WHY Can't The Lindens PREVENT This??!!

Not surprised. A lot of people, ignorant of the facts, use them, including popular creators. However, they are gambling with their account; it's just a matter of time before someone ARs them for spamming. (I AR every one I encounter if the owner doesn't immediately remove it upon being notified of it being both useless and against the ToS).



I don't know the specifics of the "black texture" issues, but I gather that they are caused by a bug in the renderer, not in the asset storage system. As such, the textures are being downloaded fine, and are stored fine inside of SL, however, when they are drawn on the screen, they are black. In addition, GLintercept pulls the textures as they are rendered, so you would likely just get black textures, since that is what your video card is displaying. As such, I don't think it will be of any use to you in that situation.

I think the only hope for that is for LL to fix the bug which is causing the renderer to generate/use black textures, which means one of the next few versions of the viewer.

clarissa,
the black textures are probably the fault of your nvidia drivers.
sl uses a very old driver feature to "bake" an avatar texture from the different layers (skin, and cloth layers are put together into one texture by using your graphics card)

in the new nvidia drivers this feature is removed so you get this "black body error"

there are a few solutions:

get an old driver,
use the release candidate (you can download it from the downoad section here under test viewers, once this viewer will be released as main version it should be fixed anyway, so you also could just wait for that),
or disable palletized textures in the advanced menu (i am using the rc viewer and can´t look at the exact location of that setting atm)

good luck

Encryption would help, but the performance hit would be massive.

dont need any external programs, just flip through your own cache, everything you load on client gets stored into your cache. You can then grab them out of cache move them out, etc.

if SL was worried about copyrights and stuff they would encrypt the cache folder, but of course that would cause huge performance hits. so there really isn't any protection other than if something shows up in game you recognize, start tossing ar's

I've also known of people using it to bake tattoos on their skin, since tats use up clothing layers and it's inconvenient when changing clothes to juggle the tats and the clothing. My alt also wore body oil, which also comes on the clothing layers, compounding the problem. The folks I know of who are using this program to capture and bake in their tats are *not* using it to make copies of things for sale, only for personal use.

Click on your Avatar and select Appearance mode. Click the tabs that define your shape and face. Write down the numerical value for every slider for the shape you have created. The slider values are absolute for each gender--they are not relative to what the shape looked like when you got it.

Next open your Inventory window, and pull down the Create menu and choose "New Shape". Name that new shape in your inventory, and wear it. Then go back to Appearance mode and set each slider to the value you previously noted.

This only works if the original shape has Modify permissions.

Don't start with a shape in your library folder (such as Ruth); it will show someone else as creator. If you plan to sell the shape, you probably don't want that, as it will confuse issues of ownership. Also, if you plan to sell the shape, sell it "No Modify" or anyone else can duplicate it using the numbers. "No Modify" hides the numbers that define the shape so the new owners can't see them.

Copybot Protector is basically a scam where the person operating one advertises their gullibility. It might have been effective for a couple of days just after the original copybot was released, but it's been at least two years since it's done anything but spam people. There is _no_ version of copybot that still works that listens to "!QUIT" messages from objects.

If there was any justice in the world the people selling it would have been suspended for spamming long since. Not the poor suckers who run it, but the well known person who is still selling it.

Even if copying textures could be prevented, there is no way on earth to stop someone from taking a screen-shot jpg of what they see on their screen, and photoshop crop and re-upload as a texture of their own.

Maybe a fresh round of complaints is in order, now that slex has been sold..

Difficult to prevent but I wouldnt go as far as saying "no way on earth". For example they could heavily embed an invisible watermark which is detected by the server and the upload rejected. Or clever hashing of the original image when a "prevent reuploads" option is ticked which prevents the same image (regardless of filter/cropping) from being reuploaded by anyone other than the original creator.

As somebody who's uploaded generated images, I find this idea a little disturbing.

Not saying it's necessarily a good idea but why is this disturbing to you out of interest?

Because there's lots of software out there that lets you enter a few numbers and it generates a texture. I think, for example, Torley had a vidtut about something that generated seamless wood textures a while ago.

Should the first person who enters a set of numbers be the sole owner of that texture in SL forever more?

Yeah, but that ends up making an even lower-quality image. The original is JPEG2000 compressed on upload, and you are rendering the compressed image. Then you take a screenie of it, diddle with it in PS/GIMP, and reupload, where it is compressed again.

What you end up with is a lower-quality compressed version of the original. Still slimy, but it also looks bad, to boot.

Unfortunately, I don't think that there are any current "invisible watermarking" algorithms that can survive JPEG2000 compression and/or cropping/resizing. Pretty much, if you diddle with the image too much, they fail.

Now *visible* watermarks are a different story, but you're not going to use visible ones on textures. Photos/snapshots, maybe, but not textures.

Yes good point. And the situation with free/for-sale textures on the Web would be even worse.

It would need to be cunning for this to be workable. For example: 1) Bob downloads a texture from a website and uploads it to SL, 2) A smart hash AND a file checksum (before compression) is generated for this image and stored separately to the image on the asset server. 3) Joe the thief grabs the texture from his cache and tries to reupload it, it gets re-compressed (presumably?) but the hash still matches the protected image so is rejected, 4) Sue downloads the same texture from the same website and uploads it. 5) The Image's hash matches a protected image, but because the checksum (pre-compression) matches identically the upload is permitted.

Well, you get the gist anyway. I'm just iffy about the "no way on Earth to stop someone" claim

HEY! Another SW PA Person!! Go Steelers!!!

And this is why I watermark my skins

Actually, you can. On the areas of the templates that aren't shown on the avatar. Not sure if it shows up in these capture programs, but its better than nothing. You could also incorporate a copyright or whatever into the texture itself like I used to do when I worked as a sculptor. All my sculptures had my initials on them, incorporated into the textures.

I'm afraid maybe you didnt quite get what I posted, anyone can copy anything that appears on their monitor screen, there is ~NO WAY~ to prevent someone from making a screen-capture image of what they are seeing on their monitor via a variety of means, be it with software, or even a digital camera photo of the screen itself if someone wanted it that badly.

Every computer has a built-in way to take a picture of the entire screen or portions of it, and there's free software that does the same.

Yes, the copy may be less quality than the original that is displayed ON SCREEN, but not necessarily so, and if so, the difference may be very slight.

In any case, a little loss of quality in an environment like SL is of no consequence, it would be a problem if you were planning to print the photos on tee shirts or posters.

The same can be said of sound files, while you might be prevented by permissions from physically downloading a sound file, there's nothing that can stop you from playing that sound on your computer as it's designed to, thru your wall speakers and taking a tape recording or digital capture of that source, and uploading that after tweaking with it a little.

Anyone who is extremely worried about textures, images, video clips and sounds being copied probably just shouldn't put them on the net anywhere at all because all of these can and will be copied, that's just the way the digital technology works.

Your comment was not just about being able to copy images (that's a no brainer) but also about re-uploading as your own and that no force on Earth could prevent that. That's the part I was arguing against.

How can you id the graphic they uploaded as being unowned?

The companies out there selling texture patterns are having them uploaded by the tons to sl... and can barely get a dcma to stick because it's so hard to prove ownership of the patterns in most cases (where a simple recolor of one line in a tartan pattern can make it an invalid claim)

Just converting the image from JPG to GIF and back again will completely change any signature you're using to identify it.

I don't think animations can be captured either.

Rock

Ummm, "nothing on earth" is simply a figure of speech...

Why do you always have to bring me into these discussions?