[Opensim-users] Announcement of inventory tool (MyInventory), mostly of interest to grid operators/grid nauts
John Sheridan
john at pseudospace.net
Sat Nov 17 14:17:34 UTC 2012
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outdated OAR of my welcome sim that I was lucky enough to salvage from a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
>> <blackberry at forsterinternet.nl
>> <mailto:blackberry at forsterinternet.nl>> 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:snowcrash.short at gmail.com>
>> *To:* opensim-users at lists.berlios.de
>> <mailto:opensim-users at lists.berlios.de>
>> *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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