US trawls Second Life funny money
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We will, we will solution you! Letters Now and again, we at Vulture Towers feel it is our honour bound duty to purge the English language of offending little dittys that get up your noses.â¦
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Second Life, the fast-growing online  site where hundreds of thousands of people play out fantasy  lives online, has suffered a computer security breach that  exposed the real-world personal data of its users.
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Despite the recent failure of a Second Life-based virtual bank, financial experiments continue in the popular virtual world. The latest: A Singapore-based credit card you can use within Second Life.
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Second Life, the fast-growing online   site where hundreds of thousands of people play out fantasy   lives online, has suffered a computer security breach that   exposed the real-world personal data of its users.
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San Francisco-based company Second Life has opened up its virtual world to the mobile phone, and is looking for interested beta testers to put the application through its paces.
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A 24-year-old Romanian cheats a California computer equipment distributor out of $10 million. An Australian teenager causes a release of raw sewage by hacking into a treatment plantâs system.
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(InfoWorld) - The personal details of thousands of mostly U.S.-based PC users have been discovered stashed on a server located in France, another indication of use of the Internet to collect personal data on a vast scale. The Web page, which was live as of Monday morning, does not contain financial details of the users. But other Web pages associated with the same domain indicate the site could be connected to a group of hackers based in the Middle East known for their involvement in other Internet financial crime as well as defacing Web sites, said Chris Boyd, research manager for FaceTime Communications Inc., a security company. He posted more details on a company blog . The ISP (Internet service provider) that hosts the page has been contacted, Boyd said. The data appears to have been collected in April 2006, according to timestamps in the file, and includes the full names of people, their address and their IP address. Also included are the names of the Web sites from which the details were apparently collected. The names of those Web sites, most of which are now not active, appear to offer a freebie, with names such as www.likefreestuff.com and www.freebgift.com. The offer of a free gift is often made in exchange for data, Boyd said. There's nothing illegal about collecting data that users voluntarily submit. Likewise, the storing of personal details for marketing purposes is also not illegal. But leaving those details open on a server could violate European or U.S. data protection laws. It's not clear how that data on the French server is being used, but various hackers forums are aware it has been exposed, Boyd said. The e-mail addresses could immediately be used to send spam, while the addresses of the users could potentially be used for identity fraud. Research into the domain name hosting the data has also turned up clues that it may be connected to well-known hacking groups, he said. The server the domain is hosted on also hosts nearly 24,000 other domain names, another indication of possibly either phishing or other scam activity, Boyd said. One page on the same server contains a hacking tool that can be used for a variety of other nefarious activity, such as building custom Web pages with exploit code. The tool, called King IE Exploiter, is an application that can be used to find malicious software that can be incorporated into malicious Web pages, Boyd said. The application has been linked with Trojan horse programs aimed at stealing bank details and other malware that sends spam, he said. Interestingly, when King IE Exploiter starts running, it lists several usernames of hackers, Boyd said. "They're got quite a history for being known for all sort of elaborate scams and attacks," he said. Those attacks include a worm found two years ago that installed a fake BitTorrent client on targeted computers that distributed large video files. The users whose data is now circulating on the Internet in this incident may be less protected that other victims of large data breaches. In the U.S., some states have laws where businesses must contact those affected by a loss of data. However, user may be unaware how their data is now circulating or is used if it was collected by scammers, Boyd said. "It is quite worrying," Boyd said. "Obviously, they are quite happily gathering up all of this information."
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Italy's Gabetti Property Solutions has  joined the Second Life land rush, laying claim to being the  first real-life property company in the booming virtual world.
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Sweden on Wednesday opened a virtual embassy in the fantasy world Second Life, illustrating the growing interest among nations to be present in the online society inhabited by computer-generated residents.
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As Peugeot gets ready to unviel its 308 RC Z concept car at the Frankfurt auto show, the 2+2 coupe is available for test drives in Second Life, an online virtual world.
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Tycho:  It's floating around now, out there on the Wub, and it calls to you.  Or maybe it does, I don't actually know.  In any case, it can be got from 3D Downloads, the Fileplanets, GamersHell, or WorthDownloading.  Download it from mulltiple sites simultaneously for a naughty thrill.  God only knows how this would run on my Vista rig at home, but it's a Vista rig, so you can probably guess.  (CW)TB
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Members of the Second Life online world criticise the handling of a serious security breach.
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Titled 'The Entrepreneurs Guide to Second Life,' the book is a how-to guide to building a profitable business in the popular virtual world.
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DALLAS, Texas - Taking a step into the new frontier, NASA Ames Research Center, under the direction of Simon &quot;Pete&quot; Worden, has launched an island in Second Life, an online 3-D virtual world created, shaped, and owned by its participants.
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HOLLYWOOD, FLA. -- An online casino owned by a Canadian-based company forked over $28,000 US yesterday to the owner of a 10-year-old, partially eaten grilled cheese sandwich thought to carry the image of the
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By Michelle Kessler  SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Second Life doesn't scare Jim McCann.    Sure, the CEO of 1-800-Flowers.com knew almost nothing about Second Life's virtual world until a young employee pointed it out.
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SAN FRANCISCO -  Philip Rosedale didn't create Second Life to be a game or a toy. He thinks he is remaking the Internet - taking it on a giant leap forward, much like the invention of the Mosaic browser or World Wide Web. "What would feel like success?" Rosedale says, pausing to think about it. He is in the funky, ragged cafeteria of the company he founded, Linden Lab, which built and runs the groundbreaking, buzz-generating online virtual world called Second Life. Half-eaten Costco-size bags of chips and bowls of fruit lie on bare tables. Rosedale is wearing jeans and an orange sweater, hair gelled and spiked. With his classic good looks and wide-eyed enthusiasm, Rosedale seems like a cross between Brad Pitt and Bill Nye the Science Guy.