Fwd: [sldev] Re: Lookup Tables and Texture Bugs

[Zack Geers]

From: Zack Geers <kunnis at gmail.com>
Date: Jan 25, 2007 4:57 PM
Subject: Re: [sldev] Re: Lookup Tables and Texture Bugs
To: Gigs Taggart <gigstaggart at gmail.com>

There is a certin amount of Privacy that users expect.  We shouldn't do
anything that moves away from their current set of expectiatons.  IP's don't
matter, it's the associations between accounts that do.  I feel we should
start this conversation by actually figuring out what our requirements are.

1) What level of privacy should users expect?  If it's too high, then you'll
never get any features.  If it's too low, then there will be all sorts of
things like focused marketing, spyware like prims, association of alts.

I bet for example, LL employees have their own private accounts so they
won't get pestered constantly.  I doubt they will want it well known who
their alts are.  There are also some famous people that play, and they would
be major targets.  Right now you have to go onto someone's land to even be
prompted for a stream download, and even that is not guarenteeded to happen,
only if the user starts the media are they even exposed.

This idea would let someone farm data for almost nothing.  It would be
simple to rent space in several popular malls, and farm data that way.  The
player density is low, and you could put a couple opaque objects on each
side that would obscure the view of the object till they are close.  Place
several dozen objects in diffrent malls and you'll probably stumble into
nearly everyone on SL, not to mention having some bots float around,
randomly switching the object they are wearing to figure out who the person
that's in LOS of them.

Plus a good bit of cross corliation, and you'll learn what everybody's IP
address is.  If you now ABC downloaded the image when they were near you,
then you wait for one person to leave, and switch the texture, you then know
who one of the people is.  Repeat a bunch, and you easily map out a lot of
IP addresses.

I think that prompting the user is NOT the way to go.   Popups are horrible
UI design, and users blindly click through popups.  Yes, they are stupid for
blindly clicking through popups, but it doesn't matter, that's what they do,
don't say they shouldn't, we're talking about reality, not what it should be
like, we have no control over how users act.  You can't change the world,
you have to work with it.  They confuse users, and will only make the game
harder to play.  What do you think it's going to be like when everyone has a
dynamic image on their shirt, and you walk into a populated area and get hit
by 30 popups?

 For http images hosted on a texture, what about making it so that the
textures are fetched by LL, and hosted on their servers?  This would remove
most of the privacy issues, but still allow dynamic image generation.  One
of my biggest concerns about something like this is that people will be
hosting textures all over the internet, and there will be a lot of support
issues due to the fact that "Well this should work..." and "..it works for
me" because of diffrent people's access to the internet.  If we get a stable
connection to LL, then LL could host all images for us, and it'll be less
cranky.  What I'd sorta like to see is to be able to create an image
programicaly through LSL, because eventually we'll have .net code running in
LSL, and you could then do a mixture of a HttpRequest and a convert to
image.  I feel this solves some of the problems, but not all of them.

I think this will be good for some cases, but not nearly all of them, I
don't think it's a perfect solution, but it's the best I've heard so far.

Kunnis Basiat


 On 1/25/07, Gigs Taggart <gigstaggart at gmail.com> wrote:

> Grr... Why doesn't reply reply to the list??
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Gigs Taggart <gigstaggart at gmail.com >
> Date: Jan 25, 2007 5:08 PM
> Subject: Re: [sldev] Lookup Tables and Texture Bugs
> To: Rob Flickenger < rob at hackerfriendly.com>
>
>
>
> > If SL ever expects to transition from a service to a platform, it
> > will have to confront this problem sooner or later, because it
> > doesn't just affect dynamic textures.  Any peer-to-peer service that
> > is likely to be implemented in the open source client (VoIP, file
> > sharing, direct chat, and eventually users hosting their own sims)
> > will have precisely these same issues.
> >
> > Personally, I think it's the user's responsibility to protect their
> > own communications (assuming it's important to them) and I have no
> > sympathy for people who "need" to hide behind alts yet don't
> > understand the technical issues.  Update the ToS to mention that your
> > IP is revealed in certain circumstances, let's implement these
> > features, and move on.
>
>
>
> Yes, exactly.  We need to think big picture here.  The sooner people
> realize that IP addresses aren't private information, the better.
>
> It was bad enough that LL didn't make it clear to people that the DRM
> didn't work on anything but scripts.  Giving people a false sense of
> security is a terrible thing!  People shouldn't have an expectation that
> their IP won't be exposed.  The more effort we put into providing that
> illusion, the more paralysed SL becomes as a platform.
>
> There are whole classes of features here that we would be throwing out the
> window if we start down the road that IPs should be private.
>
>
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