In Wilder West, at 740m, Niki Wilder hosts an air race track, which I visited for the first time a couple of weeks ago, and was instantly hooked. You can hop into a plane and tear around the track at high-speed, bumping and dodging others as you jockey for position in the turns. Seriously, this is so addictive, that I dropped everything to return to a plane that I abandoned months ago in favour of helicopters.

My new racer, Terra Tachyon, is shaping up to be a powerful little thing. With a top speed of about 110 knots (or around 200 km/h), it can lap the course seconds faster than the competition.

Of course, speed isn't everything. And I wouldn't want to make racing easy, so I threw in a couple of twists. First, you have limited fuel. This means in an endurance race, you need to time your pit-stops carefully, or you'll find your engine sputtering out with another plane on your tail. On top of that, it has an optional damage mode, in which collisions will damage various parts of your plane. So watch your turns around the pylon -- a wing-strike will shear the wing right off. (And no, you can't fly with one wing.)

For novice pilots, or those who like to fly stunts or fly tours over SL, I added easier, optional flight models. Click a button, and the plane becomes slow and forgiving in turns.

As Socrates once said, "But wait! There's more!" Half the fun with racers is the cool paint: racing lines, checkers, and numbers. The Tachyon's paint menu lets you not only choose from five paint schemes, but also add your own. If you have a knack for Photoshop, pick up the templates from my support page, and paint your Tachyon.

It's been a blast working on this one. If all goes well, the Tachyon will be available at Abbotts Aerodrome this Saturday (Dec. 22). Bring it to Wilder West to tear up the track. See if you can beat Niki's top laptime of just under 14 seconds.

It's the holiday season again in Second Life -- and as I understand it in real life too. The gift-shopping mayhem is in full-swing. Here are the top questions in my IM inbox at this time of year...


How do I give a vehicle to someone for Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa/Festivus?

You buy a helicopter, then find that SL won't let you send it to your friend. How do you buy no-transfer items as gifts? Easy... go to one of the SL shopping websites and have them make the delivery for you.

• SL Exchange - Registration is required, but easy. To go shopping, first you can deposit Linden dollars at an ATM on Exchange Island. Then, when you find the item you want, use the Purchase As Gift button. Items are delivered to the person of your choice with a personalized message from you.
  
  
• OnRez - Registration is required here too. You can deposit L$ to your OnRez account using an ATM or PayPal, then browse the catalogue. Use the Send As Gift button to make the purchase.

Why are you such a jerk, Cubey? Just change vehicle permissions to No-Copy/Transfer!

You should never ever buy a vehicle without Copy permission. Why? SL EATS VEHICLES.

Second Life's quirks (aka, "bugs") often make your items go missing. Asset failures can leave you bald when your hair vanishes, for example. Your favourite furniture might be eaten by a region crash. And region borders eat vehicles for lunch. It's true! I've lost piles vehicles that way, and where they go is a mystery. Maybe they fall through a hole in the space-time continuum and land in a secret place in a corner of the grid where Lindens play with them in their off-hours.


Do you have gift certificates?

No, for two reasons. First, there is no foolproof, secure way to issue and redeem gift certificates in Second Life. The second reason being that, with SL Exchange and OnRez, you can buy the gifts directly.


I hope these answers help you. Good luck in your gift shopping, and a Happy Festivus to all!

On the official Second Life blog, Linden Lab announced that they have pushed their "IDV" scheme -- often referred to as "age verification" -- into a live beta-version SL client. This means that you can download the IDV version of SL and try out the verification features ("Age verification enters Grid-wide beta").

In short, Linden Lab will ask residents to pay them a fee to get "verified" status for their avatar. In the verification process, residents are asked to provide their real name, plus some ID, such as SSN, driver's license number, passport number, among others. This information is sent to a US data-mining company called Integrity (whose sister company Aristotle, sells data...hmm), who sends back a "verified" or "unverified" response.

According to Linden Lab, landowners will be able to block unverified visitors from entering their land, and will be legally responsible for preventing minors from seeing anything objectionable should any happen to sneak into their land.

Reaction is sharp and overwhelming: residents hate the scheme, which they say may be illegal and possibly untrustworthy, among other objections. Despite months since the plan was revealed, Linden Lab fails to address these legitimate objections:

• In many countries, it's illegal to require someone to submit ID numbers, like SSN, SIN, driver's license, or passport to a website (or in some cases through any medium).
  
  
• Many feel that this isn't information verification, but information gathering by Integrity, a data miner. I will not willingly provide my ID to a US data-miner, myself.
  
  
• Of those who provide their ID data despite the legal question, the accuracy of the Integrity verification is questionable. Many are verified with incorrect information, and other are not verified with correct information. Some report that Canadian residents can't verify, even with correct information.
  
  
• Many residents don't have any of the ID numbers required. If you're a UK resident, who doesn't drive and hasn't travelled outside the country, there is no way to verify -- banned from large portions of SL, perpetually suspected of being underage.
  
  
• Many estate owners are faced with a conundrum: If they want to allow their tenants to possess content above kids-level fare, they will be faced with legal liability if they don't block unverified accounts. That would mean losing a great many paying tenants who are undoubtedly adult, though unable or unwilling to use the verification process. It also means estate owners are faced with giving away their ID to Integrity (if the process even works for them) or losing access to their own estate.
  
  
• Finally, any kid who wants to sneak into SL can just borrow a parent's info. Even ignoring all of the above issues, the process can be thwarted by any child with half a brain.

I have to ask -- why is Linden Lab pushing to implement an identity verification system that can't possibly verify identity? All this will accomplish is to add yet another barrier to new residents and drive away existing residents.

Links:

• Official Linden blog: Age verification enters grid-wide beta


• SL Official website: Age verification FAQ (requires registration)


• Canadians: SL/Integrity cannot verify age based on SIN or passport number


• Have *any* Canadians been able to verify?

Available at Abbotts Aerodrome, SL Exchange, Shop OnRez, and anywhere that Terra Aeronautics products are sold.

If you logged into Second Life yesterday, you've seen the announcement from Linden Lab:

We were alerted a short time ago that a QuickTime exploit has been discovered which may allow an attacker to crash or exploit the Second Life viewer. The Second Life viewer uses Apple QuickTime to play videos and streaming media. This exploit affects QuickTime usage on every platform that uses it, and to date, Apple has not released a fix for the exploit.

While the Lindens are very clear that this is an exploit in QuickTime and not Second Life specifically, they were less than forthcoming about the exact details of the exploit. Mercury News fills in the details.

Charles Miller...and Dino Dai Zovi..., two experienced hackers, say they have found a vulnerability in the way Second Life protects a user?s money inside the virtual world from being stolen. It has significance because that currency, dubbed Linden dollars, can be converted into real world dollars.

According to Mercury News, QuickTime can be directed to a malicious website that "allows them to take over the Second Life avatar."

Personally, I'm not clear about how this could work. Each land parcel in Second Life has an associated video stream, so the landowner would have to add the URL to their land -- it's not something a hacker can do without the landowner's permission. I understand that malicious websites can exploit vulnerabilities in computers, but there's a big gap between planting a virus and taking complete control of the Second Life client. Assuming that this malicious code is able to do that, one can't use the Second Life client alone to plant viruses in-world, as Miller says. Many script-kiddies try that daily, and accomplish only annoyances -- replicating cubes with offensive pictures, for example. Eventually, those cubes either meet behind-the-scenes defenses and get cleaned up with no harm done -- they're hardly viruses.

This isn't the first attempt to steal Linden dollars. Previous attempts have been crude scripted objects in-world that depend on residents accidentally granting debit permissions.

To protect your Linden dollars from this hack, open Second Life and click Preferences in the login screen. From there, go to the Audio & Video tab and disable video streaming.