Second Life makes the news all the time, but rarely does it seem like it does for a good reason. The hacking of a politician campaign headquarters here. A thriving sex business here. And now apparently you can add child pornography to the list of things that have been associated with the virtual world of the game.

From the article:

According to this blurb over at the BBC (the only company to ever make the corpse of George Orwell cry), German police have been following allegations that some Second Life inhabitants have been trading in "child abuse" images. While it's entirely possible that people are trading pictures of burn marks and wire hangers, here in the Yoo-Ess-of-Ay, we prefer the term "kiddie porn", or "dude, seriously, that's f*cked up".

Here's a snippet regarding the German news programme that led to the police investigation:

Second Life, as its name implies, is a virtual world in which members create an avatar and then use that character to live out a separate existence.

The investigation was carried out by Nick Schader from the Report Mainz news programme who is also a member of Second Life.

Mr Schader was asked to pay to attend meetings where virtual and real child pornography was being shown.

Members of this group also offered to put him in touch with traders of real child pornography.

The investigation also uncovered so called "age play" groups that revolve around the abuse of virtual children.

Information gathered during the report was passed to the prosecutor's office in Halle who said it hoped to track down the German Second Life user who shared the images of virtual child pornography.

Read the full article over at destructoid.com