Oct 20, 2009 7:26 PM in response to: Blondin Linden Re: Discussion: Third Party Viewer Policy
Seems to me you can use a little help. Third party Second Life Client Registration should be used to inspect client software before recommending it to Second Life residents. It should be a certification that the recommended software is safe to use and will not stop the Resident that uses it from qualifying for account support. No amount of inspecting and certifying of Second Life Client software will change the characteristics of the protocols used by the Second Life Servers. It is my understanding that all one needs to view and subsequently copy data from Second Life, the virtual world, it's database servers and other networked services, is a working Second Life user account. I gain this understanding by living in Second Life myself, building my own Second Life Client binaries from Linden Lab's public SVN repository, and testing patches provided by other residents via pJIRA, after reviewing them myself. The protocol is fairly well documented now and many programmers can write their own client libraries or modify an existing code base to bypass any of the methods that can be used in the client to prevent it from saving copies. Thus, I don't see Second Life Client software registration as an assurance to content creators, of which I am not, that their content will not be compromised by other Second Life Residents. The only way I see to deal with the current concerns of uncontrolled Second Life content propagation is to assure that all holders of working Second Life user accounts can be and are being held responsible for their actions. Notice that I say holders, not accounts. As long as throw-away accounts can be created anonymously, the content theft and propagation issue will continue. I don't see the act of having open-sourced the Second Life Client as the cause of the problems we are discussing here. I see the penchant of some individuals to conduct nefarious activities as the problem. Giving them the tools to cause grief has made things easy for them but letting them have unlimited anonymous accounts has made it possible. _______________________________________________ Policies and (un)subscribe information available here: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/SLDev Please read the policies before posting to keep unmoderated posting privileges
