Vote Now: Stop Libsecondlife

No need to get contorted now.

You're the only person I have heard use that term with respect to such organisations, so it piqued my curiousity. No need to sigh, I meant no offence, and I am glad we got it straightened round.

I have a inquisitive nature, and I am sure I can be annoying at times, so thanks for answering my questions.

I bring it up for no reason other than to demostrate the total hypocrisy of LL in regards to this matter. How they treat an individual, not even responsible for an expliot that allowed texture theft but merely warning others of its existance, in contrast to a group making publically available the source code to allow automatic copying of entire objects with texutres intact.

I can guarantee that if you or I did the same we would be banned for life.

Correction vs. Exploitation? Are you serious?

Also, just in case anyone is mistaken that I am dragging up something Christiano, who I like, should be ashamed of think again.

He was the fucking hero in that story and took a bullet for all of us. That exploit was on the grid for days and LL did NOTHING despite the fact that people were warning them about it. He was driven to post to try to help people out. How ironic.

I've sat in a position where I must make critical decisions based on law and justice. There is the individual inside of me that wants to make decisions by what I believe is right, and there is the side of me that must makes decisions based on the office held. I can easily relate to this experience with an episode of The West Wing I watched. President Josiah "Jed" Bartlet, played by actor Martin Sheen, had until midnight to make a decision to call off an execution. Even with tons of people who wanted to stop the execution, all the peer pressure around him, and his only personal religious belief that thou shalt not kill - it was his final decision that people voted him to do job of the office that he held. At midnight, he confessed his sin.

All I ask is to let libsecondlife be a place where Lindens are able to step out of office and do what they believe.

There are lots of uses for an open source SL client, for example one could be done for different lanquages. A nicer camera also leaps to mind as a possible advantage. I could even picture one that loads textures in an order closer to that of how I want them to load, namely right where my camera points.

The problem is that clearly info is being sent to the client that the players (residents, if you perfer) aren't supposed to know. This really should never have happend.

CopyBot was designed to circumvent in game permissions & undermine the legitimate copyright of content creators.

CopyBot violates the DMCA regarding the creation of tools to circumvent copyright protection.

LibSL created CopyBot and Linden Lab continues to support the project.

Please, at least provide verifiable souces for such statements made. Otherwise, your statements will remain unsubstantiated and your intent questionable.

You blame it on CopyBot. However like the handgun revolution, CopyBot doesn't steal avatars -- avatars steal avatars.



Actually, LL supports the idea of SL's expansion into a metaverse and LibSL shares a common interest with that idea. Right now, LL has centralized servers. LL already stated plans to decentralize, but they have not given any official path to acheive that goal. LibSL may be officially apart of that goal. There may be well-established companies interetesed to host the domains of the SL universe. There may be tons of other entrepenuers (which LL has officially stated support for) to make applications, domains, clients, databases, banks, businesses, servers, and more that can use LL as a secure asset databank. By that time, the domains of the metaverse will be owned by more entities than just LL, and it may be called something different than SL.

It may blindside you...

I'm sure banks would be thrilled to know it's open source and that non-Lindens will be busy poking around trying to find the holes.

I know!! AIN'T IT GRAND?!?!?

... "Secure asset databank"? Where you have libsl crew asserting there's no security whatsoever in SL communication architecture, and LL pretty much admits they can't do anything about it so they will provide people with technical equivalent of smokesignals to tell one another better who may be a data thief?

Surely you jest?

Understand? Yes. Agree that it's legitimate? No.

LibSL provided all a griefer needs to effortlessly jump in and begin doing damage. Please explain how AVG does that? Because I'll tell you the truth: I sure wouldn't know how to use AVG against people. The very idea baffles me. CopyBot, on the other hand ...

I'm sure you can understand what I'm saying here.

it still exists.

It wasn't GLintercept if that's what you mean. The other, which was more of a bug, I remember them fixing eventually.

No that isnt what I mean, but i dont believe I even know what it is.

I brought up an exploit regarding textures weeks ago and it is STILL do able.

Wouldn't be at all surprised, heh.

Damn straight, he did.

But he was a resident, trying to do good, not a demi-God like LibSL, who don't care what they do to people.

Now here's a thought. LL apparently wanted this information released. They had to listen to about a thousand blog posts before they even went so far as to declare the use of it to copy unauthorized items against the TOS, and promised even THAT only till !2007.

Why?

coco

The TOS expressly forbids it. It forbids interfering with SL as it was intended to be presented, and it forbids reverse engineering.

However, LL decided that the LibSL people could do it anyway, all they want.

coco

SSL, Secure Socket Layer, is the most used device on the Internet to encrypt and decrypt data. Even you on-line bank uses it. It is an open standard.

OpenSSL, is an open source software program that implements the open standard of SSL.

How many people on the Internet complain about OpenSSL being open source or SSL being an open standard?

If you used your credit card or paypal to verify your account on-line, you used SSL. Did anybody complain that SSL provides methods to circumvent encryption, and that anybody "will be busy poking around trying to find the holes?"

On-line banks use SSL to communicate to your web-browser. It is the Internet's de-facto standard. When you web browser asks you if you want to download a security certificate, it actually receives a public key used by SSL.

Some complained here that SL has no use for open source. Again, would you rather have SL not use SSL to encrypt your CC verification? Without SSL, it would be just left in plain text and open for any network sniffer to grab.

SL could build its own encryption service, but then you would have "busy [people] poking around trying to find the holes." OpenSSL has already gone through all those busy people to a much larger audience than that of total SL residents alone.

There is a big difference between open source and open standards. Open standards do not include the product.

The protocol between the client and the server is not an official open standard. SL changes fairly rapidly with its updates for the protocol to become an open standard at this time. When the protocol becomes an open standard, it has to be concrete. People will read the open standard and make software based on those specifications. That is the same way the Internet was born.

LibSL is obviously made of entrepneurs and purely researchers that try to stay ahead of the game before the open standard is official. When it is, they'll have the first chance to market it.

(hmmm, let me let my paranoid analysts report some feedback included below...)

There are more ways to make Lindens. I see the vote against libsecondlife as FUD from those that want to circumvent (*hehe*) other from their Linden business opportunities.

If you want SL to be a place where you can *only* sell content, ya I guess you have a right to be against libsecondlife.

However, lets be fair about it and disable any use of audio and video streams into to client. None of those streams are official services that Linden Labs has approved. None of those programs that serve those streams are officially recognized by Linden Labs.

OMG, how dare you put something on your land that streams audio and video to MY client. What a hole! =p

Why should those who stream audio and video be favored over those that want to provide other services? That would be anti-trust.

All this hype about CopyBot and this proposal to ban libSL is simply as that... anti-trust.


Let's see here we already have:

1. Tying - "Buy the prim hair for $5, each color costs $150" - check
   

1. Vendor Lock-in - Proprietary programs, check
   

1. Price Fixing - "How much should I sell this for?" - check
   

1. Monopolization - if this vote passes, check
   

1. Oligopoly - if the current seller tries to prevent the possibility of new goods and new services being sold by new sellers, check
   

1. Bid Rigging - OMG, have you tried to buy land and have gotten a response "I have another buyer here that bids $10,000 over yours, and the offer closes in 15 minutes", - check!
   

My paranoid analyst could make an anti-trust case here!

Fortunately, people have told me that the ToS doesn't allow this vote to have any affect. Someone must have not wanted a checkmark next to monopolization!

Shoot, now I got to go ban my paranoid analyst...

Is this not anything different from a well-established financial bank based on the U.S. Dollar?

It is! SL deals with content and Lindens that have no monetary value. Please explain how is it a security issue?



Legally, no monetary security issue exists if fought in court about it.

People are concerned about content. I'm concern about content. Obviously, you are concerned about content and those who may use their own client to access SL. That concerns me also, but I have taken a bit of study about open source and libSL. I hope you do too.

If you read Lindens blog, you will see that they have greatly answered with devices to protect content. In fact, these ideas are far better than what web-browsers do right now to protect content! These ideas are far better than Digital Rights Media.

OMG, DRM tries to prevent you from being able to use your computer that you payed for with your own damn money because it determines there is content for which you payed for with your own damn money to protect against your free use unless you pay for some key with your own damn money to temporary, yes not permanently, have access to that content on your computer that you own. That's like CopyBot going into your on-line SL store where it copies everything you owned and replaces it the vendor that exists with its own version that you can't have free access to anymore. That's like CopyBot going into your inventory and replaces items with its own and won't let you rez them unless you pay everytime.

We know CopyBot doesn't do that... but just wait until someone makes DRMbot.

I want my content to be secure and not have to be owned by someone else in order to protect it. A secure asset databank is a far better solution to DRM.

[/list]I am aware that SSL is open source. This may be a dumb question, but humour me - I am not a coder beyond HTML and a bit of java, are you saying that SSL could be incorporated into the client? Or would the client launch a browser? Or...? The reason I ask is because I don't see the benefit of walking into a 3d bank. It really offers me nothing more than doing it from a webpage like I currently do. Unless I count opening myself up to more hacks as a benefit.

As for the rest of your post, I am unsure why you chose a post in which you're replying to me about the bank thing to launch into that. hrugs: I didn't vote that libsecondlife should be banned, and have not taken that stance in any of these threads. Nor have I taken the position that content creators are more important.

Let me clarify my stance - Linden Lab brought much of this on themselves through inconsistent market speak - "New and Improved SL - now with IP rights!" and so forth. They have made a series of blunders that in effect made this situation worse than it ever had to be, such as affording people complete anonimity since 06/06/2006, and adding features and hinting at future tier rate increases when the product barely works. You may disagree, and that's life. People disagree sometimes.

To say AVG might have been a bad example since the Grisoft's main products are not purely open source. Sorry, that confused the issue. Grisoft does what many companies have done, and that is to use open source technology, put their own user interface and specialized software suite together, and offer support for premium users.

There are antivirus programs out there that purely are open source. Google for "open source antivirus." Anybody can get the code and study it to understand how a virus works. In fact, Norton AV and McAfee AV used to install itself onto a computer just like a virus would do, but newer versions of Windows have special functions so there is no need for these programs to take-over Windows in order to protect it.

An antivirus program like a virus? Have you given your kids immunization shots? I hope that idea doesn't baffle you.

Wikipedia has a good introductory discussion of the 'security through obscurity'-approach that is promoted here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_through_obscurity

It is for most cases not well regarded, and if you regard SL as a pioneering attempt for a communications platform it is unlikely to succeed.

If you view your involvement in SL as a temporary source of money in the entertainment sector, analogous to farming gold and items in other MMORPGS and drawing revenue from it, on the other hand closing up the protocols and slapping on some digital restriction measures for the rest of the lifecycle of the game 'Second Life' might be a viable short-term solution to protect your investment.