[sldev] Re: Texture bugs.

[Argent Stonecutter]

> We are looking toward making it possible for
> prims to reference external websites for texture information, which
> is where PNG textures would start to come into play.

This would allow you to trivially create "web bugs" and drop them  
anywhere, and track people by their source IP address.

Set a texture to http://my-computer-ip/ and have the prim contain a  
script that uses llHTTPRequest to pass back the names of nearby  
avatars, drop a few of these textured prims around the place, and  
it'd take no time at all to correlate texture fetches to avatars  
presence and build up a database any stalker would kill for.

Currently this can be done to a much lesser extent with a great deal  
of effort by playing with streaming media on parcels. This would make  
it trivial.

> Hi Phoenix can you elaborate what you mean by "PNG files will soon  
> not be
> accepted as textures" ?
>
> Currently, all texture uploads (bmp, tga, jpg, etc.) are first encoded
> into an internal raw image format, then compressed as j2c, then  
> sent to
> the asset server. The PNG patches work the same way.
>
> So from an asset server perspective, aren't all textures j2c  
> anyway?  I'm
> curious to know how the asset server could possibly "know" that the  
> image
> was originally PNG (as opposed to, say, TGA), and not accept it.

Yes, that was what I was wondering too.