It's 2020. Why does it still cost money to upload an image?

[Sara Nova]

Yes, I know it's not much, but there's tons of places online that have no problem hosting images indefinitely for free. For some sites that's literally their entire purpose, like Imgur. Free image hosting is everywhere online.

Yeah, LL is fine hosting images here for free. What difference does it make if it's going to be inworld instead? I'm sure there is a reason; I'm just not sure what it is.

[ChinRey]

9 hours ago, MyAlt4099 said:

Yeah, LL is fine hosting images here for free. What difference does it make if it's going to be inworld instead? I'm sure there is a reason; I'm just not sure what it is.

It's only 10 L$.

Although they may not be too important, there are two reasons to keep an upload fee. One is that the SL economy needs money sinks to function. The other is to reduce the amount of frivolous and duplicate uploads. Hosting those images isn't a big deal but keeping track of them rendering them sure are. The SL assets server has several billion entries as it is and the more we add to it, the slower it works. We do not want to fill it up with entries that aren't necessary.

As for renderng, I've seen things like houses with dozens of identical windows with identical textures, each using a separate copy of both the mesh and the texture. Such idiocy needs to be punished and the only way to do it is through the increased upload fee that causes.

[Sara Nova]

On 3/16/2020 at 4:25 AM, ChinRey said:

It's only 10 L$.

Although they may not be too important, there are two reasons to keep an upload fee. One is that the SL economy needs money sinks to function. The other is to reduce the amount of frivolous and duplicate uploads. Hosting those images isn't a big deal but keeping track of them rendering them sure are. The SL assets server has several billion entries as it is and the more we add to it, the slower it works. We do not want to fill it up with entries that aren't necessary.

As for renderng, I've seen things like houses with dozens of identical windows with identical textures, each using a separate copy of both the mesh and the texture. Such idiocy needs to be punished and the only way to do it is through the increased upload fee that causes.

If an uploaded image is identical to an image someone else uploaded, why do they need to store another copy? Couldn't it just add a copy of the existing texture to your inventory?

[ChinRey]

2 hours ago, MyAlt4099 said:

If an uploaded image is identical to an image someone else uploaded, why do they need to store another copy? Couldn't it just add a copy of the existing texture to your inventory?

Ideally yes but that would mean checking all existing textures for duplicates every time somebody uploaded a new one.

[Sara Nova]

7 hours ago, ChinRey said:

Ideally yes but that would mean checking all existing textures for duplicates every time somebody uploaded a new one.

Wouldn't that be easy using hashing though?

[Beq Janus]

Your wish is going to come true-ish in the near-ish future. LL just promoted the benefits viewer changes. This is a set of changes that will allow them to vary the fees for certain activities based on an individuals subscription level, it so happens that image uploading is one of those tweakable things. So you can now choose to upgrade you membership and get cheaper texture uploads (and other perks) or stay as you are and uhm not. Note that the changes are live (in the LL viewer) but the fee adjustments and other aspects of this are not yet in place. 

 

 

[animats]

2 hours ago, MyAlt4099 said:

Wouldn't that be easy using hashing though?

SL should do that as part of a cleanup of the uploading process. If you upload a mesh with textures, you should pay for each texture only once, even if you upload it repeatedly while debugging the mesh.

[OptimoMaximo]

On 3/19/2020 at 1:59 AM, Beq Janus said:

Your wish is going to come true-ish in the near-ish future. LL just promoted the benefits viewer changes. This is a set of changes that will allow them to vary the fees for certain activities based on an individuals subscription level, it so happens that image uploading is one of those tweakable things. So you can now choose to upgrade you membership and get cheaper texture uploads (and other perks) or stay as you are and uhm not. Note that the changes are live (in the LL viewer) but the fee adjustments and other aspects of this are not yet in place. 

 

 

What I fear is that free accounts will be charged more, a basic premium will undergo no changes and the higher levels would get lower rates. 

[Sara Nova]

10 hours ago, OptimoMaximo said:

What I fear is that free accounts will be charged more, a basic premium will undergo no changes and the higher levels would get lower rates. 

Yeah I could see them doing that. 🙄

It would be nice if it was free even for free accounts. There's too much stuff in SL that requires money of some sort. And not everyone necessarily wants to associate a payment method with their account, or is even necessarily able to. For these people, even a L$1 fee can be a deal-breaker. I do have one associated (and in fact have a premium account) but the same isn't true of everyone. It would be nice if they accepted something not tied to a real-world identity, like Bitcoin—it would be very much in the spirit of SL, I think. There used to be third party exchanges that did, but then they banned third party exchanges for some reason...

Still though, any requirement to involve money can still be a problem for some people, even if they can do it in a completely anonymous, freedom-preserving way.

[Kyrah Abattoir]

On 3/19/2020 at 12:51 AM, MyAlt4099 said:

Wouldn't that be easy using hashing though?

You still have to actually check for hash collision with all the other hashes.

  

4 hours ago, MyAlt4099 said:

It would be nice if they accepted something not tied to a real-world identity, like Bitcoin—it would be very much in the spirit of SL, I think. There used to be third party exchanges that did, but then they banned third party exchanges for some reason...

You pretty much figured it out, LL has a vested interest in preventing their platform to be used for money laundering.

Edited March 22, 2020 by Kyrah Abattoir

[Sara Nova]

54 minutes ago, Kyrah Abattoir said:

You still have to actually check for hash collision with all the other hashes.

You pretty much figured it out, LL has a vested interest in preventing their platform to be used for money laundering.

Checking for a collision is as easy as looking up a texture by its hash.

What's their vested interest? Why is it LL's problem what people use their platform for? Are they legally responsible? I'm really sick of the government always acting like they're entitled to set rules for things they have nothing to do with, and I'd hope LL wouldn't willingly limit their own users' freedom simply to help them do that.

Have they actually confirmed that that's why they don't allow third party exchanges?

I know this is off topic for this thread, but I have pretty strong libertarian views in case you can't tell, and I just felt like ranting there, lol.

[Kyrah Abattoir]

2 minutes ago, MyAlt4099 said:

Checking for a collision is as easy as looking up a texture by its hash.

Indeed, but I don't think you quite understand the scale of the SL asset servers, after 16+ years of active use. You still have to compare your new texture hash with all the others, for each upload.

4 minutes ago, MyAlt4099 said:

What's their vested interest? Why is it LL's problem what people use their platform for? Are they legally responsible? I'm really sick of the government always acting like they're entitled to set rules for things they have nothing to do with, and I'd hope LL wouldn't willingly limit their own users' freedom simply to help them do that.

Have they actually confirmed that that's why they don't allow third party exchanges?

They have in the past justified various tightening of the transaction system as being part of an effort to comply with US/Euro regulations regarding taxes and money laundering yes.

European users are subject to VAT for example, and you have to fill a W-8 BEN form above a certain threshold. There are also various transaction limits in place and suspicious transfers will be investigated.

Welcome to the real world

[VenKellie]

images as well as other uploads like sound and mesh are all assigned a UUID and that UUID changes with every item uploaded so it kinda impossible to check if the item is already on the server. As far as i know it would require a complete rewrite of the asset server code to do such check but would also make uploading and fetching alot longer process, meaning a instant upload of a 512 by 512 image could take up to 5 seconds to upload if LL rewrote the asset code to allow such checks on the server during the upload process.

[Coffee Pancake]

On 3/15/2020 at 7:07 PM, MyAlt4099 said:

Yes, I know it's not much, but there's tons of places online that have no problem hosting images indefinitely for free. For some sites that's literally their entire purpose, like Imgur. Free image hosting is everywhere online.

Yeah, LL is fine hosting images here for free. What difference does it make if it's going to be inworld instead? I'm sure there is a reason; I'm just not sure what it is.

The 10L acts as a break. Every image you upload will exist forever, so think for just a second before you upload the file. 

Only storing a single copy of a single image is impractical for many reasons stated above, it just doesn't scale. There is also no way to prune images from the system, even images that haven't been requested in a really long time still have to exist or there is the potential for breakage, hopefully the CDN manages this.

There has to be some fee to prevent SL image data (which is accessible outside of SL via HTTP) from being misused to encapsulate other non-sl-image data - remember when gmail had unlimited storage .. and someone wrote a gmail filesystem driver. Google had to overhaul their API to break GmailFS and ensure it stayed broken.

[Kyrah Abattoir]

I addition, imgur does not keep images for ever:

Imgur keep images for ever as long as they are receiving at least 1 view every six months.

Edited March 22, 2020 by Kyrah Abattoir

[Sara Nova]

18 hours ago, CoffeeDujour said:

The 10L acts as a break. Every image you upload will exist forever, so think for just a second before you upload the file. 

Only storing a single copy of a single image is impractical for many reasons stated above, it just doesn't scale. There is also no way to prune images from the system, even images that haven't been requested in a really long time still have to exist or there is the potential for breakage, hopefully the CDN manages this.

There has to be some fee to prevent SL image data (which is accessible outside of SL via HTTP) from being misused to encapsulate other non-sl-image data - remember when gmail had unlimited storage .. and someone wrote a gmail filesystem driver. Google had to overhaul their API to break GmailFS and ensure it stayed broken.

About Gmail, that's not how I remember it. I'm pretty sure Gmail started with a gigabyte or so, and had been rising for a while since then. Might still be; I don't know. And I don't remember them ever intentionally breaking Gmail Drive. In fact now they have their own official equivalent that works much better.

[Sara Nova]

19 hours ago, VenKellie said:

images as well as other uploads like sound and mesh are all assigned a UUID and that UUID changes with every item uploaded so it kinda impossible to check if the item is already on the server. As far as i know it would require a complete rewrite of the asset server code to do such check but would also make uploading and fetching alot longer process, meaning a instant upload of a 512 by 512 image could take up to 5 seconds to upload if LL rewrote the asset code to allow such checks on the server during the upload process.

Five seconds seems like a perfectly acceptable delay if it's only when uploading an image.

[OptimoMaximo]

8 hours ago, MyAlt4099 said:

Five seconds seems like a perfectly acceptable delay if it's only when uploading an image.

The issue at hand is that items upload assigns an uuid that's not based on the content itself. The method you proposed would need a per pixel scan and, based on that, creating an uuid to then check for previously scanned images uploaded with the same method. And it is not how it works, moreover, even implementing such system now, can't take into account images uploaded at an earlier time that didn't use the new system, breaking the fetching because, at that point, another image uploaded, say, in 2011 has the same uuid and your new image would point to that one, which most likely won't be the same image.

Edited March 23, 2020 by OptimoMaximo

[Beq Janus]

On 3/22/2020 at 3:57 AM, MyAlt4099 said:

What's their vested interest? Why is it LL's problem what people use their platform for? Are they legally responsible? I'm really sick of the government always acting like they're entitled to set rules for things they have nothing to do with, and I'd hope LL wouldn't willingly limit their own users' freedom simply to help them do that.

Yes it is totally their responsibility.

Global governments are by definition entitled to set the laws for all the citizens that they govern. It is quite literally their job to do so. The lab have first and foremost to comply with US federal laws, and then (potentially) with legal regimes in countries around the globe that their users are based in.

Any system/service that allows money to be converted back and forth to other currencies and forms is a vector for money laundering. If I have ill-gotten dollars I can use them to buy Linden dollars and use those linden dollars to buy services/products from myself, then withdrawing the cash as legitimate revenue. Anti-money laundering (AML) is a mandatory practice for every business operating in the global marketplace.

I would not suggest that this is the reason why textures derive a fee however, that has far more to do with putting a sensible amount of friction in the system to protect performance and storage costs in the long term. I think the question is not so much "why don't they allow it?" but more "why would they want to?" The benefit to most users and to the platform is tiny.

 

[Jules Catlyn]

On 3/21/2020 at 11:56 PM, MyAlt4099 said:

in a completely anonymous, freedom-preserving way.

No such thing exists if you use the internet

Edited March 27, 2020 by Jules Catlyn