AV spying

Objects can send IMs to agents ("avatars", but can't receive IMs. Agents can receive IMs from other agents, or from objects, but the IMs from objects are handled somewhat differently (for example, they don't pop into the Chatterbox window like agent-originated IMs, rather appearing in chat/chat history in a special color).

Addressing another question, yes, collars can be scripted to track the wearer and listen to the wearer's chat or any chat around them, etc., but not IMs. There is no *scripted* way to access IMs.

This is not the first report of intercepted IMs. It's almost always a result of "social engineering" (e.g., the victim sent a log to somebody who shared it with somebody else...).

But there are other possibilities. If the victim is using a hacked client, all bets are off. It would also be possible if the victim's machine has been compromised with a trojan horse that delivered a payload of, say, a packet-sniffer (forwarding to another address some selected subset of the information flowing in and out of the victim's machine), or a key-logger (which would forward just whatever the victim types), or... who knows? some hacked OpenGL driver might even work. All this would be prevented by proper security and anti-virus measures on the victim's machine.

There is an extremely remote possibility that an exploit on the LL server network could also intercept IMs, either en route on the network (another packet-sniffer), or as they're being logged to disk (the Linden's log, not the one on the client). But this sort of thing is pretty trivial to detect, which makes such a scenario even more far-fetched.

Jack, did you ever consider the possiblity that these "friends" are ALTS of the person who's IMs were supposedly read? That they know because they are all the same person messing with your head?

That's more likely than what I was thinking. If the spy has a keylogger installed in your computer (a form of spyware), he could read everything you type, including SL IMs. But he'd have to infect your machine first, and that can't be done inside SL. He'd have to know your real identity, and then send the malicious software, and trick you into installing it.

(Never mind...I see someone beat me to that idea)

No. Categorically no. Absolutely impossible.

Must be a jealous gf or bf.

Mine don't

Data over a network is broken down into smaller packets. A packet sniffer is something that examines all the packets on a network section, picking out those that match some criteria. Note that firewalls and routers do a lot of filtering, so a packet sniffer will only see those packets within the firewall boundaries.