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Important info about selling sculpty products - be careful!
Kitty Barnett Registered User Join date: 10 May 2006 Posts: 5,586	01-03-2008 04:17 From: Karen Palen The short answer is that you would not use LSL, but pay some one in India to write a C# program for you! The long answer is that you would "rebuild" the unknowns parts from inferences provided to the"client side" 3D engine. Since quad 3Gb P4 class processors are already available and 8X/16X pretty close for very reasonable prices, it is reasonable to assume that "decrypting" the shape of the actual "prim" is something that you could pay SW engineer in india/China/wherever about $200 to get working. In short "security by obscurity" is even less of a barrier than it was 30 years ago when it was first discredited. A professor of the U of Chicago (I think) published an "position paper" on tracking $20 bills. It seems that if I give you 100 $20 bills then record their numbers every time they enter a bank, I can reconstruct ALL of your movements and purchases with about a 98% accuracy! This was published over 20 years ago! Cameras on freeways monitored by FBI/MI5/KGB/??? is really only the bare "tip of the iceberg". How is any of that relevant to the post that you quoted? My point was that using encryption as a copy protection mechanism is pointless since encryption aims to obscure the original data while it's en route from the source to the destination. You want the destination/viewer to be able to decode it and since it's an open-sourced component humans will always have easy access, encryption doesn't even make it harder in any way, it would be entirely redundant.
Karen Palen That pushy American Broad Join date: 26 Feb 2007 Posts: 140	01-03-2008 08:53 From: Kitty Barnett How is any of that relevant to the post that you quoted? My point was that using encryption as a copy protection mechanism is pointless since encryption aims to obscure the original data while it's en route from the source to the destination. You want the destination/viewer to be able to decode it and since it's an open-sourced component humans will always have easy access, encryption doesn't even make it harder in any way, it would be entirely redundant. You may be confusing this with an even earlier confusion about "IP". (My bad ) You are quite correct that "end-to-end" encryption only protects against some third party. The original post to this sub-thread however was concerning "server side" and "client side" information. Essentially the idea is that by restricting the amount of information available to the "client" (thats you!) makes reconstruction and hence copying of the original information more difficult. This is true as far as it goes. The point of my post was that this "reconstruction barrier" is no sure bet either, given the high grade and low cost compute power available. Both "carbon based life forms" and in electronics filled boxes. Re-reading my posting, I think I got into too much esoteric theory for a public forum - I apologize. The basic argument still remains though: If I can get enough information under my "control" to display and manipulate a 3D object such as an avatar or "sculptie prim" then I can also rebuild and make a copy of that object. Essentially "copy protection" is a technology solution to a legal problem and is not very effective as shown by all of the pirated material that is freely available. This is a much larger problem than just Second Life of course. Worse yet are debacles like the Sony/BMG "copy protected" CDs which installed a "root kit" on a user's hard drive! This opened a ready made and hidden platform for bad guys to install viruses on the customer's computer. Not a good thing! Turbo-tax did something similar a few years ago and damaged their customer's computer systems even when their software was installed by a lawful user! Since almost every car in the uses a version of Windows and MS networking to run the car (everything from the engine to the door locks), it is only a matter of time until a "copy protected" CD/DVD causes some disastrous malfunction such as disabling the brakes! There has already been one near disaster (not due to copy protection) when a Toyota Limo had a system crash (yes they use Windows too!) which caused all of the doors to lock, engine to quit etc. It took almost 4 hours to cut into the car (armored limo) and the occupants nearly suffocated! Sorry for the rant, and I hope that I am wrong.
Ralph Doctorow Registered User Join date: 16 Oct 2005 Posts: 560	01-03-2008 09:25 From: Kitty Barnett How would you turn a sculpty texture (or a shape for that matter) into actual geometry without the client being able to decode the texture? Clearly some code in the client has to interpret it, but as stated, that part of the client code doesn't have to be open source. From: someone If you drag a texture over onto a prim, the client simply sends over the UUID of the texture to be applied and the sim mindlessly applies that texture to the face/prim(s). You'd also likely break all of the legitimate scripts that currently do use UUIDs of textures that weren't distributed along with the script. You can't drag a texture anywhere if you don't have permission to use it. The issue with UUIDs is that a script can apply some resources using just the UUID without the resource itself being in the object's inventory. No existing scripts would be broken because none of the existing UUID based resources have protection codes associated with them and so wouldn't be protected.

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