This week, we cover the second installment of our summarized history of Second Life and Linden Lab (or check out part one, if you missed it). From 2005, there's an impossible amount of material to cover, but there are some interesting stories lurking among it all.

Join us as we work our way through some of the interesting highlights from 2005, 2006 and 2007.

Continue reading The Virtual Whirl: A brief history of Second Life, the middle years

The Virtual Whirl: A brief history of Second Life, the middle years originally appeared on Massively on Sat, 03 Jul 2010 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

As a part of his keynote presentation today at this year's Second Life Community Convention, Linden Lab's Tom Hale has unveiled a new plug-in framework for the Second Life viewer. The Second Life viewer has hitherto been restricted to rendering media content that was supported either by its browser component or by the use of Apple's Quicktime. Quicktime is certainly quite workable, but only provides a subset of the extensive range of potentially viewable media that's out there.

The introduction of the LLMedia API looks to change all that, by allowing a straightforward plug-in system to extend the viewer's ability to render various arbitrary kinds of parcel media.

Continue reading Linden Lab's Tom Hale announces Second Life support for media plug-ins

Linden Lab's Tom Hale announces Second Life support for media plug-ins originally appeared on Massively on Sun, 16 Aug 2009 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Two weeks ago, Second Life users were warned of a flaw in QuickTime that allowed carefully crafted QuickTime datastreams and file headers to access their accounts through the viewer, and could potentially be used to steal items and Linden Dollars. The flaw was in QuickTime itself and was usable to compromise a wide variety of software unless you disabled or uninstalled QuickTime to prevent it running.

A few hours ago, Apple finally dropped a new version of QuickTime (version 7.3.1) which fixes these exploit issues. Whether you use Second Life or not, if you have QuickTime installed on your machine you should get the update without delay.

Apple releases QuickTime patch to close exploit originally appeared on Massively on Fri, 14 Dec 2007 09:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Second Life users are being warned today (and the rest of you should be aware as well) that there's a security issue with Apple's QuickTime that allows an attacker to potentially crash or attempt to inject code into the software under which QuickTime is running. That would be your web-browser, or Second Life viewer, for example.

Second Life uses QuickTime to stream video - though not from Linden Lab's servers. All video in Second Life comes from other sites and from web-sites controlled by users.

Continue reading Second Life users warned of QuickTime flaw

Second Life users warned of QuickTime flaw originally appeared on Massively on Fri, 30 Nov 2007 22:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.