[Opensim-dev] rex auth & avatar systems (Re: future rexviewer merger)

[Antti Ilomäki]

Just a small clarification: the trusted authentication service structure supports both blacklists and whitelists, making it a bit more decentralized. It's possible to choose only certain users and/or authentication services you allow into your world, but it's also possible to ban certain users/auth. services and allow everyone by default. This makes the system inherently a bit less decentralized, which is a point I agree is an important aspect of the future 3D web.

As has been said earlier, it is of course possible to host an authentication service and an avatar storage service on your own computer just like it is possible with email today. It is not as simple as having your avatar on a USB stick, but that's of course just a technical challenge for someone to fix if necessary. The way the experimental reX authentication system works isn't very centralized at the moment, since anyone can host them, they're not dependent on each other or anything else. Personally, just like Toni, I prefer to have a service online that I can access from anywhere and especially if I would for example want to send an IM or VoIP comms to a virtual world through a mobile device ("Just a second, guys, I'm on a bus and I'll get to the meeting soon"), I would rather not host the services on the phone.

The avatar storage is usually coupled with an authentication service, but since it is pretty much just a storage, we might be better off with having just a generic content storage service instead.

Anyway, it is important that the avatar portability services (and pretty much everything else) are distributed and freely available for everyone to use. Anyway, this is a really interesting topic in general and since we are now talking, it would be very interesting to hear everyone's opinions on how this kind of a system should work.


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Antti Ilomäki