Re: [Opensim-users] Announcement of inventory tool (MyInventory), mostly of interest to grid operators/grid nauts

Sat, 17 Nov 2012 06:17:43 -0800 

Inuyasha,
Obviously you love what you're doing, and of course I would urge you to continue. But, IP rights and content theft aside - what you've written here raises some seriously red flags. For a little over a year now, my mantra has been "Real Life First!", and for good reason. Its far too easy to let yourself get to involved and too immersed in these worlds. 


  I know this from personal experience.  October of last year I was 
admitted into the hospital with an infection the size of a basketball on 
my inner leg, and soon after found out that it was due to a body wide 
infection caused by my blood sugar averaging between 300 and 500 for at 
least the three months prior.  I was septic, my blood pressure was off 
the wall, and my organs were at risk of shutting down.  All because I 
had been neglected my place in the real world.



  Instead of exorcising, going to work, and eating right - I would 
literally spend between 10 and 15 hours a day behind the computer 
coding, building, scripting, animating, texturing, you name it. 
Meanwhile, in order to fuel these daily mad creation sprints I had been 
gorging on fast food, downing chocolate bars like they were nothing, and 
literally guzzling whole milk as a way to squelch the heart burn.  By 
the time I had realized there was something wrong, my body weight 
ballooned up to 450lbs and I damn near lost my life.  It took two months 
in the hospital on a constant IV antibiotic, add in surgery to remove 
the infection, and months of physical therapy afterwards - at a cost of 
$107,000 since I didn't have insurance at the time.



  Meanwhile, during all of this my virtual projects were left in wait 
and in the end were lost due to a hardware failure in my absence.  
Nearly two years worth of work gone - poof, and all thats left is an 
outdated OAR of my welcome sim that I was lucky enough to salvage from a 
test folder I found on a USB key in my desk drawer.



  I'm better now, I'm down nearly 200lbs from where I was during all of 
that - and come next month my doctor plans on taking me off of my 
medications.  I'm physically active, I can walk and breath normally 
again, and I've gone back to my real life job.  I've even taken up 
bowling on the weekends and participating in faculty / staff sporting 
events at work.  All while picking up the pieces and rebuilding that 
small bit of the metaverse that was mine, and lost.  HOWEVER only in my 
spare time at night and on weekends. After I've tended to the 
responsibilities I have to my self, my father, my cat, and my job.



  My apologies if this seems harsh, however I strongly urge you to step 
back and do a reality check.  Which is more important?  Your life, 
family, and health or the pixelated bits of 1's and 0's you're creating?



  As for content theft, it will always occur, the same way as in the 
real world people will steal from stores and re-sell items that "fell 
off the back of a truck".  Its an unfortunate fact of life and no matter 
how many safe guards are put into place, no matter how much DRM is 
implemented - it will always happen. Criminals are criminals and they 
will always find a way to break the rules.  The most that we as creators 
can do is to craft our wares with love and care, and if the worst case 
ever occurs - grit our teeth and report it to the authorities.  There 
is, after all a reason why they put those scary FBI warnings at the 
start of a movie and in the leaflets of CD cases.



  InuYasha, I urge you to be well and put your first life first - as 
the folks from Linden Land would say.  Remember, there's no virtual 
reality without a reality to drive and care for it.


Be well and be safe.

/me hugs...

- John / Orion Pseudo-Fhang


On 11/17/2012 08:11 AM, InuYasha Meiji wrote:

I am sorry, I am a bit prone to mood swings, on account of being both, 
an insulin dependent diabetic and after an 8 year wait on dialysis,  I 
am on kidney transplant immune suppressants.  This whole conversation 
is starting to depress the %^&* out of me, wondering if all of this is 
worth my time and money anymore.  When I discovered Opensim, I 
thought, finally I can have enough land to build something 
impressive.  I once built the most important building of Shuri called 
the Seiden of Shuri in a sim called Butler in Secondlife.  Now I could 
build the entire castle on my own grid, and choose a time period and 
scale.    With enough research to build a historically accurate Castle 
during its golden era..  I have researched more then  5 years on this 
project, only to be sure I had enough detail and knowledge of the 
culture to create what was around in the late 16th early 17th century.



 I have been saving money by not eating as well, I lost 32 pounds in 
three months.  It should be another year, or year and a half, to get a 
monster of a server to run it on.   As I save up, prices cme down to 
built a twin AMD 3+ Bulldozers each with 16 cores to run it on.



This conversation has me thinking  only about people stealing my 
assets, makeing me think, why bother.    To me the realease of 
Snowcrashe's software makes it easy for anyone to just freely grab all 
my work, I give on my grid, for use on my grid,  and drag it off 
someplace, even SL to resell and use no matter how I try to protect 
myself and my work.  Also from what he said other "black hatters" can 
do it ANYWAYS.  To me this means hours of hand texturing, the hours I 
spent building, till my one good eye gives me such a headache I pop 
tylonol like candy.



IT takes me more time and effort to do as much as some with only one 
working eye.  I want it to stay here on my grid unless I choose to 
sell it in another grid like Secondlife.  I also don't want my grid a 
16th-17th century grid becoming filled with airplanes and cars and 
other modern items.  Can someone tell me now, why should I even put 
more work into creating this world and taking any more of my life 
creating anything anymore??


InuYasha.




On 11/17/2012 2:47 AM, Snowcrash Short wrote:




On Thu, Nov 15, 2012 at 3:50 PM, What Virtual World - Martin Forster 
<[email protected] 
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:


    Hello Snowcrash,
    I think it is good having software to backup your items but....
    As melanie sayed before, the ability to backup "Any" item would
    not be a good idea as your software will be banned from major
    grids due to this.
    To be honest we would also blacklist your software if we think it
    can be at harm for the creators in our grid.
    Please think if this:
    Most people can not make a "copybot vieuwer" as the things people
    need for that are available but also complicated to build if you
    dont have any experiance.
    If your software is easy to compile without any knowledge it will
    be a base for people to create these "copybot's" with.
    This will not be the best advertisment for your software in my
    believe.
    I think it will be best not to make it an opensource project ..
    but just distribute only in binary form.
    Also making it TPV compliant will be even better.
    If it protects content from beeing ilegaly copied on "any grid" we
    will support it for sure.
    Just my two cents ...


The backup feature, which really is only a small part of the overall 
featureset, currently operates in one of two modes, TPV compliant 
mode and unrestricted mode. MyInventory forces the download component 
to be TPV compatible when connecting to any known Linden Labs grid 
(and similar protection is underway for other grids), My original 
mail had two topics.



1) Which grids would like to have the same hardcoded protection level 
against unrestricted download as Linden Labs
2) This tool may - if it becomes popular - create a lot of duplicate 
assets, therefore I came up with a suggestion on how to alleviate 
this problem.



Going closed source is simply "security by obscurity" under a 
different name, the "black hatters" already have the ability to take 
what they want, claiming that content creators assets are safe is 
simply not true, and that fact holds for Linden Labs grids as well.



Even if you decide to block MyInventory, the blocking tools are so 
inadequate in these days of fast recycling DHCP servers, that all you 
will manage to do is to block out legitimate users, the "black 
hatters" can easily get around these limitations. And is that really 
what you want?


    Best regards,
    Martin Forster

        ----- Original Message -----
        *From:* Snowcrash Short <mailto:[email protected]>
        *To:* [email protected]
        <mailto:[email protected]>
        *Sent:* Thursday, November 15, 2012 10:44 AM
        *Subject:* [Opensim-users] Announcement of inventory tool
        (MyInventory), mostly of interest to grid operators/grid nauts

        Hi

        I've been working on a client side tool for decentralizing
        user inventories, which I will release as an open source tool
        in two weeks, some of the features may be relevant to grid
        operators.

        The basic premise of the tool is that the inventory and the
        backing assets of the inventory items really should be
        controlled by the user. The tool is born out of a frustration
        of having visited a number of grids. Each visit to a new grid
        presents me with an empty inventory, and I can then spend time
        searching for suitable item, clothing, attachments and
        other accessories.

        For this purpose I have created a tool which will allow me to
        backup my inventory to a local cache and then upload the
        contents to another grid.

        If my tool becomes popular, both the upload and download
        mechanisms may have some impact on the grid-operators, hence
        this email to serve as a notice.

        The basic architecture is pretty simple, consisting of a
        number of import agents, which can import the users inventory
        and backing assets to a local database, and a number of upload
        agents which can upload inventory content to a specific account.

        Backup/Import
        There are two import agents, one which will import .iar files
        and one which works very much like I believe "Stored
        Inventory" works, which can backup the inventory of an avatars
        inventory. Avatar backup/Import is governed by a policy.
        Currently there are two policies, one complying with a very
        restrictive interpretation of the Linden Labs policy on
        backups, and a completely unrestricted policy, where anything
        that can be downloaded will be downloaded.

        When a new account is registered in MyInventory it checks if
        the account is for a Linden Lab grid and limits the choices of
        policies to policies suitable for LL's TOS, I cannot and do
        not know if other grids have similar policies, I can well
        imagine that Avination has a similar restrictions, and would
        like similar logic implemented to restrict the download. Any
        grid operator which would like to have backup governed by a
        more restrictive policy are invited to notify me and I will
        attempt to implement the policy prior to the first release of
        the source code. or supply patches at a later time.

        Upload/Export
        MyInventory supports two mechanisms for uploading inventory
        content, traditional upload using UDP/CAPS and direct access
        to the inventory and asset web-services.
        Due to limitations in the UDP/CAPS protocol each upload will
        create new assets, and as of my latest read of the Open
        Simulator code the asset store does not support "single
        instance assets", i.e. it does not use a checksum to verify if
        the asset already exists, for this reason MyInventory prefers

        to upload using direct access to asset and inventory 
web-services.


        I would propose that the grids which chooses to support
        MyInventory augment their "GridInfoService" entries with the
        url's for the asset and inventory web-services, e.g.

        [GridInfoService]
            assets = http://assets.osgrid.org
            inventory = http://inventory.osgrid.org

        Best regards
        Snowcrash

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