[Opensim-users] Announcement of inventory tool (MyInventory), mostly of interest to grid operators/grid nauts

Sat Nov 17 15:41:32 UTC 2012

Hi Snowcrash,

I'm looking forward to seeing the full functionality and feature set of
your tool to have a more informed opinion, but from my original email in
this thread, I still think the better approach would be to default to the
most restrictive TPV-like setting and let grids who want to offer the less
restrictive options contact you.  Opt in rather than opt out.  I really
fear that you would be opening yourself to a dangerous legal nightmare if
the tool is designed with the current approach, for all the reasons we've
discussed in this thread.

We both know that this would likely result in most grids only having the
more restrictive functionality, at least initially, but it still seems like
the safest approach to me - safer for you as the developer and for grids
who need to protect their users' content.  I also think you'd be more
likely to get buy in and support from the community with this approach, so
people could feel comfortable that the default mode will at least do no
more harm than what's already permitted in existing tools like Second
Inventory, etc.  Perhaps from that starting point, and seeing the other
benefits your tool provides, more grids would be interested in going to a
more permissive setting in the future.

Sincerely,

- Chris/Fleep

Chris M. Collins (SL/OS: Fleep Tuque)
Center for Simulations & Virtual Environments Research (UCSIM)
UCIT Instructional & Research Computing
University of Cincinnati
406A Zimmer Hall
315 College Drive
PO BOX 210088
Cincinnati, OH 45221-0088
chris.collins at uc.edu
(513) 556-3018

http://ucsim.uc.edu

On Sat, Nov 17, 2012 at 2:47 AM, Snowcrash Short
<snowcrash.short at gmail.com>wrote:

>
>
> On Thu, Nov 15, 2012 at 3:50 PM, What Virtual World - Martin Forster <
> 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 <snowcrash.short at gmail.com>
>> *To:* 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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