Katharine Berry, while not leaving Second Life completely, is winding down pretty much all her Second Life commitments, forum moderator status, shucking her island, and closing off her other Second Life website services except for AjaxLife.

AjaxLife is how we came to know Berry, with her superlative efforts to produce an open-source, web-based, thin-client for Second Life.

Sabin Linden informs us that the login process for the viewer is going to change to address anti-fraud and other security issues. Essentially, you're not going to be logging in through the viewer anymore.

Instead, logins will be processed through the Second Life website, and the browser launched from there with a custom, secure token included in a secondlife:/// link. The token is valid for five minutes.

While the solution has been tested internally to function fine with Windows and Mac viewers, the Linux viewer solution still needs work.

You may not have used Second Life's Map API. I know I didn't frequently, though I'd just started using it for a project yesterday. Today? It's gone, without any apparent warning - I noticed a few minutes ago when I sat down to continue yesterday's work.

Some hurried checking around looking for notices or announcements from Linden Lab (there aren't any) indicates that the talented Katharine Berry has also noticed the problem, and that it's killed the AJAXLife project. She writes, "Some research indicates that they have intended to do so for a while, and were going to make a wide announcement before doing so. Breaking it does not count as a wide announcement."

There are apparently undocumented ways to pull some of this data through the SL-CAPS capabilities web-services, but they may be incomplete and seem to rely mostly on guesswork.

Whether the Map API is down intentionally or unintentionally, this counts as a communications failure, I should think.