The good news is that Linden Lab has started to investigate the theft and hacking attempted by our little crook. Meanwhile, the event got some coverage on the Second Life Herald (with some interesting debate in the comments) and the legal angle was debated on the blog Virtually Blind. As it stands now we wish Linden Lab the best of luck in their investigations and we hope the thief wasn’t as smart as he’d like to think he is!
Today I logged in to DarkLife to see a disturbing message from the coder, Bram (aka. Mark Busch in game). The post describes how we’ve had $400us stolen from our main ‘account’ holding our cash in Second Life for the DarkLife game. Read the rest of this entry »
Few things annoy me more than bad web site design. I want to give people money, I want to buy their products, but if I can’t research the product on your website or I can chuck it in a shopping cart and order it, chances are I will never bother spending money with you and will be annoyed your web site for wasting my time. And then I’ll blog about it because I’m angsty.
Harvey Norman New Zealand – A terrible website that tells you to download their catalog or you can flip through a scanned pop-up copy that does not even show enough detail to read the text of the ad! There’s no online ordering facility at all. Completely and utterly awful.
Overclockers – A nice company based in New Zealand offering good computer gear. Shame about the website. Red on black text? Hello, MySpace want their 13 year olds back! At least the shopping cart works I guess.
Reading Cinemas – For a long time this site was completely broken in Firefox and IE. You could simply not get film listings or times to display. Now, they’ve repaired it (took a couple of months) and have a great scheme where you can sign up for ‘rewards’ in return for most of your personal information. Hmm. What makes this dubious offer worse is that when you do sign up, they send a confirmation email which includes your login and password in plain text! Now, I don’t use the same password for everything, but I do use the same password for ‘junky’ things like signing up to crappy websites. It’s good to know any bored admin can access mail logs on the many servers between here and Reading and check out my password too!
ASB Bank – Their login page involve a simple one-step login process. In the UK many banks moved to a two-step process involving a user name and password as well as a drop down asking you to select a letter from your user name. This step was designed to defeat key-loggers, which are heavily used by East European criminal gangs in particular. No such sophistication for New Zealand banking customers.
I feel there’s an echo in here! Again, we’re pushing to get DarkLife updated to the next version, with a complete rebuild of the sim in Second Life. This time we might be able to do it though, Bram has his code about right and Crash and Logan seem keen on getting things squared away. We have most of the art ready, and we have what looks to be a good contractor available should we need someone to do some emergency building or texturing.
Phew! Fingers crossed we’ll have something more to report, as well as the new web page, in the next couple of weeks.
Recent Comments