Looking Back at Emeraldgate

Yesterday, Team Firestorm celebrated it's eighth anniversary party. All were happy with the celebration. But eight years ago, the team was rapidly formed in the middle of a scandal that was sinking the team behind the most popular viewer at the time: Emerald. Known as "Emeraldgate," it started in August 2010 when a key member of the development team took advantage of a weakness in the viewer code to launch a Denial of Service attack on the website of someone he didn't like. The aftermath was a drama in which one woman brought people together to lead a new team, while others ended up banned by Linden Lab.

Read the story in Events.

BREAKING NEWS: "The End" for the Emerald Team

On the Emerald Blog today, the team posted that they had made the decision to fold. Two reasons were given, Linden Labs' demands that three "key members" of the team be dismissed, and an attempted (unsucessful) takeover from within. They stated before closing, there will be one final version of Emerald released, "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 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.

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

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More Developments on “Emeraldgate”

In the days following Linden Labs taking the Emerald Viewer down from its list of approved viewers, and the decision of Fractured Crystal to resign on Sunday August 22nd, the controversy has yet to die down.

Probably the most clear example of this was the “Tonight Live” talk show that evening. The show was plagued not only by technical difficulties, but there were also a number of likely griefers at the sim, judging by both Paisley’s observations of day-old avatars with replicating scripts, and my own when I got there of seeing what at times resembled a peanut gallery. Paisley ended up having to do the show in a secret location, with the studio audience facing a gray wall on the set labeled “REHEARSAL.” This was an action Paisley and her staff hated to, but as the hostess stated, “the show must go on.”



On Tuesday, Linden Lab finally ended its silence about Emerald since removing it from it's third-party viewer list without explanation. In it’s “Malicious Viewers and Our Third-Party Viewer Policy,“ It clearly labeled the action on Emerald’s rival a denial-of-service attack:

We have removed Emerald from the list of third-party viewers, and are now in touch with the Emerald team to discuss what can happen next. We did this to do our best to protect the safety and security of Second Life users. We will not tolerate a viewer that includes malicious code, nor will we tolerate development teams with a history of violating users’ trust or disrupting their lives.

We take privacy, safety, and security very seriously, and we will act to the best of our abilities to protect it. We have not yet disabled logins via the Emerald viewer, but will do so if we feel the software and the team behind it is not able to meet the standards we’ve set. ... The third-party viewer directory is designed to be largely self-policing, but we take our responsibility to act very seriously when problems come to our attention.

Contrary to some of the rumors flying around, Emerald users will still be permitted to use their viewers, at least for now. At worst, Linden Labs will block the use of Emerald viewers. Tales of users under threat of suspension for using Emerald are false.

Despite the problems, some residents continue to use Emerald. Others have switched to the new 2.0 viewer, but some of them doing so reluctantly and open to alternatives. One such alternative that keeps being mentioned is the “Imprudence” viewer, available in Windows, Mac OSX, and Windows. It’s been described as more useful to builders than the new LL Viewer, though not perfect. LordGregGreg, the ex-Emerald developer whose exit marked the beginning of the controversy, recently offered an alternative of his own, “produced in a way where all binaries are either provided from a well known trusted source (such as linden lab or openjpeg), or myself,” the “Emergence Viewer.”

Ex-Linden Qarl Fizz, who joined the Emerald team just before the denial-of-service attack, gave no response to a request to be interviewed by SL Newser. On New World Notes, he described himself as being “pleasantly surprised with how the Emerald people are handling the mess.”

Modular Systems, the creators of the Emerald Viewer, stated, they “received a large list of requirements and conditions from LL. ... At this point, I can safely say that we fully intend to address and fulfill ALL of them as soon as we possibly can. ... Although some of these conditions will be very difficult, we feel they are reasonable considering recent events. Due to that difficulty however, some will take more time than others to fulfill. It is a big list of things that we need to do and we will be providing LL with a time frame on each individual item ... Once we have completed these items to the full satisfaction of Linden Lab, we intend to re-apply.”

Sources: Linden Blog, Tonight Live, New World Notes,

Bixyl Shuftan