Are you ready for the web?

This particular train of thought hit me over the weekend as I was tweaking my Myspace blog, clearing up Friends requests. For some reason, there are a large number of Myspace accounts created to promote "Live Webcam" porn sites. They're not hard to spot before you click on the person's link, but there is some clicking involved in eliminating their request. It's against the spirit of myspace.com, but that doesn't stop anyone from trying.

My mind inexorably wandered to SL. More and more we're seeing prims linked to URLs. Soon we're told we will have full web sites on prims. And as inevitable as death and taxes, so will we also have the flood of shady advertising methods, unethical phishing and all the other clever but annoying spam that loads down the internet (and your email) today.

It's not a pretty thought, but I want to make it clear I'm absolutely not anti-porn, anti-av sex, or anti-capitalism. Quite the opposite, actually. What I am against, however, are businesses who think it's ok to infect my PC with spyware, phish my email with randomly-worded come-ons for insurance, viagra, penile implants and breast enlargements -- without even getting started on the distasteful "hot young teenage girls" sites that are so prevalent. It occurs to me that if the commercial sprawl of SL is already something of a concern, just wait until we allow the web a foothold in the grid. The next scripted genital attachment you buy could come with its own ad for adult webcams, "hot teenage girls" or real-life penile implants.

There is a difference, of course, if it's significant. Second Life does have a community culture. Unreasonable/uncontrolled ad spam from outside the grid can have negative backlash. A general outcry could bring on limitations, though that would take a while and not until there was a painful grid-wide debate.

I'm just pondering this in general terms now. I know some of you have already given it thought, perhaps even had lengthy discussions here over the potential for abuse. I'd love to hear concerns and ideas since I want to be prepared for the web invading SL, too. It will be a great day in many ways, but with every opportunity comes peril. We need to be prepared for both.

Honestly I don't see the point of this. This program doesn't have high system requirements and just about anyone should eb able to run the game windowed and keep a browser open if they really need access to websites..

My "gut" feeling is that web access will work in a manner similar to quicktime access... maybe one single texture per parcel can be used to display web content, with users able to turn that access on and off.... the whole system would be a technical (and bandwidth/cpu hogging) nightmare if they implement it any other way.

How's that? All the pages are going to be loaded straight to the client, not proxied through LL.

Personally I'd rather see spam everywhere than a limit to functionallity - limiting it to parcels would screw a lot of good uses for it. I expect this is something under debate at LLHQ too.

SL already has spam. Profiles, Classifieds, Events, People.
Adding HTML support will inevitably lead to spam, phishing attempts, Crude humor, and yes, pr0n.

The only real obstable will be educating the consumer.

It should not tax the computer as badly as, say, local lighting or flexihoochiehair. Because it's running on a Firefox-based runtime it will be more stable, a a great deal more secure than IE, it's also compatable with all three SL-supported operating systems.

I do await the day I can open all my forums up on a Wall Of Drama, Or pipe RSS feeds to a newsreader attachment. Or even *gasp* get the browser links to interact with in-world objects

For reference, I've had over 100 pages open, half of them loading, at the same time in FF without a problem.

My concern is more the imbedded malicious scripts on many websites getting to SL through SL.

I don't want all my lovely textures and objects reduced to nothing because a trojan infected one of them and next thing I knew, they were all doing little dances and shooting pushgun bullets at everything that moved.

That would require that the SL "browser" be java script, java, flash, etc enabled. Have they mentioned which if any plugins they'd actually support?
Not to mention something would have to be specifically written to try and attack SL in that way..

Erm, Firefox is almost as much of a hog as SL itself.

Let me attach *any* local progran to a prim surface and you'll have something useful. Because then I can attach stuff that I actually want to use from inside SL. Instead of having to wrap it inside a flash or java VNC viewer that'll lag me worse than a nightclub full of lighted hoochie hair.

Quicktime streams aren't proxied thorugh LL either, but you can turn those off.

That would be so unbelieveably complex to do that it's never going to happen.

If I understand things right, LL should be able to impliment it so we can choose which plugins we use and set things up so that javascript can't influence your computer outside of SL anyway.


C'mon Argent, it's not all that bad.
Anyway, the excessive memory use by FF has nothing to do with things - LL are intergrating the Mozilla rendering engine (I forget it's name - Geko?) not Firefox.

Ah, I see what you mean. Bandwidth for the user, not LL. Soz.

Well, it's always possible they'll allow you to turn it off.

The bandwidth for a webpage isn't usually that much, like I said; it's possible to load tons of pages at once. Plus LL could impliment a queue of pages to load rather than loading them all at once, same with the page rendering. If you're running SL I really think it's unlikely you'll notice the difference.

I still don't understand what the technical nightmare you're suggesting would be though.

What do you think, how fast will Flash applications render in world? E.g. will an average user's computer be able to render several flash apps at the same time? Of course it also depends on the types of applications.

I guess it boils down to how many simultaneous instances of an OpenGL gecko engine you think you can render to in-world surfaces at the same time (especially if - as rumours suggest - they're going to support stuff like flash and ajax content). My betting is "not many". I mean, quicktime surfaces aren't even interactive (and are way easier to render than web pages), but they're limited to one per client.

That would really be a horrible implementation of any kind of rendering engine. Im pretty sure the devs are keeping sane memory limits in mind in regards to this. It is likely that the page loading will be queued, the objects closest to you rendering first, and those farther last. This way at any one time, only one gecko engine needs to be loaded in memory. Its also very likely, at least at its inception, that youll only be able to interact with one webpage at a time, the one on the prim closest to you, or the one that you're currently alt+zoomed on. Why incur the extra load of a gecko engine for every single prim with a rendered webpage?

Regardless, I'm pretty sure our computers can handle more then the "bare minimum" scenario I suggested. Im just saying that it probably can be done.

As for the spamvertisements, doesnt the TOS or Community Standards prohibit advertisment? Everyone, even spammer bot accounts, must follow these rules.
==Chris