Gotta love permissions

Sorry if I'm moaning in the wrong forum.

Before I start my rant, I just want to say, I have indeed read the thread in the concept forum explaining permisions.
/8/0b/6729/1.html

Without further ado, my rant:

- I hate permissions. I really do. A friend of mine and I built a door together. The other day, we realized that neither of us could make a copy of it. This was irritating. Just now, I built a table, that was created by me, and is owned by me, that I cannot copy or modify. Unfortunately, it was my only one. This is infuriating.

- I would really like to be able to specify a "default" set of permissions on everything I make. I have never once purposely set something to nomod, nocopy or notransfer. A countless number of times, I have had to give someone yet another copy of whatever object/texture/script because I set all the permissions wrong. I'm sure there are dozens of people out there who were too polite to ask for a second, mod/copy version of whatever I just gave them.

- I would really like something more powerful than "Grant Modify Permissions". I want a "Let them do anything I can do, including rob me blind in the middle of the night". The risk this incurs to my stuff pales in comparison to the agravation of dealing with permissions. "Grant Modify Permissions" seems to be the worst of both worlds. Enough power to screw stuff up, not enough power to actually be helpful.

- A recursive, set all permissions and permissions of contents, and permissions of the contents of my contents etc would be useful. This way, I don't have to manually click everything I own, and check its permissions. Ideally, I could select my entire inventory and say "make sure everything I ever made is copy/mod/transfer".

- Incidentally, while I'm on my soapbox, I really wonder if people are a little overzealous with property access lists. Just because you have a gun doesn't mean you should shoot people with it. I was in Mauve the other day, and there was this property I couldn't enter. Fine fine, okay. But just as I was turning to go, I see that they had this nice prominent Vote/Donation booth. Fat chance.

Please tell me I'm a noob, and that I've made a horrible mistake, and all these permission problems can be fixed by hitting Ctrl-Alt-Shift-F8 or something..

YES!

I totally agree with yah Francis. The new permissions system really makes it *alot* more difficult to work on a project with a group, when you dont want to spend the money to make a physical group (with a title) and/or are working with only one other person.

A 'grant full inventory modification permissions' would help alot, or a modification to the current 'grant modify permissions' that allows people to grant to others the ability to modify otherwise non-modifyable inventory items.

==Chris

If you OWN an object you can always mod/copy.

If you give an object away or sell it, even though you are the *Creator*, you cannot modify it (unless the current owner allows you to, either by being in a group, or by editing your rights via your calling card).

Making things with your friends, I'd suggest joining a group together, you can easily create your own (although I think groups require 3+ members). Once grouped, make sure the objects you create have the group permissions set. (note: make sure your group is actively set on your avatar, else you cannot edit specific-group permissioned items).

Bos

p.s. I'm not entirely happy with permissions, but my grumble is that they are not secure enough.

The permissions suck and never should have changed. Actually most recent changes to this game have been for the worse but who am I to tell LL what to do.
Making a group requires three people, not two, costs 100 bucks and we are limited to 10 groups, which sucks. I'm always maxed out and having to leave groups I didnt want to leave. Actually I think everything should be free to copy and the money grubbers who want monopolist control of everything can go send their resume to [email]bill.gates@microsoft.com[/email]
We should get a feature voting thing like so many projects out there have - I think LL sometimes gets paranoid when a very small minority of users complain that feature X sucks. Just wait until they start charging real monthly dollars for land ownership.

Not in my experience. I can create a box, take it into my inventory, take it out again and not be able to do a thing with it.

And numerous other similar niggles; I can put one of my own scripts into one of my own creations, and end up with no mod permissions on the item - which I assume is a bug, as is the one above.

I thought permissions were supposed to carry over into and out of your inventory now? No such luck. I tell you, if I gave Misty one copy of that ladybug yesterday I must have given her a dozen. Half of the times, she couldnt see the permissions as I'd set them anyway; I get out a ladybug, set it to modify, copy and free to copy by anyone ... she cant copy it. I set it to sale for 0$. She cant buy it. I give her a copy direct. It says no mod no copy despite the fact that in my inventory all rights are set. It bugs me. A lot. I don't think permissions have worked right once for me yet! And it's a pain, as has already been said, that the default setting is that no one can do anything.

But the main thing that is a right royal pain in the butt - and actually appears to be by design - is when someone else does a script for something you made and THEY become the creator of your work and the permissions of THEIR script override your object permissions!

Now I can understand that the person might be willing to drop a script into something for you and yet not let you see the script, and I can live with that (just about), but why not handle it like it does if you have a no mod script in your inventory and just not allow viewing? And why on gods green earth would I suddenly find that not only do I have no mod or copy rights on my own creation but that its actually someone elses IP altogether now?!

Are you guys filing bug reports about these things or just complaining?

I would very much like permissions to default to "most permissive". It's a huge waste of my time having to explicitly make everything modifyable or copyable when I give it to people.

And speaking for myself, I'm just complaining.

I third the motion for permissions defaults at least... but all I need personally is the Allow anyone to Copy checkmark.

If I build it just for me, I'll uncheck it. If I build something that someone thinks is cool (and the content is mine alone to give) I'll happily give a copy away. (where's that Linux client?

Doesn't cost me a thing and I've got this crazy millionaire Uncle Philip who gives me money every week if I need it

As far as the permissions problems there *are* some weird things going on. Including not being able to copy Free to Copy items. And yes I reported it... Jeff Linden wasn't even able to take a copy so it's being looked at at least.

I also had a similar experience where I took a moddable, copyable item out of inventory and all of a sudden it became no mod, no copy. At the time I wrote it up the the HD crash that LL was still working on at the time... I'll go check and see if I still have that item and problem.

I also think it sucks that groups have to be 3 people.
There are plenty of people I like in game but there are many situations I want to give permission to only 1 other person... plus as Chris pointed out it still doesn't always let a group member do anything they want to an item.

ah..
the good old days.

fen-

I figured Francis wouldpost here about this, I came to rant myself at first but here we go, she did it for me

Yes, that table she mentioned in her post, at first I could actually copy itmes on it, ( I was playing with some cusinos she made) then all of asudden I wasn't able to at all... even one object i made myself I couldn't copy!

Very frustrating.

Well, I believe that groups of 2 actually work. But groups have their own set of problems too. For instance, group-owned objects can't give out notecards (#%@#% thought this one up?) and can't rez objects.

And to Bosozoku Kato, if you can show me how I can make a copy of my own table that I own and created, I would be greatful. However, I assure you, that it cannot be done.

Eggy, sometimes you don't want "free to copy". Like, you give someone a gift, and part of what makes it special is that it's unique. Not having "free to copy" makes sense sometimes.

FYI, I'm just complaining. The things that bother me are not bugs, because they are "to specification". I'm saying that the specification should be changed, and I dunno how to file a bug that Linden philosophy is wrong.

Eggy I do not agree at all.
I've made one little permission problem in DarkLife once, and not much later someone found it and used it to cheat.
You DO agree that a multiplayer game with cheats is pretty useless???
There are some weird things with permissions though.
It seems like if you have an object in your inventory, and set the next-owner permissions on there (right click->properties) and then give it to someone else, it's still no-copy no-mod....
sometimes....

Have any of you guys tried reporting this as a bug?

Eggy wrote:


"Everything" Okay, think about this...
We all decide we'll take your name. We'll all be Eggy Lippman. Now what are you? What are we?

Is the disco copyable? Are the games in it? I think I'll open up a disco with zero effort because I'll just copy your group's work. I can do this, because I, too, am "Eggy Lippman".

(Global) Open Source, blah. I'm a capitalistic ninny, and I always will be. My work is my work, and distributed how I see fit. Because I am not "Eggy Lippman", I am Bosozoku Kato, and this is MY kitty, which I made with my little hands. If I want you to have a kitty I might choose to sell you one. Else you can find another vendor to make you a product and offer a better deal. This is what capitalism is all about.

Capitalistic midget,
Bos

p.s. I'm still unhappy with permissions, but only because they aren't strict enough. Still have loopholes that don't fully protect the creator's work.

You tell em Fran

Just for claification, two does not equal a group. You have to have three or your group will be disbanded. Here is a humorous thing I saw concerning this.

A newbie couple created a two person group so they could share their things. They deeded their land to their new group. Played around with land permissions and wound up restricting access to the group. The group was disbanded by the Lindens because there was not three people. The land still belonged to the non-existant group and they got locked out of their own land!

No names have been used to protect the innocent, but the one I talked to about it thought it was rather humorous.

With that said, there does need to be an easy way to share mod rights with a friend.

Via calling cards you can Loki. But I'd use it only for good friends you trust, because it affects all your stuff.

Bos

Yeah, your right Boso. I remember seeing notices in the past that I had been given modify rights to so and so's stuff, and another notice following saying they had been revoked, hehe. I need to look at that closer, lots of people want to share their stuff and I need to be able to tell them how. Thanks.

Mark, security through obscurity is bad. Open source code is historically less buggy since there are many more eyes to inspect it. I already told you how to make your game perfectly secure even if the channels are known, using a technique similar to real world secure systems based on Key Distribution Centers. If you had open sourced your code, either me or Ama would have implemented such a system into it already.
Boso you have every right to be a "capitalist ninny", and I have every right to be a pinko commie
I couldnt care any less if any of you want to go around using my silly nickname. It doesnt have any special value to me, and theres plenty of people using similar nicknames on the web.
The games at the MGM Grand werent made by me, but the chairs and tables I made for it were indeed free to copy and could also be found at the bazaar. Plus a lot of people have had clubs and bars out there and I dont go whining about it.
You are not special. I should remind you that whatever you can build or script, I can too, and so can 100 other people out there, some of which might even make it better than any of us.
I never understood why people in SL have such a pressing need to feel special and unique - IRL a lot of people have made a lot of money by providing exactly the same thing as their competitor, but at much lower prices.
There is no need to "protect" creators. There's very little in the way of creation anyway. Everything we do here has been done before IRL, and most of what people make are exact copies of existing real world objects.
What would you say is something important and original enough to protect?
When Graham Bell went to patent the telephone, Elisha Gray followed with his independently developed telephone on the same day. If Bell had caught a cold and postponed his patent filing, Gray would now be known as the "creator" of the telephone.
While we were busy with DarkLife, a whole group was busy with Akar and this ZHugh Becquerell (who was a noob at the time!) was also independently working on his own MMORPG thingy.
And back in 1876 there were TONS of people trying to create a telephone, all over the world, simply because they had the telegraph, saw its obvious limitations and the telephone was an immediate and inevitable consequence.
You cant own an idea, and shouldnt try. We are nothing but an organic robot, we are not unique but rather easily replaceable, and our ideas are simply a product of our times.

Eggy if you create an object, put it in your inventory, and take it out and suddenly can't edit it, you should file a bug report. Same for if you put a script into an object and suddenly can't edit it. If you don't like bug reports ask someone for help. That never happens to me.

Recently I made a jet and I'm selling it for $1 copy/mod in the hopes that talented people like BK can tweak it, call it their own and resell it for $1000. Not that they need the help, but to save them time reinventing the wheel. Out of curiosity, what camp does that put me in Eggy?? Am I friend or foe to open source?

Friend? Foe? It's not a war Jack
It's not a contest either. You can do whatever you want in SL or outside it. This is a forum. We're here to debate and express our opinions, throw our ideas around and have fun
I'm not here to judge people and certainly not attack them, merely to philosophize on abstract notions such as patents, copyrights, "innovation" etc.
I have filed many bug reports in the past. I dont think this is a bug as much as a design flaw. What I really want is an option to make my inventory act like a bag again and my objects/scripts free to copy/mod as default.

Yea, I want a way to make and entire object copy mod too. I want to give a game to someone tonight but there are 80 individual textures that need copy/mod turned on before I can give it to him. Thats gonna be a fun 15 minutes

You sound like an open source expert Eggy and I don't know anything about Open Source so I still want your opinion on where someone like me fits into the open source movement.

That is a common statement that is put out there as fact, without any empirical data to back it up. If this process produces such secure, non-buggy code, please explain the following:

According to a report published November 12 by Aberdeen Group, "Security advisories for open source and Linux software accounted for 16 out of the 29 security advisories - about one of every two advisories - published for the first 10 months of 2002 by Cert (www.cert.org, Computer Emergency Response Team)."

http://www.newsforge.com/software/02/11/14/1913227.shtml?tid=2

Security advisory list for Linux - there are close to 50 advisories, just for the month of November 2003.
http://features.linuxtoday.com/security/

Oh, mind you, Jack, I'm not an expert on anything. Take my comments at face value.
The Open Source / Free Software movement is more about openness and freedom than non-profitability. It's mostly centered around an alternative way of licensing software, called the GNU GPL - GNU General Public License. The straight dope can be found at http://www.gnu.org/licenses/licenses.html#GPL but I'll give you the gist. To license something under the GPL:
1 - You must freely distribute your source code with the application or make it available somewhere else. You may optionally charge a small fee to cover your distribution costs.
2 - You must allow your users to copy and modify your source as they see fit (thereby creating on their own a new version of the application) and you must allow them to distribute their modified version. However, this new version must also be licensed under the GPL.
Which means 1 and 2 apply all over again to the new version.
Open Source software is typically developed by large numbers of volunteers. If you like a linux game and want to add a feature or fix a bug, you can hop on over to sourceforge.net, download the source code and just do it.
You may also submit a patch to the original developer, so he will include your fix or feature in the official version, or heck you can take his engine and make a whole new game based on it.
As you can see, Open Source is a boon to software diversity and creativity. There are so many things to choose from in your average Linux distro, so many cool little features and options. You can spend hours just playing with all of them. And if you cant find a particular feature in any software, you can add it. Or take some code from one app and use it in another one, mixing features from both to make your ideal version.
With Windows, you're stuck. There is often no easy way to change it to suit your needs. Imagine that you're left handed and it would make more sense to you if the minimize and close buttons on each window were on the left. You're stuck with whining about it forever and praying that someday MS will remember to add a feature like that. In Linux you can just change a couple values in a couple lines of code and the buttons will be on the left.
Of course this assumes some technical knowledge. But as time goes by and computers become more mainstream, everyone and their mother will either know a little about coding or know a friend who will do it for them.
And the good thing is, you can redistribute it. So if someone on the other side of the world also likes the buttons on the left, they can download your patch.
Open Source therefore provides a way for everyone on the planet to collaborate on the Internet to make their software better suit their needs. And the best thing is it's free. It's free of charge and free as in freedom. Because it wasnt made by slaves working 80 hour weeks in some giant corporation with a vested interest in screwing you out of as much money as possible. Microsoft, among many others, has this awful practice of trying to lock you into their products. For instance the whole 5-yr long lawsuit was about their bundlgin and integration of Internet Explorer with windows. Basically they made it so you not only get IE with windows but cant remove it at all. They didnt need to do it, they just made it so people would start using their browser, killing netscape in the process.
This removed your freedom of choice. Even if you install an alternative browser, whenever you open a folder it is IE opening the folder.
Plus you know those rumors about microsoft sending all sorts of information back to themselves, about what software you have installed and stuff? Some of it is actually true. How can you know exactly what microsoft is doing with your data? You cant. With Open Source software its all open - you can check it yourself, or have someone check it, and be satisfied that you know exactly what is going on with your computer at all times.
This also applies to SL. How can you know that beautiful scripted door you bought for your house isnt actually recording everything you say and sending it via IM or email to the scripts author? You cant, but if the script was open you could check for llInstantMessage and llEmail commands, which are somewhat suspicious to find in a simple door.
Ok, I'm tired
Slashdot.org is a good place to hang out and read some news and comments if you want to get into the open source thing. If you havent already, try out a Linux distro.
Knoppix (www.knoppix.net) boots right off a CD without any installation process and its a great way to demo Linux to new people. Mandrake (www.mandrake.org) is my favorite brand of Linux. Insanely easy to set up and with a huge selection of software packages. It's actually easier to install than windows, in terms of how many choices and raw clicking you must do to get it up and running
Red Hat is one of the most popular distros, I use it in college but its not quite as friendly as mandrake. Debian is the best for experienced users and purists, since it doesnt carry any packages that arent open source. Slackware is widely regarded as the most stable and an old favorite among old-timers. This stability comes at the cost of using only older packages that have been tried and tested time and time again.
There are also more open source operating systems. Apple's kernel, called Darwin, has its source available. Unix systems such as the various BSD variants are also open source. These are under a different license - not GPL - but still have the source readily available. GNU has also been developing their own kernel called HURD for a long time. LONG time... think "daikatana" or "duke nukem forever"
A lot of people, companies and even countries are moving to open source because its cheap, it preserves your freedoms, its endlessly customizable, and it can create jobs in countries that had so far relied entirely on american corporations for all their software needs.
SL is built mostly on open source software, and that penguin tshirt in your inventory is actually a linux tshirt, featuring tux, the cute linux penguin mascot.
Let me know if you need anything else. There are lots of open source advocates in SL, heck, nearly every coder i've ever met in or out of SL is an open source advocate and at least partly a linux user
Even my non-technical girlfriend installed and used linux a few times. She liked the cool games, "frozen bubble", "jezzball", "clanbomber", "liquid wars" and she also thought it was much prettier than windows

The Aberdeen group is a corporate whore that gets PAID to produce these studies and has everything to gain from obtaining results that are favorable to their clients

"Lies, damn lies and statistics" - you can milk any sort of information out of them if you twist the facts hard enough.
They noted that the *raw number* of vulnerabilities *posted* for Linux was more than for Windows and jumped to the conclusion that Linux was less secure than Windows.

First of all the metric used is flawed - it failed to weight each vulnerability according to its severity and what percentage of the installed base is vulnerable, among other things.

The raw number of vulnerabitlities is irrelevant. MS has a non-disclosure policy regarding security info, so most things never get posted anywhere. It is the type of vulnerability that matters, and most of what was posted for Linux was not remotely exploitable and affected only a small group of people with a peculiar non-standard configuration. It was the exact opposite for windows, most were remote root exploits where the hacker gained full control over the computer and it affected all who used IE or IIS.
Also, they conveniently miscounted the total. If you had actually read the link you posted rob himself noted it. Aside from that, they also made some convenient mistakes such as counting the same vulnerability in 3 different distributions - "brands" - of linux as 3 different vuilnerabilities. Just because 3 different companies distribute one buggy application with one vulnerability doesnt make it three different apps with 3 different vulnerabilities

Also, for most Linux software, there's a new patch out every night including the very latest bugfixes. Linux's development philosophy is "release early, release often". Which means that you get software as it evolves, not when it is considered "finished". When was the last Internet Explorer version, a year ago? Do you know that IE7 isnt coming at all for your computer, and that you'll only get it by upgrading to the new version of windows in a couple of years?

Using an honest analysis and valid metric, a Linux system deployed for the same purpose as a Windows system would be less likely to be invaded and damaged, IMHO.

If you want empyrical data, let's talk about outlook viruses
So tell me, how many email viruses show up in your inbox EVERY SINGLE DAY?
Ever seen any for linux? Didnt think so
Let's talk about the built-in backdoor that allows NSA to inspect your computer. Let's talk about the data that MS collects from your computer and distributes without your knowledge or consent. Heck, let's talk about spyware. Let's talk about the EULA that says everything you do with your computer automatically belongs to microsoft.
Lets talk about how microsoft lost their lengthy trial, the sneaky tactics they used, the lies, the deceit, the subterfuge, the leaked Halloween memos.
Microsoft is a convicted felon. Do you usually trust convicted felons? Why start now?