2009. július 21., kedd

Age verification

is just not working. I have fooled it many times. I'm all over the adult grid.

Why don't you just use a better way to do that? I'm off to lunch. Just wanted to let you know this.

On Builder-/Copybot

You can't stop this. People copying other people's stuff in Second Life.

LL either change the business model and re-structure the whole SL making it a kind of MMO where you have a freedom unlike in any other ones (just hire better builders than the $10/hour moles)

or

make the copying harder. Currently with alternative viewers it's really not much effort to re-compile them without removing the few 'if x has y permissions on this prim then' and you can grab whole sims and import them into the various OpenSims.

Of course when the real good builds are ripped and made available grid-wide, the motivation for newbies to actually search for the original and buy it, will be around zero.

If you inspect where the use of copybot is widespread you will find that mostly in those communities whose members are from the less prosperous countries, this is natural. I won't suppose that the Brazilian who copybotted, repacked and resold a friend's items, would have bought anything from her anyway.

To make one more step along this line... I knew people who begged for L$ or camped hours for a few L$. They hadn't a credit card or they didn't have money to pay for virtual goods. Their mates copied them stuff and they were OK. For them copied stuff were an incentive that made them stay in SL.. before they left because their dumb mind didn't find this world enthralling enough.

But I also knew people who copied entire product lines and sold them as their own. Were they reported? Certainly, they were. They sometime even got a permaban, but they returned until they got bored of SL.

Unfortunately, even without these copybot affairs, virtual goods don't erode. You would need something like sculpties every 3 years to inject fresh blood into the virtual economy. (Maybe it's a reason why we still don't have mesh support.) Though even with the coming of sculpties, still you can see newbie builds (esp. if they GLOWWWW) overhyped in blogs, but that's a different topic.

So what's the solution? I will post it sometime. But for now, my suggestion is to make this harder for the copying guys. For everybody in the IT sector, security is a hunch on the back. This is true for SL and their residents too: they want lag-free, smooth 'gameplay'. They take security for granted. 'Of course, it's natural that my objects are MINE.'

Ever tried to turn on auditing for file objects on your machine? It will die. But it will at least log things before it dies. So what will you do? Turn on auditing for a few things.

I suggest the same for SL: devise an auditing strategy. You don't need to turn it on for every residents.

But you must turn on it on for EVERY AR-ed resident. You must turn it on for every NEW resident. (For 1 month for example.) And for EVERY resident who hasn't verified himself. Oh wow, that latest one is too harsh.
Yes, it is. It needs a good implementation... for example notifying residents with names starting with 0-a... that they either verify themselves or their operations will be audited. Then residents from a-b etc. What if they don't verify? Their account would be limited to the official SL viewer. Ok, they can still use SLProxy, etc. but that would only be the first step. They wouldn't be able to visit sims that had an 'Audit verified'-only checkbox ticked.

Uh, I'm hungry. Gotta go now. Later.

Btw copyleft is still way much nicer than copyright.

2009. július 17., péntek

it's a Start

Well, I've decided to start an own blog. I'm still willing to pollute other blogs with my comments though.

First of all... this is a Second Life blog. Second, posts may not be coherent at times, depends on my mood. If you can pick out anything usable, that's ok. I reserve the right to erase any comments or delete them. It's not because I'm arrogant, it's because I'm tired. Therefore I probably won't live with that right.

I work on SL to be a better place with harsh critics on everyone involved in it. I'm not associated with LL, I'm just like Anonymus was, except I'm documenting my own thoughts.

An