Monday, April 6, 2026

Meeting up with Barry

Meeting up with Barry

The other day Barry Lubezki walked into Street Whores. That was a nice surprise for me. My daughter seemed to like it even more: I guess she is a bit easily star-struck still.

Barry was the owner of Hooker Hotel, Cinema Q and some more land, until the places got hacked two weeks ago. I will keep the details out of this blog, but read the last chapter of this post on some tips to secure yourself.
What was particularly nasty, was not just that all his lands were abandoned and his builds destroyed by the hackers,  but that within 24 hours a profiteering person had setup a new place, named 'Hooker Hotel', with same land descriptions and business model and had a bot ready at Barry's old parcel to direct traffic to his spot. Similarly, the owner of a large Second Life beer brand also setup there in no time...

Some people have no morals.

That includes Linden Lab apparently, who allowed this opportunist to even set up a full region using the brand name that Barry Lubezki had established over the years in SL.

Real Hookers 

So you can imagine that Barry was not amused.

Meeting up with Barry
 

He visited though to rent an adboard for his new place, that is to replace Hooker Hotel: Real Hookers. Ngoc and I showed him the two adboards that we had already setup for him and we had a little chat.

Account security 

So yeah, this also gave us all a lesson in account security. Linden Lab already had a good community blogpost on this subject. I will link it here: https://community.secondlife.com/news/featured-news/your-account-your-world-keep-it-safe-r11193/
 
I am not going into depths on this subject, as I am no expert on it, but I do recommend everyone to:
 
- use a strong password
- setup Multi-Factor Authentication
- never click any links sent by someone you don't know (or preferably: none at all...)
- if someone points you to something, say on Second Life's Marketplace: go there yourself and look it up. Don't click the link. And don't just enter your password after clicking a link!
 
And really, just read that post that I did link. You can also do a search on the subject in your favroute search engine, if you don't trust my link. ;-)