[Opensim-dev] Micropayment

[Dalien Talbot]

On Nov 14, 2007 7:19 PM, dan miller <danbmil99 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> I think the problem comes up when you envision a casual user browsing the
> "3D web", moving from grid to grid.  It would seem easy for such a user to
> get confused, forget, or be intentionally misled as to what the consequence
> of a transaction will be on the grid they are on at the moment.  It seems
> unworkable to have a system where a user has to remember explicitly whether
> (s)he is on a trusted grid or not.

"home sim" shows the message to the user before teleporting to the
remote grid. I have such a capability in the architecture that I was
hacking on this weekend (the mail did not seem to get through to the
list, but it's on my blog anyway :)

>
> That said, it seems ridiculous to just punt the issue and say opensim
> doesn't handle transactions.  This may be the exact point at which we have
> to decide whether to slavishly follow Linden, and wait for them to offer us
> crumbs of capability in the client -- or, we forge ahead, and support a
> non-LL-compatible feature.  That doesn't mean the Linden client won't work;
> it just means there will be more capability with a forked client.

there's a way to do that with the add-on small application, and not
change the client. how - simple:

when you make a payment above, say, 100L, or above a certain rate, the
payment server sends a random string to the client via IM. They have a
small "pad" program where they enter this challenge, and the amount of
the transaction. it outputs the response. user IMs this response.
Payment server generates the challenges randomly, so the malicious sim
is not able to predict this - so even if they spoof this to the
client, they do not really gain anything. Very very draft, but might
be something around that.

Basically it is the same problem as fighting phishing, except with a
slightly different twist.

+ need the trust models for the "foreign agent" and the "some sim on
this or another grid".

/d