The company behind the popular online game Second Life announced Friday that servers containing customer data had been compromised:

Linden Lab reported today that it is notifying its community of a database breach, which potentially exposed customer data including the unencrypted names and addresses, and the encrypted passwords and encrypted payment information of all Second Life users. Unencrypted credit card information, which is stored on a separate database, was not compromised.

Second Life is a 3-D virtual world inhabited by over 200,000 users. The game has become extremely popular with librarians over the last several months, due in large part to the creation of the Second Life Library 2.0, a project developed by Alliance Library System and OPAL. The Second Life Library features various library services, book discussions, and other live programming.

Second Life recently made news in the the legal education world with the announcement that Professor Charles Nesson of Harvard Law School and his daughter, Rebecca Nesson of Harvard Extension School, would offer a public course on argument in cyberspace through Second Life. The course, titled "CyberOne: Law in the Court of Public Opinion," begins this week.

Isn't it about time we retired this technology:

I created several IM accounts yesterday for use at work, and every single time I had to contend with one of these awful, awful forms, regardless of whose IM service I was registering to use. I think I may have typed the "word" correctly about 50% of the time. On one form it took me 4 tries to get it right.

I understand the purpose behind these forms (I even used one on another blog I run for a while -- until I found an easier solution), but there has got to be a better way to enforce security for these services. How about a tool like Bad Behavior? When it works properly, a web user never even knows it's there. And it works beautifully.

If MSN, AOL, and Yahoo! really wanted people using their web services, wouldn't they ditch these forms?