![]() The company Rosedale founded most recently, High Fidelity (opens in new tab), originally planned to build a new virtual world with a blockchain economy-it took investments from cryptocurrency companies and launched a "stablecoin" that was later scrapped-but ultimately chose to focus on spatial audio, which he thinks is more important than avatars for creating "natural conversations" in virtual settings. (His Twitter account (opens in new tab) is full of musings like "if a virtual world doesn't have entropy, it can't contain life.") He's an entrepreneur-Second Life developer Linden Lab isn't the only company Rosedale has founded-but he comes across more like an academic who spends a lot of time daydreaming, so when he says that blockchain economies and Mark Zuckerberg's metaverse can only lead to the downfall of humanity, I'm convinced he's not just seeking publicity. What I didn't expect is how grave some of Rosedale's concerns are. Rosedale is taking the metaverse boom (or bubble?) in good humor, but as you'd expect, he's skeptical that blockchain evangelists and a rebranded Facebook (it's now "Meta") have all the answers to questions he's been thinking about for decades. He also founded High Fidelity (opens in new tab), which is currently working on spatial audio. You can't lose what's not there.Philip Rosedale founded Linden Lab in 1999 because he "wanted to simulate a world that was real." He left the company in 2010, but returned as an advisor this year. dollar) exchanges so as not to keep too many Lindens in your SL account. And in the case of Linden dollars, that likely means doing regular (Linden dollar/U.S. To date, however, Takahashi wrote, Linden Lab said it isn't aware of anyone actually using the exploit to rob anyone.įor residents of Second Life, then, the solution may be to avoid holding onto large numbers of Linden dollars.Īs I told Takahashi when he asked me to comment for his story on Linden dollar security, "As one SL business owner said to me.you should always have a backup plan in case of a glitch that causes you to lose everything, because you never know what might happen. This exploit affects all platforms that use QuickTime and, to date, Apple has not released a fix for it." The Second Life viewer uses QT to play videos and therefore this exploit could potentially affect the residents of Second Life. Takahashi said that Linden Lab told him, "We were alerted a short time ago by Internet security professionals that a QuickTime exploit has been discovered which may allow an attacker to crash or exploit any user of the QuickTime software from Apple. Nonetheless, the company put up a warning on its blog Friday. The end result of that could be that a malicious hacker could then strip the avatar of any Linden dollar holdings.įor its part, Takahashi wrote, Linden Lab told him that the exploit is easily patched. By exploiting the flaw in QuickTime, the hackers can direct the Second Life software to a malicious Web site that then allows them to take over the Second Life avatar. In doing so, QuickTime directs the Second Life software to a Web site. "When someone comes nearby and is within view of the object, the Second Life software activates QuickTime so it can play the video or picture. ![]() "The exploit works because Second Life allows users to embed videos or pictures on their characters or their virtual property," Takahashi wrote. The exploit is related to Apple's QuickTime software, which is used to display videos in Second Life. dollars.Īccording to Takahashi's story, hackers Charles Miller and Dino Dai Zovi told him that they have uncovered an exploit that could allow someone to fleece Second Life residents of their Linden dollars. That would be a big problem, of course, because the currency, known as Linden dollars, are directly convertible to U.S. Over on Dean Takahashi's San Jose Mercury News blog today, he reported on the discovery by a pair of security researchers that it may be possible to steal Second Life users' in-world currency.
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