[sldev] A rather perculiar idea (hear me out)

Tammy Nowotny TammyNowotny at mac.com
Sat Aug 30 17:38:51 PDT 2008



Argent Stonecutter wrote:
> On 2008-08-29, at 15:50, ordinal.malaprop at fastmail.fm wrote:
>> If you are referring to using the current HTML media system, the 
>> media changer would surely have to be deeded to the parcel or owned 
>> by the parcel owner. This can work well enough in a private sim (I 
>> wrote a system myself recently for use in a museum) but not really in 
>> public.
>
> I think the idea is that a notecard could contain HTML and be opened 
> in the internal browser window.
>
> This is a good idea, though the implementation needs to be very 
> careful to avoid allowing external links that could be used as web bugs.
>

If you disallowed web bugs altogether, you would have to nerf the 
ability to embed images in the web pages, which is one of the very most 
basic features of HTML.  (Unless of course you wanted to host all the 
images in-world, which seems problematic: for one thing, you would have 
to store millions of extra textures on the asset servers, and you would 
even have to ping the hosts to see if they had been updated since the 
notecard was created.)  You could handle the images many email clients 
do (and most browsers if you click the right preferences) which is not 
to upload the images until you specifically ask for them, thus letting 
you read the text without getting the images.  But even then, the images 
serve as a web bug, since the webmaster can still see the recipient's IP 
in the server log if the recipient views the images.

There are  valid reasons to embed hyperlinks in notecards, although that 
is less of a security risk than embedded images since the user would 
have to decided to click on the links


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