It’s a bit of old news now (in Internet time, at least), but not long ago there was quite a bit of buzz in the Second Life® blogosphere about a new program called Second Inventory, whose stated purpose is to allow a Second Life® user to create a local backup of their Second Life® inventory - Scripts, notecards, textures, the works.
Of course, there was an immediate buzz (see Dedric Mauriac, Vint Falken, and Your2ndPlace for example and comments) in the SL™ blog scene and lots of interesting speculation, discussions, and outright accusations on SL-related forums about how the software could be used to steal from content creators. I don’t know and won’t speculate here on whether that’s true, but I could actually envision myself using this software for it’s intended purpose, as there have been many times when I’ve wished that I had a local copy of a script or texture that I can no longer find or that Second Life® seems to have lost.
Most recently Second Life® had lost the notecard for my ZHAO animation override, but even more importantly (and more frequently) I’ve lost several important scripts over the last two years. Unlike my real-world software development environment, Second Life® has no version control, automated backups, or even adequate inventory search functionality, and this has led to my rigidly following a practice of doing *all* of my SL™ scripting work offline using SciTE-ez, lslint, and Subversion.
So, as I say, I can see wanting to use the Second Inventory program myself, but I just can’t get past the most powerful of trust issues : It requires your Second Life® username and password. Having developed several kinds of utility software for myself using libsecondlife, I’m well aware that this is a requirement for which there is no workaround, and that’s not the part that makes me uncomfortable. The part that makes me uncomfortable is that I am just fundamentally wary of giving my password to anything but official Second Life® software.
There’s another program generating a lot of buzz in the blogosphere right now that provides a pretty concrete example of why that unease is justified : G-Archiver. Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror fame recently received an email from Dustin Brooks (who reverse-engineered the program) describing how he had discovered that the program sends user’s GMail login and password info to the software’s creator. Mr. Brooks apparently discovered the sign-in credentials for 1777 GMail users!
Now, I’m not saying Second Inventory is a phishing scam, I don’t know if it is or isn’t (I tend to believe it’s not, but not as strongly as I believe that the Nicholaz viewer is not), and that’s not the point I’m trying to make. The point I’m trying to make is that thousands of people get fooled by malicious programs because they don’t have a fundamental mistrust of software that asks for sign-in credentials. Even fairly intelligent and tech-savvy people fall for these kinds of things, perhaps in part because they *do* understand the technical reasons behind the software asking for such sensitive information, and they are very comfortable with technology.
I strongly suspect that with the Second Life® viewer being released as open source and libsecondlife growing steadily more capable, we can expect to see an explosion of third-party utilities and programs. While that’s generally a good thing in my book, and I look forward to seeing what kinds of things such software will enable with respect to bridging the real and virtual worlds, I think it’s important to remind potential users to proceed with caution.
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