IBM to host private Second Life regions behind IBM's corporate firewall

All content in SL, except for scripts, is transmitted to the Viewer. All the prims, objects, and textures. The content is all downloaded to anyone who looks at it, in a form that it can be fully copied. There are no permissions in play.

This has always been the case, and was reverse-engineered by people even before the Viewer was open source. Anyone can steal anything they want this way, and a few people have. There are programs that any idiot can download and use for this purpose (eg. CopyBot). When CopyBot came out about 18 months ago, everyone said it was the end of the world.

There are real certainly real issues with protecting content in the face of grids being connected. But just don't labor under the illusion that anything, up to this point, has ever been protected before.

They're a business, of course they expect the rules NOT to apply to them same as to us peons.

LL needs to roll out a switch to prevent items from being taken to these private grids.

Believe me, I'm well aware of the realities, but just because those hell bent on ripping off content could do it already doesn't mean that LL should just throw their hands up and make it easy for everyone to do it. I'll never understand the argument that just because something isn't totally secure to begin with that all thoughts of security should be thrown out the window. Just as economies largely rise and fall based on consumer confidence, so a platform like SL will live or die based on the perceptions of those who devote themselves to populating it with content. If the platform is perceived as a paradise for thievery without consequence, who's going to want to expend the effort to create content for it? If LL makes it clear that they're doing what they can, even if it amounts to little more than security through obscurity and not being shy about applying the ban hammer, it creates more confidence in the creative community, benefiting LL, the artists, and the consumer. And this isn't just about the security of content, it's about the integrity of the economy, which will absolutely depend on third party connected grids not minting their own money.

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I'm worried about these untrusted grids because they would be modified (read hacked) and modified to bypass the permission control system. It really depends on how much control they have on the code, and who will be authorized to connect to the main grid. So it's not a problem of today, but it would be tomorrow...

The article I read (whether it's accurate or not) claimed IBM is hosting their own sims and is directly connected to LL's infrastructure/the main grid in (much) the same way the Texas hosted sims are directly connected to the grid which would put IBM in a highly trusted position.

Last I heard LL never designed the grid to handle untrusted sims, sims are simply authorative so if one of IBM's sims were to claim that "Kitty Barnett just paid Rogue IBMEmployee" L$1 million then it's simply assumed to be true by the rest of the grid and I'll have a very large negative balance (Illustrative example).

Hiding the sims from us should be easy too: LL can assign them a different parent estate ID which would make the "IBM grid/estate" like the "teen grid/estate" where inventory/assets only exist in that grid/estate and can't be transferred/accessed from one to the other.

If they can get their own login/presence/asset/inventory servers they would probably be entirely self-sufficient in case SL breaks again, with the benefit of being able to tp to the (broken) main grid whenever they want/need to.

Each avie is actually "permanently" assigned to an inventory server which references to individual assets on the asset server.

In a warehouse (the asset server/cluster) full of crates (the assets), the inventory servers are the cabinets in another building that contain the individual lists of which crates we "own" (our inventory). It's a forced analogy but it gets the point across in the least amount of words .

We seem to have been in agreement on that.


I think though that according to the reports quoted, the IBM avatars are intended to have the ability to move freely between the IBM sims and the main grid.
This is what gave rise to people's concerns about the protection of IP.

Eep... I missed that entirely, sowwies .

(I actually did read that later post as well, but it never clicked in my head that you were elaborating on the earlier post )

NP.
I was sort of 'thinking out loud' over coffee after reading the articles referenced.
Message boards are really suited to that sort of thing.
I should have spent longer thinking quietly and then posted something complete and carved in stone