they do it and they can definitely guarantee 100% malware free - run a mile because they're pretty deluded if nothing else..

So as you can see, there are lots and lots of potential vulnerability points between the code repo and the executable which rocks up on your system. These types of vulnerability are exploited every day by very clever but naughty people and examples are easily referenced by a straightforward google search.

So really, while well intentioned, the following assurances should be treated with a pinch of salt.

  • THE LL VIEWER IS 100% NOT DOING XYZ! (apparently the caps and exclamations carry some weight here).
  • Yeah mate, I pulled the repo, compiled that bad boy and it worked fine (lots wrong with this - did your build env = the LL build env, when did you, and what constitutes "fine")
  • I'm a super coder mate, anyone worth their salt can read the code repo and easily identify shenanigans.

To be fair, I'd be very surprised (I mean drop off my chair surprised) if anyone from LL would publicly go on record with quite the same level of guarantee as you guys. In fact the ToS explicitly says otherwise.

"Linden Lab does not ensure continuous, error-free, secure or virus-free operation of the Service, the Software, the Websites, the Servers, or your Account"

Anyway, do what you want to do, trust who you want to trust. But maybe, just in case I'm not a complete lunatic worthy of derision, take some precautions yourself and more importantly guide new users safely into our little world 🙂

Edited by QwiQ
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Syo Emerald

Syo Emerald

Posted
Posted
6 hours ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

If he has a cat, how does he keep it from eating him?

We have already established, that he is a mole but also big enough to operate a fridge. Assuming its an average sized fridge with normal sized products inside, because of you being able to raid it and not be suprised until opening the fridge, we can make a safe guess that he must be a human sized mole. Thats either absolutly adoreable or terrifying, but would explain why a cat wouldn't eat him.

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