Blue Mars beta

DRM is an unsolvable problem.

I suspect that the solution is along the lines of:
- The content would only be useful on Blue Mars;
- Thieves can't upload it.

but Blue Mars is really buggy ...and so far, there's nothing there -- just a city with a bunch of empty buildings, people all looking the same and wandering around looking lost, and gee you could play golf if you want. The forums there have maybe 100 posts. It has a looooooong way to go; it feels as undeveloped as OSGrid, at the moment.

Am I missing something?

The idea of off grid build tools is good, and perhaps something SL could do.

PS Ooops did I violate the NDA? And: I hate the click to walk thing.

Hi Poppet, it sure will be fun when some of the current developers upload their fully developed cities now that we have our hands on the tools to do it.

What are you planning to create or develop for Blue Mars?

Poppet: gonna make bunnies?

proof is in the concept... of why SL fails at it. creator anonymity.

if a creator is no longer anonymous (to the managing company), their creations can be compared to and protected (or attacked) through normal legal channels. furthermore, content creators known to rip others work can be blocked from further content creation.

this enables use of legal protections, not technical protections.

and to disagree slightly with what argent said, there are ways to protect things that can't be seen. such as complex build shapes, or programing guts, and that's to simply not have them available at the end user level, but that can mean alot more processing on the server end which equates to lag time, so isn't a likely protection for shapes, but it is for scripted items, especially in light of an exclusive developer model. the main tradeoff is security, vs server processing time

Yes, you can protect things that can't be seen, but about the only thing that can't be seen is scripts, whether in SL or BM... so in practice, apart from obfuscation, BM will have about the same technical level of protection as SL.

If they try to impose a stronger policy protection they will run afoul of the DMCA and the Prodigy decision. The safe harbor protection under the DMCA is just too important to give up.

What they can do is prevent casual users from building at all, and they can prevent scofflaws from re-registering as developers. And of course they're going to do that, betting that throwing out all the casual builders will be a worthwhile sacrifice to get a smaller number of committed developers. That's what There.com and Activeworlds did. And that's why There.com and Activeworlds are walking dead men.

When is that going to be? When do we get to see these things?

I am not sure what I would build for Blue Mars. It makes me tired to think of trying to reproduce what I have made in SL, over there. Kind of reminds me of the couple of weeks I spent struggling to find a way to move stuff from SL to OSGrid before I decided it wasn't worth the effort to do it. I really will need a serious impetus to move.

So far, Avatar seems like a small company, and while it is easy to dream of a perfect thing that fixes all the problems of SL, I want to wait and see whether it actually develops. The graphics are nice, yes, but I am not sure that SL can't get there. LL has shown time and again that it is willing to do radical things (like mono and windlight and havok 4) that really shake things up but are needed to move forward. And the SL creators, all of us, are always raising the bar, always finding new stuff to make and to do. I just don't believe we have a WoW vs. Everquest thing going on here. Some of the EQ zones haven't changed since the game first launched. Plus avatar doesn't have a huge and loyal following like Blizzard did/does.

I have been primarily interested in seeing how it will work as a place for educational projects. But really I spend 12+ hours a day building in SL, and at the moment, it saps me to think of starting from scratch again.



Yes -- that's why there has been only 1 war in history, and no one gets married any more. ;o)

So are you arguing that failure is the likely outcome of such harsh development control?

The fact is that a LOT of committed builders in SL started out as casual builders. If there isn't a way to permit people to use the medium creatively, then I am not sure that it will ever approach what SL has to offer. The idea that you can just rezz stuff in world and make stuff is amazingly powerful.

But time will tell.

I don't know if "failure" is the right term. Failure to become a real world for the population? Yes. Commercial failure? Depends on whether people care.

It is, and it isn't. It is nice to simply login and start building. However, we are throttled to 10m size restrictions, alpha ordering bugs, and texture issues on cut, tapered or hollow surfaces. Sculpted prims require external software to develop and import, as do animations. SL does not support meshes and and LSL does not support arrays, a couple of the most basic fundamentals of programming and development.

So "powerful" might not be the best word to use, for something that it's not.

"Good enough, for most purposes" would better describe the SL build tools.

The main problem with objects in SL is the permissions system. Having "transfer" inextricably linked to "resell" is wrong at every level and this has been the crux of serious abuse from day one. LL claiming that it's up to the individual to protect themselves by DMCA is a cop out after the fact, because they are the one's facilitating theft through deficient controls and inadequate databasing of original creators. DMCA was a god-send to LL, because it let them wash their hands of the IP rights of it's residents. Moreover, they don't feel the need to fix things that are badly broken, as a result.

By eye or hand, it is virtually impossible to inadvertantly create an identical object or script. Primative objects have parameters down to .001 of a meter in size, position and rotation. Scripts have "fingerprints", because variables can be named as the coder chooses. Ask a hundred people to make a simple rotation script, although the output is similar, I seriously doubt that two would be perfectly identical. Parameters would be different, spacing, brackets and REM lines would have slight variations.

Proper certification, databasing and permissions, as well as DMCA options should be implimented at import and locked as such forever thereafter.

So all this is well and good but... just a few moments ago I was at a gathering of friends and we got to talking about a particular subject. I realized that I has a few pictures that I had recently taken that illustrated that particular subject so I spent L$20, uploaded two pics, rezzed a couple cubes, resized them appropriately and applied the pics as textures. Left them there for the duration of the conversation and then gave them names and took them into my inventory just in case I might want to show them again in the future (not a huge likelihood). This type of thing actually happens quite a bit in my circles of friends.

I write scripts and build little fun things too like fireplaces and lamps but I make the scripts all open source and the objects full perm. I have lots of fun doing this.

What does BM do for me?

Oh, yeah, then there's the game of Primtionary. Wonderful fun! That doesn't sound likely in BM either.

But would you call someone who goes to a store and buys a RAW terrain file, loads it into their new sim, then goes shopping for plants and trees and places them on their landscape, then goes shopping for a gothic castle and places that, then shops for furniture, and arranges that inside their castle, then buys lots of poseballs to suit the purpose of this castle, then turns to the lagoon, and goes shopping again for fish, coral and nice rock formations and places them, to be creative? Would you call them a 'builder'?

Sure, when they invite all their friends over who then go 'wow' they feel good, but although this accounts for the majority of people who 'build' in SL, is it really building?

Or was it the folk who created the textures that made the castle and everything else really look like a castle or fish or whatever, or the folks who created the animations in the poseballs, who are the 'real' creators in SL?

In RL, when you buy a house in a nice neighborhood, or with great views, and you buy furniture, and arrange it really well, and your friends come over and say 'wow' are they really complimenting your building skills, or your taste? Big difference.

Rock

Since Lisp doesn't have arrays either, would you dismiss it the same way, despite it being one of the most powerful programming languages ever.

Good enough, when it is genuinely good enough, can be amazingly powerful.

I don't believe that it's possible to separate them, even in principle, in any environment worth spending time in.

You can't compare an apple with a lemon. Plus: See threat "secret viewers of SL" which means. Somebody should really really have more control over his own world! And this somebody is LindenLab.

The idea behind Bluemars is not new at all and almost everybody have been waiting for this high end graphic enviroment. Especially designers and professional content creators. There are many of them in the real world waiting to start making this even better.

So, let's give Bluemars some time to get his selection of skilled designers and scripters, give it time to grow and we will see.

Often its just the first impression that makes people say - I love this. This first impression is absolut bad in SecondLife when people arrive in the welcome area. It is not enough to have a nice login screen "picture" impression shwoing up for some seconds. When people arrive inside a laggy enviroment where ugly noobs just wait to attack ugly noobs for free with all kind of different ways of griefing - something is going wrong then. Wait one year - then you may will say- somone wants to shoot you to Bluemars.

Nobody, not Apple, not Microsoft, not Bungie, not Sony, not the RIAA nor the MPAA, has been able to implement a DRM regime that actually works. That people expect Linden Labs to waste their limited resources trying to do something that is mathematically impossible really depresses me. This is something that should have been covered in high school computer classes for the past 20 years... and yet the "rights culture" marketing machine is still successfully pushing the idea that technology can magically roll back the clock to the 1800s.

It's not impossible. In fact, it's sickingly simple. Just un-marry transfer/resell into two check boxes. The resell/no resell option would permanently "grey-out" the price window on all root and child prims, and that's all. LL fixed a bug a while ago, where mod/copy/no trans allowed group members to take multiple copies of deeded objects. As a result of that fix, the setting "Share with group" no longer defaults to "on".

The only reason LL doesn't, is because they really don't care about IP theft and have done nothing to mitigate it since. A DMCA takedown order only prevents future abuse, but not compensation for previous damages. You literally have to sue LL first, to get a thief's info, before suing the thief, who very well might live in Upper Armpit, Slobobia. So even with a DMCA takedown order in hand and several thousand dollars in legal fees to get LL to cough up the info, you could still be dead in the water.

I always say, a ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Besides that, the damage is already done. The business-in-a-box model is shameful at best, yet LL continues to pretend it doesn't exist. That does more to discourage content creation than anything.

It's no wonder others are looking for alternatives. BM might not be everything to everyone, but it sure looks promising to me.

No, it's far more because the new permissions box would have to have a default setting, and that default setting would inevitably be wrong for many items. If the default is FALSE, LL have just damaged legitimate resellers; if the default is TRUE, the existing businesses-in-boxes can continue to thrive, and now they can argue legitimacy (there's a tick next to "resell ok" now, isn't there?)

But I think that point BM is making is that time has passed since then. The environment in SL for casual builders is different to how it used to be, precisely because of the existance of those committed builders at the high end. Certainly, in 2005 many people started casual building "to earn L$"; in 2009 most people do it "just because they enjoy building and any L$ would be bonus". In other words, L$ are no longer a progress driver - that's actually a significant shift.

In 2008 and 2009 many skilled builders lost interest in being creative because there is no way to protect their work against CopyBots. That is a very dark side of the open door LL offers for his world so everybody can be as creative as needed.

Bluemars focus on High End environment without the possibility to think about bringing something into this world that was not made by the original creator and inventor. So all effort, all work of those skilled designers should be protected well by Bluemars management - at the very start.

There is an extreme huge damage Copybot users and Memory hackers brought into SecondLife's community.

Actually, there is an almost Pavlovian thing that happens, while you are building, when you get the "money" sound when someone buys something, that creates a stimulus/reward loop in the classical conditioning sense.

It is not an either or thing. When I build, I need a place to display my wares. I have to pay for those prims. It is perfect if the prims I sell at least pay for the cost they incur, even better if I make a profit. The more I make, the more prims I need, the more I need to sell.
For me, the enjoyment comes from the whole enterprise. There is real pleasure for me in breaking even -- that is the "game" for me.

The great thing in SL is the talent of all the people you have never even heard of yet, who have thought of incredibly cool stuff to make. It almost hurts me to go out and look at what other people have done, because so much of it is so wonderful and I get jealous; I know that other builders feel the same way. If there were just a few developers, this would not happen. We would have a "monoculture" like fast food compared to home cooking.

I am not saying that there is no place for Blue Mars. But I am not sure that it will ever offer what SL does. SL offers a venue for small time creators to connect to a big big world.

And people using scripted vendors would never even notice. LL doesn't do things like this because they're stupid things.

They could however add a box that says "Royalty: xx%" so that it can _only_ be transferred in a buy box, and when it's sold xx% of the sale goes back to the creator, no matter how many steps removed. That kind of "mandatory license" would work. But the oft-requested "no sale" permissions are bunk.

Even though Copybot was already a couple of years old at that point, and even though the fact that something like Copybot was inherently impossible to prevent was obvious to anyone with a modicum of technical knowledge years before SL opened, because people react to appearances rather than facts.

We have Ph.D.'s here, that know the stuff cold, and we don't believe it's possible to protect digital content. -- Steve Jobs (2002).

It will be protected ... better. But as long as the client does the rendering, the stuff is on your machine, and SOMEONE will figure out a way to steal it, and profit from selling the cvontent and/or the knowledge of how to steal it. The bigger Blue Mars gets, the more likely this is to happen.

This is the flip side of the openness of the internet, the price of freedom, if you will. It is what is causing problems in all sorts of media like music and video.

In my opinion, the only way to survive is to keep making more cool stuff, that is better than what you had before. Then for your profits you can count on the fact that many people are honest, and many people want to have the real thing. As for the feeder fish that steal -- well, if they can live off your bounty too, then more power to them. I would rather be an originator than a scavenger.

hahahahahaha