Does anyone else find it hilarious that Linden Lab is crowing about reaching 1M user accounts? It reminds me of one morning when I came to work at i-drive (remember them?) and noticed that there were 10 thousand more free accounts than when I left the night before. It seems that the script kiddies had figured out how to programmatically create accounts and use them together as a free storage and distribution solution for their warez. Over the course of the next month, the script kiddies blew hundreds of thousands of accounts into the DB and our marketing folks happily trumpeted how quickly the service was growing.
We eventually made it less fun to hack us than to hack other free online storage sites, killing the influx of zombie accounts, but not before receiving a lot of press about our fantastic growth.
A few weeks ago Linden Lab eliminated the requirement that new Second Life accounts be verified by a credit card. Since then there has been an increase in grid cashing attacks and a huge increase in account creation.
Go figure.
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