Cory Linden’s Town Hall Transcript
Tuesday, January 9th, 2007 at 4:20 PM by: Jeska LindenHad a great text-based Town Hall with Cory Linden today. Also, be sure to check out Cory’s Pre-Town Hall answers for even more technical answer goodness.
Jeska Linden: We will be posting a full transcript to the blog after the event, you may also want to read Cory’s Pre Town Hall blog post here: http://blog.secondlife.com/2007/01/09/pre-town-hall-answers/
Jeska Linden: Ok, Cory, take it away.
Cory Linden: OK, here we go . . . since I posted the answers to the blog, I think we can jump right into questions
Cory Linden: Kudos and thank yous to everyone who has already downloaded the code and who submitted questions
Jeska Linden: Ok, I’ve got the first question
Jeska Linden: Hannah Shenley: What network connectivity does Linden labs have to the outside world, and in particular to continents other than the US? Hannah Shenley: What network connectivity does Linden labs have to the outside world, and in particular to continents other than the US?
Cory Linden: We use Internap, who connects generally via Sprint and Level 3’s backbones
Jeska Linden: RacerX Gullwing: Why do islands disappear when you look at the big map and zoom out, and don’t stay visible like mainland sims?
Cory Linden: I just noticed that 20 minutes ago while doing a demo . . . seems like a bug so will submit it.
Jeska Linden: Curtis Gardiner: i became a premium member in order to buy first land and have not seen any first land for sale for several weeks?
Cory Linden: Sadly, that does fit into the technical town hall . . . we have had such a run on land purchases that we are behind on putting new land up .
Cory Linden: we are working as fast as we can to correct the situation and get more machines shipped into our colos
Jeska Linden: Stephane Zugzwang: Are there plans by LL to deal with the eventuality of people using the source code to write robots - this could bring a see of changes, not to mention overload some servers or features or enable DOS attacks ?
Cory Linden: People will write bots whether or not we open source. The questions become what they use them for and how we want to get in that arms race …
Cory Linden: THe goal will be to give folks ways to identify and deal with bots if they become a problem
Jeska Linden: Broccoli Curry: will there be measures in place so that ONLY the official viewer can connect to the main grid, and homemade viewers have their own grid where no damage can be done
Cory Linden: There is no technical means to perfectly ensure that only official viewers can connect to the grid
Jeska Linden: Kamilion Schnook: What is involved in the boot process of an individual grid node?
Cory Linden: Don’t take this the wrong way, but I don’t want to be anyone’s friend during the town hall :-)!
Cory Linden: The boot process of a server machine? well, they are debian boxes that get imaged every night. Do you mean sim startup or machine startup?
Jeska Linden: Drake Stonewall: What’s the timeframe on getting the OS viewer into a source control mechanism we can access? The pre-blog just says “the future”
Cory Linden: I can definitely confirm that it will be the future
Cory Linden: I’ll defer to robla on that timing (Robla = Rob Linden)
Jeska Linden: Shoq Venkman: WHAT ISTHE PRIORITY for Mozilla Libraries, ubrowser. When can we render pages in-world, like the F1 Help window. Will this be a priority so the OSI people have something hot to work on early?
Cory Linden: We have a contract group working on zilla. It is a very high priority but has proved to be “tricky”
Jeska Linden: Aster Lardner: How will the average user experience the advantages of an open-source client? Do you think that open sourcing the client will bring about things like plug-ins, or would the average user have to wait until code is implimented into various independnt builds or the standard client to see any benefits from third parties playing with the code? And does this mean that SL is on a heterogenous grid system now that ppl can connect to it with thier own clients? :3
Cory Linden: We’ve already had our first bug fix. For the average user, I expect a better viewer as a result of this. I think that larger features are further out but I wouldn’t bet completely against them
Jeska Linden: David Frantisek: When should we expect to be able to use web pages (maybe including flash movies) as textures for objects?
Cory Linden: Sometime after we integrate flash into the in-SL browser. Flash is actually the hardest part of the embedding process.
Jeska Linden: Jeremy Duport: Considering the current Open Sourcing of the viewer has made the protocols used to stream simulator data (that is, primitives, textures, avatars and so on) widely available in order to allow third-party midified clients to function properly, what measures are being put in place to directly protect the products and other intellectual property of residents involved in content creation?
Cory Linden: The protocols were figured out before we open sourced. There is an extensive security and IP discussion on my blog post and the FAQ page.
Jeska Linden: Bato Brendel: Does Linden Labs have any plans to implement PhysX PPU support for a massive boost in physics calculations and object handling?
Cory Linden: No
Jeska Linden: Draco Flaman: 12-months of inactivity to recycle non-premium accounts, and 18 months to deactivate premium accounts.. and then how about putting the SL second names up for Use again if enough of them become inactive?
Cory Linden: That’s an interesting idea, actually, will pass along
Jeska Linden: Alenzia Epsilon: There has been an immense problem with lag in several reigons, and we have seen a handfull of reigons hit especially hard. For instance, 2 days ago Tethys was down for 12 hours. Is there anything being done to improve the stability of old, mainland sims?
Cory Linden: We continue to find and fix issues in the simulator code. We also have been learning a lot of lessons about opening a second colo facility. We believe that we are getting ahead of most of these issues
Jeska Linden: Marbles Tokyo: is there any plan for allowing a user to alter the direction or force of the wind?
Cory Linden: Well, you can kind of fake that with enough scripts, but more control over physics in estates is an idea that has bounced around. Not inthe dev pipeline yet, though
Jeska Linden: Sanford Foulon: What sort of test regime does LL plan to use when accepting enhancements into the baseline Viewer code?
Cory Linden: We have both an external security auditor and our normal dev/qa team. The simpler bug fixes will be easier to evaluate, larger patches will be taken more carefully or not at all
Jeska Linden: Leviathan Akami: Wouldnt it hurt SL to release the server code? like hinder their ability to profit from SL?
Cory Linden: No
Jeska Linden: Akumu Akula: Will user updated veiwers have to be re-made everytime a new veiwer is released by LL?
Cory Linden: For right now, yes, but per the blog post about capabilities and rapid deploy we are making changes to support heterogeneous viewers
Jeska Linden: Marbles Tokyo: Will there be a way to allow users to restrict/refine searches based on covenant?
Cory Linden: eventually, that makes sense. we are just starting the search redesign this quarter. There is a lot of room for improvement in search.
Cory Linden: Will probably do a townhall just about search sometime soon
Jeska Linden: Kage Seraph: Cory, if the open source client was a celebrity, which one would it be?
Cory Linden: Alf
Jeska Linden: Prokofy Neva: Hi, Question: “If your long-term plan is to open source all of Second Life, not just this viewer, how does land retain its value, and does your own business plan involving selling land have to change then, too? What’s the timetable?”
Cory Linden: Timetable is “the future” Will the business model have to change? Of course. Web sites have value today despite running on open source underpinnings and many different…
Cory Linden: business models are supported on the web, so I suspect that several of them will apply to an open sourced SL
Jeska Linden: Something Something: Is there any plan to integrate a bounty program directly into the Report Bug functionality? In other words, set a L$ amount as reward when you report a bug. SL is unique among open source projects in having a micropayment scheme built right in to the client. Are there any technical reasons why this could not be offered? You would not only get your bugs fixed for free, but you’d get other people paying developers to fix your bugs for free. 
Cory Linden: I think that there is a real opportunity for bounties, both for bugs and for open source. Robla is going to help refine that but it is too early to know exactly how it will work
Jeska Linden: Kamilion Schnook: Now that we have external programs accessing SL, when will popular places go away? 1Q/2Q 07 when the search code is updated?
Cory Linden: Go away? I think it is better to think of it being upgraded and made more useful as we take the current search out behind the shed and shoot it.
Jeska Linden: Leviathan Akami: oh hey, opening the source, does that mean somebody can finally modify search so you dont have to get private island listings in with the public mainland listings under land sales?
Cory Linden: It may be possible to do that on the client. I’m not sure.
Jeska Linden: Zi Ree: can we get a picture of an actual colo SL uses? I’d love to see the hardware involved.
Cory Linden: they don’t like camera being inside the colos
Jeska Linden: David Frantisek: Will any sort of plugin environment be developed for SL in a future release?
Cory Linden: Almost certainly, for sufficiently large definitions of future
Jeska Linden: Antonius Misfit: Now that the viewer is open sourced, is it possible to create a viewer that can stream open source media formats?
Cory Linden: Yes
Jeska Linden: Avil Creeggan: Right now, with the client open sourcing, there are a load of questions about the protection of intellectual property. I’m not so worried about the technical issues, which I already know are going to be mostly moot considering LibSL exists, but on a social level; Right now, there is next to zero help for persons having intellectual property issues from the Linden crew unless it involves submitting a DMCA takedown notice. As an example antecdote, my group, the Alliance Navy, has been attempting to stop persons involved in copying our proprietary equipment for a good deal of time, almost two months now, and we have been generally ignored and “handled” on asking liaisons. Does Linden Labs have any plans to start improving Intellectual Property protection on a SOCIAL level /soon/, ideally /now/?
Cory Linden: The IP issues are the same as we discussed previously. Meta data is being worked on. I’m actually a little surprised that nobody has started an asset registration business…
Jeska Linden: Joel Savard: Are there any plans to provide an inventory snapshot/backup/archiving function to provide some protection against the recurring “lost inventory” problem? Several friends have lost absolutely everything, years of work with apparently no recourse, and this seems an implausible situation for a growing and more commercial user base to tolerate.
Cory Linden: in SL where you could register your stuff. Linden Lab is not in the position of being police, nor can we. DMCA is the right tool for us to respond to.
Cory Linden: We were just talking about this today. Yes, that will get into the dev schedule soon
Jeska Linden: David Frantisek: Should we expect a fix in the near future to the memory leak problems?
Cory Linden: Fixes, yes. Will that get all of them? Unfortunately that will probably be an ongoing problem.
Jeska Linden: Dale Glass: Will there be a place in the grid suitable for testing modified versions of the client? In case modifications turn out to have unexpected effects, and so that LL knows that it’s a modified client being tested and not a bug in the official one
Cory Linden: The FAQ talks about this. There will always be a separate grid up that is in sync with the open source release.
Jeska Linden: David Frantisek: Where can those who are having technical problems developing using the source code provided get help?
Cory Linden: FAQ, wiki, irc, each other.
Jeska Linden: Kamilion Schnook: What is the current status of the MONO Scripting engine, And when can we start testing on the beta grid?
Cory Linden: Mono is coming along but isn’t quite ready for prime time yet. We want to get some of the rapid deploy/het grid stuff working first.
Jeska Linden: Draco Flaman: Does LL plan on releasing a version of SL for other PC types, such as Windows 98? Some of my friends w/ slightly older computers wanted to know this.
Cory Linden: Windows 98? No.
Jeska Linden: Bato Brendel: Will SL be finally or in the planning of supporting PPU technology like Aegis PhysX cards?
Cory Linden: Nothing planned right now.
Jeska Linden: Henry Kirshner: Are there any improvements planned to the building tools?
Cory Linden: We’re still continuing to clean up the focus and internationalization issues first. I suspect that modified build tools may be a fruitful area of open source exploration.
Jeska Linden: Aston Hildyard: Is there any plan to implement some of the other operators available in most computational solid geometry packages into the SL prim system? That is, is there any plan to permit all boolean operations on primitives, and not just unions?
Cory Linden: Yeah, I want a “not” operation as well. When we get through the current round of architectural and scaling issues, I expect we’ll take a long look at the building tools. Some people, oddly…
Cory Linden: seem to want something called polygons for their modeling needs. Not sure why.
Jeska Linden: Shaun Altman: In what ways do you see your business model changing when SL is fully open sourced? Also, when the server is out, can everyone make their own little SL, or will all the servers have to connect to your grid?
Cory Linden: We’ve only open sourced the client, so fully OS discussions are premature. We all have a lot to learn about working as an open source community, and the viewer is a great opportunity for that.
Jeska Linden: David Frantisek: Are there plans to improve the jpeg library released with the SL source code?
Cory Linden: Hopefully you will. libjpeg needs optimization work for j2c.
Jeska Linden: Judge Hocho: My question is in two parts; first what effect do you think the open-sourcing will have upon intellectual property rights? And related, Why have LL employees failed to perform even the slightest due diligence with regard to theft of said intellectual property even faced with a preponderance of data to support such claims? Second, what are you doing to protect your corporate customers and more importantly, their customers for whom they represent?
Cory Linden: Per previous discussions on this topic, the DMCA is pretty clear for how we can respond to IP issues. We do not have discretion in either direction. Thus, we abide by the DMCA safe harbor provisions.
Jeska Linden: Shoq Venkman: Why can’t SLURLS teleport directly to a landing spot. Why must web users go through the map page first. Integration with the web will never be smooth that way.
Cory Linden: An excellent point. I agree that the map stage is annoying.
Jeska Linden: Eduardo Falken: Will be possible to create our own client-sided LSL functions in SL Client Viewer?
Cory Linden: Clearly, if SL is to feel more responsive, we need client side scripting. There are a lot of competing ideas right now on how best to do that.
Jeska Linden: Marbles Tokyo: Is there a way to create top level folders in addition to “my inventory” and “Library” if not, is there plans to allow this in the future?
Cory Linden: No
Jeska Linden: David Frantisek: Are there plans to add distributed computing/peer-to-peer functionality to SL?
Cory Linden: We’ll be publishing a roadmap for SL’s future later this quarter which will talk about that a bit.
Jeska Linden: Kamilion Schnook: Will you accept patches to the input subsystem of SL to use alternative interface devices, such as braile teletype machines, P5 datagloves and wiimotes via something like GlovePIE, and head mounted displays like http://www.3dvisor.com/ ?
Cory Linden: It depends on the patch. Enabling more input devices would be very cool, though.
Jeska Linden: Taft Worsley: What will LL SOP be when a rogue viewer is release and what will they do for preventing its use?
Cory Linden: This is no different from what can be done with libsl right now. If you are worried about a viewer, you should be downloading from secondlife.com
Jeska Linden: Sundog Sakai: In the licensing terms listed@ /developers/opensource/licenses what is meant by “commercial terms”?; Can we still use the GPL with the FLOSS exception even if we are building a proprietary offering, as long as we release the source code under the GPL?
Cory Linden: Not sure, I’ll pass that one to Robla and Ginsu
Jeska Linden: Ting Yue: What would be the prerequisites to open sourcing the server? tech hurdles or more a business decision?
Cory Linden: tech
Jeska Linden: Temptor Redgrave: Has any thought been given to adding semantic information to objects, especially in the form of an ontology, so a object would have not just a form, but a consistant funciton?
Cory Linden: that is a great question and goes to the heart of a search redesign. Of course, semantic data like that is complicated, because you can’t assume correct assignment of meta data. Come to the search town hall when we do it!
Jeska Linden: Marcus Reisman: I would love an update on the sim-caps and backbone projects in the next year?
Cory Linden: The last blog post on it is still pretty correct. We keep rolling pieces out with each update, slowly. We want to be very careful with these changes.
Jeska Linden: Joel Savard: Has the concept of land-based “state snapshot and restore” been considered - allowing a land-owner to “snapshot” the current configuration of objects on their land? This would allow “what-if” construction work where you could restore the land to a previous state without having to rebuild it…
[Torley Linden: The blog post on sim-caps and backbone etc. is here -- http://blog.secondlife.com/2006/12/21/a-big-change-youll-barely-notice/ ]
Cory Linden: Yes, we are actively talking about the right way to do that.
Jeska Linden: Henry Kirshner: Are there any plans to integrate voice chat into sl?
Cory Linden: Folks are already using voice. Such as the language lab project.
Cory Linden: Blender would have to buy me coffee first, maybe a few dates, before I would consider it.
Jeska Linden: David Frantisek: Within the next year, will releases be made to be more integrated with the platform they are running on, so that for instance inventory windows can be dragged outside the main window?
Cory Linden: We hadn’t planned to move in that direction as it make cross platform maintenance more of a pain in the posterior.
Jeska Linden: Marbles Tokyo: Are flexible prims going to stay client side? or are there plans to move them to Server side so that everyone sees the same flexibility?
Cory Linden: Client side for now.
Jeska Linden: Anna Zwiers: Can we have a way to backup inventory? Haven’t been able to edit clothes/character for a week now.
Cory Linden: As previously mentioned, we are talking about how to do that. Also, we have made some pretty substantial equipment purchases to buff out our back end storage.
Jeska Linden: Raven Welesa: Will LL make a way for specific groups to be banned from parcels and estates instead of just having to make everyone a certain group for you to ban them?
Cory Linden: I know that community is planning the next round of group work right now, so that is worth mentioning to them. Will pass along.
Jeska Linden: Draco Flaman: Are there any plans of LL releasing a text-based communication system for mobile phones, so that people can talk/text w/ their friends online?
Cory Linden: Haven’t a few folks done those already?
Cory Linden: OK, last question?
Jeska Linden: Peekay Semyorka: Aside from JIRA, may we have some visibility into the “Bug Report” tool’s database, so OSS developers have a better sense of which bugs are impacting a lot of people, and should receive fix priority?
Cory Linden: Jira exposes voting and other methods for doing that. Take my word, you don’t want to look at Jira’s database.
Cory Linden: OK, that’s all!
Cory Linden: Thank you very much for all the great questions and I look forward to seeing what you do with the open source client. Till next time!
Jeska Linden: Thanks for coming out today everyone, we’ll be posting this transcript to the blog!
January 9th, 2007 at 6:37 PM
Cory, Robla,
That was one of the most incredible town hall meetings I’ve ever had the chance to read about. I was there for part of the time but my viewer crashed for some reason (I had it running as -multiple and was building elsewhere with another avi, I think this might be why–some one mentioned memory leaks?). I would have liked to have been there (perhaps we could meet on the boundaries of four different regions next time, instead of Pooley Stage–that way town hall can meet more laglessly?) persona via avatar.
Are all the town hall meetings hence going to be technical? From a programmer’s perspective this would be interesting news–but I’m wondering about the old town halls where there was audio and questions from skype about features and some interesting points about companies in sl. What about radio linden, does that still happen anymore?
I got done reading Eric S. Raymond’s “The Cathedral and The Bazaar” and I am feeling like I’m seeing something familiar here with the an approach to open source second life (the viewer *is* an excellent place to start). I have yet to build my first hack but I am working with an orphaned project. I just could not find any perticularly neat application to work with that I had user or programmer any experience with. Perhaps OSSecondLife will give me a chance to be a part of the open source model.
Thanks for OSSecondLife,
Dominick.
January 9th, 2007 at 7:57 PM
It would be interesting to know what percentage of people in Second Life would understand even 1/20th of the topics covered in this Town Hall transcript… I suspect less than 2 percent; certainly less than 5 percent. It’s increasingly obvious that Second Life is a VERY stratified society, with no clear road for the 98 percent to ever learn what all the technical stuff means to their everyday online life (without a four-year RL education in a variety of computer science subspecialties). Someday, it would be interesting to have a meeting in which the ‘masses’ could be involved: a feature/benefit forum perhaps? Perhaps a complete glossary of terms used in transcripts such as these would also be useful!
January 9th, 2007 at 9:26 PM
I’ll agree that SL is a stratified society, however I believe that the bulk of SL residents choose to remain ignorant about all the “technical stuff” of their own volition. Higher education is not required, let alone a focus in computer science (I, myself, was an English major).
All that’s needed to understand what’s going on behind the scenes in SL, and how things on the Internet work in general, is some time spent doing a little research. There is a wide variety of resources available that explain, in non-technical terms, what all this “technical stuff” is, what it does, and how it works.
The sad fact of the matter is, many people DON’T WANT to learn, choose to remain ignorant, reject any explanation you try to give them as “too technical,” and then wear their ignorance as a badge as though it were something about which they can be proud. I.e.: “Look at me! I don’t know anything about this technical stuff, and I can’t be bothered to learn because I don’t want to know! I just want to use it!”
This mentality is often infuriating to those of us who took the time to learn about this “technical stuff,” whether as a self-taught hobbyist (such as myself), or someone who pursued a degree through higher education.
Knowledge is power.
Take care.
- SDW ^..^
January 9th, 2007 at 9:39 PM
Heh! I think you nailed it right on the head, Shadow.
January 9th, 2007 at 10:05 PM
I always have to read the transcript since I can’t attend Town Halls during the day. Seems like each time there is some part of the transcript missing. Answers to questions not listed…
Is there a technical reason we are not getting the whole transcript posted?
January 9th, 2007 at 10:22 PM
Hi everyone - sorry I didn’t make it to Pooley during the town hall…I was listening, but it was pretty crowded there. However, let me answer some of the questions which Cory deferred to me
Regarding version control, there’s a wiki page here:
https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Version_control_repository
Be sure to click on the “discussion” tab to see some of the discussion, and log in to add your 2c. As soon as the specification gels, I’ll try to get it built.
Regarding bounties, there’s info about that here:
https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Categories:Bounties
The reason for not coming out the gate with such a thing is that we first need to kinks knocked out of the process for accepting contributions. Only then will we be in a good position to do things that accelerate contribution such as bounty programs.
Finally, these questions regarding licensing, in reverse order:
Sundog Sakai: Can we still use the GPL with the FLOSS exception even if we are building a proprietary offering, as long as we release the source code under the GPL?
Answer: No, the FLOSS exception is purely in place to provide GPL compatibility with licenses that would otherwise be incompatible. We specifically put it there because we use some code licensed under the Apache License 2.0, which is not compatible with GPL 2.0, and we wanted to make sure that people still can legally redistribute all of the open source viewer code as a complete work.
Sundog Sakai: In the licensing terms listed@ /developers/opensource/licenses what is meant by “commercial terms”?
Commercial terms are the terms you would need to agree to to provide a proprietary derivative of the Second Life viewer. We haven’t yet published them, but please contact us if you are interested.
January 9th, 2007 at 10:40 PM
While I agree with Shadow, I think we shouldn’t underestimate the level of technical savvy in the community. Isn’t all building activity really just a very high-level form of programming? It seems that there is an logical educational progressing from building to cut-and-paste scripting to detailed scripting, potentially on to non-LSL programming or genuine interest in this OS project. This is way less polarising than, say, the producer-consumer divide in typical application programming.
In the SL environment there is a high level of motivation for people to get to grips with these progressively more technical issues, since it has a clear impact on one’s life in SL. Compare that with the current state of the web, where the end-user tools are so slick that few people would feel compelled to get deeply technical, even though some status accrues to those who do.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that SL supports a smooth continuum of “tech-headedness”, where people aren’t as polarised into geeks/non-geeks as in other technologies or real life. It’s not necessarily a simple leap from choosing hairstyles to choosing Haskell, but the culture does encourage those baby steps.
Linden, you rock!
January 9th, 2007 at 11:48 PM
“Jeska Linden: Draco Flaman: 12-months of inactivity to recycle non-premium accounts, and 18 months to deactivate premium accounts.. and then how about putting the SL second names up for Use again if enough of them become inactive?
NOWAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! once the name dies LET IT STAY DEAD! Your forgetting something very important. What about those that had that name and the people that befriended etc………….ANd or the problem that avie name occured! NONONONO this idea has been up for chat countless times and I DON`T want to see thise type of careless thinking start being a trend on sl! NO NO to this VOTE! Your asking for all sort of problems Personal real life side and sl as well…………
January 10th, 2007 at 12:23 AM
Usagi, you must have an evil “dead” avatar :)).
But I agree… there’s millions of last names that could be used so why revive the dead ones… pointless.
January 10th, 2007 at 12:47 AM
I’m rather concerned by the reply to my question, essentially saying there is ‘no way’ to prevent homegrown clients from connecting to the main grid, rather than the intended test grid.
Surely this must be a priority requirement for the safety and security of the grid? Will you really accept “sorry I was just trying out a feature of my own SL viewer that went wrong” when the asset server spontaneously combusts?
If people want to play with their SL clients, in a separate area, then there isn’t much that can be done about it - however, when that ‘ability to play’ has a good chance to affect my Second Life, then it becomes of concern to me - and 20,000 others who happen to be online at the time.
It’s clear that you are going ahead with the ‘open source’ project, however a simple change like stopping experiments affecting the main grid would quell a lot of the very legitimate concerns that people have.
We’ve already seen the damage of ‘hacked clients’ with big prims and copybot - are you really prepared for even worse to happen?
Broccoli
January 10th, 2007 at 12:47 AM
MarmelaGramela………………
Its just not me thinking this. But that of a few others. The issue of bring past names back to life is nothing but a *******nightmare is the making! Let the retired names STAY RETIRED!!!!!!!!!! PERIOD. Leave a little what left what whats desent that made this great games history! Don`t sell this part of this game as well! GESH LLABS Use some common SENCE!!!!!!!!!!
January 10th, 2007 at 12:51 AM
Problem is too many things are not thought about, The are just being thrown into the fire thinking, the past where common sence once was is nolong. Beside MarmelaGramela what good is there bring back old names? they are better off letting people just choose their own last name…..
January 10th, 2007 at 1:15 AM
Personally I have no trouble with the tekkie stuff, but I’d agree that this discussion would not mean a whole lot to the majority of SL residents. Nor should it. The ideal remains total transparency to the customer.
I’m looking at this platform as one of those that have potential to grow into Web 2.5-3.0, eventually as a universal front-end, no less. In that context, there is one item that betrays a certain selective attitude which (despite these recent and very worthy open-source moves) could be a blocker, and that is - currently, the demanding and quite specific nature of the system requirements. I think I’ll buy shares in nVidia.
January 10th, 2007 at 1:56 AM
[...] crowd, so a lot of questions could be addressed. You can find a transcript of the town hall on the Official Linden Blog. They also had a relay set up to an IRC channel which went without any problem as far I could see, [...]
January 10th, 2007 at 1:57 AM
Shadow may have hit it on the head. Because everything here is created from nothing instantly and we don’t even pretend to eat reguarly, there are no jobs for waitresses, chefs, miners/farmers etc.
We need raw materials as not everyone coming into second life wants to become sctipters or builders. We can’t all do the same thing.We need roads so people can bus drive others on tours etc.
The average process worker might come here to socialise & explore but not want to learn to program the game, but what then does he do for money to explore things like DCS & related area’s. We don’t want to turn it into a money slog like real life but a 4 hour shift a couple of times aweek perhaps would supplement many’s income. Girls seem to have a lot more entertainment industry jobs available of course. For guys it seems rough to get work.
January 10th, 2007 at 2:14 AM
Problem is too many things are not thought about, The are just being thrown into the fire thinking, the past where common sence once was is nolong. Beside MarmelaGramela what good is there bring back old names? they are better off letting people just choose their own last name…..
Hmm and should we store the inventories of the fallen till the year 3000 too, what if you could chose your last name and were told your favorite pick was unavailable because some griefer used it 26 years earlier.
What about your respect for the guy who took a name you like, played SL for a week then logged out forever 5 years ago, think of how people who haven’t used the AV’s for such long times really feel. They really don’t care. Delete them all from the servers, They don’t count as residents anymore and are only hogging server space. Who know’s how much space used in storage of unused opened freebie packs alone….
.
January 10th, 2007 at 2:25 AM
Jeska Linden: Aston Hildyard: Is there any plan to implement some of the other operators available in most computational solid geometry packages into the SL prim system? That is, is there any plan to permit all boolean operations on primitives, and not just unions?
Cory Linden: Yeah, I want a “not” operation as well. When we get through the current round of architectural and scaling issues, I expect we’ll take a long look at the building tools. Some people, oddly…
Cory Linden: seem to want something called polygons for their modeling needs. Not sure why.
Oh no, they are going to put me out of business.
I am selling a polygon creator in my shop and on SLX:
http://www.slexchange.com/modules.php?name=Marketplace&file=item&ItemID=161476
DisQ Hern
January 10th, 2007 at 3:33 AM
kath sorry makes no sence………..
January 10th, 2007 at 3:53 AM
“”"”"”"”"Jeska Linden: Broccoli Curry: will there be measures in place so that ONLY the official viewer can connect to the main grid, and homemade viewers have their own grid where no damage can be done
Cory Linden: There is no technical means to perfectly ensure that only official viewers can connect to the grid”"”"”"”"”
Guess that means that since it’s not perfect, they aren’t going to try and do anything about it. Nice approach.
As for naming… the first name should stay dead, but last names brought back. I *think* that was the original intention. Just like Sassoon… Seola could never be used but Yoyobobo Sassoon could be created.
If they opened up full names however, usually there’s a few year waiting period in games, then everything associated with that is removed from the database. All items, friends links, stored data, etc… so if someone came with Seola in 5 years, all the friends on my list wouldn’t have an idea it’s me simply because the links to each would be destroyed when clearing it out.
But I still don’t like opening first names, just the last ones every once in a while.
Like some sort of fun ‘throwback to 2004′ kinda thing.
January 10th, 2007 at 4:34 AM
Guess that means that since it’s not perfect, they aren’t going to try and do anything about it. Nice approach.
It is for me. This way I don’t have to worry about my homebrew client I’m slowly starting to put together connecting or not.
January 10th, 2007 at 5:05 AM
“But I still don’t like opening first names, just the last ones every once in a while.
Like some sort of fun ‘throwback to 2004′ kinda thing.”
Yes but then again everyone likes retro……:/ NOT…..
But let the dead alone………Move one with better last names and you can make and tell periods of sl history by the names. If they start this bozo retro reborn idea, sl is just going to kill off the last decent part of waht left of the wonderful beginning to this now ad drive,PR joke of a game. Mind you i love sl and i rather not see such ideas be used for the historical value.
January 10th, 2007 at 5:38 AM
I am somewhat concerned about the security aspects involved, and the approach that Linden Labs are taking towards it. It certainly seems that they avoid answering the questions posed on that subject directly, instead referring to a document that still does not give a solid, straight answer.
To be honest, I was all for keeping the client code locked up. I do believe that Open-Sourcing it is going to create more harm than good.
To demonstrate my point, I will use a real-life example:
The USA and the UK are two very similar countries, despite those who would disagree. One of the staple differences are the laws, especially the ‘Right to Bear Arms’. In a slightly wide shot, I would reference the US as ‘Open Source’, and the UK as ‘Private Code’.
Now, in America the attitude seems to be “Every human has a right to bear arms. We do realise that these weapons fall into the wrong hands, but are equipped and trained to cope with it when it happens.”
Whereas in the UK, they say “No guns. At all. The less people can get hold of them, the less gun crime we will have. The benefits of the public having guns do not outweigh the flaws.”
Which country has the most gun crime? (taken as an average per head)
So take this and replace the guns with Open Source code. While it cannot kill people (I hope those facecious people among you do not take this too literally) it does cause major harm to people, most likely their bank balance. Think about it this way, while those that do copybot or have nothing worth copybotting will have mostly favourable views over the code release, think about those people who build houses for a living, or primmed avatars (or really, any product that sells based on aesthetics rather than script performance). Their entire business can be taken out from under their nose. Is this acceptable?
I do apologise for those of you that are to use this code for honest means, I do not wish to see this taken away from you. Maybe Linden Labs should incorporate a system whereby they register all users using the source code. Clients can be tested on the test grid, but only after a look-over by the Lindens can it be used on the main Grid. Surely this can’t be too hard to incorporate?
January 10th, 2007 at 5:40 AM
Cory Linden: The IP issues are the same as we discussed previously. Meta data is being worked on. I’m actually a little surprised that nobody has started an asset registration business…
I just wanted to comment on this - such a business would not be viable due to lack of a way to enforce violations. Any such registry system a’la copyright registry, trademarks, or patents outside of government and government-approved agencies hold no authority either in court or with LL.
Or maybe I misunderstood Cory’s comment about asset registration? If so I’d like to hear more.
January 10th, 2007 at 5:50 AM
Lewis Nerd says:
We’ve already seen the damage of ‘hacked clients’ with big prims and copybot - are you really prepared for even worse to happen?
The ‘hacked clients’ pros have far outweighed the cons.
January 10th, 2007 at 6:48 AM
“”"”But let the dead alone………Move one with better last names and you can make and tell periods of sl history by the names. If they start this bozo retro reborn idea, sl is just going to kill off the last decent part of waht left of the wonderful beginning to this now ad drive,PR joke of a game. Mind you i love sl and i rather not see such ideas be used for the historical value.”"”"
Care Usagi… you might come off as elitest!!! /sarcasm
January 10th, 2007 at 6:56 AM
“Care Usagi… you might come off as elitest!!! /sarcasm”
Want alitte jello with that mudpie your eating……laughs at the nut…..:/
January 10th, 2007 at 7:05 AM
Chronic, that was me not Lewis, but anyway… please do share the ‘positives’ of hacked clients, because all I am aware of are:
a) God Mode hack, overriding peoples right to privacy.
b) Copybot, overriding people’s rights to ownership.
c) Huge Prims, which if they weren’t potentially damaging, would be included in the regular client.
I also find the dismissive answer about not being able to prevent home-grown clients logging on and potentially damaging the grid - perhaps irreparably - very worrying.
Broccoli
January 10th, 2007 at 7:06 AM
Could it possible to incorporate a digital certificate into the official client when it’s built by the Linden team, and then require that certificate for connection to the main grid? Surely that would be an effective means by which to restrict access to the main grid to the official client?
January 10th, 2007 at 7:14 AM
I’m a bi tdismayed at the town hall meeting. Sl have been down more then up the last few days, and lagg has become so bad, that some objests can’t even rez and load properly. I was hoping they would address what theyare doing to resolve these issues. Being only able to serve 20,000 people of 2 MILLION is a HUGE disservice.
Also, more inmportantly, a system should be put in place to allow connectivity for paying members, but once server population hits 15,000 or so ONLY allow paying members to connect.
Sl MUST serve it’s paying members before non paying players, otherewise with the current situation many people might just not resubscribe.
Maybe giving people a 60 day free trial, and then give them the boot if they do not subscribe would be the best workable solution?
Something MUST be done pretty soon now. All the popular places have had massive lag the last 2 weeks, and transactions now have also now been affected, yet more new members are added daily.
I could care less about future open source plans, and tech jargon.. I care MUCH more if I can log on, and actually use SL, and I suspect that is MUCH more important to ALL users.
What good are all these technical “advancements” if not one can log on, tp, and the lag and packet loss are so bad we cannot use SL at all?
WOW does not have these issues, but then it IS an all paying subscriber base.
January 10th, 2007 at 7:17 AM
I am so tired of the scheduled maintenance always happening in the mornings and on Wednesday. One, I only can be online in the mornings and then only monday through fridays at the most……. why always wednesday mornings…. why not another day, or afternoon?
I had been warned about this before coming to this community, I should have known better that maintenance would eat up one day a week. and then one to two days to “fix” all that was broken on that update. all is a bit much sometimes!
January 10th, 2007 at 7:17 AM
Garee taov: “Sl have been down more then up the last few days”
Really? Cause I’ve been online the last few days and SL has always been there. You mean “a few weeks ago?”
This has actually been a nicely stable period of late.
January 10th, 2007 at 7:19 AM
this is bogis
January 10th, 2007 at 7:19 AM
Cory, you didn’t answer my question from the original questions post:
“Cory, can you please respond to those who feel that this is just an attempt by a for-profit company to get free development work? How does having an open source client substantially benefit anyone other than Linden Lab?”
January 10th, 2007 at 7:33 AM
Unfortunatley I didn’t get to make it to the town hall
However there was one thing of interest I was going to ask, which was regarding inventory backup/save/restore/download - basically something to safeguard your stuff in case of further database issues.
I know quite a lot of people that lost things recently.
Anyway, as i didn’t manage to get there I’ve created a proposal. So if you’d like to see this as a feature, take a look at
http://secondlife.com/vote/vote.php?get_id=2677
Or via the “feature voting” from the main menu, enter proposal id 2677.
I thought this would be worth mentioning and something nice to have. It would give people a little more reassurance and confidence.
January 10th, 2007 at 7:42 AM
who cares about updates?
January 10th, 2007 at 7:44 AM
not me!
January 10th, 2007 at 7:53 AM
As an ex programmer i shouldn’t really say this but
I agree with Gareee Taov.
SL serve your paying customers 1st.
Give them what they pay for, connectivity, less lag, asset servers that work all the time (lots 1000’s over the last few weeks).
1st Land for the prenium accounts that sign up under the belief that they could get some.
Get rid of the dead wood, clear the servers and this will generally speed things up.
If SL was a company in the UK, they would be procesuted under the trade descriptions act for failing to provide the service as advertised.
Just to say it again. Forget the upgrades for now, get things working for those paid members, clear out the dead wood (old dead characters over 12 months is a start) and serve your paying customers before they vote with thier feet. (if they can and haven’t invested too much in SL).
If you do this, U WILL PLEASE 90% of the paying customers instead of 10% of the techies.
and breath…..
January 10th, 2007 at 8:01 AM
i hate second life! and this is why!
January 10th, 2007 at 8:04 AM
Thank you LIEA for your skilled impersonation of a clueless troll. Rarely have I seen someone pull it off to better effect.
January 10th, 2007 at 8:18 AM
@Broocoli
Broccoli, every incident you’ve pointed out has happened before the client was open sourced. This means that even if the code was never released, the threat of cracked clients won’t go away. We were no safer before than now, nor are we any less safer either. The benefits of open sourcing the client that Chronic alluded to are open peer code review, active inclusion of residents in the development process, and the ability for residents to create and submit new features.
For example, I would like to create a client that can stream open source media formats such as Ogg Vorbis and Theora. Currently only Quicktime and mp3 are used, which limits options for users of open source(Linux users) to use inelegant and inefficient wrapper scripts which may or may not work(particularly for Quicktime). By opening up the source code to the client, I can pinpoint the client functions pertaining to streaming media and streaming media playback, and with a little effort add new functionality to handle Ogg and Theora streams. Then I submit it to LL for code review and possible inclusion into the official client. After submission, my code is reviewed not only by LL, but also looked at by other techie-inclined residents. A tiny typo bug is found in the code and corrected by an eagle-eyed reviewer(or several reviewers, as is usually the case in open source development). After the code review is done, LL can either approve or reject the contribution. If accepted, then Macintosh and Windows-using clients gain a new format for streaming multimedia in SL, and Linux-using residents gain the ability to stream their preferred media format. If not, then at least there’s a client that does have a feature the official one doesn’t have. That creates choice and cooperative competition, and that’s always good for everyone.
January 10th, 2007 at 8:24 AM
Gosh I tried reading this blog and got soo lost and just wandered down it but all of a sudden I think I saw that we can’t save our inventories of like clothing and my clothing sets that I spend day working on sometimes. I mean I got most of my stuff for free except my hair and shoes and jewelry and ponygirl stuff that I paid my lindens for too like my lost blue eyes was 20L and now I’m wondering will I lose all of my stuff *somehow* if like lighting struck you there or like don’t you have earthquakes a lot ? please tell me that can’t happen ….. Ever.
January 10th, 2007 at 8:29 AM
El Rob Said:
“So take this and replace the guns with Open Source code. While it cannot kill people (I hope those facecious people among you do not take this too literally) it does cause major harm to people, most likely their bank balance. Think about it this way, while those that do copybot or have nothing worth copybotting will have mostly favourable views over the code release, think about those people who build houses for a living, or primmed avatars (or really, any product that sells based on aesthetics rather than script performance). Their entire business can be taken out from under their nose. Is this acceptable?”
There is a real world parallel here that people seem to continue to ignore. Take a stroll through downtown Los Angeles, or downtown _your major metropolis here_. Notice all the little warehouse shops that sell knockoffs of real, major commercial products - Your Nike, your Rolex, etc. There is no magic potion in the real world that can prevent this. It is fought on two primary levels -
1 - Brand Recognition, and thus the ability to recognize when the brand is being counterfeited. I will guarantee you that if somebody lifts a house or other building made by an established, recognized builder, who has established clear brand recognition in-world, and tries to pass it off as their own creation, they’ll get smacked down inside of a day.
2 - Enforcement - See #1.
It is simply not practical, reasonable, or fair to place the burden squarely on Linden Lab to provide a technical environment which secures content to the extent that seems to be expected by a relatively small group of folks here - notwithstanding the viewer going open source, it simply is not possible, without “to-the-glass” encryption on each and every end user computer system in the world. What is passed to your computer monitor in the form of an image that you view with your eyes is copyable. Period. As has been demonstrated quite handily by libSL, software can and will be reverse engineered. There is NOTHING Linden Lab can do to stop it. The burden is on the content creator to establish their brand and loss prevention strategy soas to minimize their losses. This is the way it works in the real world, this is the only way it will work in the metaverse.
Broccoli Curry Said:
Chronic, that was me not Lewis, but anyway… please do share the ‘positives’ of hacked clients, because all I am aware of are:
“a) God Mode hack, overriding peoples right to privacy.
b) Copybot, overriding people’s rights to ownership.
c) Huge Prims, which if they weren’t potentially damaging, would be included in the regular client.”
I’m starting to get the feeling that those are all you are aware of, simply because those are all you are willing to be aware of. God mode had the net positive effect of having the vulnerability patched. Copybot has been discussed to death, and the net positives from the libSL project are discussed in abundance throughout the forums and blogs. Not even sure how Huge Prims is even a component of this discussion. It has the potential to be used maliciously, and Linden Lab has stated that they will deal with it case by case. By the way, LSL can also be used maliciously - to effectively crash a sim, grief residents, etc. So maybe we should eliminate that?
“I also find the dismissive answer about not being able to prevent home-grown clients logging on and potentially damaging the grid - perhaps irreparably - very worrying.”
The answer was not at all dismissive. It was short, candid, and truthful. And it remains so whether or not the client goes open source. I actually appreciate cory when he says “No. Next question.” when nothing more needs to be said in response to a given question. It is not dismissive at all, it is simply all that is necessary to answer the question.
On what, exactly, do you base your presumption that these “home grown” clients can potentially cause irreparable damage to the grid? A small few of you seem to keep beating your breasts and insisting that the end of the world is nigh, yet in the face of all of the actual facts and details that are right before your eyes in the form of numerous responses to your oft repeated rounds of baseless cries of armageddon, you yourselves have yet to provide a single fiber of evidence on which to base your contentions. I say it is your turn now, to bring forward your evidence to support the concerns you seem so very passionate about. Others have gone out of their way to answer your concerns, yet this horse never seems to die.
January 10th, 2007 at 8:33 AM
I agree with you Garee on the aspect of repairing what problems we have now instead of adding more…as for “only paying customers being allowed on” i do NOT agree there, although i do pay, i know of many people who do not have credit cards to play (smart people, they arent slaves to CC companies) but still enjoy it tremendously…leave them alone, they have all the rights being on SL as paying.
January 10th, 2007 at 8:35 AM
Ugh, as paying customers do….
January 10th, 2007 at 8:43 AM
Broccoli - with your sense of paranoia i am surprised that you use the net at all.
January 10th, 2007 at 8:55 AM
Ricky,
I’m not Cory (obviously), but the benefits of OS to the community are potentially staggaring.
There are thousands of people that develop and use SL.
Most of these people won’t do anything with the SL source code - leaving us in exactly the same position we were in anyhow with respect to them.
Some will look for malicious acts to perform - but the security of a system is Server side, not client side. evicting people from your land will always be possible, and no custom client will permit connection to a server that the user is prohibited from.
Many, however, will look on this as an opportunity to assist LL in tracking down some of the bugs in the code - there is a vested interest, both in usability terms, and in reputation terms for people to contribute to the stability and development of the codebase.
SL going to an open source client means that the “good guys” on the outside now have all the resources and permission they need to help improve the client - the “bad guys” were in any case pretty good at working out what was being sent and received, and reverse engineering the client.
In time, this will, I hope, see a marked improvement in the client and permit LL to devote more resources to sorting out the meaty problems on the server end.
As for people using home-grown clients. I really don’t see a reason to worry about it. We already have server based tools for handling disruptive people in our SIMs and most people with home-grown clients are likely to be disinterested in crating havoc for others.
A few bad apples are no reason to thrown most of the barrel away and keep just one or 2 bad ones.
January 10th, 2007 at 8:57 AM
Glad I had something to read while the grid was down for maint. I would like to know why av’s cant select their own last name?Also I would like to know why we have an island with 1200 scripts running and its constantly lagging like a pig?And why is it so difficult for people to purcahse Lindts?Its so frustrating when people wanna spend money and they cant buy it because they cant immediately access it, and then they tp out. Other than the lag we thought we were buying our way out of, I find my Sl experience to be very exciting. Lately, with so many people online the profits have been up, hope you resolve these lag issues so it stays that way.Good job on the TH, found it very interesting, hopefully I dont miss the next one, as I wouldnt mind particpating
January 10th, 2007 at 9:04 AM
@Broccoli Curry: I’m rather concerned by the reply to my question, essentially saying there is ‘no way’ to prevent homegrown clients from connecting to the main grid, rather than the intended test grid.
I’m confused how this applies to OSS, considering LibSL happened before the viewer was opened. The danger already was there. At least now, you won’t have people guessing about how to connect — they’ll have the code.
@Broccoli Curry: Surely this must be a priority requirement for the safety and security of the grid? Will you really accept “sorry I was just trying out a feature of my own SL viewer that went wrong” when the asset server spontaneously combusts?
I think you’re over-estimating how much damage a viewer can do. Before changes take place, the commands to implement those changes still have to be verified through the server. Even if this worst-case scenario comes true, LL is prioritizing better inventory backup/recovery.
@Broccoli Curry: We’ve already seen the damage of ‘hacked clients’ with big prims and copybot - are you really prepared for even worse to happen?
What long-term damage have they caused again, other than FUD?
January 10th, 2007 at 9:06 AM
@Antonius Misfit:
Thank you for explaining how so succinctly how a non-technical person might benefit from the SL decision to open source the viewer. Most of the posts here only made me fearlful that I will lose the many items I have purchased, as a “free” user, from my inventory. Your post makes me a little less fearful.
@Gareee taov and Everyone that Disses “Free” Account Holders:
Not all “free” users are deadbeats. I wouldn’t have tried SL unless it was free to join. Once I tried it I liked it. I don’t have a lot of money so I had a choice to make. I could have joined as a subscriber and saved my weekly stipends from SL to buy things, or I could remain a “free” user and buy Lindens on the market and buy the girlie things I need from the paid subscribers that have all those wonderful stores I like.
I chose to put the equivilent of my SL membership fees in the pockets of the shop owners, not in SL’s pockets.
So it would be nice to see a distinction between free users with no account records on file, and those of us “free” users that did register payment information and that do spend money at the shops and stores of registered users.
To the register users that have put your time and money into making SL a really fun place, THANK YOU.
Def
January 10th, 2007 at 9:10 AM
When’s the test grid gonna open?
January 10th, 2007 at 9:11 AM
There seems to be a great deal of fear, ignorance, and a general stigma surrounding the decision to go open source with the client.
Anyone who doesn’t think this move is the greatest thing since sliced bread, Read on.
Fact is, an open source SL was inevitable. Several people, myself included, have been developing their own SL clients for some time now, and for entirely legitimate purposes. A great deal of serious bugs and potential exploits have been found, and dealt with, because of this.
In the short term, open sourcing the client will aid in spotting and repairing further serious bugs before they can become an issue. Temporary grid instability will undoubtably occur, but the long term result will yield an increase in server-side and client-side stability. This is just the tip of the iceberg.
Long-term, users will be able to utilize the source to create additions to SL, such as object import-export, offline modeling and scripting, UI customization, client-side scripting, etc etc.
Albeit conjecture on my part, I see SecondLife as the birth of a new generation of the world wide web. Right now, just about every company, and a lot of individuals, have websites. Little places on the web to call their own. Despite over a decade of existance, websites are more or less the same. SecondLife, on the other hand, offers a far more interactive and personal experience.
More and more individuals and companies are going to want an SL presence.
Unfortunately, it requires a great deal of resources and work to maintain this virtual community. By opening the server, the stress is shifted from LL to those hosting the servers.
So could you host your own private sim for free? Most likely.
Wouldn’t LL lost money? No.
You can host your own webserver for free.. But you aren’t going to see much traffic without a domain name registration. I imagine LL will release the server and client, but there will be a fee for your server to integrate with the grid. Brilliant.
Conjecture for the most part, but a very real posibility.
- Chief Executive Manager
- Metaverse Solutions, LLC.
January 10th, 2007 at 9:26 AM
Well, everyone says “The Pros outweigh the Cons” for the sex offender registries, too. But then, most people just ignore the facts on Sex Offenders. Thing like:
-Most minors who are victims of such sex offenses are victimized by a relative or an acquaintance.
-Most registered sex offenders with accurate registration information are now law abiding citizens. If they were not, they would not be registered, so the truly dangerous sex offenders are not tracked by this.
-The Sex Offender Registry is to protect Children, but blatantly ignores the threat other criminals and behaviors pose to children’s safety. For example, in 2005, less than seventy people were known to have been murdered for sexual reasons. That’s of over seven thousand murders that occurred where they could ascertain the purpose the murder was committed. Alcoholics, on the other hand, kill almost seventy people each day, INCLUDING CHILDREN!!! You do the math.
-The Sex Offender Registry is being used for vigilante style crimes. It is being used to find sex offenders and kill them, which also puts their families at risk.
-Sex Offenders are the second LEAST likely group of criminals to reoffend. Who is the LEAST likely group? Murderers.
Open Sourcing may be a “good idea,” but show me some FACTS that will prove it’s a great idea. Please refrain from giving opinions or spreading false or misleading information.
An example of false or misleading information? “Firefox is more secure than Internet Explorer.” FireFox has a 30% browser share. Almost 70% is owned by Internet Explorer. If you’re going to hit a target, and only one target, which would you choose? The one that hurts 70% of people, or the one that hurts 30%? The answer’s pretty clear to me.
January 10th, 2007 at 9:30 AM
Yes, these problems were caused before the OS announcement - but by a group working on the code for the client.
What you had before was one group, given special permission (why, nobody knows) to break a part of the ToS that prohibits derivative products - ie personalised clients.
What you have now is the whole thing made much easier for anyone with programming skills, and the ability to get hold of the code and do their own thing - either positively (which is the hope of Linden Lab) or negatively (which will be the most likely reality).
Remember back to when the accounts database got hacked. Why was Second Life hacked, and not some other game? Because the big economy is advertised, and it’s known that some people have a lot of money in this game. Now, all that needs to happen is someone to download a third party client promising extra features - with a keylogger embedded - and goodbye account. It happened with Sims Online for bot programs, it’s happened in World of Warcraft with third party addons, and it’ll happen here.
There are only two ‘mostly safe’ situations:
1) Only using the official client from the SL website.
2) Only using your own modified version of the client, that you know what you have done to.
Any other client is a risk that I, and many others, will be unwilling to take. However, you can’t really factor into this the unknown dangers of another person modifying their client some way to intercept data streams and … hmmm … copy other people’s details? Spoof their account? The list is endless.
I want the best for SL and its community. I just have concerns about OS.
Broccoli