In light of the recent uproar about data mining by unscrupulous people exploiting a hole in the viewer media system, I thought it might be helpful to include a few ways to protect yourself.

These are not ideal by any means, but until Linden Labs bans these and any other data mining systems and fixes the security hole(s) they exploit, options are limited.

Imagine this scenario:

You are visiting a local shopping mall or favorite nightclub.

As you walk in the door, a rather shady private detective hired by owner to catch shoplifters, collects your name, address, age, financial information, what car you drive, takes a picture, and then sends all of that information to his (not the owner’s) home office.

All of this without your consent, or even knowledge it has happened.

Since the detective doesn’t have very good eyesight, he thinks that nearly everyone is shoplifting.

As if that wasn’t enough, if someone wants to, they can call on this detective, who gladly provides them with the information and tools to stalk you or even smack you around.

Since one of my personal favorite viewers is Henri Beauchamp’s excellent Cool Viewer, I thought I might give a short how-to on installing it on Linux, as it sometimes seems to cause some confusion. You will need to download the Second Life Viewer and the current release of the Cool Viewer diff files. My recommendation [...]