Oh, Is This Why They Changed the TOS?

[Prokofy Neva]

For years, Hamlet ne Linden Au has been crabbing on New World Notes that the Lindens didn't load the world, and as a result, it had to redraw.

 

[Prokofy Neva]

Yes this is the most helpful information in this thread and note it comes from Employee No. 2, Andrew Linden.

[Innula Zenovka]

Thanks.  I've found the original quote, I think, and I see it dates back to March of this year, so whatever it's describing predates these changes.   I agree that it needs some clarification, but I suspect it means that the simulator used to resend (and thus over-write in the local cache on the user's PC) all scripted objects whenever someone arrived at a sim, because it didn't know if the script might have changed the object since the last time someone visited.

That's the only way I can make sense of it, because, scripted or not, the server has to send the object details to the user's PC (or tell the viewer to retrieve them from cache) so the user's graphics card and cpu know what to draw on the screen.   

[Madelaine McMasters]

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Innula Zenovka wrote:

Hi, Lexbot!

What you said was

The only difference now, is that the data stays on your computer a little longer so it can be re-used next time you log in. Thats all. There is no data there that hasn't passed your computer already.

 

Can you expand on this, please?   

While I agree that the data have always been stored, in the hidden folder  C:\Users\<your windows username>\AppData\Local\SecondLife if you use Windows 7, I don't really understand the bit about the data staying on your computer a little longer (I thought, unless I clear cache manually, it stayed there permanently until it got overwritten because I'd run over the limit of the cache size I'd set).

I think I remember reading that, before the changes, the viewer had to redraw the sim each time you tp there rather (as will now happen, at least if I've got it right) telling the sim which objects it has and letting the sim send it any extra ones needed, rather than downloading the lot again.   Is that what you meant?    

I agree, though, that, both before and after the change, when you log out, your cache contains (and always has) the most up-to-date list of all the objects you've seen.

As I recall it, though, the earliest versions of the "copybot" programme, at least the ones I saw when first I heard about them and wondered how they worked, intercepted the commands your computer received from SL and made their own cache of whatever the graphics card and CPU were being told to render, regardless of where the viewer was storing stuff and for how long.

---

Innula,

I think Lexbot meant that things may stay on your PC a little longer because the effective cache size may increase with the sim caching change. I haven't seen any direct reference to total cache size increasing, but that's not unreasonable to expect if the viewer is going to pre-emptively load unseen content at low priority in the background if you dwell on a sim long enough to make plausible the assumption you'll continue exploring there.

As for the way copybot programs probably work, they do not depend on anything the viewer does, except call OpenGL. I went into this more elsewhere in this thread.

About two minutes of Googling reveals there's a Chinese ripping program called GameAssassin, which rips OpenGL and DirectX content, including bones and animations. I've no idea how that higher level information is gleaned from OpenGL calls, but as I explained in my other post, the motivations for creating such general purpose model rippers are there. Computer gaming is big business. SL is, I think, too small a market for people to invest in specific game ripping technology, even if the viewer is open source. It makes more sense for people to be leveraging existing, documented (even if only in Chinese) tools that are widely available and widely applicable.

I have seen nothing, including Perrie's chat transcript from Andrew Linden, that says the viewer will now cache kinds of information it hasn't before. It will cache more information, but of the same kind it's always been caching.

[Innula Zenovka]

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Prokofy Neva wrote:

So what?

 

The difference between "automatically clearing" or "being clearable because it is temporary" is not so important.

The point is, it was temporary.

The point is, people often clear their SL caches to fix all kinds of problem, particularly inventory not showing up.

So it was not put on the hard drive.

---

I don't understand your point.   For as long as I can remember, the viewer has had a setting, under Me>Preferences>Advanced on V2 and later, for "Cache Location".   In Windows 7, by default this points to C:\Users\<windows username>\AppData\Local\SecondLife.  

That is a location on your hard drive and, if you don't want to use the viewer's tools, you've always been able to clear cache simply by navigating there with Windows Explorer and deleting the folder manually, in the same way you would delete anything else on your hard drive.

 

[Sassy Romano]

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Prokofy Neva wrote:

So what?

 

The difference between "automatically clearing" or "being clearable because it is temporary" is not so important.

The point is, it was temporary.

The point is, people often clear their SL caches to fix all kinds of problem, particularly inventory not showing up.

So it was not put on the hard drive.

That's the important aspect of what is different. SL has not always loaded on the hard drive, like other games that didn't have dynamic user-generated content. Now it seems to. Except, some people are saying it always did.

 

Would like to hear this from a Linden, and not the know-it-all user base.

---

The cache has always been there for sounds, animations and textures.  ALWAYS, you can look at it yourself, it has been on your disk,  it is right now, it hasn't been cleared unless you clear it and that will remain the case with the project interesting viewer.

What story is it that you want to go forward to tell such that you're absolutely insistent on not taking what is being told repeatedly that can so easily be verified by opening your very own cache and having a look at it?

You're confusing the need to pre-cache a world such as you would in Cloud Party versus the need to download much more dynamically, the content in SL.  It goes to your hard drive and has a set size.  Item will remain in the cache until either the user clears manually or there's no futher room allocated and something is purged to make space (automatically), that's what a cache does.

So just to be clear:-

The cache IS on your hard drive and always has been, data is downloaded TO your hard drive cache.

What project interesting does is change the priority of what is downloaded first.

The whole region is NOT pre-cached like optimised games where the content in the environment is static.

A cache IS temporary, you can delete cache content at will in just about anything, it will just re-cache what's appropriate, that doesn't mean it's not written somewhere that persists a power off, in this case to hard disk.

Edit:  I didn't mean Cloud Party, I don't know how that one works, I meant Blue thingy, the one that nobody uses.

 

[Perrie Juran]

I am guessing here is what you are questioning is what is meant by "temporary" when talking about the Cache.

The reason the word 'temporary' is used is because the content of your Cache can change.  As others have shown and you can see for yourself content is always stored on your computer in your Cache.  It does not automatically disappear when ever you log out.

Unlike my Browser, I use Firefox, there is no setting to my knowledge in the Viewer to automatically clear the Cache every time I "close" it.  I can set Firefox up to do that if I were to choose so.

[Madelaine McMasters]

---

Perrie Juran wrote:

I am guessing here is what you are questioning is what is meant by "temporary" when talking about the

Cache

.

The reason the word 'temporary' is used is because the content of your Cache can change.  As others have shown and you can see for yourself content is always stored on your computer in your Cache.  It does not automatically disappear when ever you log out.

Unlike my Browser, I use Firefox, there is no setting to my knowledge in the Viewer to automatically clear the Cache every time I "close" it.  I can set Firefox up to do that if I were to choose so.

---

And if your intent was to rip content from websites, you'd probably not set your browser cache to clear on exit. But you'd probably also not dig in the cache for the content, there are plenty of plug-ins for browsers that will rip content in immediately useable form. Tired of not being able to right click "protected" images for saving to your hard drive? I'm sure there's a plug in for that. If not, use your PC's screen capture facility. This parallels my explanation for ripping content from SL. There are tools for doing so that are completely oblivious to SL and much more widely applicable.

[Celestiall Nightfire]

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Sassy Romano wrote:

Edit:  I didn't mean Cloud Party, I don't know how that one works, I meant Blue thingy, the one that nobody uses.

---

Blue Mars. 

[Celestiall Nightfire]

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Madelaine McMasters wrote:

---

This parallels my explanation for ripping content from SL. There are tools for doing so that are completely oblivious to SL and much more widely applicable.

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Yes, Maddy there are more sophisticated ripping tools out there, but for amateurs using the cached info is a pretty easy way to do.  It also eliminates the prospect of using a client or tool that would result in a ban.   So, the risk factor is less.

 

[Madelaine McMasters]

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Celestiall Nightfire wrote:

---

Madelaine McMasters wrote:

---

This parallels my explanation for ripping content from SL. There are tools for doing so that are completely oblivious to SL and much more widely applicable.

---

Yes, Maddy there are more sophisticated ripping tools out there, but for amateurs using the cached info is a pretty easy way to do.  It also eliminates the prospect of using a client or tool that would result in a ban.   So, the risk factor is less.

 

---

You might be right. There is an SL cache ripper program out there (first hit on my Google search for the obvious) and probably some copybot viewers still available somewhere, but anyone hunting for those will also find more general purpose tools that can be used on WoW, EveOnline and any other game you can think of.

And if those tools are as easy to use as the OpenGL debuggers used by my design team back in the days when I was a productive member of society, almost anybody could use them. And if you can't, it won't take long to find a forum (including this) where you can get some help.

;-)

[Lexbot Sinister]

---

Innula Zenovka wrote:

Thanks.   That looks like the passage I thought I remembered reading.

I'm not sure, though, whether 

 "[t]he server's definition of cacheable used to be something like:  "is static and does not have a script".   The server has never, as far as I know, sent any details to the viewer about whether the object is scripted, so I don't see why being scripted or not should affect whether or not its cached.

The viewer doesn't need to know if my hair contains a colour changer script or not.  All it needs to know is what colour my hair is and what texture to use when drawing the picture.   How my hair got to be that colour (script vs manual editing) is completely irrelevant.    

That's why scripts don't get stolen in the same way objects do.   The viewer doesn't know anything about the contents of any scripts the objects may contain.   I think people's confusion about this is based partly on the fact the visual shorthand the viewer uses makes a script seem to be inside an object, in the way a piece of paper might be inside a plywood box in RL.   That's not what happens in SL, though.   The icon just means the object has a script associated with it on the server.   The script itself never gets anywhere near the viewer.   Only the results of the commands issued by the script matter, as far as the viewer is concerned (use this texture for the hair; now move the door through 90 degrees on its Z axis; and so on).

---

---

Hi! Sorry for being vague before, i was trying to dumb it down so it could be easily understood, but it seems i failed (seeing Proks post below).

What i ment with "data staying little longer " is exactly as Perrie Juran explained: Scripted objects weren't cached before, since they could change appereance. I think Maestro or Andrew Linden explained that at a server beta meeting some months ago, when the project was started. The server doesn't send info about the script to the viewer, but it did divide between things that could be cached, and not. It was a rather tight definition, with a yes/no option for caching or not. So anything scripted fell out.

Also the other thing that i ment by "data staying longer" is that cache is getting other improvements, i think it was indexing? Maybe someone can correct me on that. So the cache can be made bigger, since it's more feasable to look for cached objects now. A big cache could potentially otherwise take as long to search, as it would take to load that texture to the viewer, so there's always been a limit on how much can be cached before the size becomes a problem.

A bigger cache can also mean that it doesn't need to recycle space as frequently, so if you visit the same places often, the data can be stored longer. Meaning if i visit sim 1 and then 2 and 3 and 4, i don't need to download all data again from scratch once i revisit sim 1.

Otherwise i agree with you fully, having tested how copybotting works (on my own objects and textures), cache has nothing to do with it. All thats needed is that you see the object, once. That data gets downloaded separately, into neat folders and needs no special anything to be looked at, edited or uploaded again.

Getting anything out of the cache specifically in comparison is inconvinient, but i suppose it can be done. There is just no use for it.

 

Edit:

 

Sorry i was a bit late to the party! I'm echoing a lot that was already written, it seems.

[Lexbot Sinister]

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Prokofy Neva wrote:

So what?

 

The difference between "automatically clearing" or "being clearable because it is temporary" is not so important.

The point is, it was temporary.

The point is, people often clear their SL caches to fix all kinds of problem, particularly inventory not showing up.

So it was not put on the hard drive.

That's the important aspect of what is different. SL has not always loaded on the hard drive, like other games that didn't have dynamic user-generated content. Now it seems to. Except, some people are saying it always did.

 

Would like to hear this from a Linden, and not the know-it-all user base.

---

When you claim that you don't know how things work in SL under the hood, a good idea is to listen and take in what people say.  Instead i'm seeing you claim the right of ingnorance, and then in the next breath, starting to make things up as you see fit. And then when corrected, you will again claim you don't need to know how it works. Make up your mind already! Do you want to know how it works, or not? Or are you happier with your own fantasy version?

---

Prokofy Neva wrote:

 

The point is, people often clear their SL caches to fix all kinds of problem, particularly inventory not showing up.

So it was not put on the hard drive.

---

 

How can you "clear" something that is according to you, empty? Dun Dun Dunnn!

 

[Prokofy Neva]

Yep, I know that. it's where you go to read your conversations which are in text files, it's where you can access other files.

And, hey, let me suggest that if data in this case is overwritten, why, that's the same as being"thrown out".

 

Just saying.

[Prokofy Neva]

Um, temporary means temporary.

It means it is not kept permanently on your hard drive.

 

 

[Prokofy Neva]

One of the great things that precludes critical thought in Second Life is the notion called "knowier-than-thou" in geek circles.

I think it's probably predicated on vast, vast stores of insecurity, that come from people who in fact are self-taught, or at least, not recognized computer professionals working at IBM or something, but just kids who learned online.

There's a terrible, crushing, overwhelming drive each time some critical discussion begins for some of the participants to prove they "know more"; that others are "clueless"; that "they know less" and -- "science" and "math". There's always this haughty, exasperated sigh, as if the person telling you about something as mundane as a toilet flushing only in a browser is somehow describing the celestial architecture of the ages.

I'm just not snowed. I'm not worried about asking questions and trying to force obfuscators and insecure geeks into telling things in laymen's terms so that we can all get to the bottom of issues that impact the society as a whole.

It's what society demands of every other walk of life, whether medicine or education or car repairs.

The browser is now doing more things and doing different things. This may or may not have compelled the Lindens to change the TOS *and we don't know that because they haven't explained themselves*. There's an enormous amount of speculation about this *precisely because they never talk, and too many people think they speak for them*.

Duh, we know that there have been many attempts and successes at copying over the many years that the Lindens have inflicted their open source cult on us and their embrace of third-party viewers that should have been locked out long ago.  I've been in SL now nine long years, and I'm familiar with everything from Copybot to Thug Lyfe to Onyx. It's more than fine given all that to question whether the Lindens' new "Interesting" solution is opening up new vistas for copying. Not that they care as much about their users getting copied as they do claiming copyright of their uses' content.

I'm going to try to fish out of this discussion some of the hard facts and useful points to reblog, disregarding all the sheer, unadulterated psychotic nonsense that occurs in these types of discussions because of people trying to prove they are smarter than you about some mundane technical thing.

 

 

[Theresa Tennyson]

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Prokofy Neva wrote:

So what?

 

The difference between "automatically clearing" or "being clearable because it is temporary" is not so important.

The point is, it was temporary.

The point is, people often clear their SL caches to fix all kinds of problem

, particularly inventory not showing up.

So it was not put on the hard drive.

That's the important aspect of what is different. SL has not always loaded on the hard drive, like other games that didn't have dynamic user-generated content. Now it seems to. Except, some people are saying it always did.

 

Would like to hear this from a Linden, and not the know-it-all user base.

---

 

Okay, I'll play - if it never was on the hard drive, how could there be something to clear, often days after they started having problems?

[Perrie Juran]

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Prokofy Neva wrote:

Um, temporary means temporary.

It means it is not kept permanently on your hard drive.

 

 

---

But temporary also implies a period of time. 

The period of time is determined by one of two things in this situation:

1.  When old data needs to be discarded to make room for new data.

2.  You manually clear your cache.

As I stated above, unlike my Browser, there is no setting in SL that automatically deletes the cache when you log out.

 

 

[Storm Clarence]

---

Perrie Juran wrote:

As I stated above, unlike my Browser, there is no setting in SL that automatically deletes the cache when you log out.

 

 

---

Nothing built in, but a one line script can handle that.  Absolutely efforlessly. 

I have more an issue with Coney Island vendor stalls hawking 'subs.'   Native Brooklynites/NY'ers would consider that griefing.

 

 

[Perrie Juran]

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Theresa Tennyson wrote:

---

Prokofy Neva wrote:

So what?

 

The difference between "automatically clearing" or "being clearable because it is temporary" is not so important.

The point is, it was temporary.

The point is, people often clear their SL caches to fix all kinds of problem

, particularly inventory not showing up.

So it was not put on the hard drive.

That's the important aspect of what is different. SL has not always loaded on the hard drive, like other games that didn't have dynamic user-generated content. Now it seems to. Except, some people are saying it always did.

 

Would like to hear this from a Linden, and not the know-it-all user base.

---

 

Okay, I'll play - if it never was on the hard drive, how could there be something to clear, often days after they started having problems?

---

Just for fun, I can document as stated by a Linden, the existence of the Cache all the way back in 2005.

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Clear_Cache_test

 

[Perrie Juran]

---

Storm Clarence wrote:

---

Perrie Juran wrote:

As I stated above, unlike my Browser, there is no setting in SL that automatically deletes the cache when you log out.

 

 

---

Nothing built in, but a one line script can handle that.  Absolutely efforlessly. 

I have more an issue with Coney Island vendor stalls hawking 'subs.'   Native Brooklynites/NY'ers would consider that griefing.

 

 

---

It's been a few years since I've been there but if I were to vist again, it would be Nathan's or nothing.

[Lexbot Sinister]

---

Prokofy Neva wrote:

 

I'm going to try to fish out of this discussion some of the hard facts and useful points to reblog, disregarding all the sheer, unadulterated psychotic nonsense that occurs in these types of discussions because of people trying to prove they are smarter than you about some mundane technical thing.

 

 

---

I think you are rather fishing for just about anything, that could support your theory. You are trying to find a new angle at how it will be easier to copy things now, while it wasn't before, etc. It's all false though.  It will NOT be any easier to copy things now. (In fact, the last project, Project Sunshine made it slightly harder. Not by much, but a little)

Nobody is trying to prove being smarter- however, some people do bother to see how things work. Then you ask questions and make assumptions- those people answer, and correct wrongful assumptions.

You keep ignoring the hard facts, over and over.

Copybotting has nothing to do with cache.

The changes in the "Interesting viewer" does not make copying others assets easier.

The functions you claim have never been in place, have always been in place, they are getting an improvement. The basic functionality is the same though.

The ToS changes do not tangent anything with cache, or Project Interesting.

[Sassy Romano]

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Prokofy Neva wrote:

I think it's probably predicated on vast, vast stores of insecurity, that come from people who in fact are self-taught, or at least, not recognized computer professionals working at IBM or something, but just kids who learned online.

The browser is now doing more things and doing different things. This may or may not have compelled the Lindens to change the TOS *and we don't know that because they haven't explained themselves*. There's an enormous amount of speculation about this *precisely because they never talk, and too many people think they speak for them*.

---

Just to comment that unless i'm mistaken, you don't know where "we" work or what "we" do, nor do we have to "out" ourselves or try to prove anything.  It's quite clear to the computer professionals who knows what, it's a bit like a plumbers convention.  There are things that identify skill sets and all of what has been stated is easily researchable and should be if the intention is to write up a drama story about it.

Anyway, that aside, the VIEWER is doing pretty much what it did before, it's just prioritising what needs to be displayed first and that doesn't need or compel a change in the TOS!

Go and do a bit of research on "hidden line removal" and see if that makes sense, it's a very simple concept to understand and underpins pretty much all of what the viewer is attempting to do now (and should have been doing from day 1).

Let me put it into a simple analogy.  You are asked to paint a scene with oil paints.  You start painting that scene of lovely fields and then half way through, a sky scraper is build between you and that far away hill.  Now you have to start painting over the top of your lovely hill and paint the skyscraper but just as you've finished, a truck parks right in front of you obscuring a lot of the view.  Now you have to paint the truck on top of all that you've already painted.

What a waste of effort!  Wouldn't it have been nicer to have the hills in the distance, then the truck and skyscraper all in place first before deciding exactly what to paint?  In other words, load what's important and paint the result.

That's as simple as I can make it, the rest of the cache function is pretty much the same other than keeping things cached for return to a sim, nothing wrong with that plan.  Regular operation of a cache of stuff.

[Sassy Romano]

Well you wrote the blog anyway but it IS just so full of incorrect content.

http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/

"Except another aspect of this "speedy delivery" system is that it loads regions *on your computer* so that the next time you visit that sim, it loads faster."

Right!  It just caches information that was downloaded, just like it did before.  It just reloads them better, like it didn't before.

"OK, so you see where this is going. In order to load other people's content on your own computer, it has to download people's content to your computer as if you downloaded it, owning the permissions. But you don't."

Right!  It just caches it, just like it did before.

"Is this encrypted in any way or obscured by obfuscation? I don't know where to look, and it may be in the form of some kind of raw file or something that you can't open"

Google knows, I found the answer to this question several years ago.  Plus you've repeatedly been told here plus you can go and find a cache viewer.

"I'd like to hear a technical and philosophical discussion of this."

No, clearly you don't as evidenced here.  What you WANT is a set of supporting views that are completely polarised with yours.

"Yes, I get it that in order to see something, Linden Lab has to stream it to you and it has to be visible in your browser and be cached. But that's in the browser, and that drops out after each session."

And over and over you've been told here that the data isn't cleared after each session.  Go and look, you've been told where to look.  The files are still there in your cache after you logout.

"But this goes further. It downloads files to your hard drive. Now, that may be a realty that "streaming" encompasses that is not meant as infringing, but is only meant "to provide the service"."

Just like the cache has always done...right now, in the standard viewer and all the tpv's.

"Even so, I want to hear more of the specifics of this, both the theory underlying it, the technicalities, and the ramifications for intellectual property."

See above, about only wanting to hear views that align with yours.  You're not listening nor even looking at the clear evidence sitting in your own cache folder that would take less time that would have taken to write the blog article.

"So now if the new feature of Project Interesting is that now scripted objects are downloaded to the hard drive, that may drive more ripping because it's a new vista opening up that was previously locked down."

As before, scripts execute server side, object data is downloaded, just as it always has been, scripts are NOT downloaded to cache, there's no need or purpose, this is a non issue with the cache of object data.  This evidence is available from many sources.

"I wonder if it is impossible to encrypt these files or have them on DRM. And before I hear the usual knowier-than-thou response that DRM "doesn't work," let me point out that the inherent contradiction of the encryptionists these days is that they hold out the prospect that communications can be absolutely encrypted (i.e. Bruce Schneier on Tor) but they oppose DRM for intellectual property."

I answered this for you and explained the rationale behind the answer.  You confused encryption of session data with encryption of stored data where a key is held locally in memory and the game is a simple one of "find the key in memory", not about breaking encryption.

"scripted objects, which are arguably the most expensive things in SL (pets, vehicles, guns), then is there more vulnerability to theft now?"

I've bought some clothes which are not scripted and way more expensive than scripts, that statement is somewhat over stated and no, there is no more vulnerability.  NONE.

"And back to the main point: was this the reason for the change in the TOS? The change could even be catching up to the reality that has always been in the browser."

Nope!

I've picked out all of the main points just for clarity.  While you picked out lots of other residents posts from here to post on your blog for the purposes of sensationalism and to demonstrate something I know not what, you and I have no prior axe to grind and I still don't have one now.  What might be worth taking away from this whole thread is that there is not a single person who holds one single claim that you're wanting to make as valid.

Every poster here has stated the very same technical answers and they all align give or take a bit of inter nit picking about some specifics. 

I don't know these people and they don't know me but doesn't that rather give some clues as to how things actually work, that a group of peers can all work it out for themselves and agree on the same thing?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Lexbot Sinister]

Sassy, you are a gem.

My own patience has worn out.