Re: [ogpx] Cable Beach + VWRAP update

[Morgaine <[e-mail]>]

I spoke at length with John about his blog post.

Unfortunately, it seems that his model has some serious restrictions as a
result of hardwired service coupling, with only a single deployment model
being allowed.  This is a deployment in which the AD dictates region asset
policies to RDs or regions through central inventory policy.  This appears
to be much less flexible than the multiple deployment models that we have
been discussing here, where we gained much flexibility by using multiple
asset services and keeping agent and region policies separate.

In addition, the model adds communication between ADs, whereas in our VWRAP
discussions there was no communication with AD2 when an agent from AD1
teleported from RD1 to RD2.  Ie. we needed no prior federation, whereas
John's model does.  In effect this proposal just extends the world
controlled by AD1 with additional regions that have no say in local asset
policy, as in the original OGP.  We've gone beyond that in VWRAP to allow
for tourism between worlds with different region policies, in which only the
agent identity and multi-world assets are common.

Also, in John's model there are no independent asset services, instead you
can use only a single inventory service which is tightly coupled to the
Agent Domain with which you have authenticated.  All your assets are
accessed through this centralized inventory service, which means that your
AD controls the region asset policy of the regions you visit, since whether
you are allowed to acquire objects from the foreign RD2 is dictated by AD1
instead of by RD2.  In other words, there can be no useful cross-world
tourism for your agent except with worlds that have assets allowed by your
AD.

To a first degree then (and bearing in mind that I've already discussed this
extensively  with John so this understanding is at least partially correct),
this appears to be just the original "let's grow SL" OGP protocol but with
OpenID added.  It doesn't appear to offer the cross-world interop that we've
been working towards in VWRAP, since that requires Destination Determines
(Local) Policy, just like in the real world.

I'll have to see the model in action to understand it fully, but at first
glance this is a recipe for creating walled gardens with no interop at all
except to federated worlds.  There is no deployment option in it to do any
more, whereas we've been talking about many more deployment options because
of the independence of VWRAP services.

As a footnote, this really highlights why such things should be discussed
here on this list first before being added to a draft spec --- I'm very glad
to see John doing that here and giving us the opportunity for comments prior
to spec time.

PS. The above problems are "fixable" (but awkwardly) by making John's
hardwired AD inventory extensible on the client.  Whenever a dictatorial AD
disallows placing a foreign region's assets in its restricted inventory
service, the client could automatically use a more flexible inventory
service instead, extending symmetrically the user's perception of inventory
contents beyond that of the AD.  I don't advocate this approach though, as
it's a fix to a problem that shouldn't be there.  We should begin with a
clean model from the start by keeping services decoupled so that a user
controls which assets she references in inventory, and not her identity
provider.


Morgaine.






=================================

On Sat, Jan 16, 2010 at 1:13 AM, Hurliman, John <[e-mail]>wrote:

>  My post got a bit long and includes some pictures, so I put the Cable
> Beach + VWRAP update in a blog post at
> http://www.jhurliman.org/2010/01/merging-vwrap-and-cable-beach/
>
>
>
> The comments on that post are closed to encourage discussion to move to the
> appropriate IETF mailing list (OAuth-WG or VWRAP).
>
>
>
> John
>
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