Hubris, was Re: [sldev] Cache politics: performance vs obfuscation

[Gordon Wendt]

With all due respect if you have linden after your name (Q Linden in this
case) then you are going to be assumed to be speaking for LL every time you
post anywhere, is it fair? no but that's life on a mailing list that the
company you works for runs.

On the topic of obscurity through obscurity it doesn't work, period.  People
can easily figure out that glintercept is at glintercept.nutty.org, anytime
I post on the forums people see that since I link to it from my signature.
To discourge piracy either go full out or leave it out in the open and make
the platform allow people to implement their own solutions to this.

-G.W.

On Mon, Jun 9, 2008 at 5:36 PM, Kent Quirk (Q Linden) <q at lindenlab.com>
wrote:

>
> On Jun 9, 2008, at 5:22 PM, ordinal.malaprop at fastmail.fm wrote:
>
>
>> On 9 Jun 2008, at 11:34, Thomas Grimshaw wrote:
>>
>>  Dante Tucker wrote:
>>>
>>>> Lets all just stop pretending anyone who wants to steal textures can't
>>>> with the current system. Anyone who wants them can already get them. The
>>>> only thing storing data raw would do is make them more accesable to people
>>>> who don't want them and have no knoledge of how to get them currently. And
>>>> if they don't want them then whats the harm?
>>>>
>>> Agreed.
>>>
>>> I tire of people moaning about IP security.
>>>
>>> Your stuff is already stolen, deal with it.
>>>
>>> ~Tom
>>>
>>
>> Not to pick on Tom particularly here, but this is the sort of m message
>> that reinforces my opinion that:
>>
>> (a) the people involved in discussing assets don't understand what those
>> _creating_ the assets want or think;
>> (b) they don't care.
>>
>> The level of snobbery applied here is breathtaking, endless references to
>> pitchforks ho ho, you know, they're all irrational peasants. But even in the
>> current situation, textures not being instantly obtainable by just going to
>> the right directory and dragging to somewhere else is a disincentive to
>> pirates.
>>
>> YES, we do all know about glintercept and all the other ways to get hold
>> of textures. YES, we know that there is an intrinsic problem here, that
>> displaying the damn assets implies that they are received by the client.
>> YES, we've all heard these teenage extropian "information wants to be free"
>> tropes, thanks all the same.
>>
>> Amazingly enough, people appreciate the practical issues. What they don't
>> like is the idea that they are being treated as idiots and rubes by LL and
>> assorted geeky types because they dare to get worried about the reason that
>> they are there and building the world for you lot to play about with in the
>> first place. Because, you know, if it wasn't for people who make content,
>> you and I would not be here discussing this stuff, as I've said before.
>>
>> If you can't offer anything to content creators apart from "ha ha your
>> stuff has already been stolen stupid n00bs" then you might as well close the
>> whole company down right now.
>>
>>
> Boy, I can totally see both sides of this argument.
>
> It's true -- if we're displaying it, it can be copied with a relatively
> small amount of work for a motivated individual with technical skill.
>
> It's *also* true that if it's trivially easy to copy it, it will be copied
> much more frequently than if it's slightly harder. This is why "security by
> obscurity" is popular. The extra step makes it obvious that you're taking
> some measure -- no matter how simple -- to break a protection scheme, and
> that sense of an explicit violation does deter a lot of people.
>
> So while I completely agree that there's no way we can provide true
> protection, I also agree that simply stuffing the files into a directory
> using standard formats is kind of like leaving your bike unlocked in the
> street -- someone will ride off with it who might not have bothered if you
> used even a cheap bike lock.
>
> Personally (I'm not speaking for Linden here), I think that if we want to
> change the way we do caching, we should make it slightly complicated to grab
> items out of the cache by NOT storing them in standard formats.
>
>
>        Q
>
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