Lancewae Barrowstone

Don't forget the mermaids beneath Blake Sea (I think it was). They are down there, avatars, a whole culture, and they are beautiful, especially in those last moments before you drown.

The great threat to human generated passwords, of course, is when the hosting site is breached and their database of hashed passwords stolen. Then, it’s a matter of minutes before it can be subjected to any variety of offline cracking techniques and myriad dictionaries, and 70% of passwords likely cracked within minutes. The mention of MD5 here is not a comforting thought. So, either our personal passwords are exceedingly, exceptionally and cleverly tough strings of pure jibberish, or our host site is using the top current strongest hashing technique to front line shield us, or else, we are just going to get pwned. That's probably the best way to think about this when considering your password regime. You would expect robust cracking attempts on sties where banking and currency are involved, including Second Life. Under such attacks only a tiny percentage of hashes (in the single digits) will be unresolved.

Regarding your personal vulnerability via your IP address, he can see where you live down to the neighborhood. With Google streetview he can traverse up and down those streets viewing what the Google cam recorded and look at all the houses around you, even your own, and will not know which it is. He can learn quite a bit such as nearest supermarkets, gas stations, routes into town. I do not wish to alarm, just telling you the obvious. What I find curious is how he might get your IP address by having access to your account? Any help on that from anyone? Edit: You see there is a very good chance this man is a liar and a bully. It would be helpful to the OP if we can shoot holes thru that IP claim. But can we?

re: mentors, Yeah see, mentors should have no power, only their own eagerness and love of helping others because it's fun to them. It's fulfilling and sparks a raw energy every time, as if bringing sight to the blind. I know some, who will try to mentor newbies every time they meet one, because SL is too valuable to waste and a noob is feeling around to perceive the imperceptible potentialities they've heard, or intuited, are out there. It's not land that draws them, it's not even the avatar yet that holds them, it's a sense of some connection that must await them, somewhere, some reason to stay another 5 minutes and another 10 that turns into a decade. That's what mentoring is for. Not just some info bot, but an inspirational force. There are only a few such. Give them no power; give them a stipend if you wish, that would make sense. And they probably won't even care about that, but it's one reason for someone to agree to a schedule. But the coolest, most curious oddity of all is that one good mentor can bring you others. One could write a dissertation on the newbie phenomenon in Second Life, because noobs all fall within a basket of certain potentialities -- some are only curious and of varying patience, some just want to mess around an hour and bug people, others are willing to perceive a depth of possible richer experiences, of fantasy dramas, and yet don't know quite how to get there yet, and so on. If you compiled a basic list of human interests that can work inside virtual worlds, food is not one of them so you go down to the next item, SEX, and that works. And then you go down to say, motorcycles, oh yeah that works too, and then dancing and music and chatting, and flirting and romance and living in a city with civic responsibilities or immersing into a fantasy combat roleplay with a family to fight for and protect, and worlds upon worlds open up. That is what mentoring can do. Open some windows onto alien scenes all to be found inside this single entity called "Second Life." Such mentoring is valuable. It should not be left unharvested.

The poster was patient through a lot of jibberish. If she returns I want to suggest that you can download a vpn service in less than a minute, and for a few bucks a month secure your traffic from your computer to the vpn server of your choice somewhere in the world, then on to SL and back. This answers your concerns and thwarts the nosy guys around a university who are not criminal minded seeking bank accounts but are interested in the private lives of girls and how to snoop on them thru fun hacking. Only subscribe to a vpn that allows you to see the server list and the percentages of load on each server, so you can choose one in a good location and under light load each time you log in. I know of one such service and I won't mention it's name but I think it starts with "N" and ends with "n." Just choose one of their servers on their list that is close the the SL servers in San Francisco or else close to your own location so that traffic is most direct. You know there is no total security on the internet and don't need to be preached to and told snarkily to alter your behaviour. To answer your initial concern, this should ease your mind about local snoops on the university network. Best of luck, lass.

If you have the original purchase then rezz the package again and Open, and copy to inventory as usual. Pull the screwed-up hair into Trash. Now wear your new one. I liked the redelivery idea too. That is so handy. As for your current conundrum, it sounds like when you clicked to Edit your hair for repositioning you might have inadvertently selected something else along with it that you didn't know. Say, an eyelash or a prime object many meters away it. This is common problem in cluttered areas, say in your home. That alone could prevent you from repositioning the hair if that unseen object has no permissions. One clue is where the positioning arrows are when you've clicked to Edit the hair. If they are a meter a way then you can suspect you might have snagged something unintentionally in your selection beam.

I don't know if anyone mentioned these: 1. I suspect you can wear any skin. Have you tried going into your SL library in inventory and throwing one of those freebie skins to see if it works? It may be as simple as that and becomes of matter of just finding the skin you like. SL is full of skins, freebies and otherwise. 2. Omega has special applier HUDs for the different mesh bodies. You will need that. They have a centralized store in SL (I don't have the LM) and there you will find a huge array of HUDs for the different bodies. Maybe you'll find your body's Omega HUD there. There's a small purchase price I don't remember what it is.... maybe $200L? So, there is an impetus for Omega to build these applier HUDS. This may solve your issues with good fortune. If not now, maybe soon.

One place to learn about this is to talk to some DJs. They've experienced it all. There are many in world right now if you can get one to give you a little advice. Good luck.

You might as well uninstall Firestorm and delete it's folder, and delete the download file too. Go get a new one and start again. That's what I would try. Good luck.

Heard on Twittershpere it was DDOS attack. Lindens is being quiet, and that's fine; they are working at it, whatever it is. Also, saw an article on _Zero Hedge_ about massive Chinese hacking campaign let loose on USA right now. Not saying these two are linked or even true. But the first seems credibly apparent, and the second, a rather obvious and ongoing fact. No, I would give Lindens some slack at this point, like every other corporation under going attacks.

On the plus side, the firefighter throttling has thrown net neutrality back into public debate with calls for it's renewal, and yet too, we have a chance to see deeper, franker discussions now and new revelations, such is seen today at Tech Dirt website with a piece called "That Time Telco Lobbyists Sent Me All Their Talking Points About Trying To Shift The Blame To Internet Companies." [I don't post links -- just an observer, not an advocate]. The article and the following comments are rather eye-opening form many angles. The ISPs right now are clearly trying to frame the debate to spin any further actions in their favor. We're not against Federal action where needed, just please take the time to get it right.

Update: We see Verizon was caught throttling data to firefighters who have "unlimited" plans. They were called to task for this by government now looking into it. Excellent. And few things to note here: 1. The ISP has been EXPOSED to the world for being non-transparent and misleading. A correction will occur and will influence other ISPs in the country. A positive outcome. 2. It now brings to light the whole throttling issue, a key that we all need to rationally understand: why does throttling happen? 3. It makes no sense in that we know it is near-axiomatic and reasonably so, that capitalist marketers WANT to supply their products to as many customers as possible. So, why throttle? Were they just cheating so as to steal what was promised to some and just sell off some of it to others? I frankly hope it is this simple, and that they will now pay for this cheat. Yet, we still have far less understanding about their throttling than we need to know, and we must get it now that this barn door is thrown open. And HERE is where real progress can happen, as opposed to bland unknowing legislative fiddling going on. Let's now get to some court suits and criminal investigations. 4. Was the throttling of Netflix and other big content hogs in some way protective of ISP limited bandwidth supply (whatever that limit is) so that we small consumers were protected at our little internet usages without it being drained away by the big megolithic content gobblers? 5. OR, was it just a negotiating squeeze to force those giant hogs into different rate terms? I suspect this later and we don't really know about the former. Capitalist industry has always formulated different price/cost rates with high volume wholesalers and users, and other rates for average small retail customers where delivery cost is higher. That's free marketing, and it has reason behind it or it would not exist, since competitors always undercut each other at every opportunity. SO, we need the LIGHT of publicity to shine in on these ISP practices, and we need REAL competition allowed to flower in this marketplace. We should never have enabled the few BIG ISP corporations to snatch up the marketing of internet where now they are seen by that Obama era "banks too big to fail" mentality, all done in the name of just fast-track expediency over short term at the expense of real and longer term benefits of true and open competition. If only we can get that. What we have is not what is optimal. Instead of a nutrition-rich ear of corn on our plates, we have been tossed a nutrtionless bag of "candy corn." That's what BigGov/BigCorp bedfellows too often produce. That's what "Net Neutrailty" was. Another lame bag of candy corn. IMHO.

But if building components of mesh you're making things that must be "built to," right? I mean a nice mesh door unit is something you must shrink your building's opening down to meet, and not the other way around of stretching the mesh unit out to meet the existing opening. This can lead to some creative junctures that must be hatched, but it's surely doable but maybe not always. For instance, if you want to put a 3rd party mesh window unit into a wall of a mesh prefab house, you can set the window against the house but not into that wall so that it functions as a window. It won't be a see-thru window or show on both sides as a full product window (unless you build it that way), but still it can work as a faux window seen on one side but not the other and never seen thru. I've done that when I just had to. It seems to me a mesh building component is a dream for setting into standard prim construction because of the easy of editing prim shapes, but becomes limited and even problematic in prefab mesh homes. Unless you want to also consider building your own mesh home blanks that your kit products can fit to. Hmm.. now it turns into a whole different product and different market, and well.... you make of that what you can.

Textures inside purchased products are almost always protected. So start building your own library of textures and there are tons of free ones that are still usable and pertinent as you'll see. Search MP for Texture Organizer and such. I used to find free textures at sandboxes long ago. You'll get in the habit of finding and collecting. As for your porch you could blank that base prim and tint it solid black and then put your own lattice over it to make it seem the porch is built on posts and lattice with dark shadow behind it where the porch rests over air. That's really the construction of that porch anyway, and it would be fun on that. Or just shrink that base prim back a bit, again blanked and blackened and raise it up into that void under the actual porch. Then apply transparency so that it becomes deep dark shadow, and then actually set corner posts of your own making and run lattice of your own devise between them. That would be hardest since the lattice works won't exactly match but would be a fun experiment and you might actually surprise yourself. Or just put your posts and no new lattice and leave the blank space open (the faux shadow) and see that that works. Or finally, give up trying to match old things (which is what I would do) and simply work toward accentuating such difference as is often seen in porches that are added onto to older houses, such as running a brick underpinning or stucco... or other creative ideas that you hatch. Since you are the builder of this creative approach you can (and certainly will) alter it, add to it, touch it up every day that you log on and see it anew. Soon you get it to what you really like.

>> even objects i have previously edited i can no longer do. It reminds me of working in a new area such as on a ground that may hold transparent grasses or in a house with furniture and rugs where transparent things can get in the way of accessing the directional arrows when we set a prim down to edit. We end up clicking some unseen thing that's intervening. Of course, you're likely working on a clear, clean plat like we always do. But i would turn on transparencies just to see what might be there, otherwise.

Maybe it was a first recording of the new song and thus done so inside SL as a performance. Cool, either way. Too bad I missed it. I'm all in favor of new music in SL. So many oldies being played all over and endlessly.

Nice.

On Mac you can use Garage Band to create your own sounds or drag some other audio file into it (search Free Sounds online) and then edit the clips for what you want and upload into SL. In Windows pc you can use free program like Audacity to do the same thing. Then inworld go up to the menu bar and click Build, then click upload sound and follow the prompts. There is a small linden fee. You can use your sound inworld by means of Gestures, which is probably what you're thinking. Create a New gesture and add your sound and create any text to go with it and even set it to hot keys and you're ready to go. Press your key, there's your sound. Make sure you have "sounds" volume turned up in your sound settings at top right of screen.

The REAL value in the Premium Membership lies in its IMMEDIATE infusion of stimuli into the confusing life of the newbie. It provides both an anchor and many doorways. It provides sudden opportunities -- you need furnishings for your new home, for instance -- and that drives you along the learning curve and into many different purposes, directions and discoveries. It's rather an ingenious and helpful device. It has real value. I've never used the Premium Membership but I've witnessed it's good effect on newbies. If I came in as a newbie now, knowing what I know, I would take the Premium and launch forth on my new and intriguing learning curve.

Isn't this issue a huge fight over bandwidth? A great struggle between giant monopolistic capitalists on one side (ISPs), who are battling now against huge monopolistic capitalist content creators on the other side (Big Gaming, Big HBO, Big Netflix, Big Amazon, etc.) and who are gobbling up bandwidth as fast as they can get it in order to expand their profit-making empires and serve their fast-growing clientele. And, God bless them, but this is a private fight between the Big Fat Capitalists, and do we really think politicians in Congress have the brains to dabble in this sphere? They were pulled in by only ONE SIDE of it, the creators who squealed that their users were being cheated and were going to suffer because of mean old ISPs not moving fast enough to sell bandwidth to them. And perhaps their users WILL suffer, unless these big fat creators step up (as they've been invited to) and come to fair terms with the providers on the problems of expanding that growing infrastructure for their own consumption. It's a rather new phenomenon of certain highly visible Hog-Gobblers now shoving their snouts into the internet service provider marketplace. Well remember, we consumers all want MORE competition on the provider side of the internet equation so we can keep our 100 Mbps service costs down. Such competition is what pushes for expansions and hardware investments to produce ever better, faster, cheaper product, or else see we all turn to their ISP competitors. That is the ideal world if we can get that. Net Neutrality doesn't move in that direction at all. And it is truly the one overwhelming public good. Net Neutrality only steps in to interfere in the squabble of giant Capitalists, where you got Big Daddy yelling down the stairs, "You children play nice down there or I'm coming down! And if Netfester and Amazaroon can't pay your rents on Boardwalk and Utilities then you must just INCREASE your efforts to make sure they can pass on by without too much burden. Do YOU HEAR ME!" And so BOOM: the Net Neutrality legislation is spawned by sheer genius of elected know-nothings and sycophant alarmists, who couldn't stand the fat-cats crying wolf so vigorously (and from only their own self-interested perspective). I don't profess that this scenario adequately represents exactly the issues on the table, because we don't KNOW those issues, it's a private fight inside corporate boardrooms. And with the great Net Neutrality thrown out by Washington we had no certainty what unforeseen ramifications would result from it further down the line, as such hopeless political meddlings tend to do (like having Gruber design Obama care). No, this great game of private market competition must fight on a bit longer, unless you want big daddy just throwing more oil on water and mysteriously claiming, "THERE, all fixed." Even if Washington just shuts the F** up in this struggle, then these greedy empires will work out just how to make sharing costs of greater expansions actually and finally happen, because they all want to feed their customers. That's the given, and frankly the good part for all of us. Let's hope Big Guv doesn't destroy this natural instinctive marketing process. Give them time to sweat and swear and cry, and WHEN they see finally that no more Big Daddy voice is going to scream out just to stop the din..., then they will get serious, solve issues and move on to making more riches. This, is my take on it.

NO, the OP's concern is NOT paranoia. It's, in fact, sensible. IF you noticed someone watching your home, recording every package delivered to your door, noting all the mail going in and taken out your letterbox, jotting down the times when lights go on or off in certain rooms, watching when your car leaves the driveway and returns, and maybe where your car goes, etc, and indeed, etc. Well, that is the world of today which to many of us became utterly predicable and apparent years ago in the meteoric rise of Google and it's ilk. All those much touted sweet "freebies" we could download for neat applications, and yes I remember the birth of the famous Gmail that we were all urged by the great tech pundits of the time to quickly go get one while they are still available! Hah! And so now it seems most the world has one of those including some high uppity leaders and/or consultants, who should know better. Finally today, even the general public seems to realize the behemoth giant data vacuum-cleaners at work out there gathering all they can from us. Facebook, et al. And rather a bit too closely resembling the fantasy image above of the mysterious car with blackened windows that stays in front of your house. And you suddenly begin to wonder is it there in traffic behind you..., oh! is that it? Did I just glimpse it there? Is it not? Am I going crazy? No. You are not crazy, and neither are you paranoid. You are awake. Is this Legal? I can't say. But we are sensitized to it enough now to know that it is CREEPY.

It sounds like fun to me, because you are invested and productive. Decorating your home is an artistic expression, just as creating your avatar is. The clothes, the look, the body and face and hair and jewels. This is all very satisfying. You are hooked on that artistic creativity and the productive "doings" of your life in SL. You have no time for "other" things yet because you are still deep in the personal expressiveness that you bring to the things you want to get done here. That is very cool. Yes, I certainly get it. What you describe is actually what MANY, many people do here in SL and all over Open Sim. We show up and get busy, like the artist at her easel or the composer at his instrument. It's what we do! And we find that these platforms are a creators paradise, and we feel right at home. That is very satisfying. Yes, I see that you are having fun. Just like the rest of us.

The poster is obviously talking about a specialty club. And that's quite alright; SL is full of specialty clubs. Clubs for sexual preferences, clubs for furries, clubs for old farts who still listen to tired old blues, clubs for endless boring 1970's same old rock music, etc. Going for a specialty club means he can break all kinds of rules and make up his own because it's focused toward a somewhat limited group. We sense that he dosen't mind paying the rental fee and that puts him way ahead. It doesn't really have to make $L to cover costs. Very cool. I say go for it! Have fun and build up friends and clients and do all the fun stuff you want! Club success is directly related to the energy, drive and personality of the club owner. You have energy and focus. Let us know where it is. Because we all here really are in favor of your success, however measured. Congratulations on your endeavor, and have fun!

Well, according to an article on Breitbart.com recently, we read it stated this way: "FOSTA also authorizes increased penalties — including fines and jail of up to 25 years — for people who “promote or facilitate the prostitution of five or more people or who contribute to sex trafficking through reckless disregard.” I'm no lawyer but we can pretty well see from this broad language where certain risks MIGHT seem perceivable, as pertains to some things in SL. I don't think we here can define the meanings of this law, because there can be different interpretations of its meanings. And notice the use of the word "or" and not the word "and." That is significant. We know that it's law enforcers arresting people that brings about clarity of new laws through court judges ruling on the cases. So, for instance, it seems to me that an SL facility hosting certain activities that some law enforcer might decide is "facilitating prostitution of five or more people" (given that cybersex roleplay is seen as "sex") could then act to bring a charge; while some other law enforcer somewhere might decide that even the individuals behind the avatars working as escorts in an SL advertised "escort club" could be seen also as a part of "promoting prostitution" where there are five or more people involved in the club, and so bring charges against individuals too. I don't see why that couldn't be a possibility, because this is all open to interpretation, and different minds interpret things differently. Law enforcers are career minded and ambitious like most everyone else. Just my thoughts on the matter.

As for the "water kit system," you're probably talking about the waves. It's almost certainly like the one I've used in the past where the KEY thing for you to know is that the heart of this wave-generating trick is a small invisible prim up in the sky that will pop up there when you rezz your "waves" from the folder onto the ground (or so you think). That little prim houses the scripts that are causing the animated textures that give you wavelets washing ashore. Very nice. But your waves may be going in the wrong direction and needing adjustments, so to fix this, when you rezz your beach (this unseen prim box), make sure you have no trees in the way so you can find that box in the sky. It may be inland a bit and not OVER your beach. To find it just turn off transparencies (ctrl alt T) and this will turn all prims on your sim red, including that invisible little prim box, so you can now look up in the sky until you see it. Then r-click it and select "Edit" so you can move the box like any other prim, and you will then see that you in adjusting the box you are moving your waves. And thus, you position everything as you want them for a lapping effect up onto your new sand. You may have a different system but probably not. The exceeding cool thing about all this is that while the you can't place prims OFF-sim, and thus you wonder how are you seeing your waves coming in from off sim? The trick is that the prim box itself holding the scripts and animations IS ON your sim, and thus the animations will run and you will see them rolling onto your beach like coming in off the wide ocean. These are not big breakers, but little normal wavelets washing upon to a shore. Really cool.