Emerald Viewer Blocked

Farewell Emerald

I will miss you my lovely Emerald viewer! I thought I could trust you and you had so many nifty features but reading the blogs now the truth has finally dawned on me.

I have been a total absolute fool to place my trust in a group of unsupervised adolescent gang of hackers, these brilliantly gifted but terrible children that have made up the dev team of Emerald. My complete lack of insight and knowledge about the technical and safety issues concerned with using a viewer and my realization now of what these young men and women could - and indeed possibly would - do to hurt me have forced me to make a decision.

I will never again use a viewer made by anyone except Linden Labs!

But I beg of you Philip Linden, my dearest interim CEO, please drop that terrible "Viewer 2"-project and pick up some of the slack from the Emerald viewer.

Emerald - The End

"This is the end, beautiful friend
This is the end, my only friend, the end
It hurts to set you free
But you’ll never follow me
The end of laughter and soft lies
The end of night we tried to die
This is the end

United we stand and divided we fall. Thus ends the final days of the Emerald Project.


Approximately 10 days ago I and a number of devs came together to reform the Emerald Team in the anxious hope of continuing the most popular TPV in Second Life. The incredible driving passion, flair for innovation, endless energy and camaraderie were all still there. Because of this, I was sure we could make this work.


Alas this was not  to be. Linden Lab has made demands of the team that are impossible to meet. Among the demands not listed publicly elsewhere was to publicly release an RC without any ability to load the emkdu or llkdu files. This was do-able. The final demand was to ‘delete’ 3 key members of our team. While making this demand, Linden Lab was quite aware that this was effectively the guillotine to the project.


This is the opportunity for a fork project to develop and create a TPV version of snowstorm, which is what Linden Lab really wants. I am aware of a number of small projects underway now, and I wish them the best, the very best in their endeavors.


For you, the user, what this  means is that there will not be any further releases of the Emerald Viewer after today. The existing releases will continue to operate until Linden Lab decides to terminate their access and end Emerald once and for all.


There will be one final version of the Emerald Viewer released here later today; that is, the viewer we’ve been working on for the past six months. It would be a shame to let the efforts of the developers who put so many unpaid hours into this project go to waste.


This virtual world is ever changing and must be, otherwise it will stagnate. This incredible environment will continue.

Arabella Steadham
Communications Manager"

Emeraldgate - update

Read all about it on "Eddi Haskell´s Second Life"

Eddi Haskell also gives us this piece of advice: "My strong advice to you is not violate TOS, which clearly states your account can be suspended if you are using Emerald or any other non-approved viewer. Linden Labs does not play games. And this is a very bad mess right now. (...) But there is another reason not to use Emerald right now, especially if you are concerned about privacy issues.

What some key managers at Emerald have done is simply outrageous. It may even be criminal."

I highly recommend you read the full post on Eddi´s blog and also this post by Douglas Green of "Harrisburg Second Life Examiner".

For me this is a question of trust. I don´t like the thought of my computer being used in someone else´s illegal activities. Neither am I comfortable with the thought that my privacy may have been breached.

The attempts to conceal the wrong-doings and the nonchalant way in dealing with it when it was revealed in spite of that, calling it "mistakes" and "shenanigans" and attempting to explain away and minimize what had in fact happened also upset me.

The Emerald viewer debacle

The Emerald viewer has been my favorite way to access Second Life for a long time.

After the recent criminal activities on that viewers developement team, which you can read about on other blogs,("Tinas universum" or "Eddi Haskell´s Second Life"), the viewer was taken off the Linden Labs "Third-Party Viewer Directory" yesterday.

This means it is now against the TOS to access Second Life with the Emerald viewer If you do that anyway you can get into some major problems with Linden Lab and your account can get suspended (see the link below about Eddi´s experiences).

Hopefully my friend Eddi Haskell is correct in his assessment that the Emerald viewer probably will be quicky reinstated, but the recent events have caused me to lose all trust in the people involved with that viewer.

I hate changing to a new viewer, does that mean I am getting old already? (I am so NOT allowing comments on that - at least not if you agree!) I already tried the official viewer and hated it...

If I do not answer you in SL you know the reason, I am only trying to learn how to control my new viewer. Aaaaaaaaarrrrgggghhhhhhhh...

OrmDricka för Haiti

Ikväll var jag på OrmDrickas evenemang för att uppmuntra och uppmanaoss att skänka pengar till stöd för jordbävningsoffren på Haiti.

Det var en trevlig kväll där Frostland skötte musiken. Det blev en utmärkt blandning.

En annan av mina favoriter sirhc var också där (han tillhör ju OrmDricka-gruppen). Han var som alltid i sitt snöleopardskinn. Denna kväll utmanade han de närvarande med att han skulle klä av sig naken om någon donerade 100 LD. Självklart var jag snabba att följa uppmaningen! Naturligtvis gjorde jag detta endast för att ni, kära eventuella läsare, skulle kunna få se honom i all sin avklädda glans på denna blogg! (Så självuppoffrande kan bara jag vara...)

sirhc in the buff

Tyvärr blev det bara ett "ass-shot" eftersom han trilskades genom att använda sin kära Vampi för att täcka framsidan - men alltid något!

En annan lättklädd person på OrmDricka denna kväll var Sofie. Denna gången röstade jag för henne som vinnare i tävlingen men  - som vanligt - var det någon annan än den jag röstade på som som vann!

Sofie badandes i champagne

Jag måste också berätta att det faktiskt var ikväll jag för första gången upptäckte vilken intressant guppande effekt man kan få på kvinnobröst med Emerald-viewern, den som alla hetrisar har snackat om i flera månader men som jag aldrig har märkt. (Jag är nog mer bög än jag själv tror, eller...?!)