Gabriele Graves

I have the latest version of Firestorm installed on my Ubuntu system, both native and the Windows version via WINE. The Windows version is much slower than the native version.

I was very tempted to get a Teegle horse until I read from their web page that the horse's location is constantly being sent to their web server so you can track down where your "lost" horse was last seen. This tracking is not something I would want. https://www.teeglepet.com/features There is a Pet management page which suggests that the horse settings can be controlled via that page as well as being able to view various bits of status (like location) about the horse. There is no statement about how optional this feature is and what happens with the horse should the web server go down and what if any limitations that would create. They also don't seem to address if all this telemetry and remote control can be turned off permanently and still have a working horse. By turned off I mean no sending of data to or from the horse to the web server because being "turned off" can have different meanings and sometimes it just means that data is still sent but just not accessible to the user any more. Like Google does for Location History, etc. I'm not accusing them of any misuse of this information and remote control but this puts me off buying. I don't knowingly wear anything else that would track my avatar across the grid and I don't knowingly buy products that rely on a server unless I know that is their primary function. Which is a shame because they are really lovely horses.

When I cannot detach stuff I know I have to do a Refresh Attachments (Avatar->Avatar Health->Refresh Attachments or ALT+SHIFT+R) then wait about 20 seconds. Things generally come right for me after that.

On this topic. I've decided to remove MFA for now from my account. I had my account setup to use TOTP for MFA. When the ToS update happened FS 6.6.3.67470 got stuck in a MFA <-> Accept ToS loop which resulted in me being temporarily locked out of my account. This is what appeared to be happening: Press "Log In" after entering credentials Ask for MFA token Show ToS dialog which can take up to 10 seconds to load and you cannot accept whilst loading Wait for acceptance Validate Token which has probably timed out now or is just treated as invalid for some reason Send user back to step #1 Rinse, repeat until locked out of account for what seemed like about 30mins Had to accept the ToS from the secondlife.com to proceed. Clearly the right design would have been to verify the MFA token immediately after asking for it and before showing the ToS as this would verify the person who is accepting the ToS really is the account holder and prevent the token timing out. I'm not sure if this is LL's fault or the fault of FS. If I were a gambling person, I would say LL. When you add this inconvenience to the fact that enabling MFA right now is pointless if someone with a older TPV can just bypass it, I decided just to wait until this is sorted out. TOTP MFA is a fantastic security measure if done right which I use for many non-SL accounts. This currently isn't done right in my opinion and certainly isn't secure.

Not at this time.

Unfortunately people like this say a lot of things that aren't true because it rattles their victims. It's doubtful they have your IP addresses and even if they did, they could not use them to stalk you across the grid. Unless you are wearing an attachment that they or one of their alts gave you with a tracking script in it, it is also not possible for them to know where you are for sure. They probably just know your habits, checked out your groups to guess where you might be, etc. One of their not-so-obviously named alts could be someone who knows you and/or you know well. You've banned them and realistically that's pretty much all you can do unless you want to file an AR for abuse.

Ahh, that might be true now but I distinctly remember having to turn them off when I first joined up to the new forum.

Some people, like me have signatures turned off for all people.

Luckily a lot of boats are relatively simple. Powered boats at their most basic are just turn engine on, put it in gear, hold the throttle and point it in the direction you want. Sailing boats are where it tends to get more tricky/complicated with trying to sail using the direction of the wind. Even then those boats often have a powered mode or simple sailing mode. Pretty much all come with great instructions and a HUD to show you relevant info as you go.

Yep no disagreement on any of that from me.

The BBX boats also allow non-owner driver and I'm pretty sure the Bandit does too.

BoM already supports asymmetrical tattoos, it's the bodies/skins that don't and probably never will. The rest doesn't bother me at all. Avatars in SL aren't perfect, they're never going to ever be perfect and I realized a while back that I don't even expect them to be. It's really reached that point of being good enough for me.

I've got the following: BBX: Princess II, SLB A1 & A2, SPD X2, Mary Bandit 50/3 All really great products in my opinion.

I wear an Evo head (Lake) which is Evo X capable but I chose to stay with Evo mode and it's SLUV map compatibility. Obviously this means I don't buy Evo X BoM layers but I'm not too concerned about that as I have thousands and thousands of options already. I don't much like how the Evo X UV mapping makes avatars look weirdly cyclopian before their heads rez. The majority of make-ups, etc. are now HD appliers which I also don't buy as I'm not buying into yet another applier system along with clipping etc. I don't much like the Evo X skins I've seen but fortunately I already bought many skins and have a good set of choices. I also don't like that there is yet another BoM layer for just the ears. So the majority of my L$ tends to go on clothing, buildings and decor these days and virtually none on make-up, skins, etc. but like I said I have many more options than I would ever really need. I'm not feeling any kind of loss so far. I'm very happy with how everything looks with the SLUV mapping and don't expect that will change. I don't need to reach for more and more realism, it's realistic enough looking for me. I'd not be a fan of moving off SLUV for bodies either for similar reasons.

Life is unfair, you'll get over it.

You did say this though which seems a bit of a contradiction: I think people can be forgiven for reading exactly what was written and responding accordingly.

Most creators haven't been great to deal with in my experience, some are, some are OK and yes there are definitely a few who are awesome but there are many who have been simply awful. However like any population of people it will be a mixed bag and have awesome right down to lousy. All that anyone can state are their own experiences. From my own experiences: * I have witnessed a lot of over-inflated egos and precious people. * There are more than a few that are outright hostile to having to deal with customers for anything at all. Even seemingly begrudging them a useable product and treating their payment as a tribute more than an equitable transaction. * There appears to be an unspoken belief among many that criticism is a threat against them all which creates of lot of protectionism of each other and circling the wagons when there is a perceived threat whether real or imaginary. * There are more than a few who love to play the victim and tell you all about how bad they have it. * It's seems to be very common to weaponise bloggers and friends to silence criticism, valid or not. * More than a few are happy to tell customers lies, make promises that they have no intention of keeping and other underhand behaviours in an attempt to avoid criticism from unhappy customers. Finally, yes there have been some great creators and a few notably awesome people who I will forever remember fondly but in my experience the ugly it isn't limited to just a few "bad apples" it's endemic. I believe that this comes down to how little customer protections there are built into SL and so unethical behaviours become common. To anyone thinking of responding, please remember that these are my experiences, are perfectly valid and though your mileage may vary it does not invalidate mine.

That's what I said.

I've only had mobiles for about 10 years now. Haven't ever really had any problems with that, in fact it solved more problems than it ever caused for me.

It's not an age verification tool. Not by any stretch of the imagination. There are no age verification tools available, it's just snake oil.

A smart person who wanted their alt to slide right by any a NPIOF ban unnoticed would just add their payment method and buy a minimal amount of L$. Nobody would have any idea of whether they were an alt or a main account. Generally people who want to play alt games are not detectable unless/until they give themselves away somehow.

Don't think it will help much but I can log in from New Zealand right now.

The only thing I can think of is creating a proxy-style site that sits between SL and the service that you wish to access and takes requests from SL and turns them into requests to the service you want to access and returns the response data to SL. It would provide a much simpler API to SL and would store the token to use for accessing the third-party server. SL <-> PROXY <-> THIRD PARTY Not simple and very much overkill for less than a KB's worth of header data though but limits sometimes make things like this necessary. I hope you get a better answer than this but I noticed there have been no answers yet.

The same way they stopped mail spam and robo-calls.

I've been using Firestorm for way longer than you. There is no Firestorm account. They're all SL accounts. Firestorm just uploads and downloads it's profile pictures through the legacy viewer API same as all other viewers that use the legacy profile API and the same one that LL used to use for the official viewer profiles. LL has been through 2 re-implementations of profiles since the legacy profiles. The first was web profiles and now the new profile API. There have been known issues with LL syncing profiles between the legacy API and the web API. A lot of what you are saying doesn't make any sense. What Firestorm profile picture upload button? Do you mean the Snapshot Share to Profile Feed? That shares a snapshot to your My Second Life Profile Feed and is still there in the latest. No viewer is able to search "local information and pictures". Anything any viewer can access has to be stored with LL on their cloud servers. Anything stored locally on a users hard disk is either a cached copy of something on the servers or things like chat logs and no viewer can access those directly. The real reason why things are probably getting better is that LL's newest profile API doesn't use web profiles at all because they are going away, it uses a similar mechanism to the legacy API but better.