Some consider him a kook or an eccentric, while others think of him as a technological visionary. Either way, the accomplished Raymond Kurzweil will be taking the stage to keynote the Second Life Community Convention in San Francisco next month, a spot traditionally afforded to a Linden Lab executive.

Kurzweil, a famous futurist, author and inventor, is notable for his many inventions (from the first CCD-based flat-bed scanner to reading machines for the blind), his notions about transhumanism and technological singularities and a significant number of awards and honorary degrees. He has strong opinions on virtual environments, and it will be interesting to hear what he has to say.

The Second Life Community Convention 2009 will happen in San Francisco, on August 13th - 16th, 2009 at the Westin St. Francis Hotel. Registration for the event is open and attendees can register at the convention's Web-site.

---

	Are you a part of the most widely-known collaborative virtual environment or keeping a close eye on it? Massively's Second Life coverage keeps you in the loop.

Since the rollout of Second Life server 1.26 the already unreliable Second Life group-chat system showed an almost crippling drop in reliability, compared to the previous 1.25 release. Linden Lab have estimated an overall 60% drop in the number of group-chat messages successfully delivered, and the problem skews towards the larger groups, prompting many group owners to completely disable their group's chat functions to avoid online members from being spammed with error messages.

Linden Lab is reporting that server version 1.27, currently in quality assurance, represents a 300% improvement in group chat reliability over version 1.25 (or almost 1000% more reliable than what is currently operating on the Second Life grid today). As yet, no deployment date has been announced, but for many, the update cannot come soon enough.

---

	Are you a part of the most widely-known collaborative virtual environment or keeping a close eye on it? Massively's Second Life coverage keeps you in the loop.

It's been a long run for the Gossip Girl simulation on Second Life, two years in the making actually, but all good things must come to an end. The well trafficked sims will be closing the doors tomorrow, as Warner Brothers and The CW discontinue their virtual marketing campaign for the show of the same name.

But that doesn't mean the Gossip Girl community is dying...

Fans of the simulation will be overjoyed to hear that the Gossip Girl community is transitioning to a new home thanks to the Metaverse Mod Squad, the builders and moderators of the original official sims. While the official sims, and the setting of the Upper East Side, will be retired on June 30th, the new doors will open on July 1st to large fanfare and a great number of festivities.

Warner Brothers has a very successful setup in Second Life, centered around its popular Gossip Girl property. All isn't exactly rosy there, of late, as WB's actively moderated environment collides with Second Life's and Gossip Girl's rather broad popularity demographics.

Warner Brothers uses the Metaverse Mod Squad for active moderation of the Second Life presence. The question is, how do you moderate conversations in languages you don't understand? The answer, it seems, is that you don't. Visitors who communicate in languages other than English are warned to switch to English. Failure to comply sees the visitor ejected.

There are several sets of rules for users of Second Life. The Terms of Service (TOS) and Community Standards (CS) which combined form your explicit service-contract with Linden Lab, and assorted implicit ones, like following any additional conditions the owner of whatever land-parcel that you are currently on may have chosen to impose.

Well, the Linden Lab have updated the Community Standards for the first time in, well, perhaps forever. While the Lab has said that it has updated them in the past, the document has remained unaltered since at least 2005. What's new, however, isn't necessarily as interesting as what's missing.

Australian Communications Minister, Senator Stephen Conroy, has promised to extend Australia's proposed network-level content filtering regime to block games, online games, downloadable games, and websites that sell or allow download of games that are deemed not to be suitable for a 15-year-old audience. This, despite research by the IEAA (the Interactive Entertainment Association of Australia) that the average age of Australian Gamers is 30.

Even though Australian Federal and State laws say otherwise, some MMO titles exceeding that classification are already sold on Australian store shelves, by simply bypassing compulsory classification. Australian Federal and State authorities refuse to respond to any enquiries about the topic.

The matter becomes even more confusing and complex, however, as it introduces a new, defacto classifications body to the mix.

A while back, Linden Lab's Philip Rosedale announced a new Second Life viewer development project. That project ultimately grew along lines similar to that of third-party viewer project, Imprudence, breaking down many barriers to user contributions, and adopting a more agile methodology. After only a couple of release-candidates, the result is already available.

One of the biggest developments you might see in the Snowglobe viewer is that the map is now an order of magnitude faster to load, rather than taking several fractions of forever, as is traditional. This is the start of a new texture-transfer pipeline, which we can reasonably expect to become standard in future viewers, and to encompass more kinds of textures, however there's a new caching architecture which should benefit all textures.

It's the sixth anniversary of Second Life opening to the public (not the sixth birthday, which is actually in either March or April depending on how you figure these things), and as usual, Linden Lab is organizing a soiree for the occasion – though once again this year, it's a week later than usual, starting on the anniversary date of 23 June, rather than ending on that date.

Generally, just after 23 June, community (and the Lab's) attention is inevitably drawn away to Linden Lab's SL Community Convention and SL Relay For Life, both taking place later this year, and requiring considerable amounts of organizational attention.

Nevertheless, there's a packed schedule of eclectic events and discussions, starting with Philip Rosedale's opening speech in just 30 minutes time (10AM Pacific time), and 20 regions packed with user-contributed art installations and displays, so there's plenty to see and explore.

---

	Are you a part of the most widely-known collaborative virtual environment or keeping a close eye on it? Massively's Second Life coverage keeps you in the loop.

Stratim Capital, an institutionally funded secondary-market private-equity firm, is reported to have bought into Linden Lab by buying out most of the holdings of one of the other investors. "We bought almost the entire position of an existing shareholder," said Stratim managing partner, Zach Abrams. Which shareholder, and how much was paid remains a mystery. A previous sale of less than a 5% share in Linden Lab sold for approximately half a billion US Dollars in 2007.

There is no primary private-equity market for Linden Lab. The company does not seek investors, and by all accounts is making enough money that it doesn't need additional investment capital. There's also no sign of an IPO on the horizon, nor indeed, any compelling reason why the Lab should want to have one.

---

	Are you a part of the most widely-known collaborative virtual environment or keeping a close eye on it? Massively's Second Life coverage keeps you in the loop.

We know, we're shocked that the opportunity was passed over. With one movie in the works based on a newspaper article based on a divorce, and – of course – the CSI:NY story that humorously featured Second Life like we'd never seen it before, well ... hopes of a decent cinematic treatment of Linden Lab's virtual environment were starting to look pretty low.

Enter Rachel Ward's Beautiful Kate, which aired in the Sydney Film Festival late last week and is due to air in Australia on 7 August. It's an emotional and confronting work, in which Second Life makes an interesting cameo.

Linden Lab has released the new viewer, bringing Second Life up to 1.23 a few days earlier than expected, off the back of a very short release-candidate cycle.

The new viewer brings three things with it: The new Adults-only continent (formerly Ursula and now Zindra), user-verification by documents or payment-status, and a new Adults-only content rating that opens up Second Life to more extreme sexual and violent content.

This week we managed to get a look at an early build of what calls itself Second Life 2.0 – though the final version numbering is up for grabs and it could wind up being called 1.24 or 1.25 yet but Linden Lab has been amending their Second Life trademarks to allow "2" to be added. The only really major changes in 2.0 revolve around the user-interface that interactive design agency Big Spaceship has been working on for the last 6-8 months.

And quite a change it is. We're under no illusions that the new user-interface is entirely set in stone. A few parts are confusing, and it has a ton of rough edges and little quirks. It's fascinating to see the direction that it's going in, however.

Linden Lab have made a new Second Life viewer release-candidate available. RC4 is the fifth release candidate in the 1.23 series (Linden Lab starts counting from RC0). It's looking increasingly like the objective is to release before the Second Life sixth anniversary (23 June).

Barely any changes this time around, so either Linden Lab isn't really aware of any showstoppers or doesn't perceive them as such. The context menus have had one small reversion, there are updates to the Mac crash reporter, and a fix relating to object updates that affected poseball visibility.

Hypergrid Business is reporting that an unknown person or persons destroyed a large number of OpenSim regions over the weekend, by exploiting a weakness in LxLabs' Linux-based HyperVM management software. OpenSim is a popular third-party reverse-engineered implementation of Linden Lab's Second Life server software used in a variety of commercial, non-commercial and educational virtual-environment grids.

More than 100 regions are reported lost, along with any data that wasn't backed up off-site. Apparently more than just the simulators were taken down, Web-pages and other ancillary data and files on the affected servers were also lost in the attack.

OpenSim regions using virtualization software other than LxLabs' HyperVM were unaffected. The attack hit more than just third-party Second Life compatible grids, however, as more than 100,000 other websites and servers were wiped over the weekend using the software exploit.

In the wake of the attacks and massive data-loss, LxLabs' founder, K T Ligesh (32) allegedly committed suicide in his Bangalore home on Monday.

---

	Are you a part of the most widely-known collaborative virtual environment or keeping a close eye on it? Massively's Second Life coverage keeps you in the loop.

While online economies can seem to be (and often are) fundamentally different from AFK economies, there's a key component that makes any online economy function in ways that are all-too-familiar.

That's us. You and me. People.

Whether bags of treasure fall out of dead rats, or the economy is reliant on texture artists, modelers and scripters, it's people that make online economies with fundamentally alien premises work in some very surprisingly quotidian ways.