Can SLS trigger events

Hello
i am new to second life.
i was loking a little bit on scripting, and i was wondering can scripts in Second life trigger events like writing to other programs on my computer. i am not thinking about viruses, am asking if second life can say write something to a runing C program, and than that C program would tigger some event that wuld happen on my serial port or USB port?

not directly.

But if you have a program running on your computer that can be triggered via emails, or commands sent to a webpage script (like a php script) then you could use LSL to send those command messages through sending emails or requesting http resources.

If you WANT this to happen, you could also turn on logging of local chat (and or IM) and purposefully create a program that monitors the chat log files and responds to various patterns. That I am aware of, there is no danger of anything in SL being able to violate your computer's security on its own though, with a couple of exceptions:

1.) For a while there was a security concern about media streams and some kind of vulnerability in Quicktime. Not sure on the details because media streams didn't work at the time on my system (Linux) anyway. I believe the vulnerability has long since been fixed. I keep the media stream off most of the time anyway though, and just turn it on when I'm in a friendly and trustworthy location.

2.) Beware of using third-party viewers. If you execute a client that you got someplace other than secondlife.com, you had better darn well trust the source. Otherwise it could contain literally anything. An exception might be if you download the source code and can examine the changes on your own and compile from source. Even if you don't understand the code, chances are at least better that someone hasn't put something really nasty in, since people would be able to figure it out.