Yesterday was also the last rezday I’ll be celebrating in Second Life. A recent culmination of circumstances has pushed me away from Second Life, and triggered my migration to OpenSim. I’ll be wrapping up my affairs over the next month, then putting my Second Life account on the shelf. By this time next year, I expect SL to be mostly irrelevant to my day-to-day life.

I’ll explain why I’m leaving below, but I don’t want this to be a completely whiney frumple post. Yes, I’m leaving Second Life, but it has been a rich and amazing four years. Here are a few of the interesting things I’ve done in my time in Second Life (in no particular order):

• Built hundreds of silly little things as part of a weekly speed-building competition at The Shelter.
• Worked a variety of odd-jobs: scripter, texturer, builder, animator, artist, teacher, clothing designer, shop owner, and more.
• Taught dozens of students how to build with prims. (I was an instructor at NCI for several months, teaching one class at first, then later three.)
• Exhibited my artwork in several virtual galleries.
• Discovered countless things about myself that I never knew.
• Met the best friends I’ve ever known. (And hope to keep even after I’ve left.)
• Fell head-over-heels in love. (More than once.)
• Opened up a shop to sell several of my creations. (Some were more useful than others).
• Earned thousands of US dollars working as a metaverse development contractor. (And found out how much fun it is to pay self-employment taxes.)
• Created a series of “chibi” comics featuring toon versions of me and my friends in various silly situations.
• Organized the Creator’s Playgroup, a small group of friends who would do show-and-tells, themed creation games, and collaborative builds.
• Exploited a short-lived server glitch in order to build a giant megaprim sculpty octopus.
• Won second place for my entry in a UI design contest, earning a cash prize of over USD $700. (I also earned a multi-post tirade about the Leninist and anti-populist concepts my design supposedly exhibited, and about the downfall of the SL economy that would occur if I ever had the opportunity to implement my design. That was almost as good as the $700.)
• Owned a variety of homes: a modernist house built into the side of a cliff overlooking an icy waterfall; a peaceful garden facing out to the sea; and a sky platform high above a volcanic island that resembles a sea creature when viewed from above.
• Took an epic multi-day sailing trip of the mainland waterways, navigating my trusty Flying Tako through narrow channels, shallow waters, and hundreds of perilous sim border crossings — and lived to tell the tale. (My motto and catch phrase was “Sand bars and ban lines be damned!”)
• Developed a tool to create avatar animations with Blender. (Then gave it away for free.)
• Attended the Resident Experience Team Office Hours for months, providing feedback, ideas, and patches.
• Organized the User Experience Interest Group after the Resident Experience Team abandoned the above mentioned office hours. (We’ve met weekly for a year and a half, generating countless great ideas for Linden Lab to ignore.)
• Contributed numerous software patches to improve the Second Life viewer. (Linden Lab even got around to using a few of them, eventually.)
• Got fed up with LL and started a new viewer project with my friend McCabe — despite neither of us being much good at C++ at the time.

So you could hardly call my time in Second Life dull. There were ups and down, excitement and frustration, good times and bad. All considered, I’ve had a good run in SL. But the time has come to move on.

I’m sure some of you have guesses about why I’m leaving, but it’s not as simple as it seems. I could point to the kerfuffle over the Third-Party Viewer (TPV) policy as the reason for leaving, and people would nod in understanding. But that’s not the whole story.

True, after the annoucement of the new Terms of Service (which requires you agree to the new policy), I was certain I would have to leave SL and cancel my account before April 30 to avoid the legal implications of an overreaching and ill-conceived policy. But the policy has recently been revised enough that, although I still don’t like the policy, it’s no longer an urgent danger that prevents me from logging in.

So, I could stay in Second Life — if I wanted to.

But you see, by my own nature, I’m a creator. I can’t help creating things. It’s what I do, and I love to do it. It’s what attracted me to Second Life in the first place. SL was the ultimate canvas, a “game” where the goal was to create and share cool things with other people. My own skillset and interests in art, computer graphics, and programming served me extremely well in SL. There wasn’t (and still isn’t) much in SL that I couldn’t do if I applied myself to it. And as you can see from the sizable list above, I’ve tasted a huge variety of what SL has to offer.

Yet for the past year or two, I’ve had the growing feeling that the things I enjoyed about Second Life have been slipping away. I attribute this feeling to a number of factors:

• Frequent policy missteps by Linden Lab. Seriously, LL screws up so often that I have an entire blog category devoted to their messes. After a while, I just stopped caring enough to even write about it. Linden Lab pulling a serious policy gaff has become less novel than a cat playing the piano on YouTube, and far more depressing. A cat can learn to paw at the piano keys, but Linden Lab apparently can’t learn to respect or understand its user base.
• A gradual shift in Linden Lab’s corporate culture. When I first signed up for Second Life, Linden Lab felt like a cool, creative company full of awesome people who were passionate about SL. Today, Linden Lab still has plenty of awesome people, but it’s not a cool, creative company anymore — because the people with a real passion for SL aren’t the ones driving the company anymore. Maybe it’s inevitable that as a startup grows, the suits take over and it becomes focused more on profits and other serious-business-type stuff, and less on making something cool. But that inevitability doesn’t make it any less unpleasant.
• A growing cynicism towards Linden Lab among Residents. This goes hand in hand with the policy missteps and corporate culture shift. Unfortunately, there is a vicious cycle at work here. As a whole, Linden Lab doesn’t understand the Residents, so it frequently does things that upset and anger them. Having been burned by Linden Lab in the past, Residents habitually see everything the Lindens do and say in the worst possible light, and frequently overreact and lash out. These negative reactions from the Residents drive the Lindens further away, so that they understand and relate to the Residents even less, and are more likely to do things that upset them. Both sides started the cycle, and both sides perpetuate it. (Myself included, I’m afraid.)
• An increasing prevalence of fear, intolerance, greed, pettiness, and viciousness among the Resident population. For as long as I have been in Second Life, there have been doomcriers, bigots, moneygrubbers, and drama mongers. But they were just a nuisance, fringe elements that the rest of us shrugged off as we went about our lives. But today, those things are an integral part of the culture and mindset of Second Life. The dwindling percentage of Residents who are here to create, learn, and enjoy life are being overwhelmed by individuals whose lives are ruled by the most base and destructive aspects of human nature. Or so it seems to me. Maybe I’m just getting crotchety in my “old age”, and resentful of a new generation of Residents with a different set of values. But regardless of whether the phenomenon is real or just my perception, Second Life no longer feels like a haven for folk like me.
• My own shift towards more serious occupations. When I first joined Second Life, I enjoyed it tremendously. I learned new things daily, socialized with friends constantly, created and experimented freely, and explored the grid, eyes wide with wonder. Over time, though, I became more involved in “serious” things, and began to accumulate obligations. Teaching, running a shop, working as a contractor, organizing groups, maintaining a viewer, helping users and customers. The carefree days of my virtual youth are long gone; I’ve drifted away from my old friends, and my emotional connection to SL has frayed. Sure, I could make changes in my life to become more involved in the fun parts of Second Life. But given the overall situation, it makes more sense to start again in OpenSim.

So you see, the TPV policy was simply the impetus to act on my growing dissatisfaction with Linden Lab and Second Life. If the TPV policy hadn’t been so screwed up, I wouldn’t be leaving right now, but my departure was inevitable given the way things have been going. (Besides, given Linden Lab’s reputation for making exactly the same mistakes every time they introduce a new policy change, I doubt they were capable of not screwing up the TPV policy.)

So, what’s next for me? The exciting frontier of OpenSim, that’s what!

I’ve always wanted to have my own sim to mess around with, but a Second Life sim has always been prohibitively expensive for me. (A full SL sim costs USD $295/month, plus a $1000 set up fee). Now I have my own self-managed sim on OSGrid with free uploads, an unlimited prim count, megaprims however I want them, LightShare server-side windlight control, and precise collision meshes for sculpties — for a paltry USD $15/month.

So for me, OpenSim is a creative paradise. A giant, octopus-shaped creative paradise.

That said, OpenSim is still a rough and rugged frontier. I happen to enjoy that fact, and my skills are put to good use there. The reason I can run a sim for only $15/month is because I have the technical know-how to set it up and manage it myself. Less technically-inclined people should expect to pay in the range of $40-$100 per month for a managed sim from a commercial OpenSim host. Still, it’s a bargain compared to Second Life.

But OpenSim is certainly not for everyone. There are still plenty of glitches, and there aren’t all the amenities of Second Life. The number of users is much smaller than Second Life, and they are spread across a large number of separate grids. There’s not nearly as much content as there is in SL, and generally not “professional quality”. Not all of the grids have any money system, so you won’t find such a bustling commercial economy as you do in SL. But the flip side of all this is the fact that it’s easy to make a name for yourself in OpenSim if you’re open, friendly, and have a bit of talent.

I’m sure I’ll be happy pioneering OpenSim; it’s a good fit for me. As for my plans with Second Life, I’ll be tying up loose ends over the next month. I’ll be closing down Cuddlefish Junction soon, but I’m making arrangements for my most popular products to be sold through other shops.

I’m not disappearing, though. I’ll still be responding to emails, I’ll still be on Plurk, and I’ll be posting here about my adventures with OpenSim. I’m not cancelling my SL account, and I’ll probably drop in from time to time to export my creations or attend special events. In fact, given how infrequently I’ve been logging in over the past year, hardly anyone would have even noticed the change if I hadn’t said anything.

So, this isn’t really a goodbye; I’m just moving down the block. See you around the metaverse!

I’ve heard some grumbling from various established Residents, along the lines of, “Why do they think I would want this?” Indeed, it’s a really weak incentive for existing premium users who are already established in Second Life. A small parcel you can’t sell, a house that you can’t change or remove, and no events or classified listings allowed? Pshaw! Who would want that, when you can own your own, fully featured and customizable land?

Well, to all the people unimpressed with LL’s offering, allow me to point something out: It’s not for you. Or for me, or anyone else who has owned or rented land before.

The Lindens don’t think we would want this. They probably don’t care much what we think about it. We’re simply not part of the target market for this program. For an established land owner to ask, “Why do they think I would want a Linden Home?”, is like a professional mountain biker scoffing, “Bah! This bike shop sells training wheels! Why do they think I would want training wheels?”

If you want to evaluate the effectiveness of this plan, you must consider its goals. Jack Linden writes in the announcement:

A key aim for the beta is to provide easy entry into inworld home ownership (especially for new Residents) while not competing with estate owners. These estates do an amazing job of providing quality experiences for Residents. We want to create an on-ramp so new Resident can learn how valuable and simple owning land can be, but then move naturally on to larger parcels elsewhere.

The Linden Homes program is the spiritual successor of the ill-fated First Land program of years ago. Jack Linden wrote when the First Land program was discontinued, way back in February 2007:

The First Land program was put in place to encourage land ownership for those moving up to Premium membership. Increasingly we have found that these cheap L$1 per meter parcels were not benefitting those people as intended. Because of the low price, they were being immediately sold, or bought via alts, purely for profit.

So, the goals of this plan would seem to be:

• Entice non-land-owners into upgrading to premium accounts.
• Introduce more users to the benefits of land ownership.
• Provide a safe and positive first experience with land ownership.
• Encourage users to move on to full-fledged land ownership afterwards.
• Prevent the new land from entering the commercial land market.
• Avoid directly competing with estate owners and land rental businesses.

We’ll see whether the plan will actually achieve these goals in the months to come, but I think there’s a very good chance that it will be successful. The Lindens have clearly put thought into this, and learned from the problems of the old First Land program — even the ones they didn’t mention directly, like the unattractive sprawling masses of tightly-packed “shoebox homes” that one would find all over the First Land areas.

What’s more, there seem to be very few downsides, and few ways in which the plan could seriously backfire. Of course, many estate owners and landlords/ladies will probably stamp their feet and curse Linden Lab for competing with them. The wiser and more far-sighted of them, though, will be pleased that LL is growing a new crop of future customers for them.

All in all, this is one of the best plans I’ve seen come out of Linden Lab in a long time. Well thought out, well communicated, with their goals and motives laid out in the open. It’s not often I get to say this, but gold star to the Lindens on this one.

Now, returning to the current premium owners who are bemoaning the fact that this offer is useless to them: notice that none of the goals is “provide an additional incentive for established land owners to keep their premium account”. This plan isn’t about you.

So when you ask, “Why does Linden Lab think I would want this?”, what you’re really asking is, “Why is Linden Lab paying attention to someone other than me?” Whether we established Residents like it or not, the answer to that question is obvious and simple: Linden Lab is a business, and they have judged that it’s more profitable to put most of their effort attracting new customers, than to spend their days fawning over the ones who keep coming back anyway.

We’d especially love to hear from machinimists who are currently working with Second Life:

• What are the most frustrating or annoying aspects of working with SL to make machinima?
• What new features would help make SL machinima easier, better quality, or more expressive than it is now?

The in-world discussion will be tomorrow, October 15 from 3-4 PM SLT (i.e. Pacific time) at Hippotropolis in Second Life. If you can’t attend the in-world discussion, I’d still love to have your comments here on this blog post, on Plurk, or on the SL-UX mailing list!

Anti-inspect shields are a contentious issue for many reasons. Not the least of these is that it deprives designers of the new customers they could have gained from people seeing and admiring your outfit, and finding out who made it. But just as bad is that they severely reduce your framerate and the framerate of everyone around you, as Gabby Panacek has demonstrated.

Hurting the creators of the items you love, and slashing everyone’s framerates in the process? Well, that’s pretty vain and selfish, but maybe it’s worth it to stop “copycats” from stealing your style? Perhaps it would be, if the shields actually stopped people from inspecting your attachments — but they don’t.

In fact, there’s an extremely quick and easy way to completely bypass the shields, and you don’t even have to fiddle around trying to get the right camera angle. All it takes is 3 easy steps, which I’ll demonstrate with Caer Balogh’s lovely brown paper bag “Advanced Fashion Shield 1.0″, which Gabby kindly passed on to me. It’s just as useless as the real shields at stopping people from inspecting, but doesn’t hurt your framerate, and is way more stylish.

1. Enable Advanced > Rendering > Hide Selected. (Use Ctrl-Alt-Shift-D to turn on the Advanced menu if you need to.)
2. Open Edit mode (Ctrl-3) and click on the shield to select it. It will disappear from your view (except for its outline). If the person is wearing multiple shields, you can hold Shift and continue to click them until you have selected (and thus hidden) them all.
3. Click on the attachment you want to inspect.

Even the biggest, primmiest, laggiest shield, whether scripted or unscripted, sculpty or nonsculpty, can be bypassed in just a few clicks using this method.

So if you have a shield, please, take it off. All you’re doing is making SL less enjoyable for yourself and everyone around you.

So, it’s with some disappointment that I read Dusan’s recent post on Second Life’s permission system. His post is prompted by the progress of VWR-8049, a proposal to allow users to choose the default permissions for new objects that they create.

Dusan comes out strongly against it, and although I’m firmly in favor of it, that’s not the disappointing thing; I don’t mind people disagreeing with me. What disappoints me is that Dusan has bought into the baseless FUD that certain individuals have piled onto the issue.

Alas, not only does Dusan believe the FUD and let it color his entire analysis of the feature, but he also regurgitates it in a most unsavory and uncharacteristic manner, littered with baseless attacks, ranting nonsequiturs, and flawed thinking. I’m usually content to let this sort of thing lie, but it boggles my mind that FUD of this sort could spread when it has so many holes in it.

Isn’t copy/mod/transfer about as close as you can come to an ideal system for allowing people to create stuff, sell it, let others modify it, collaborate on it….all the things that Creative Commons purports to do but, well, doesn’t.

I’ll set aside the baseless (and frankly, irrelevant) jab at Creative Commons, and get straight to the point: No. Copy/mod/transfer isn’t as close as you can come to an ideal system. In fact, SL’s permission system has a variety of identifiable flaws and quirks that have plagued both consumers and creators for years.

• It’s too coarse. Where’s the permission to make prim hair recolorable or resizable, without letting everyone see the prim parameters? Or the permission to allow someone to only transfer an item back to the creator, so it can be fixed, exchanged, or refunded? What about the ability to have a no-copy/transfer gift box with an item inside that becomes copy/no-transfer when you take it out?
• It’s quirky. Did you know that for animations and sounds, the “modify” permission doesn’t actually let you modify them? It just lets you use them in gestures. Weird, right? And that “faux-modify” permission is so firmly established that LL would have to add another modify permission just to let people actually modify them, e.g. to adjust the priority level or hand poses on animations.

  And see if you know the answer to this one, without looking it up: If you have a full-perm object with a no-modify script inside, are you allowed to reset the script? How about if the object was no-modify, but the script was full perm? Even after 3 years of building and scripting in SL, I’d still have to check to be sure.

• It’s a hassle. Part of my job is making backup copies of collaborative builds, and this inevitably involves hours of checking permissions and calling in the builders to fix them. In one case involving many builders, the task of getting them all to fix their perms took a week, when the actual work of making the backup took only a few hours. In a few cases, we’ve had to discard entire sections of builds because we couldn’t afford to have it taking up space and prims for several more days while perms were fixed.

  You could argue that, being professional builders, they should have been more careful about perms in the first place. But that’s denying human nature: people forget things if they are not reminded. It’s this same human fallibility that Dusan offers as a reason why people must be protected from themselves by restricting their ability to choose their own default permissions. (I, on the other hand, offer it as a reason to have better reminders, and warnings where appropriate.)

  Store owners too have to deal with permissions for everything they sell, and they too can make mistakes. Setting the wrong permissions on a product can cause all sorts of headaches. If the permissions are too restrictive (more so than advertised), then customers will complain. If the permissions are too open (particularly if they are copy/trans), the product might “get loose”, being passed around for free or sold by other people, potentially reducing the store owner’s ability to profit from the product.

  Despite this issue being so important, it’s only within the past year that tools to more effectively manage permissions have begun to appear. (And I find it somewhat amusing that an optional tool to help content creators avoid permission mistakes, is being attacked on the grounds that it could encourage content creators to make permission mistakes.)

Indeed, SL’s permission system has been the subject of widespread criticism for years — by creators, consumers, and even Lindens! — precisely because it’s not all that great at the things Dusan thinks make it ideal.

C/M/T is what it’s all about kids: it’s Little Big Planet but with the right to sell your levels to others; it’s The Sims Online but with a wider range of avatars; it’s Facebook, or Twitter, but instead of little game widgets or bloggy haiku the whole PAGE is your own, and you can sell every bit of it, every photo, every poke, every status update, every font if you want and not turn around at the end of the day and find out that the platform owners, well, OWN it.

C/M/T built Second Life, C/M/T powered what must be the largest micro-transaction economy in the world today, C/M/T powered the ability to sell and buy stuff for fractions of a fraction of a cent if you want, C/M/T is what filled my inventory with 15,000 objects called, um, object, but they’re MY objects and I’ll organize them if I want to.

There are two big, leaky holes in the bottom of that argument:

• Linden Lab, the platform operators, do “own it”. Creators retain intellectual property rights on their SL creations, but the Lab owns and has control over the data. Can you really say you own your SL assets, when LL can delete them or restrict your access to them (i.e. ban you) at any time? Builders in particular lack a convenient way to create backups of their creations, and until that’s resolved, I’d argue that in practical reality, they don’t really own their creations.
• It’s a mistake to think that the only possible alternative to C/M/T is not having any content protection at all. C/M/T is not the only — or even the best — content protection scheme possible. And it’s silly to assume that Second Life would have been crippled if it had a different scheme. Indeed, I’d argue that the SL economy would be even stronger today if SL had been designed with an easier to use, more robust, more fine-grained permissions system than C/M/T.

Yes, counterfeiting CAN undermine the business. And that’s what this is all about – whether the Lab will actually protect content, or just give it a glance and move on. But there is enough protection in Second Life that it’s a damn good start: all content MAY be copiable. But the combination of good policy, strong enforcement, and reasonable uses of technology to counter it can all go a very long way to curbing theft to a minority.

Now, here’s a point where I agree, albeit with some reservations. The general consensus among those in the know about such things, is that perfect, unbreakable DRM technology is a theoretical impossibility, due to the so-called “analog hole“: if you can see (or hear) it, you can copy it. The only way to be sure no one can copy it, is to never show it to anyone. But, even so, it is possible to use technology to make it harder to copy. SL does this, and I think that can be a good thing, in moderation. (Past a certain point, it just tends to become annoying and disrupt legitimate use, though.)

SL’s permissions system is an example of DRM and content protection done in a mostly sane, if somewhat flawed, manner. Trying to apply more technology to prevent illegitimate copying in SL would be, in my opinion, treading into the realm of “annoying but not that much more effective”. Rather, I think the proper area to apply technology to, is the detection of illegitimate copying. For example, tools to objectively analyse textures and objects for similarity could be useful for detecting simple rips.

However, SL’s main problems in this area are weak policy and minimal enforcement. LL deals with takedown requests enough to satisfy the requirements of the DMCA, but the consequences to offenders are weak: the content is usually removed, but they can just re-upload it the next day. LL has not taken the initiative to define its own, more effective policy.

Open source isn’t much different than a quilting circle or a barn raising. A community comes together, everyone brings their own tools and time, and maybe they help build a new church or whatever: the whole community benefits, everyone who bore a hammer feels good about themselves, we can all take pride, and the world advances towards being a little more civil.

The problems come when Joe shows up to help out and hopes to get hired as a woodworker the next day, or the church is built on company-owned land, or Pete wants the cost of his nails reimbursed.

See – C/M/T, the permission system in Second Life, helps to solve a lot of that. You can still do stuff for free if you want – but you’d better know that you’re doing it for the right reasons, because more often than not free is nothing more than a cheap advertising ploy that makes you look more like WalMart than Tiffany’s.

So, Joe has unrealistic expectations, the church-builders don’t understand property rights, and Pete doesn’t know what “volunteer” means? SL’s permission scheme doesn’t help any of that one bit. Nor does it stop the SL content creator who deliberately gives out freebies in a dubious attempt to bring more paying customers into their store.

Those are all “wetware issues”, and SL’s permission system doesn’t address any of them in the slightest. And there’s no reason to think that new tools to help manage permissions would make people more (or less) likely to act foolishly or have poor understandings of the permissions system.

There’s this JIRA out now that argues that the mechanics of setting perms should be changed so that it’s EASIER to make choices about the stuff you make.

Let’s say you’re a builder working on a team – you need to transfer your stuff back and forth, it’s just easier if it’s all full permissions. So the JIRA proposes that you should be able to toggle your default permissions: turn it to “Full permissions” or “Transfer Only” and leave it there. Avoid the hassles of having to remember that every prim you rez needs to be changed from its default, avoid all the complications of resetting them every time.

The support for the JIRA is support for choice, and choice is hard to argue with.

This is actually a decent summary of the JIRA issue. It is about choice. But the choice isn’t a simple toggle between “full perms” and “transfer only”; it gives much more fine-grained control than that. If you want to keep your creation permissions as transfer only, you can do that. Indeed, that’s the default, so you don’t really have to do anything at all. If you want to choose modify+transfer, or modify+copy, or copy+transfer, or copy only, you can do those too. And yep, if you want to, you can even choose full perms.

Somehow, though, the fact that full perms is a possible choice has got some people gnashing their teeth about freebie culture, and predicting the downfall of the SL economy, or even capitalism at large, if this feature is implemented and people are allowed to make their own choices. (How curious that capitalism, a system based on the ability to make choices in a free market, apparently needs to be protected from the ability to make choices in a free market!)

Of course, all that freebie obsession and doomsaying is utter hogwash. It’s just unfortunate that someone as intelligent and thoughtful as Dusan could be taken in by it.

The current C/M/T system is, in fact, the ideal ‘nudge’, and is one of the hidden choice architectures within Second Life that makes it what it is: it nudges us towards the protection of content but still allows us the choice to change it.

The C/M/T perm system is a choice architecture based on the realization that we are not all rational actors (and especially not when we’re new to Second Life). It’s a nuisance at times, infuriating at others, but even for someone like myself who has rezzed his share of prims, I STILL need the ‘nudge’ of changing those perms so that I make the conscious decision that they should be changed.

That’s fine. I can understand the concern about setting your default permissions and forgetting about them, then creating some product and releasing it with the wrong perms. As I said, people tend to forget things, especially if there aren’t reminders. I’ve suggested some enhancements that would reduce the opportunity for forgetfulness (display an optional on-screen reminder of your current permissions), and limit the consequences of forgetting (allow permission settings to optionally be set only for the current session).

But those enhancements can only be made if Linden Lab implements the base functionality. And there will likely be a period of time when only the base functionality is available, before the enhanced versions make it in. So I’ll offer this advice for the meantime:

If you’re worried about forgetting that you’ve changed your default perms, then don’t change them.

No one is forcing you to use permissions settings that you don’t want to. The initial default permissions will still be transfer-only. If you don’t want to change that, then don’t. Just leave it alone, and it will be the same as it has been for years.

That’s your choice, and I’ll let you make it. So please, don’t tell me that I shouldn’t be allowed to make my own.

She’s trying to get an accurate sampling of opinions, which means lots of people need to vote, so she’s asking for everybody’s help to spread the word and get votes from as many people as possible. But the idea isn’t to get just the people who feel the same way as you do to stuff the ballot — spread the word in all circles, so we can really find out how people feel.

So, please give it a vote and spread the word (but considerately — don’t spam). The poll is running until May 12, a week from today.

• Poll: Adult content – Both sides of the question @ Dwell On It

I’m glad to read that she has; I was among those with objections to the proposal. But I’m disappointed by her reaction to the criticism she received:

The current community of developers � and by that I mean non-LL developers � is absolutely not interested in implementing any sort of content protection schemes.

… Their argument is that ultimately any measures taken to implement �trusted clients� that connect to LL�s grid will always be defeated since it�s too easy to create a �fake� trusted client. And that the trouble to go the way of trusted clients will, well, �stifle development� by making it harder, and, ultimately, the gain is poor compared to the hassle of going through a certification procedure.

I won�t fight that argument, since it�s discussing ideologies, not really security. Either the development is made by security-conscious developers, or by people who prefer that content ought to be copied anyway (since you�ll never be able to protect it), and they claim that the focus should be on making development easier, not worrying about how easy content is copied or not.

… �Technicalities� are just a way to cover their ideology: ultimately, they�re strong believers that content (and that includes development efforts to make Second Life better) ought to be free.

Despite what Gwyn suggests, one can object to a specific content protection scheme without being an ideological extremist who believes that everything should be free. Yes, there are individuals who take that viewpoint. Many of them are quite vocal, and some are rather arrogant and obnoxious. (I am of the opinion that this latter kind ought to be swatted hard over the head with a rolled-up newspaper. Repeatedly.)

But to imply that anyone opposing her proposal must be some kind of anticommercial tekkie-hippie is fallacious and juvenile, and just as dismissive as the rudest comments she received. I must admit that I expected better from Gwyn.

Now then, let me explain my opposition and criticism of the proposal. (This is not criticism of Gwyn as a person, nor of any of her other ideas besides this particular proposal.)

While I do appreciate and respect the choice to make one’s own efforts open and free, I do not believe everything should be forced to be free, and I did not oppose the proposal based on my views on that topic. I opposed it because I see three major flaws in the proposed system, two of them purely security-related:

1. the certificates could be easily forged, which defeats the purpose of having them at all
2. an effective certification system would put an extraordinary burden on developers
3. the system does not address the most commonly exploited methods of content theft

I’ll expand on these points so that there can be no confusion about why I objected and still object to such a system. (I’ll give fair warning, though, that this is a rather long and probably dull post by most standards.)

Firstly, as others have said: where there is a certificate, there is a way to forge a certificate. Even a certificate embedded in the executable binary code can be extracted, and an uncertified client created which fools the server into believing it is a certified one.

And the target for such certificate extraction would not be the open source developers with their little custom viewers, it would be Linden Lab’s own released clients. Why? Because even after LL has found out that someone extracted the certificate to one of their official releases, they could not do anything about it.

Would they block all viewers using that certificate? Doing so would block all users who are using LL’s own viewer! Users would be forced to download a new version every day as LL struggled to keep ahead of the malicious users extracting the new certificates. (Plus, they would have to use a different method of embedding certificate for every release, since the old methods would have been figured out.)

Unless LL is willing to try to keep that up, the certificate program would cease to be effective at distinguishing authorized viewers from unauthorized ones.

Secondly, let me explain the burden of such a certification process on open source developers. It is not a matter of developers complaining, “Waah, it would take me 10 more minutes to implement my code! I’m going to go cry in a corner now.” A certification process as Gwyn described would, if effective, put a near-total damper on many of the most important areas of development of the viewer code.

Suppose that you are trying to fix a memory leak, like Nicholaz used to do. In order to test whether you have fixed it, you would need to run the viewer and travel around SL to make it load lots of content into memory. However, because of this certification program, you must have a certificate embedded in your viewer in order to see such content, and thus to test the fix. (I am assuming here the embedded certificate scenario, because keeping the certificate as a separate file would render the system extraordinarily easy to spoof.)

Every time you recompiled your code, you would have to send your source code and compiled viewer off to whatever company does the certification and wait for them to look it over and embed the certificate in it and send it back. Such a process would take at least several days at the start (after all, they have to inspect your source code to make sure you haven’t added something nasty!). That’s several days of waiting between the time you write the code, and the time you can check whether it worked. If you find out that it didn’t work, you will have to wait another several days for them to certify your next attempt.

Now, I said it would take several days at the start. If the company could not keep up with the number of developers requesting certification for their little test versions, then the delay would grow longer and longer. You would soon be waiting a week, two weeks, a month for them to process the certified binary — if you (or they) hadn’t given up completely by then.

A month between testing bug fixes? I can barely even recall my approach to the problem after two days! No developer or other creative person would volunteer to work in such a stifling environment.

Now, I admit, not every bug fix would require a certified viewer to test with. But many of the worst, most disliked kinds of bugs would. I don’t presume to speak on Nicholaz’s behalf, but I doubt his work would have been possible if such a certification process had been required.

Fortunately, though, the weakness of the system means that many developers would soon begin to use forged certificates to circumvent the system and continue their testing work. Unfortunately, such circumvention would, more likely than not, be illegal in the United States due to the DMCA, and in any other countries with similar legislation. Some developers would be willing to take that risk for the sake of improving the viewer, but many not.

Finally, even if we set aside the other issues, the proposal does not address the most common methods of content theft. Even if the process stopped uncertified viewers from being able to see the protected content, the certified viewers still have gaping holes in them.

I will set aside the issue of GL ripping, something that cannot possibly be addressed by Linden Lab, and instead focus on the insecurity of the cache and the data packets that are sent by the sim.

The viewer as it is now does not employ any real encryption of either the cache or (I assume, though I may be wrong) the data going to and from the server. Textures are easily extracted from the cache; prim shapes are (I hear) also cached, and thus can be extracted. Even if they were not cached, textures, prim shapes, avatar shapes, animations, and more could be extracted from the data packets being sent by the sim to your computer.

That is the current state of affairs. Well, what if Linden Lab did start to encrypt data packets and the cache? In such a case, the viewer must have programmed into it the decryption method and key (or else a method of receiving or generating the key). But because the viewer code is being released as open source, Linden Lab would face the difficult choice of whether to release or to withold that piece of code. Either choice would have significant consequences.

If Linden Lab chose to release the code for the decryption and keying methods, the encryption scheme is defeated. By studying the code, a reasonably proficient content thief could figure out how to decrypt the cache and incoming data packets, and thus gain access to the protected content, even while running a certified viewer. For a while, the barrier to content theft would be somewhat higher than it is now, but eventually some malicious user would release a tool to copy content without needing to understand the concepts behind it. We would then be back to the state we are in today, but with an ineffective encryption scheme added on top.

On the other hand, if Linden Lab chose to withold the decryption code, open source viewers would be locked out. Or at least, they would not have access to the protected content. So in that respect, yes, a combination of certifying only LL’s viewers, encrypting the cache and data packets, and keeping the viewer partially closed source might be effective at protecting content, for a while. I’m not a cryptography expert, so I can’t even begin to guess how long it would take to break the encryption. Perhaps long enough that LL could change encryption keys and certificates (and force everyone to upgrade) before the old ones are found out.

But doing so would impose the burdens on developers I described earlier. And worse, as Gwyn so rightly points out, it would offend and alienate most of them — even the ones who aren’t obsessed with freeing everything. I’d expect it to light a fire under OpenSim, too, as developers shifted their focuses to more open, less burdensome systems.

Would Linden Lab be willing to undo the Dia de Liberation, cripple open source development, and turn some of their most effective supporters into resources for the competition, in exchange for the appearance of strong content protection?

Maybe. I hope not, but it’s hard to say anymore.

So is the situation hopeless? Can content theft be stopped only by sacrificing open source development? Can content theft even be stopped?

Certainly, it’s not possible to completely stop 100% of content theft. Gwyn recognizes that, as does just about anybody familiar with the problem. The idea is, instead, to raise the barrier for content theft; to make it more difficult.

But even that is a matter of debate. If you raise the barrier, eventually someone will figure out how to get over it, and they or someone else will create a tool to let other people get over it, even people who have no idea how the tool works or what it’s circumventing. You can raise the barrier again and again, but that only buys you time. And often, that temporary gain in protection comes at the cost of a permanent loss elsewhere — creating extra hassles for users, stifling development, etc.

Can content theft be prevented? Probably not. I wish it could; I’d love to have a punchy ending here, to reveal that if you do X, Y, and Z, all content theft will be stopped. But it doesn’t work that way.

More likely, the key to dealing with content theft is not prevention, but rather detection and enforcement, neither of which are being carried out in a reliable, objective, or effective manner.

Naturally, fixing them is easier said than done. But that’s how it is.

Mark Kingdon announced that an outside design firm is hard at work on a new, user-friendly viewer for Second Life.

I’ve read Kingdon’s post, and I’m afraid Dusan misread it and jumped to the entirely wrong conclusion. Here’s what Kingdon actually wrote (emphasis mine):

Shortly after I started, we kicked off a project to reinvent what we call the �first hour experience� (our web experience, the viewer, and the way we acclimate and acculturate users inworld) for new users. We�ve made great progress and will be working with an award-winning interactive design firm to help us complete the reinvention and bring it to life. Yes, we are creating a viewer that is new user friendly! Stay tuned for updates.

That reads pretty clearly to me: they are working on a viewer that is friendly to new users, not a new viewer that is friendly to users. I suppose you could read some meaning into “reinvention” and “creating”, but I don’t see any indication that he means anything other than the renovations already in progress to make the existing viewer more friendly to new users.

Improving new users experience has been a recurring theme at Resident Experience (Rx) office hours, and is clearly one of LL’s primary obsessions. And as it happens, Linden Lab contracted Vectorform, an award-winning interactive design firm, for what is known as the Landmarks & Navigation project. This is no great secret. Vectorform attended the Rx office hours on April 17 & 24 to gather information, and then presented the L&N project concept on May 29. There were also emails to the SLDev mailing list in April and May, around the same time as the office hours. The L&N project has been underway since then, and is now nearing completion (as much has been said at Rx office hours in recent weeks).

So, sorry to burst any bubbles, but unless LL contracted another award-winning interactive design firm to work in secret on a whole new viewer, and the timing of that project just happened to coincide exactly with the timing of the Landmarks & Navigation project… well, I’ll let you jump to your own conclusion.

To many such physically impaired users, the body is no more nor less a tool than an online avatar, and the latter (despite lag, occasional inventory loss, network problems and all the other hurly-burly of a virtual environment) is the more reliable, expressive and liberating, allowing more ability to contribute, work, play and socialize.

Why then, do the able-bodied among us tend to see so much more distinction between our bodies in the physical world and our digital representations? Is that distinction merely an artificial one, a handicap brought about by our able-bodied perspective?

I suspect it’s a matter of the strength of the connection between thought, action, results, and feedback.

For a perfectly able-bodied person, the mind directs the body smoothly, precisely, and effortlessly. Thought easily translates into action, and the feedback — sensory input confirming the results — reinforces the mind-body connection. As a result, your body starts to feel like part of your “self”, rather than an external thing.

But for an able-bodied person using an awkward tool or interface, the translation from thought to action is not nearly so effortless, the feedback is not as rewarding, and thus the connection is not as strong. As a result, the person feels less in control, and more conscious of manipulating an unwilling external object.

I certainly can’t speak for any disabled person, but I’ve heard motor impairment described in similar terms. It requires a great deal of conscious effort to merely take a step or pick up a coffee mug. The body seems more like an unwilling object that must be forced to act, and less like an intimate tool for enacting the mind’s will.

On the other hand, someone with motor impairments that, say, make it difficult to walk, may find a Second Life avatar controlled through the computer responds more easily to their will than the body does, and the feedback to be more rewarding than that provided by the body. They are in control, and the avatar obeys with minimum effort; it takes only a keystroke to make the avatar walk, run, or even fly. Depending on the severity of the motor impairment, the avatar may feel like an equal — or better — tool for enacting the person’s will than their physical body is.

So, my hypothesis is thus: the relative quality of control over the body versus the avatar determines the attachment and sense of self with respect to each. If you feel much more in control of your body than you do your avatar, you will feel a much stronger attachment to your body. Likewise, if you feel more in control of your avatar, you will feel more attached to it.

If my hypothesis is correct, then we should be able to observe some corollaries:

• People who are very physically fit and in control of their bodies (e.g. gymnasts) should tend to be less avatar-identified than those who are less fit.
• People who are skilled at using computer interfaces should tend to be more avatar-identified than those who struggle with computers.
• People who can control Second Life through a mind-computer interface (e.g. an Emotiv headset) should tend to be more avatar-identified than people who use the keyboard and mouse.
• If Second Life became easier to use, people should tend to identify more strongly with their avatars than they currently do.

Although I’ve been thinking about this in terms of users with motor impairments and other physical disabilities, it occurs to me that it also should apply to any other sort of debilitation. So, let me generalize my hypothesis: the relative enablement of one’s will by the physical self versus the avatar determines the attachment and sense of self with respect to each.

If that is true, then the following should also be true, as well as the things listed above:

• People who have physical difficulty hearing or speaking, and thus find communication by chat more enabling, should tend to be more avatar-identified than those who can easily hear and speak.
• Among people who find speaking and listening easier than typing, those who use voice chat should tend to be more avatar-identified than those who do not use voice chat.
• People who have have difficulty socializing in person (due to shyness, social anxiety, etc.) should tend to be more avatar-identified than those who socialize effortlessly.

This is an extension of the observation that people who are skilled with a particular tool (e.g. hammer, tennis racket, pencil, computer) become emotionally attached to that type of tool. And further, that if they use the same instance of the tool (e.g. the same pencil) for a long time and get positive feedback from using that tool, they begin to feel the tool as part of themselves, an extension of their body, rather than a separate tool.

I’m sure there are additional factors specific to avatars that enhance the emotional attachment to the avatar. Two in particular that come to mind: the expression of our personalities through customization of the avatar, and the fact that the avatar is the primary means through which we interact with the virtual world as a whole.

Those factors enhance and facilitate the attachment and sense of self, but it’s the sense of enablement and positive feedback from the tool (the Second Life viewer) that provide the foundation for it.

That would explain why having a positive experience when first using Second Life is so important to getting “hooked” and why Second Life often appeals so strongly to the shy and the disabled. It would also suggest that Linden Lab’s focus on new user experience is not so stupid, and that making the user interface easier and more enabling would go a long way towards emotional attachment, and thus user retention.

What do you think? Am I on to something, or is this just a bunch of confirmation-biased psychobabble bullshit?

In the days of my newbiehood, I heard tell of the legend of Gridnor and the coming of Lagnarok. But even in those days, the old stories were all but forgotten, and only the elders spoke of them.

In those days, the Linden gods stopped walking freely among us. The most ungrateful Residents would spurn the Linden gods and curse their names, just as they do today. Only the stalwart Liasons — who were half god, half mortal — mingled among us.

But those days were the days of legend, of the rise of new heroes and villains!

Starax the magician and his wand of infinite wonder, who left our world but was reborn. Anshe the merchant-queen, shrewd and cunning, with an unquenchable thirst for riches. Tateru the goddess and overseer, who even now walks among us, bestowing her wisdom on all who will listen. Gene Replacement the trickster, who stole from the gods the gift of megaprims, but paid for his sins with eternal banishment. Ordinal the inventor, who then, as now, crafted marvels for the delight of young and old.

There are many, many others legends; too many to recall every one. IYan refers you to the book of Hamlet for more stories of the old days. (Hamlet himself being one of the legends of those and earlier days.)

But, just as with the legends of Gridnor and Lagnarok, these stories now fade into history. The elders move on to other worlds without ceremony, and the young remain ignorant of our heritage. The old heroes are no longer revered, and the new heroes are too often missed, being but tiny gemstones in a vast desert of sand.

Or perhaps I have merely become one of the elders, who speak in longful whispers of the legends of their youth, being set in our ways and unable to see the next generation of legends unfolding beneath our very noses.