Re: [vwrap] [wvrap] Simulation consistency

[Carlo Wood <[e-mail]>]

On Sat, 2 Apr 2011 14:12:59 GMT
"[e-mail]" <[e-mail]> wrote:

> BTW, the Red Zone statistics of 9 million  scans with only 78,000
> rogue viewers captured lets us know that this  problem is exaggerated
> -- and usually by engineers who claim there is no  technical solution.

Just for the record, from a hacker/engineer: there is no technical
solution. It is possible to copy everything (and without being detected
by a "Red Zone" which can only detect rogue viewers that were released
to the public and explicitly make a point of being detectable
in the first place (call that bragging: no fun in releasing a "k3wl"
viewer if others (or even the coder himself) can't see that it is being
used.) So, there is a psychological advantage for the detectors, but
not really a technical one.

Lets concentrate on textures for the moment to explain this.

In order to see an object, or clothing, with the appropriate textures,
those textures have to be downloadable for the viewer. There is nothing
you can do about that short of running the whole viewer server-side
and providing a video. But even in that case it would technically be
possible to rip the textures: they are still visible (ie, you could
make a screenshot of the surface of a wall). I don't consider the
video-broadcast to even be remotely interesting, certainly not from the
viewpoint of VWRAP so lets forget that for the moment and just accept
that it is possible for anyone to store whatever they SEE to their harddisk.

Secondly, if the first creator could upload this texture then so can
the ripper. And don't tell me software exists that can detect if
an uploaded texture "looks like" one of the already existing billion
textures that were uploaded before. If the texture is converted twice,
ie from jpeg2000 to jpg to tga and then uploaded, then you'd need a
human to look at the original and the newly uploaded texture at the
same time to judge that it is MAYBE a copy - which then can only be
proved in court if the original creator can prove that his original
textures are 100% his own and not, for example, downloaded from the
internet somewhere (because in that case the other uploader could
have used the same source).

A real problem, currently in SL, is imho the complete lack of
support for FREE things. The amount of restriction (for people with
honest viewers) is tremendous: if you're not an expert or do not pay
attention for a second, then your creation is not truely free anymore.
Everything defaults to very copyleft unfriendly settings. I'm trying to
get my friends, who are very willing in that regard, to only create
full permission stuff, but it's simply near impossible to keep
something full permission and often we're stuck with something nobody
else can change or edit because the creator forgot to set the bit of
the contents of an object after changing the group etc blah blah...

For example, last a good friend of me wanted my help with making a
large amount of changes on his sim: hunderds of objects had to be
adjusted... He was willing to:
1) Add me to any group necessary.
2) Give me his build rights
3) Transfer any object to me (temporary ownership transfer)
4) Make any adjustments to the objects and the objects contents
   needed to allow me to access what I needed to access.
etc etc

The end result: He had to do it all by himself. It was impossible to
give me enough access to help him (for those who don't believe that,
one of things involved changing the "anyone can move" bit of an
object in the contents of objects: it is not possible to take anything
out of the contents (ie copy it to your inventory) when it's no
transfer, and therefore you can't edit it, even though it's modify
and you get all the rights that the owner can give you).

Sorry, but that is unacceptable; and it CLEARLY shows that something is
missing from the protocol.

Now the above example doesn't show that a free object is not supported,
it only make clear that non-free objects can be very annoying even in
situations where the owner has all the rights to do what he wants to
do. There are many other such examples. Hence, it shows that it is very
annoying that an object is non-free by default at so many levels that
you need an IQ of over 140 to create one and those permissions erode
quickly to non-free. Even the so called "freebies" are non-free by the
way: they are almost always no transfer. Hell, even the default shape
that you can when you create a new account is no transfer, what kind of
insanity is that?!

I think you might find a lot of people, like myself, a lot more willing
to help out with thinking of ways on how to protect property in virtual
worlds when first it is assured that those who want to create things
that are FREE are equally supported as the commercial guys out there.

-- 
Carlo Wood <[e-mail]>