Feldspar Millgrove

When you are listening to streaming music (or other media) in Second Life, you are actually connecting directly to someone's server. Their server is not part of, not under the control of, Second Life. It is controlled by the person who is providing the music/media. The way that the Internet works is by IP Address. When you listen to streaming music, you are telling someone your IP Address. That's just how the Internet works. Now that you've given your IP Address to someone, nothing stops them from noticing that the same IP Address is being used by some other people (in your household, or whatever).

At this point, I am going to stop posting on this topic. I don't think anyone wants to hear my remarks, because it is not the answer they were hoping for. Rather than hear my bad news, they will be able to find someone who will tell them that everything is OK, there could be no problem, do what you want and you'll be fine. My only real advice (again) would be: consult a lawyer who specializes in intellectual property law.

Luschious Nightfire wrote: in a nutshell: An item/object is copyrighted as that type of item/object. So, a hairstyle is copyrighted as a hairstyle. Taking a screenshot of an Avy wearing said hairstyle is not an infringement, because you are not re-creating the hairstyle, you are creating an image. hairstyle = hairstyle image != hairstyle Second Life is not the real world, it is a world of digital art. Essentially, it is pictures. The "hair" is in fact not hair, it is a picture of hair. In general, "items" in the real world do not have copyrights attached to them. The reason that you can copyright the "hair" is that it is, in fact, a piece of digital art -- a picture. If someone takes a picture of it, what they have done is make a copy of a picture. hairstyle == image A more obvious example is a "texture" -- how could anyone not understand that a texture is a picture? And if you copy that picture by including it in a snapshot or a machinima, that's subject to copyright law.

Perrie Juran wrote: I don't see what would be dubious about it. You mentioned the Facebook TOS, but that's entirely different. FB merely says that FB itself may use your uploaded photos. In the case of Second Life, we're talking about people who are *not* Linden Lab taking your content and using it for purposes outside of Second Life. So a couple of issue bundles off the top of my head: LL is attempting to transfer poorly specified broad rights to unspecified third parties; and generally, each work requires a written contract. A lot of other issues come to mind, but those two are a mouthful to get you started. The TOS can only possibly ever do what is within the law, it can't contradict it or override it. Something to keep in mind is that Linden Lab is not promising to indemnify you against someone who would sue you for infringement. You'll still get sued, have to mortgage your house to pay for your lawyers, and hope that the court sides with you. There may be some possibility that if you lose, you could then try to sue Linden Lab for misleading you, I guess. Like I said: This has not been to court.

The TOS tries to give you the right to take snapshots and movies in SL. It looks legally dubious to me. It has not been tested in court. Feel free to be the first to go to court and test it. My advice is to consult with a lawyer who specializes in intellectual property, before doing anything.

Nalates Urriah wrote: Basically, you can do anything to change what you see that you want. New render engine, whatever. But, you can't change what I see on my viewer. I get to choose what I see. So, I can use Exodus in Torley mode and turn the world on my screen to vivid watermelon. Well, not quite. You cannot see anything, unless everyone else sees it too. So for example, if my Viewer allows me to see a particular sky and water when I enter a parcel, that is illegal. Because the official Viewer does not support Windlight changes on parcels. Another example: I see boobies bouncing. The official Viewer doesn't support "avatar physics", so that would be illegal. (The "jiggle" feature has been adopted into the Official Viewer, so it gets a pass -- but they used it as an example of something that would be illegal going forward.) It's not just that we can both see a cube. It's that we both see it the same way. That's what "shared experience" means. We're clear on that, from the examples given in the meeting. What is less clear is that "shared experience" can mean a whole lot more. And Linden Lab will not define it ahead of time -- they will call it out whenever they want to. Beyond things like skinning (changing the color of the Viewer and arrangement of buttons) and such, it's not clear at all what will be allowed.

Cincia Singh wrote: It's small wonder a significant percentage of new residents just throw up their arms and walk away from SL. The best solution would be for everyone to learn at least the basics of using the default SL viewer so they could answer the questions from new residents before they start suggesting additional downloads. When an old resident says to a newbie, "Sorry, I don't know how to work the Viewer you are using - can't help", their SL account should be terminated. Another possibility would be for the system to make users who are using TPVs invisible to those who are running the official Viewer and vice versa. In general, Linden Lab should modify the TOS to make it against the rules for older residents to communicate with newer residents. New users should be figuring things out on their own, anyway, and bringing their own unique and fresh perspective to SL, and not be contaminated by oldbies using strange illegal Viewers. The problem with new user retention on Second Life is definitely the oldbies. Existing customers are just ruining everything, especially when they try to interact with the brand new customers. I guess another idea would be to simply terminate all existing SL accounts that are more than two weeks old, and ban all TPVs. The future of Second Life is the Linden Realms and other high quality games that will be developed - and played - by an entirely different customer base. Clean off the grid and get rid of the troublesome customers. It's time for all-new customers and all-new experiences. It's time to relaunch Second Life.

Lucinda Bulloch wrote: I have found that get objectdetails has bugs, [...] I have found that changing sims can cause some scripts freeze Well, that's (not) nice, but it doesn't have anything to do with "tools" that some imaginary griefer is using to set the scripts on your parcel to "Not Running". It's just bugs. (Your "griefers" are the Linden Lab developers! LOL)

Baloo Uriza wrote: If you get disconnected, your options are "View Chat/IMs" and "Exit." Ohhhhh, duuuh! Thanks. I was thinking "Oh, you just re-launch the program and you're back where you were." Yes, it would be a GREAT idea not to have to do so much clicking to get back on. A RECONNECT button. On the screen BEFORE YOU (are required to) CLOSE IT! Brilliant! (Unlike myself today...)

Baloo Uriza wrote: Yes. The OP is looking for a button that will reconnect to SL after a forced disconnect. I still don't get it. In what was is this different from just pressing the regular old Connect/Login button?

Tides come in, Tides go out; No miscommunication. Well, unless the asset server is down, or there's a faulty network router.

It is not possible for anyone (besides Lindens, obviously) to turn off scripts on your parcel, regardless of "tools" that they may have. Scripts are not part of the Viewer, and no Viewer tool can turn off your scripts. The tools just send a request to the sim to turn the script on/off, and the sim then checks the permissions. If you don't have rights to turn the script off, it will not do anything. Sounds like either (a) you don't own the land, so it's someone else (your landlord) who has the rights to turn scripts on/off or (b) the Lindens turned them off for some reason. It wasn't griefers.

Tillyboy wrote: I don't want to sound like a spaz, but WHY the hell isn't there a reconnect button? I don't want to sound like I have never played a video game, but I haven't! What is a Reconnect button? On SL, you have a menu on startup that will connect you to the place of your choice (Home, Last Location, any other place if you want to type the region name, all your Favorite landmarks...) I guess "Reconnect" is somehow different than "Login to last location"?

Suki Hirano wrote: Showing online status is a "violation of privacy"? Is this like Nazi Germany or something? Who actually get offended if someone can see if they're online? Did people at LL forget that we can check their online status by simply IMing them or checking their status in group profile? Showing online status is indeed a violation of privacy, and I applaud Linden Lab for recognizing this as an issue. However, I (along with everyone else) condemn them for their poor decision and planning on how to go about implementing this. LL should have waited until they had a better technical solution that would not break so much important content in the world. There are an assortment of issues there: allowing people to toggle their general on/offline status, allowing people to give revokable see-my-status permission to objects owned by others, and all the infrastructure changes (permission system, LSL, presence server, sims) to support that. (That would be a noticeable amount of work.) Instead, they rolled out what we in the business refer to as a "hack", and not in the very complimentary sense. Their change breaks a zillion critical things in SL. Their workaround (script owner-based permission) is generally unworkable, and even opens up more security holes! And it does not give privacy control to the resident: permission can never be revoked. LL thought they had reviewed the existing use cases for presence: they told us this in the meeting, a condescending tone intending to shut up complaints. Now they have egg on their face, because 10 seconds later people were trying to explain the most obvious and common use cases to them. It was an illustration of how unimaginably out of touch LL is with what everyone does in Second Life. Truly amazing. Furthermore, they need a more comprehensive solution to the problem. As you have noted, presence can be determined by IMing someone. Oz Linden acknowledged this line of thinking in the meeting, and gave a stern warning that nobody must attempt to determine "true" presence information through any means at all. Not just llGetAgentStatus, but IMing, or any of a dozen other known (or to-be-hacked up) ways of determining it. Those alternate techniques (including IM) need to be closed as well. For example, when you IM someone who has not granted you permission to see their online status, it should tell you they are offline, even if they are online. You could view LL's actions here as a first step in the right direction. To me, it looks more like a public relations stunt gone wrong. Someone in management decided that online status was a privacy issue, and that responsible companies (they mentioned Facebook as an example!) allow users this control. So some kind of edict "to do something about it" came from on high (Rodvik?), and this was the best they could do in the given timeframe. Break the world, give the users an illusion that they were "doing something about it", not actually improve privacy much, and report back to upper management that they succeeded. Why will upper management buy this story? Because they are phenomenally ignorant about Second Life. Suki Hirano wrote: Showing what viewer we use is a "violation of privacy"? It should be an opt-in feature. If you want to broadcast your Viewer version to other residents, you should have to set a checkbox in Preferences. However, that's not what Linden Lab wants. They want to prevent people from seeing the information under any circumstances. This part of their policy is not about "privacy", and their tactics here are quite insulting.

Faye Feldragonne wrote: I'm so sick and tired of being confused by LL. I've sent millions of hours building a business in this world only to find out that GOD is messing around with the cosmos again. This is the essence of Second Life, and how it has always been. For various reasons, people suppose that Second Life is a stable place. But it has always been more of a wild ride into the unknown, with the rules and the world changing out from under you. Sudden and unpredictable, very difficult to deal with. It has always been this way. It probably will always be that way.

Anne Willful wrote: I don't understand why LL keep persisting in developing a viewer which hardly anybody uses. Wouldn't they be better just offering the basic viewer to get people started and put the money saved on viewer development into improving the infrastructure and rest of the user experience? The want to do both: improve their Viewer and improve the system. There are lots of reasons for doing the Viewer development in-house. First and foremost is control over the product. Second is that LL needs to control the timing of features; it is a strategic corporate secret when major new features will be released. For example, LL has decided to change the direction of Second Life and turn it into a gaming platform. Features for gaming need to go in the Viewer. Linden Lab needs to control when that knowlege becomes known to the public. Those are just a couple of reasons. I understand that Viewer 2 was not done in-house - it was outsourced. Certainly LL had control over that product, through proprietary contractual agreements with the development company. And that turned out to be a total disaster. Linden Lab is now trying to work more closely with third party developers such as the Firestorm team. However, their strategy for this is to forbid third parties from introducing any significant features; LL must originate and release any new features in the Official Viewer before any TPV may have have the feature. This is a new atmosphere and a new tension, fraught with uncertainty for the TPV community, who largely sees this as hostile until proven otherwise. (Who would want to spend thousands of hours of effort on a feature, when you will not be allowed to release it when you're done, and it is completely unknown whether it will ever be released at all?) It wlll be interesting to see how this plays out over the next year.

Baloo Uriza wrote: Toysoldier Thor wrote: why has all copybotting incidents [...] version of the opensource code when they could have been much more stealthy and just taking the data from the VRAM using LL Viewer and not be banned because of the viewer they were using? [...] most copybotters aren't using the open source codebase, but code that was developed prior to the release of the viewer code [...] Most people may not have realized that one of the factors in open-sourcing the Viewer was that it had already been reverse-engineered. There was already a TPV, before there was any open source Viewer. It was a force that could not be stopped, so part of the decision was to play along to the mutual benefit of the TPV developer crowd and LL's internal development. As explained, the entire 3D information is sent to your Viewer. If you can reprogram the Viewer or substitute your own ("third-party") Viewer, you can intercept everything and copy it. And even if you can't do that, there are programs that can use to reach "lower down" into your computer to intercept it on it's way to your screen (either before or after the 3D is turned into 2D). There are two other points above that I think are worth addressing here. 1. There is actually no way that LL can prevent a third-party Viewer (including a copybot) from connecting to Second Life. There are a few things they could do to make it trickier, but when all is said and done, no way to prevent it. 2. The reason you haven't heard of non-Viewer copying is that you haven't heard very much.

Baloo Uriza wrote: TPV devs are still welcome to create new viewer functionality. But when they do, they have to check it in upstream first so everyone has the same level playing field. This is emphatically incorrect, according to everything Oz Linden said at the meeting. They are not welcome to create new functionality in general. Note that we're talking about "shared experience" features here. And it has nothing to do with "checking in the feature upstream (to LL's code)." What LL has said at the meeting is that (a) LL must create the feature (b) LL must roll out the feature in the released version of the Official Viewer © After that, TPVs may have the feature also. If someone wants to create a new feature for their TPV, they are not allowed to do so. What they must do is contact Linden Lab and see if they can get someone's attention there. They may requrest that Linden Lab put the feature in. The third party developer may offer suggestions or code, but this not about "checking in" code or directly contributing to the Viewer. If LL is interested in the feature, LL will take it under advisement and might eventually someday devote resources to developing the feature as they see it. And then LL might eventually roll it out to the Official Viewer. After all that happens -- if it happens at all -- then the TPV may include the feature, as long as it's the same as what LL already released.

Ceka Cianci wrote: what tpv's gave back then has nothing to do with these changes.. all those client side great features are not what is falling under these changes.. it's the features that can mess with the world itself for people that decided not to use those viewers.. I think you perhaps misunderstand the technicalities of how Second Life works. The Viewer does not "mess with the world". Everything the Viewer does is "client side" -- the Viewer *is* the "client". This is not about security exploits on the server side. The policy is only about Viewers; it is about how Viewers will show you the world. The problem is that TPVs have been showing some people an improved version of the world with more features. Historically, if you use a Linden Lab Official Viewer, you see something less than what you would see using a TPV. Examples of features created by TPVs, which would not be allowed under this policy, include things like: multi-attachment points on avatars, avatar physics (jiggley bits), parcel Windlight, and mesh deformer (improved avatars). However, since Linden Lab has already picked up (or plans to pick up in the near future) those particular features, they will be given a pass for the moment. The RLV ("restraint") feature in TPVs, but not in the Linden viewers, is also given a pass, but that's hard to understand by the policy. Perhaps it's just too popular and would upset too many people to take it away. The thing to understand is that TPVs innovated many features that affect the shared experience, and Linden Lab does not want that happening anymore. The policy is designed to prevent third parties from future innovation in that area. You can innovate on things like: how the Chat windows are organized, how the Inventory window looks, what color the border around the screen is, and such. If you don't go too far, that's still allowed. Something that frustrates developers is that Linden Lab never gives an explanation that can be clearly understood or relied upon. Before people invest hundreds or thousands of hours in projects, they want some assurance that their work will not be for nothing. Under the TPV Policy guidelines, and the way LL operates, there is no way to tell whether a feature will be forbidden. Determining which things "affect the shared experience" are like how judges rule that something is or isn't pornography: Linden Lab "knows it when it sees it". It means whatever LL wants it to mean on any given day, and only they can tell. (Moreover, if you ask ahead: hearing an answer from one Linden doesn't mean that it's true, or that it will be true tomorrow, or that they won't change their minds later.) If LL had never opened up the possibility of TPVs, people would not be upset. However, many people say that were it not for TPVs, SL would be dead and LL out of business, because the official LL Viewers have been so awful. Most people on SL nowadays use TPVs. LL doesn't like that fact, which is why you are not allowed to advertise which Viewer you are using in your nametag anymore. Too embarassing for LL that every time a new customer asks someone for help, the answer is, "Oh, I see you are using the LL Viewer. Don't know how to work that one anymore. Maybe you should try downloading Firestorm?" It is not normal for an MMO video "game" company to allow TPVs at all. On the other hand, Second Life is not quite like other video games. It's more like the World Wide Web, and it's also something that nobody quite knows what to do with or where it can lead. Hence, the idea of allowing (and even encouraging) TPVs was consistent with the innovativeness of Second Life. But now LL seems to feel that it's out of control and not conducive to business. Linden Lab is reasserting their control over their world, their imagination.

Sassy Romano wrote: Innula Zenovka wrote: I still don't really understand why you say an RLV trap needs to check online status, unless it's so the trap knows sooner rather than later if it should reset itself because, since the victim has logged back in somewhere else, they presumably don't want to be trapped any more. um, my only cage checks to see if the owner is online. If they go offline then the victim is released a short while after. I guess this will continue to work since it checks for the cage owner. So, it appears that the technical experts who have actually written the scripts for these imprisoning games have chimed in and said that (a) as I said, the changes do not make it impossible to script these devices and (b) it doesn't even break existing content, because they don't use llAgentStatus in the first place. It probably does what I suggesed, llSensorRepeat. I think there might be some other scripted prisons that could break, ones implemented by other people. And it rather sucks that LL is breaking content, and the llAgentStatus change will definitely break a lot of content, even though it does not really make prison games hard to script. What I'm interested in are the approaches to the problems that can be implemented by us, because I don't think LL is going to back down on this, nor will they timely provide us with enhancements that give us better functionality for these problems. By the way, another obvious solution to the owner-is-gone-so-free-the-prisoner problem, besides owning the cage, is to periodically ask the jailer whether they still want to keep the prisoner. If they don't answer, the prisoner is released. (This communication could be done in a variety of ways and does not require the jailer to be in the same sim or anything.) This might even be better than checking the online status. Just because the jailer is knocked offline doesn't mean he's not coming back in five minutes or that he intended to release the prisoner.

friscolives wrote: The new guy here again. I'm curious what are prims? I've been looking at potentially buying a second life house, and I've seen the term bounced around here and there...not sure what it is? Also HUD? No idea what it is, but it seems to be important. The interesting thing is that this newbie is asking these particular questions here in the forums. In the good old days, the person would have actually been in SL, interacting with people, and quickly learning about the numerous schools offering in-world lessons pretty much 7x24 on these subjects. But now people don't go in-world to interact in that way. They use web sites. Welcome to the future.

Ciaran Laval wrote: You are however correct to say that IM's and groups will still show the group status, but LL are trying to make it so that a users wishes are respected by their online status. The obvious solution (as posted in some other thread) is for users to be able to give "show my online status" permission to individual objects. Right now, that permission is only available for the "Friends & Groups". However, LL has said that they cannot implement this. The server architecture is incapable of accomodating that feature. Maybe in some distant future they will make changes in the architecture (e.g. the presence system) to make this work. But there don't seem to be any plans for such a major project. Regarding the fact that you can tell if someone is online by other means than llGetAgentData. As acknowleged by LL, there are many ways to do this. However, LL has made it very clear that anyone using those techniques would be in serious violation of the policy and TOS. "Don't do it" was what they said.

Chetar Ruby wrote: But onto what still concerns me, which is killing llGetAgentData's ability to see if people are online. A lot of scripting uses this in a responcible useful manner. Another poster pointed out RLV furniture as using it to determine when the victim has dropped offline or teleported away. I'm a RLV scripter too, and this DIRECTLY IMPACTS my work. It's also just a pretty bad idea to break legitimate use of this Can't the furniture detect that the avatar is no longer there, just by scanning for them in the appropriate radius? Also, you can still tell if the avatar is in the sim(s) you are interested in. There's a question of performance with that, though, and it's not trivial. On the one hand, you won't be hitting the presence server and whatever other back-end processors that llGetAgentData involves. On the other hand, you'll be sensoring (and maybe doing other work). But with LL's new focus on supporting gaming environments, perhaps that kind of sensoring will be tuned up to lessen the sim impact.

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-28388

I am seeing the problem with clean installs. I don't have pink prims. I have > 100% CPU usage at all times.