The Feed, My Second Life, and a corner of SL I think many don't know exists

There's a whole other part of Second Life I knew nothing about. Am I the only one?

I've been sitting here playing with my viewer, looking up official documentation, and reading user groups, but I'm not sure what I'm going to talk about is adequately and clearly explained in any one place. I now suspect a lot of people, maybe the majority of people, have no idea this part of Second Life even exists. I'm still not sure you can see this in-world as I discovered it going through the SL website.

First off, I have the SL website bookmarked in my browser as I visit it on a regular basis to see a list of my friends currently online. Oooo, there's Alice and Fred. I should jump online and say hello!

Secondly, I can easily visit My Second Life, which is SL relating to me: my profile, a list of all friends, settings, and finally, The Feed, although, I'm not sure that is the right term to use to describe it.

In a profile, there is a tab labelled Feed which you can find entries relating to certain activities: pictures you post to your feed, other people's entries you liked, your name changes, etc. Under security, you have the option of hiding this tab from the rest of the world. Other people can open your profile and look at your Feed to see what you've been up to, that is, in-world pictures you've posted.

But let's now talk about My Feed and what part it plays in the bigger picture.

My feed (the tab labelled Following) shows entries from the people I follow. When you become friends, you automatically follow the person. However, you can follow non-friends. My feed is mainly about pictures posted, but people can also make text-only postings. It's quirk, I guess, in the system that you can only post pictures in-world, but you can post text from the SL website.

In my picture example. you see a picture by Iris Okiddo, a person I follow; we are not friends. You see text entries from the SL blogger Inara Pey, also a person I follow; we are not friends.

You will notice there are two tabs: Following and Trending.

Trending comes from anybody on SL. According to my research, once a posting gets two Loves (Like on other social media), it becomes eligible for Trending, a SL-wide feed which is available to everybody. It's curious. My research has shown that SL apparently has around eight hundred thousand active monthly users, and yet, there are only a limited number of names I see in Trending. From this, I have conjectured that only a small number of people are aware of The Feed. And let me repeat I discovered Trending via the SL website. I'm still not sure if you can see this in-world which may go a long way of explaining how The Feed or Your Feed remains an underexploited part of Second Life.

Just this morning, I posted several pictures to My Feed. About an hour later, I discovered that two of my friends had loved (liked) my postings. A short time later, I noticed my pictures were now part of Trending, that is, visible to the rest of the world.

Note the following link which is the URL for my profile on Second Life:

https://my.secondlife.com/hughtoussaint

Now notice this variation of that URL:

https://my.secondlife.com/hughtoussaint/snapshots

This gives you a gallery-like presentation of pictures I've posted in my Feed. You can add snapshots to the URL of any profile and see the gallery. It's surprising. Many people go to Flickr or DeviantART to publish their pictures but Second Life itself already has its own picture system. We can argue about its quality and its organization but it is there.

Final Word
I found it odd but delightful to discover what I think is an underutilized feature of Second Life. In reading an article by Inara Pey from 2015, it would seem that My Secondlife is a sort of half-hearted attempt to add social media features to the SL world. Danger Linden is quoted as saying its usage rate is on the low side and judging by the names I see posting on a regular basis, a very small percentage of the supposed six to eight hundred thousand monthly users, this corner of SL seems all but forgotten except to a select few.

A number of people including myself have supplemented their SL experience by using other platforms like Flickr, DeviantART, and Facebook, to name a few, which offer a more picture-friendly gallery-like display for photographers. While the SL web profile interface does offer "snapshots", there may be merit in looking elsewhere depending on your goals.

Nevertheless, The Feed offers an interesting glimpse into the world of Second Life, allowing you to see other fellow travelers in this virtual fantasyland.


References

Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld: No more improvements planned for my.secondlife.com - June 26/2015
During the Meet the Lindens conversation held at SL12B on Thursday, June 25th which featured Danger Linden, Senior Director, Product, Virtual Worlds and Troy Linden, Senior Producer, a question was asked about the SL feeds – also referred to as my.secondlife.com – and whether they would continue to be developed or enhanced.

Danger Linden was direct and honest in his reply: "That’s a tough one, because I don’t think anyone’s going to like the answer … The short answer is no."

2024-05-07

Gyazo: a permanent alternative to Tumblr and Imgur?

A picture is worth a thousand words. From time to time over the years, I've interjected an image, a GIF, or a meme to supplement my Second Life chats. I created a catalog long ago and classified them for easy access depending on the circumstances of my interactions with others. However the permanence of the URLs to those images has been fraught with difficulties.

Like many people, I relied on Tumblr to be a permanent storage for images. But then, in December 2018, the company banned all pornographic images. Old saying: One man's pornography is another man's erotica. All of my good work disappeared. Like the rest of the world, I hunted for other options and discovered newTumbl, vowing to publish my own version of images so as to not rely on whatever platform somebody else night have been using.

In June of 2022, newTumbl shut down. Wait? What? Oh, my God! Twice in my lifetime I lost access to an image platform! I looked around again and discovered various restrictions. Flickr, DeviantART, the latest version of Tumblr, etc., all presented in their TOS rules which could see images taken down. It's not like I'm selling the images or publishing them for the entire world to see, but rules are rules, and any platform seemed to represent a risk.

I discovered Gyazo. Was I set for life? Was I safe from the overzealous hand of the censor? This image repository seems to be founded on a simple rule: every image is private, invisible to anybody else in the entire world unless the poster (me) chooses to hand out the URL to the image. Unlike Tumblr or Flickr where the purpose of posting is to show the image to an audience, the purpose of Gyazo is to upload an image, then at the right moment to the right person, hand out the unique URL of that image. The image remains uploaded but unviewable by anybody else.

http://gyazo.com

The website offers a free account. The main restriction is that you can only use their interface to retrieve the last ten images you've uploaded. I either bookmark images in my browser or record the URL to the image in a Word document I use to catalog the images I upload, and as a consequence, I do not rely on Gyazo itself to find images. From what I've seen their interface has cataloging features; it's just that I rely on my own method to do so. My reading of their operation is that once uploaded, my image is permanent. I do not run the risk of six months from now or two years from now, finding my image has disappeared. And more importantly, because they are an image repository as opposed to an image publisher, they don't seem to be scanning images for anything they deem inappropriate. It is up to me to police myself.

Within Second Life, we can share images using textures. However, sending the URL of an image seems easier and faster. Plus, the use of a URL works outside of Second Life, so Gyazo seems like a win-win. Yes, there are other such services, Lightshot comes to mind, but from what I've seen Gyazo does offer some interesting options. An installable program adds these features to your computer:

• Right click on an image in your browser and upload it to Gyazo.
• Right click on an image file in Windows Explorer and upload it to Gyazo.
• Hit a hot key combination and use your mouse to outline a box on the screen to capture an image.
• Hit a hot key combination and use your mouse to outline a box on the screen to capture a 7-second video with sound. (The pro account gives you 60 seconds.)

Alternative to Flickr or DeviantART?
I only have the free version of Gyazo. I have no idea what features a pro account offers. As is, Gyazo is an image respository, not an image gallery system like Flickr. You would need some other system to create a gallery. This article is on Google's Blogger platform. While Blogger is for blogging, I've wondered if there was any way of bending the system to make an image gallery. I don't know at the moment. Whatever the case, let's not forget Flickr and DeviantART, like Tumblr, are platforms dedicated to displaying images. If anybody is searching for an image platform, I would remind you that Flickr's annual cost is not exhorbitant. Oh, I know people want to do it for free, but Flickr did change their rules as they do have the right to make a profit to stay in business. It's a good image system and as I said, it's not expensive.

Final Word
I was prompted to write this because a friend sent me an IM with links to four images on the platform Imgur. I could see the first image but the second one came up with error 404 page not found. The third image prompted me, asking if I was over eighteen, while the fourth one also produced error 404 page not found. This very much reminded me of my experiences with Tumble and the other websites and the danger of a platform deciding, for whatever reason, the image violated their Terms of Service and taking the image down. There had to be a more reliable way of sharing pictures with other people.

When I run across a good image, GIF, or meme, I'll copy it to Gyazo with the idea (hope?) it will be permanent. If the original source ever disappears, I've still got the image. I don't hand out the URL of the source, but the URL of my Gyazo copy. I don't run the risk of the recipient clicking on one of my links and getting error 404 page not found.

I have free accounts with various services, Tumblr, Flickr, DeviantART, Instagram, etc., that I use to access the platforms and see the work of others. I do not do much, if any, of my own publishing. However, I like to, from time to time, share with others, mostly on a one on one basis, various things which require the URL to an image repository. Gyazo, so far, has fit the bill. The free account suits my needs but admittedly, even the pro account is inexpensive. It's worth a look.


References

Gyazo Terms of Service

To Blog Or Not To Blog - June 21/2023
For the past year or so, I've had a blog on newTumbl, dedicated to the more scandalous part of my psyche, where I've posted erotic photos (read: dirty pictures) with captioned thoughts on life, love, and pursuit of happiness. Why newTumbl? This Google blog (Blogger) is text-oriented — I write stuff — while the platform newTumbl, like Tumblr, Instagram, and Pinterest was image-oriented. I can post pictures here in Blogger, too, but newTumbl was dedicated to pictures, and, as I said, for more scandalous things.

This article's opening Gyazo logo is stored in the Google blogger image reponsitory.
The following image comes from Gyazo. You can't tell really the difference
but I can easily share this image with somebody else by giving them the Gyazo URL.

2024-05-07

Message Capping, Email, and Limitations

I thought to jot down what others may only know by rumor. I refer you to the following two official documents straight from Second Life itself. Second Life: Limits Second Life: Instant Message

15 Messages
When you are offline, SL will store up to 15 messages, meaning IMs, inventory offers, group notices, group invitations. Anything else is thrown away. WARNING: Some people say send them a notecard because their messages are capped but the default is everything is capped, including notecards which are inventory offerings. But you can change this. Note: Premium accounts have up to 80 messages stored.

autoAcceptNewInventory
If autoAcceptNewInventory (debug setting) is set to TRUE (the default is FALSE), then all inventory offers, even above the cap allowed by membership, go directly to inventory and do not count against the cap on offline messages.

I repeat: Notecards are inventory offerings. The default is to cap messages at 15 so Notecards will be thrown away unless this debug setting is changed.

ATTENTION: After I had changed this debug setting, somebody sent me a texture. I kept waiting for the button in IM chat "Accept" but it never appeared. I subsequently found the texture in my texture folder. It had been automatically delivered, no prompt to accept.

IM to email
When you have this set up, when you are offline, IMs are sent to the email address you've specified. Even if your messages are capped in-world, the transfer to email continues to work offworld. Personal note: I have had conversations while offworld, just as if I was in-world IMing back and forth.

IM to Email feature, which sends offline messages directly to the mailbox connected to your account. To activate it, go to Edit > Preferences (or press Ctrl-P), go to the Communication tab and check the Send IM to Email checkbox. Press Apply and close the window with OK.

Oddity
I've discovered that I can respond via email on my computer. I'm using Gmail. However, if I respond using my phone, a Google Pixel, the person gets an IM response from me but the message itself is blank. No text. For some odd reason, the SL servers get my response but are unable to transfer the text in the body of the email to an in-world IM. Obviously, this is a bug. But it's also obvious that the Gmail on my phone, a Google product I might add, is somehow different from the Gmail I use in my browser. My word of caution is to test this before you rely on your phone working properly. I would also test whatever other email system you may be using like Outlook to ensure it, too, is working properly with the Linden Lab servers.

IM to email: You have 5 days to respond
When you reply to the email, it gets sent back to the SL servers and converted to an IM and sent to the person. You have 5 days to respond after which, the SL server will give you an error.

WARNING: Most email replies include a copy of the original message. This can be messy for an IM. I ALWAYS hit Reply, type Ctrl+A to Select All, and delete everything so my reply consists of nothing other than my response. I NEVER send back a copy of the original message.

Personal note: When I reply from email, I always preface my reply with "(from RL email)" so the other person knows immediately I'm not in-world but responding off-world from email. I've had people confused, IMing back, "Where are you?", not being able to see me online, so I started doing this to ensure people knew I was off-world.

You can't start an off-world convo
You can respond in email to somebody else's IM. But you can NOT start a convo when off-world. You can only do that if you're logged in. I'm referring to finding a name and opening a chat in the chat window.

Off-world Convos
As I said above, throughout the day, I may receive an IM from somebody, that message appearing in my Gmail. I respond which goes back in-world to the person as an IM. From that point, the two of us can chat back and forth as if I was logged in. Like an informal chat when you're logged in and not face to face, I can chat with somebody throughout the day.

An Amusing Curiosity: The Multi-tasking Chat
Person A says something. A minute later, Person B responds. 5 minutes later, A says something. 10 minutes B replies. 30 minutes later, A says something else, and an hour later B chimes in.

This type of offline conversation can go on for hours, even lasting an entire day. It's a type of convo you have when you're multi-tasking, chatting with several different people at once, or when you are doing something else, only looking back at the chat window periodically. Has somebody given this type of convo a name? So far, I haven't seen anything, but I can informally call it a multi-tasking chat. I've had a few times when I've said hello to somebody when they were AFK and had them respond hours later, and even a day later. Ha, ha!

Final Word
That's my summary. Let me know if I've missed anything. I repeat: In this virtual world, we never touch, I mean physically touch, so communication is all we've got. Nevertheess, with our words we can connect so let's make sure the other person gets our words.

All the best to you in your worlds (plural: SL & RL). :-)

Post-script
When I receive something, a texture or a notecard, I'm used to seeing in IM chat a button "Accept". With automatic delivery to inventory, I don't get that. Several times now, I'm chatting with people and they've told me they've sent me a picture (a texture). I'm waiting for the Accept button when they ask, "Did you see my picture?" I suddenly realise I need to check inventory, and sure enough, there it is! Obviously, I need to get used to this paradigm shift.

However, a friend brought up the possibility of malfeasance. Somebody could send me an object and unsuspecting me could open it, activating its evil code. Just now, I did some Googling and turned up a few articles about hacking and Second Life. I have to assume that like RL, anything is possible. I'm not sure how much money there is to be made hacking my account but I can see a hacker may enjoy the challenge of doing so and making a fool out of naive me.

2023-11-23

Flickr: What is the risk of having my account terminated?

On Monday, October 25, 2021, I clicked on the bookmarked URL for D’s Flickr and was met with a Page Not Found error. My friend is the admin of a Flickr group, and I discovered her name had disappeared. I contacted D, and she was surprised and shocked by the news. Was this a computer glitch? What else could have gone wrong? She said she was contacting Flickr.

On Tuesday, the following day, in checking other friends, I discovered L’s Flickr account had vanished.

I had an interesting chat with N, a well-known photographer who uses Flickr. She had her Flickr account deleted back in 2020. She requested an investigation. She found out why and even which particular photo was deemed unfit for Flickr, justifying the termination of the whole account. Rather than appeal, a complicated process, N created a new account and started over.

I can’t help thinking of Tumblr, and its mass transition to a non-porn platform, adversely affecting millions of people. Which platform can any of us depend on? Are we all taking a risk using any of these services?

Flickr: Terms of Service
For years, I’ve seen the fine print for services and software which says I can’t hold them liable if I use their stuff and anything goes wrong. It’s an interesting idea: I engage somebody to do something for me but they’re not responsible if they screw up.

On the other hand, how many of us actually read the rules to find out just what we can and can’t do?

Under Terms of Service, I find Community Guidelines which lists Things not to do, prefaced with:

Here's the deal: We like to give second chances. However, when we discover you stepping across any of the lines listed below, we will take action, which may mean deleting your account with or without warning.

I see what I suppose are standard things:

• Don’t violate copyright laws.
• Don’t harm children.
• Don’t be creepy.
• Don’t upload content that is illegal or prohibited.
• Don’t use hate speech.

... etc.

I make specific mention of “Don't forget to moderate your content” as it merits its own explanation page.

Photos and videos should be categorized as:

• Safe - Acceptable to a global, public audience
• Moderate - Partial nudity, like bare breasts and bottoms
• Restricted - full-frontal nudity and sexual acts; photos only–videos cannot contain restricted content and are deleted if reported

This also notes that accounts themselves are categorized using the same safety levels, indicating if the content has been properly categorized or not. It’s not clear to me if this represents grounds for the termination of an account. In the beginning, I posted a tasteful nude of my Second Life avatar with the default of Safe, all naughty bits hidden. A while later, a bot switched the category to Moderate. In that case, I wasn’t terminated. I then noticed the category of my account was Moderate, meaning I had incorrectly classified something, so I went through changing various things to Restricted and ended up with my account listed as Safe.

I also make specific mention of “Don’t forget to set the appropriate content type” as that, too, gets its own explanation page.

The content type categories are as follows:

• Photos / Videos
• Illustration/Art / Animation/CGI or other non-photographic images, or
• Screencasts / Screenshots - what's a screenshot

I had no idea this content type categorization even existed, and I had to hunt around to figure out where to see it and where to set it. Under settings, you can specific the default categories for searching pictures. Under Organize, you can set the category of an image. Oddly enough, you can’t see the category on the page of the image itself. In reading one of the forums, a user said this used to be visible but is no longer. There was also a message from the CEO of Flickr welcoming Second Life photographers and seeming to say the screenshot category is no longer required.

How can my account be deleted?
Good question. I’m not sure I have a clear-cut answer for that. During my chat with N, she explained there are self-appointed arbiters of taste, and there is always the possibility that some random person could file a complaint about any image, triggering an investigation by Flickr. Okay, I slowly say, wondering about differences of opinion. I’ve seen some pretty graphic sexual images from SL photographers: oral sex, penetration, and money shots and so far, those people’s work is still online. What did D and L do to merit being terminated? Am I going to someday offend some stranger’s sensibilities and find my Flickr gone in a flash? In a pre-emptive strike, I’ve taken to classifying all of my photos as Restricted, thinking I’m not going to get my wrist slapped for being overly cautious.

An Observation: Sex vs Violence
Just now, I scanned through a number of photos, checking their safety levels. A photo of a scantily clad woman is rated as Moderate while a Halloween photo of Victorian England street scene where Jack the Ripper is about to stab a woman with a knife is marked as Safe. Sex bad, violence good. It is what it is, and we must accept the culture we live in and follow the rules.

Nevertheless, I’m reminded of George Carlin’s Seven Words You Can't Say On Television where he replaces the word kill with the word f**k and retells a movie cliché: Okay, sheriff, we’re going to f**k you now. But we’re gonna f**k you slow.

Yes, sex is more of a corrupting influence than violence.

Final Word
It would seem that Flickr can terminate any account without warning. According to the Terms of Service, it would seem there may be no recourse for the user. As of this moment, I now personally know three people who’ve had their accounts deleted.

Why am I using this service? If I’m posting anything which bumps into the Community Guidelines, specifically sex related, am I using the right service?

I see thousands of SL users who have posted thousands of photos, representing an unquantifiable amount of time and effort who are all susceptible to being terminated. Now, I’m sure anyone could argue we all face such condemnation in society, that is, we should not cross the line of accepted so-called normal behavior, but is there a question of a difference in taste? Old saying: One person’s pornography is another person’s erotica. What offends them doesn’t offend you.

Recommendations:

• Restricted
  By default, when you set up an account, the Safety Level is Safe. Under my settings, I've changed this to Restricted. Now, when I upload, I don't inadvertently make a mistake. To be quite frank, I do not understand the visibility of the different levels. While I get the Safe means a wider audience, how big of a difference does it make for my viewership?
• Restricted by reference
  While I publish an image which is innocuous, I may include links in the description to other things, like my blog, where I may have restricted content. Consequently, the image should also be restricted.
• Moderate
  Let me repeat Flickr's own words: Partial nudity, like bare breasts and bottoms. Would you walk down the street like that in real life?
• Private
  By default, photos are public. By setting this to Private, I have a chance to review what I'm doing before "publishing" my image by manually switching to Public.
• Backup
  I must have my own backup of all my images. Flickr's ToS specifically says it's not a cloud service so do not rely on it to store your images.

And I add that none of us know whether at some point, some self-appointed arbiter of good taste takes exception to our work and calls in the Flickr police. Good luck to us all. Too harsh? Let me remind you that Flickr is a private company and can do whatever the heck it wants. When we sign up, we agree to their Terms of Service, and if we violate their rules, they have the right to boot us off their platform. Ignorance is not an excuse; the onus is on us to read the ToS and Community Guidelines.

After Tumblr, I discovered newTumbl. After Flickr, will I discover newFlick?

References

Wikipedia: Flickr
Flickr is an American image hosting and video hosting service, as well as an online community, founded in Canada and headquartered in the United States. It was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and is a popular way for amateur and professional photographers to host high-resolution photos. It has changed ownership several times and has been owned by SmugMug since April 20, 2018.

Flickr: Terms of Service
If you violate the Terms of Use, Flickr at its sole discretion may (i) require you to remedy any violation thereof and/or (ii) take any other actions that Flickr deems appropriate to enforce its rights and pursue available remedies.

Flickr: Community Guidelines
When we discover you stepping across any of the lines listed below, we will take action, which may mean deleting your account with or without warning.

2021-10-26

Malware: How to Practice Safe Computing

Old joke: I practice safe computing. When I play Second Life, I always wear a condom.

Some in Second Life refuse to click on any links in IM chat. They have good reason. Who wants to get their computer infected? While it’s important to install and maintain a good antivirus program, a prudent approach to unknown URLs is to just not click. It’s not worth the risk.

But is there anything we ourselves can do?

Reputation is a good start. Well-known legitimate websites can give us a warm fuzzy that we’re not going to unleash the hounds of hell. Legitimate also includes pornography. Porn sites have long been known as a harbour for the malicious, baddies taking advantage of our insatiable curiosity and all-round horniness when we throw caution to the wind and blindly click on the promisingly scandalous. Bingo! You now have to pay a ransom to get your files back!

However, the top porn sites, such as xHamster and Pornhub are running for-profit businesses based on advertising. They would be shooting themselves in the foot big time if they allowed malware into their presentations. These days, it would seem you have to dig way down into out of the way niche porn sites to find malware embedded in the site itself.

Malvertising
I use the McAfee antivirus system but have in the past used Sophos and Norton. These systems can filter web pages, examining individual elements, namely advertising embedded on the page.

Legitimate sites like CNN, The Washington Post, etc., can get advertising from 3rd party providers. If you see a box in a corner of the page, or a pop-up, it may contain an advertisement. That ad didn’t come from the site, it came from a service which provides ads to the site. The advertiser may embed malicious code in the ad, give it the 3rd party provider, and Bingo! You have a legitimate site serving up malware to your computer.

Lesson to be learned: In this day and age, getting malware is no longer just connected to surfing dubious sites like porn. It could be any site, even sites you trust.

Can we trust anybody?
Let’s not forget that “virus” as in computer virus is named after the human virus. It has the same characteristics. I drop in for a family dinner, holiday or birthday, and somebody coughs or sneezes. A few days later, I know I’ve got something. Cough, wheeze.

It’s important, first and foremost, to have an antivirus system. I have McAfee because it was bundled with a new Dell laptop, I purchased last year. Reviewing PC Mag’s top-ten systems, I know that McAfee is good. It certainly isn’t a mistake, and we can argue over the details.

One of its features is to compare any link to its own list of questionable URLs. If I click or if a web page automatically sends me somewhere, McAfee will stop the process and give me a warning, asking me if I want to proceed. I avoid any chance of malware by just not continuing.

What can I do?
Before visiting any website, it is possible to pass the URL through an online checking system to find out if there’s any risk.

Google Transparency Report
https://transparencyreport.google.com/safe-browsing/search
Google’s Safe Browsing technology examines billions of URLs per day looking for unsafe websites. Every day, we discover thousands of new unsafe sites, many of which are legitimate websites that have been compromised. When we detect unsafe sites, we show warnings on Google Search and in web browsers. You can search to see whether a website is currently dangerous to visit.

Type in a URL and see what’s reported. The site info gives you the latest status about “unsafe content” and tells you when Google last checked the site.

Virus Total
https://www.virustotal.com/gui/home/url
Analyze suspicious files and URLs to detect types of malware, automatically share them with the security community

Once again, type in a URL and check the report.

FYI: I’m sure you recognise Google but not VirusTotal. According to Wikipedia, the company was purchased by Google in 2012.

How to get URLs before clicking
All browsers have this functionality: Right click on a link, and you get a pop-up menu. In Firefox, choose “Copy Link Location”, in Chrome, choose “Copy link address”, and in Edge, choose “Copy link”. Instead of clicking on the URL, you have copied the URL to the clipboard. You can paste it into the above two URL check systems.

IM Chat
From time to time, I include links to various things: articles, pictures, and video. Some people who don’t know me refuse to click. I usually preface the sending of any link with this:

FYI: I check all links for malware. I don’t want to infect my own computer.

But I understand their hesitancy. The world can be a dangerous place, and we must be cautious.

However, I also know that I have more familiarity with links and can better judge their legitimacy. I recognise Flickr and YouTube, two sites that crop up frequently in SL profiles, and open them without fear of infection. But if I ran into something I don’t recognise, I can use the above two check systems to get an idea of how safe a URL is.

Good luck. Safe computing. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go out to my local pharmacy. I thought to log into Second Life this evening, and I’ve just discovered I’ve run out of condoms.

This won't work but it is funny.

References

Wikipedia: Malvertising
Malvertising (a portmanteau of "malicious advertising") is the use of online advertising to spread malware. It typically involves injecting malicious or malware-laden advertisements into legitimate online advertising networks and webpages. Online advertisements provide a solid platform for spreading malware because significant effort is put into them in order to attract users and sell or advertise the product. Because advertising content can be inserted into high-profile and reputable websites, malvertising provides malefactors an opportunity to push their attacks to web users who might not otherwise see the ads, due to firewalls, more safety precautions, or the like. Malvertising is "attractive to attackers because they 'can be easily spread across a large number of legitimate websites without directly compromising those websites'."

Malvertising is a fairly new concept for spreading malware and is even harder to combat because it can work its way into a webpage and spread through a system unknowingly: "The interesting thing about infections delivered through malvertising is that it does not require any user action (like clicking) to compromise the system and it does not exploit any vulnerabilities on the website or the server it is hosted from... infections delivered through malvertising silently travel through Web page advertisements." It is able to expose millions of users to malware, even the most cautious, and is growing rapidly: "In 2012, it was estimated nearly 10 billion ad impressions were compromised by malvertising." Attackers have a very wide reach and are able to deliver these attacks easily through advertisement networks. Companies and websites have had difficulty diminishing the number of malvertising attacks, which "suggests that this attack vector isn’t likely to disappear soon."

Wikipedia: VirusTotal
VirusTotal is a website created by the Spanish security company Hispasec Sistemas. Launched in June 2004, it was acquired by Google Inc. in September 2012. The company’s ownership switched in January 2018 to Chronicle, a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc.

VirusTotal aggregates many antivirus products and online scan engines to check for viruses that the user’s own antivirus may have missed, or to verify against any false positives. Files up to 550 MB can be uploaded to the website, or sent via email (max. 32MB). Anti-virus software vendors can receive copies of files that were flagged by other scans but passed by their own engine, to help improve their software and, by extension, VirusTotal’s own capability. Users can also scan suspect URLs and search through the VirusTotal dataset. VirusTotal for dynamic analysis of malware uses Cuckoo sandbox. VirusTotal was selected by PC World as one of the best 100 products of 2007.

PC Mag - Oct 22/2019
The Best Antivirus Protection for 2019
Which antivirus should you choose? You have a wealth of options. Kaspersky Anti-Virus and Bitdefender Antivirus Plus routinely take perfect or near-perfect scores from the independent antivirus testing labs. A single subscription for McAfee AntiVirus Plus lets you install protection on all of your Windows, Android, Mac OS, and iOS devices. And its unusual behavior-based detection technology means Webroot SecureAnywhere Antivirus is the tiniest antivirus around. We've named these four Editors' Choice for commercial antivirus, but they're not the only products worth consideration. Read the reviews of our top-rated products, and then make your own decision.

2019-10-24