Wild speculation thread: SL5B announcement?

Best things SL (for us and for themselves,) could do, would be closed source forever----includuing the viewer, and make the sims free on our local machines. Free land. Paid Service. Outlaw all bots. Lots of Service and policing to stop fraud and corruption...Linden$$ only for inworld, and do away with the Lindex. (people can pay each other with real money, pay pal etc.)...and for crying out loud.... have REAL age and identity verification and all limited alts tied to a master account.

Reverse engeneering (as they did it already with OpenSpace). Having the server on your own machine (even closed) would mean expose it to any sort of "anylisis", with the result that someone will hack into it in a matter of days. The result would be exposing it to potential hacks, many times more dangerous than a "copybot" (that operates on the client side) because owning a private region means have it accessing to the asset server: data content (third parties), transactions, etc. Unless they wanna place a "forewall" to move from a trusted (their) and untrusted (yours) regions... but it would mean: leave anything you owned from second life at the door, and go naked into "your" region, it may have some uses for a corporate, but not for inworld business where u "need" to use your inventory everywhere.

Closed source does not equal secure. Most commercial software and operating systems are closed source, and get their security through obscurity broken quite often.

Besides Linden Labs is selling the service and not the software

Applicable local, state, and federal laws apply to those that commit crimes. Linen Labs has their Risk API to help notice odd transactions, but no monitoring software is going to catch many of them. If you feel you are the victim of fraud you need to report the user account and supply the details as you would to law enforcement so LL can act and take appropriate steps.

Lindens are a valid medium for transactions in second life, since it is transferable into what ever currency that is native to a user's nation. Due to the international nature of the service, such a medium of value is necessary to avoid penalizing the users for bank fees in regards to currency conversions (You also don't have to figure out what the current conversion rate. ) They also help in regards to the fact many countries have 'dollars' that are not equal to each other.

As for age and identity verification, there is no full proof system (All such systems currently in use can and are tricked through a variety of methods up to and including outright identity theft). Combined with the international user base, it is further compounded in verification. Though Linden Labs is taking massive strides forward compared to most online services.

As for alts tied to a main account, the same tools to bypass verification can be used in order to create multiple main accounts.