I’m not sure of the veracity of this, exactly. What you’ll see is a video of what appears to be a communication from zFire Xue to someone else about recording passwords that were incorrectly typed into something (what, exactly? Something related to RedZone? Edit: The RedZone Web-site apparently, so it would be the passwords of RedZone customers, I guess) on the basis that some of those incorrect entries are actually also a person’s Second Life password (non exactly unlikely). Also about sharing that information, along with the geographical location of users.

Watch the video (dated August 2010).

[The video has been abruptly deleted, but can still be found elsewhere]

Hrm. I couldn’t tell you how genuinely authentic this information is, or whether it is just one of those ‘somewhat plausible’ stories you get at this time of year. I don’t see the point in what is described, honestly, so I’ll leave off from any further comment.

UPDATE:

Someone who doesn’t want to have their name mentioned transcribed the audio from the video, and sent me the transcript. It seems to be accurate in all respects.

Video posted 3 August, 2010 TRANSCRIPT BEGINS <garbled> Mariana. Well, I made a little Web-page for us. This Web-page will let you look up basic information about a person through isellsl as well as … if and when they joined isellsl, if they own a RedZone, if they’re on anybody’s RedZone safelists, and if they ever got a RedZone demo, which … those three things are more useful for me. What’s useful for you, is that this Web-site will also … predict people’s second life passwords. Now you know how that’s done. It does that based on the incorrect passwords that they enter. A lot of times out of habit people, of course enter their second life user name and by habit they enter their second life password occasionally. All of the incorrect passwords that they have ever entered will be visible <garbled: to you?> Not everybody has one. Many of them do, and <in?> my tests many people have indeed entered their second life passwords. So that’s here. A little useful thing, I am also going to make a display of people’s real-world locations. For <ourself?> that will be very interesting. Nobody else can access this page at all and <garble> easy. Anyway, that is all for now. I <garble> another page I am going to make for you. But here’s this one for now. <garble… something by the blue?> TRANSCRIPT ENDS

UPDATE: When I posted this I figured that there was at least an even chance of it being a hoax, given the time of year and the pitch of tensions surrounding RedZone.

However, the video is most of a year old. That’s how long it had been sitting on YouTube. If it was a hoax, it would have been perpetrated last year and then someone patiently for seven months before revealing it. A hoaxer probably wouldn’t have yanked the video down in such short order after the reveal, either.

Additionally, a number of people have come forward and are positive in their identification of the voice in the video as that of zFire Xue.

So, after some reflection, it seems increasingly less likely to me that this video is a hoax.

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Tags: Privacy, RedZone, Second Life, Video, Virtual Environments and Virtual Worlds, zFire Xue