[opensource-dev] Media Strategy?

[Qie Niangao]

(I'm not entirely comfortable raising this topic here, but it very
much does affect Snowstorm viability, so, with apologies in
advance...)

Certain alt-matching systems have attained enough grid saturation that
there is widespread hesitancy to enable Media at all.
(https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-24746)

One part of the problem is that _AGENT-specific parcel media commands
force a viewer connection regardless of the "Allow Media to auto-play"
setting.

Even with that changed (presumably, "corrected"), heuristic matching
based on regular Parcel Media and Audio streams is easily done.

To date, it is unclear what (if any) plans LL has for addressing this
matter, and that rather ties the hands of developers, to know what (if
any) technical response is appropriate.

The developer of one such system has publicly claimed that he is privy
to LL's plans about this issue; if opensource developers have been
similarly informed, it would be news to me.

In lieu of LL guidance, a patch has been developed for one 1.x-based
TPV that would at least reduce the threat from the Media vector, by
inserting a user-selectable white- / black-list before enabling stream
connection.

This approach does not conveniently apply to 2.x-based viewers with
Shared Media.  Regardless of interface, it is unclear that any
user-controlled filtering can be effective for Shared Media, given the
potential number of simultaneously proffered sources.

A possible approach to addressing these threats is for LL to interpose
an IP anonymizing service at its network periphery through which all
connections including streaming media would pass.  This would have
significant bandwidth implications, and may also interfere with
certain third-party content as long as studios and publishers persist
with geo-specific licensing.

At this point, I think developers really need to know LL's plans to
address these this matter.  Personally, I'm especially interested in
the fate of Shared Media, which seems gravely jeopardized.