Cain Maven
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Posts posted by Cain Maven
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15 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:
What would you prefer, a fax? Mailing them the info?
They need it for the aforementioned tax forms.
Ya sell enough stuff, ya pay (or at least report it for) taxes.
I would prefer that they not request sensitive information via email. For very obvious reasons. They have a secure (one assumes and hopes) web form, which they could have directed me to in the first place, although they would have had to do some actual work first.
And yes -- I have always reported all my SL income on my tax returns.
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At the risk of flogging a deceased equine: Whether it's issued a K or a MISC or both is not really the root of my concern. The fact that Tilia requests sensitive information via email is -- and I personally think we should demand better from a company that touches so many of our livelihoods.
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1 minute ago, Dragon Mommy said:
I am surprised they do not have a secure web form or other means of providing this information. I deal with SSNs at work all the time and we end nearly every email with a reminder not to send that or other sensitive info over email.
In fairness, the form under the Process Credit tab appears to be secure, and that's where I eventually submitted the information. But that's not what Tilia asked me to do.
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7 minutes ago, Ceka Cianci said:
Most places will never ask for that kind of information through an email..
Also, if Tilla is sending you a 1099 K, that means that you will be getting a 1099 Misc from LL more than likely..
Right -- having done this for a while now, I'm somewhat familiar with the various tax forms
My issue is not with he issuance of the form but with the fact that Tilia requested sensitive information over email, which is a huge no-no.
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9 minutes ago, Sid Nagy said:
Are you sure that this isn't a phishing mail you got?
I would contact support on that one when in doubt.Yes, I did contact support and they confirmed that the email was legitimate -- in the sense that it was actually sent by Tilia. Which never should have happened.
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Today, I received an email from Linden Lab's payment processing company, Tilia. It said that I was "eligible" for a 1099-K form, but they did not have a Social Security Number on file. (For those of you outside the US, a 1099-K is a tax form issued when someone pays you more than a certain amount. The SSN is your personal identification number and therefore sensitive.)
The message then went on to say:
So that we may issue you your 1099-k form, please reply to this email with your full social security number.
Yes. They actually requested that I send my SSN over email, security risk be damned.
I examined the email headers, which looked fine (famous last words, I know) but I am obviously not prepared to email my SSN under any circumstances, so I replied to that effect. I also tried calling them, but there is no way of reaching an actual person.
Tilia's response:
For your security and to fulfill this request, we have reset your Know Your Customer application and ask that you re-submit your Identity Verification once more.
This form is cleverly hidden on the Process Credit dashboard page, so I had to contact SL support to find it. Now that I have resubmitted the information -- and I'm positive I had provided it earlier -- Tilia seems to be content. However, I am not impressed.
A company that deals with sensitive personal information such as real names, addresses and SSNs needs to have its security act together. Asking people to provide sensitive information via email is not good enough. Not by a long shot.
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7 hours ago, Sid Nagy said:
So I finally decided to set up shop again in world.
I bought myself a nice building from @Cain Maven and now it is time to make all the signs and posters, come up with a vendor design and then fill them with content.Looking good, sir
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2 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:
Adding: And what does the "hop" signify? Is it a dance ("sock hop")? Is it for bunnies? Is it for beer drinkers ("hops")? Does "hop" refer to quickly moving between locations?
Maybe it just sounds better than "Purchase and Teleport"?
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29 minutes ago, Sid Nagy said:
Free in the sense that one has to come up with a new gift, one has to build a shop interior and one has to sell at at least a 20% discount. You can call that free of course, but you, as a builder and merchant, should know better than that.
Free in the sense that there is no monetary fee to enter. As a builder and merchant, you knew that.
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3 minutes ago, Sid Nagy said:
LL competes with the land barons as well with mainland and Belli, it competes with the house rental market with Belli,
it competes with the body market with the new mesh avatars. And yes, it competes with event organizers.
They own the place, so they can, I guess.Can? Yes. Should? That's an open question, I think.
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11 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:
So then the sheer size of the thing… quantity has a quality of its own (as Stalin may have said).
Which may not be seen as a Good Thing if you're a smaller resident-run event... or Leon Trotsky.
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3 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:
I think it is a "no-win" scenario.
For your consideration, "serious" arguments on all sides:
If LL runs charity events: "Why is LL showing favoritism for XYZ charity? I don't like that charity! These charities are too US-centric! Why should we be compelled to support charities? Doesn't charity begin at home? Why can't people give to charity through their communities, churches, taxes, etc.? Is LL getting a tax write-off from supporting this charity? LL is competing with my favorite event!!1!!!"
If LL does NOT run charity events: "Why isn't LL supporting any charities? Do they not care about humans? Why is LL so uncaring? Other companies show support for charities, why won't LL? Doesn't LL care about the community? What would be the harm in having a charity event? A charity event would bring the SL community together! It's for a good cause.."
If LL runs non-charity events: "Why is LL running non-charity events? LL is competing with resident-run events! Doesn't LL trust us to run events? LL plays gatekeeper for these events, it's not fair. LL only holds events to increase revenue. LL must be absolutely desperate to be running events. LL is showing how desperate they are by running events."
If LL does NOT run non-charity events: "Why isn't LL running non-charity events? Residents are terrible at organizing, we need LL to help! If LL ran the events, they would get more exposure. LL runs the best events! Only LL-run events get much exposure, we need those to keep SL going! SL will die before long, if LL doesn't run more events."
All fair and valid points -- although I do disagree with the notion that "residents are terrible at organizing"
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3 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:
But now that you mention it, I realize I'm not quite sure why the Shop&Hop events are necessary. They seem to be popular though, so they must be serving a purpose, it's just not obvious to me why that niche isn't filled by resident-run events.
Shop & Hop is free for creators (assuming you are selected to participate.) This gives the event a competitive advantage, since resident-run events typically charge a fee to cover cost and/or turn a profit. Linden Lab can also reach a large number of customers easily and cheaply.
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RFL and its events aside, perhaps a bigger question is whether Linden Lab should run events at all? They are obviously competing directly with all resident-run events.
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5 hours ago, Bleuhazenfurfle said:
Actually, it is. You're talking about a fair chunk of additional complexity they'd have to add.
We can all speculate. My rule of thumb is that it's better that complexity is handled once on the back end than thousand of times in the client -- with varying degrees of success. But reasonable people can disagree.
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2 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:
Because llGetNotecardLine is non-blocking. When the notecard can't be fetched for a very long time (say, until sim restart), the script just doesn't get a dataserver event with the notecard line, but it's not dead in the water; it can still do other things, like timeout and report an error if nothing else.
Understood -- but in those rare cases an error (say NAK, heh) could be returned. This would be no different from other synchronous functions, and handling that edge case would probably not be any harder or more complex than the timout and error reporting you suggest; it may even be simpler.
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I must be missing something here.
If we call llGetNotecardLine(), the back end has to a) check if the notecard is in the cache, b) if not, fetch and cache it, and c) retrieve and return the requested line.
Why can't llGetNotecardLineSync() do the same thing? If the notecard already is in the cache, great -- we get the speed advantage. If not, we're not going to be worse off than with the async flavor.
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13 minutes ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:
I can't imagine there's any chance a notecard could leave cache during a simple loop-read. If there is, the safe-guards we'd have to script around the loop would be a deal-breaker for using it.
Someone remind me to ask during the next meeting on Tuesday.
Sadly, I can imagine it... but it would be great to get clarity on this. I would also like a clear answer on which functions actually force the notecard to be cached.
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34 minutes ago, Gabriele Graves said:
It would have been better if the new function just went and fetched the darn notecard if it wasn't already cached and always returned after it was available.
Imagine that 😊
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It seems like there's pretty much a consensus here: Yes, the speed gain is great, but it does need a lot of hand holding.
It makes you wonder if this could have been approached differently -- although without knowing the internals of the caching system it's fairly pointless to speculate.
Besides, there are a few other things that perhaps should have higher priority for the Lab
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The new and wonderful llGetNotecardLineSync() function requires that the notecard is in the region's asset cache. Is there a way of ensuring this?
For example, will calling llGetNumberOfNotecardLines() immediately before reading lines as in the published example do this? Also, is it possible that the notecard is removed from the cache while it is being read?
Depending on how this all works, using this function may require a lot of checks and hand holding. The speed improvements are of course very welcome
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On 5/5/2023 at 1:49 AM, Wulfie Reanimator said:
Could it be related to the physics weight of the object? We know LL has restrictions on that in some cases, like physics weight over 32 can't become a Vehicle.
Probably not in the cases that I've seen -- which don't seem to have anything in common, be it size, tri count, complexity, etc. Then again, I have no idea what really is driving this bug
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15 hours ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:
Am I missing something?
I made an object (analyzed physics) set to Prim shape type, and it keeps me inside while KFM is active.
Good point. I don't have an answer, except this behavior is not consistent. I have linksets where *most* objects return to their assigned shape type after motion ends, but not all.
The issue has apparently already been reported; it would be great if LL could take a look at this.
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5 hours ago, ChinRey said:
That's documented in the LSL Portal (https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/LlSetKeyframedMotion) although you have to read the text carefully to figure it out.
There's always a workaround but do you really need complex physics for this? There is a reason why LL implemented this restriction.
What I have learned elsewhere is that the objects/linksets will behave as Convex Hull during movement, regardless of their assigned shape types and then supposedly return to their actual shape types after movement is complete. However, this does not always happen -- I don't know what causes this, but so far it doesn't seem related to size or complexity.
Unfortunately, I can't rely on hulled physics for all my objects.
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Tilia asks for SSNs over email
in General Discussion Forum
Posted
This is excellent -- thank you very much!