[sldev] Re: Texture bugs.

[Mathew Frank]

Argent Stonecutter wrote:
>> 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.
It is an interesting thought, though I am of differing view regarding 
the usefulness of it to stalking.  I could simplify part of your picture 
though. You would not need llHTTPRequest to pass info out of the game 
however.  Setting a texture to something like this via script for 
example based on an event:

    http://example.com/dynamictexture.php?id=BLA&x=BLA2

so in actual fact if this was in place you could offload all the "heavy 
lifting" done by web page viewers and the like right now and do requests 
for textures to your own server.  It would become a faster method of 
sending information out of SL than email or llHTTPRequest to setup an 
XMLRPC call into SL.

If it is a big problem then a way around it I guess would be to proxy 
things around other SL clients or something - a bit like TOR.   Or just 
allow users to run proxys themselves - they would be able to given that 
this would be standard HTTP traffic.  Or lastly LL could proxy them via 
anonymising squid proxys - though this moves everything back to LL again 
anyway and hence loses some of the benifits of self hosted scripts.

Cheers,
Mathew
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