[Opensim-users] Banning "bad" viewers was Re: Can this be done?

[Karen Palen]

The short answer is no.

The more complete answer is that you while can easily detect some characteristic of a viewer (or other software) which identifies that viewer and use that to ban it, nothing can stop the authors of that viewer from changing whatever characteristic you use.

Worse yet, whatever characteristic you select to identify the "bad" software will inevitably turn up in some other (innocent) viewer sooner or later and will cause them to be banned for no reason. 

The best you could hope to achieve is some sort of "arms race" between "bad" viewer creators and sim operators.

In addition any viewer could be adapted for piracy. The original experiments that resulted in libsecondlife/openMetaverse were based on analysing the data stream between the Second Life Servers and the viewer software (at the time ONLY the Linden Labs viewer) and had access to all of that information. This was all done without modifying the viewer in any way - it was proprietary at the time.

Sadly the lesson of the endless failures of DRM schemes elsewhere shows that the real losers are the honest/innocent users who are unable to do the things that they really should expect to do with the content that they have purchased.

For example, I have completely stopped buying anything in Second Life since I want to use the inventory I buy in my private sims as well. Sure I can use pirate tools to do this, but if I have to do that to use my purchases where I want to use them then why not just steal the stuff in the first place?

This is very similar to the situation with music CDs and DVDs, why build an expensive collection if you will just have to re-purchase it in a few years for the next technology and some DRM scheme tries to keep me from playing my collection on the new equipment?

There are several efforts being directed at come sort of "portable" content. I hope that one or more actually proves to work, but I have no illusions about that actually happening any time soon.

My opinion is that the best we can do at present is similar to the real life piracy situation: stop the commercial marketing of pirated merchandise as it is detected and reported. Ban anyone who engages in such activities and if they persist bring real world law enforcement to bear.

For once Linden Labs seems to be using a reasonable version of this when they state that the viewer is not the problem, it is the use of the viewer. They have promised to act promptly to ban anyone using any viewer for piracy.

Karen

--- On Mon, 1/11/10, Imago <imagorabbit at gmail.com> wrote:

> Is it possible to stop
> certain viewers from logging 
> in to your opensim? Like Cryo?