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Feldspar Millgrove

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Posts posted by Feldspar Millgrove

    Is it cheating?

    in General Discussion Forum

    Posted

    On 12/15/2017 at 12:44 PM, Love Zhaoying said:

    It is not cheating if you are in an "open relationship" with an agreement to not tell each other about your adventures outside the relationship. Lot of "ifs" and preconditions.

    And so you wouldn't be asking yourself if you are cheating, then, would you.

     

    • Like 1

    LL condemn the recent Executive Order on Immigration

    in General Discussion Forum

    Posted

    Say that Linden Lab has users from about 1,000 areas of the world. Of those, there are about 10 places that are known to be dangerous (to themselves, their neighbors, and SL). Most of the griefing comes from those 10 places. There are even lost of people who are trying to escape those places, it's so bad there. Now, out of those 10 places, Linden Lab's previous administration identified 6 of them as being the worst. (The other 4 might even be worse in some ways, such as being the source of a major attack, but they have certain political and economic ties.) So the incoming CEO of LL implements a policy where users wanting to create new accounts from those 6 areas are put on hold and given special review for 90 days, Users who already had accounts from those areas are still allowed to log in but they have to go through several extra login screens and may feel like they are being picked on, since they were already vetted.

    After the 90 days is up, things should go back to more or less normal, but better user verification procedures will be in place to filter out griefers -- new accounts from those areas will be more cumbersome to create due to this "extreme vetting". By the way, many new accounts (certainly all of the recent influx of users) from these areas are given free Premium accounts for their first 5 years. (This is subsidized by raising the cost of Premium accounts on all other users.)

    Out of the 1,000 areas, the people in about 100 of them have a certain religion (either by choice, or because the rulers of the area willl cut your head off if you don't follow their relgion). People are screaming "religious persecution" because 6 of those countries are on the ban list, even though all the other 94 areas that practice the religion are totally unaffected by the ban.

    Meanwhile, the rulers of the most obvious non-banned area (one of the 4 excluded from the 10 bad places), was, as part of this ban, coerced by LL into setting up their own OpenSIm system to give free accounts to people fleeing the worst neighboring areas, instead of them needing to come over to SL.

    Because of this, the CEO of LL is called "Hitler",is said to be destroying SL and the rest of the Internet, is given death threars, and many sims are trashed by current outraged residents who exploit security holes to delete other people's objects (regardless of whether those people entirely agree with CEO Hitler or not), These people also grief the s&*&t out of anyone who ever wrote anything positive about the CEO or who suggests that these temporary emergency measures might be reasonable. Or if their svi  just "looks like" the "racist" and "intolerant" sort of "oppressive hater" who might have.

    Meanwhile, AOL's CEO writes a public letter condeming the LL CEO...

    A guy claimed he could see IP - was he hacking us?

    in General Discussion Forum

    Posted

    Phil Deakins wrote:

     

    Therefore, someone knowing your internet address is not a breach of privacy.

    As noted, any computer (e.g. web site) that you connect to, knows your IP address.

    That's how the Internet works: two computers know each other by IP address in order to communicate.

    However, your IP address can be used to identify you in real life. Anyone who knows it can trivially figure out your real life location, with varying accuracy. In some places, just the general area that you live in.  In other cases, your block or maybe even street. That depends on how your provider (ISP, e.g. phone company) has things set up. But with access to commercial databases, it can fairly well identify you individually. Most people do not have access to those databases. They get the information from you yourself. When you use web sites, the people running the web site know your IP addres. And then you go put in all manner of personal information into their web site, so they know who you are. And then that is all shared with other companies who pay for the information - mutual cooperation for commercial gain in "knowing the customer" and all about them. Some ISPs (such as Verizon) have been known to monitor your entire web browsing history and sell that information to whoever wants to pay, for example.

    But in general, random individuals you encounter on SL will not know much about you (except perhaps which city you live in) based on your IP address.

    They can trouble you without knowing who you are, though, just by knowing your IP address, For eample, they can launch attacks on your ccomputer if they know your IP address. These are rather unlikely to be successful if you are on a home computer because your ISP filters out most things like that. If it's  work computer, you could be inviting an attack on your company's systems (in fact, the IP address can tell them exactly who the company is, and which IP addresses belong to the company, while at the same time not identifying a particular computer at the company).

    So, someone knowing your IP address is not "nothing", but it usually doesn't amount to much.

    Can someone on SL figure out your IP address? Yes, in at least two ways. First, if you are playing any media (e.g. streaming audio) on a parcel will know your IP address, because that's exactly the same as your accessing a web site on the Internet. Secondly, there may be (probably are) bugs in the SL systems that will allow people to do it in ways that were not intended.

    People you enounter on SL who threaten you about IP addresses are 99.9999% likely to be complete fakes, just bullying you and assuming that you don't understand these things.

    Strange Wearables

    in General Discussion Forum

    Posted

    Thank You!

    I will fire up Emacs and look for this file and see what it's doing.

     

    More interesting things.  Sometimes (transferring the object, Save As from Appearance, and other random actions, sometimes...) the object appears with the body shape icon. I guess the system gets confused while I am manipulating the object, and pants turn into a shape...

     

     

    Strange Wearables

    in General Discussion Forum

    Posted

    I have some old wearables that show with a question mark icon in inventory. When I put them on, they don't appear (although the avatar may deform slightly), and going into Appearance mode shows them. What are these? They might be slider-clothes made in SL, or purchased.  There is no Mesh anywhere in this story.

     

    I am guessing these are damaged assets or something?

     

    Viewer Design & Implementation

    in Second Life Viewer

    Posted

    Are there any design documents that explain the Viewer?  The overall architecture of the Viewer, the messaging system, circuit use, what goes over UDP, the role of HTTP, what kinds of things are polled, what the state machines are for. what all the threads are doing, why some things are plugins...an overview of all the pieces and key data structures?

     

     

    Meanwhile, Across The Street At High Fidelity......

    in General Discussion Forum

    Posted

    Cathy Foil wrote:

    2. Most peoples upload speeds are nowhere near their download speeds.  Wouldn't this be a huge problem causing lag?

    I think all the high speed providers very recently started upgrading everyone's upload speed to match their download speed, so the above is no longer going to be a concern.

    I have Verizon FIOS and actually my upload speed is sometimes faster than my download speed, nowadays. Either way is between 75 and 89 Mbps.

    Contests v. "Skill Games" policy

    in General Discussion Forum

    Posted

    Are contests, which require no payment to enter, but which offer cash prizes. allowed?

     

    I am thinking about contests like "Best Dressed" (popular in clubs),

    and about arbitrary things like Building contests (popular at in-world education sims).

     

    I've heard that such things are no longer allowed, but that it's hard to tell from reading the policy document.

     

    Skill Gaming Policy Thread

    in General Discussion Forum

    Posted

    Madelaine McMasters wrote:

    irihapeti wrote:

    Madelaine McMasters wrote:

    irihapeti wrote:

    is some really well-designed AI programs that can create self-modifying executable code

    I have very fond memories of writing self modifying code on Dad's PDP-11 and on my Macintosh. People look at me funny when I suggest that as a way to solve thorny problems in real-time systems.

    have never understood why this isnt done more often. Given that they used to do it a lot back in the olden days on the metal. And is still doable today with higher-level language interpreters

    maybe bc resources like memory and that got cheaper. So just chuck space at the problems

    I can understand it. Self modifying code must be done in assembly language,[...]

    As an embedded system developer, I grew up close to the "metal", and I love it there. But the siren song of high level languages is hard to resist. I think it's just fine that self-modifying code is largely forgotten. But I'll never forget the fun of doing it!

     

    Many high level languages support self-modfying code.

    What the new SL will be about

    in General Discussion Forum

    Posted

    All building will be done outside the world using tools such as Blender.

    There will be no in-world tool for creating parametric shapes.

    It might also be that other users do not see any changes (i.e. rezzing an uploaded mesh) in real time; the system contains user-generated content, but it is more static than SL. This has implications for the architecture: what and when content is downloaded, how it is distributed on the grid (because a sim is not a place anymore), etc. The current architecture as you know is not performant.

     

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