[sldev] 3rd party viewer policy post on blogs.secondlife.com

[Ardy Lay]

Oct 20, 2009 7:26 PM  in response to: Blondin Linden
Re: Discussion: Third Party Viewer Policy

Seems to me you can use a little help.

Third party Second Life Client Registration should be used to inspect
client software before recommending it to Second Life residents.  It
should be a certification that the recommended software is safe to use
and will not stop the Resident that uses it from qualifying for account
support.

No amount of inspecting and certifying of Second Life Client software
will change the characteristics of the protocols used by the Second Life
Servers.  It is my understanding that all one needs to view and
subsequently copy data from Second Life, the virtual world, it's
database servers and other networked services, is a working Second Life
user account.  I gain this understanding by living in Second Life
myself, building my own Second Life Client binaries from Linden Lab's
public SVN repository, and testing patches provided by other residents
via pJIRA, after reviewing them myself.  The protocol is fairly well
documented now and many programmers can write their own client libraries
or modify an existing code base to bypass any of the methods that can be
used in the client to prevent it from saving copies.  Thus, I don't see
Second Life Client software registration as an assurance to content
creators, of which I am not, that their content will not be compromised
by other Second Life Residents.

The only way I see to deal with the current concerns of uncontrolled
Second Life content propagation is to assure that all holders of working
Second Life user accounts can be and are being held responsible for
their actions.  Notice that I say holders, not accounts.  As long as
throw-away accounts can be created anonymously, the content theft and
propagation issue will continue.  I don't see the act of having
open-sourced the Second Life Client as the cause of the problems we are
discussing here.  I see the penchant of some individuals to conduct
nefarious activities as the problem.  Giving them the tools to cause
grief has made things easy for them but letting them have unlimited
anonymous accounts has made it possible.