I’ve moved!

Well folks I’ve gone and got myself a nice little website and added a wordpress blog so I can ramble away there. If you’d like to pop over and take a look you’ll find the website at www.nandnerd.info and the blog at blog.nandnerd.info

Take care all.

Setting up vendors

Well, last night I bought myself a JEVN vendor system, I’ve long delayed in setting up vendors or turning my items into products for sale (with a few exceptions, namely the mirrors and Flexis on display in my “Flexi Fun” museum). So now I’m going through the repetitive task of rezzing, photographing, setting permissions (which I’m not very sure about but I’ll leave at mod/copy/no-trans for the most part) photoshopping, uploading the texture and adding to the server. Fun.

The JEVN system is a popular one, you need only tour a few of the big malls in Second Life and you’ll see plenty, which is funny as it’s possible to rebuild the vendor itself and retexture everything to the point where it wouldn’t be recognisable as a JEVN vendor and yet we see so many of them in the default state. The system works by storing the items, textures and notecard of settings in a server, multiple vendors can be placed anywhere throughout the grid/world and registered to this server such that any changes or additions to your server’s contents or notecards (i.e. updating prices) will result in these changes taking effect at your vendors thus removing the requirement to travel from vendor to vendor and make the changes manually at each.

JEVN vendors are available from SLExchange.

The last word on CopyBot

Well, if you’ve read my rambling on CopyBot you’ll know I detested the speculation and rumours that surrounded it and turned the whole thing into a major drama show.

Thankfully I saw libsecondlife’s recent post Your World, Your Imagination, Your protocol.

In the post they link to three “fact vs. fiction” sites (which I’ll link here to pad this post out a bit):

http://www.libsecondlife.org/content/view/30/
http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/11/15/copybot/
http://www.sluniverse.com/forums/topic12759-1-1.aspx

Well, that should be the end of that. It should, but what is that I hear? “!quit” you say? aww crap! We’re now plagued by “simple copybot protection” and other such nonsense, this spam is possibly more of a problem than the CopyBot itself was (exageration perhaps). For more information see Spambot backlash… need help or search for !quit in a forum near you.

Second Life after CopyBot

So, what is life after death, erm, I mean CopyBot like? well, it’s much like it was before.

In the latest update we are now informed that use of CopyBot to make copies of items for profit etc is against the TOS (Terms of Service) and will result in a ban for those found to be using it as such. So um, whats new?

A lot of speculation was flying around, people making accusations, blame thrown in the Linden’s direction or in the libsecondlife direction. libsecondlife also got a lot of flak for “hacking” second life while reverse engineer or document its protocols would be more apt titles I think.

All in all it scaremongering and drama ensued on a grander scale than GLIntercept had seen. Several content creators closed shops and vowed not to open them again until “this has been sorted”, as if that would be possible. Others are complaining that Linden Labs isn’t doing enough to protect their copyright… it isn’t even Linden Lab’s responsibility to protect the residents/content creators copyright, that’s like saying company A who makes CD players has to take responsibility for the protection of copyright material played on said CD players, isn’t it? You know, finding metaphors for Second Life isn’t easy.

Well folks, I for one will be staying in SL for a good while yet and can see that CopyBot is as much a threat as GLIntecept (and works along similar lines, intercepting data which MUST be transmitted and could not be encoded) so there is little that can be done to hinder such things. If it breaks the Lindex/currency then I’ll be might peeved but otherwise? meh.

CopyBot

Okay, lots of speculation and uncertainty about the libsecondlife’s (link) CopyBot. I don’t wish to add to the speculation but would like to collate some links I’ve found to be useful or informative so here you go:

From libsecondlife’s own website:

CopyBot is not a product that we sell or distribute. It’s a debugging tool and silly demo with a [now] obviously bad choice of name. Hopefully you won’t be seeing copy bot on SLex any time soon..

The issue at hand with copy bot seems HUGE!

“Oh my god why would they do something like that?!”

But our reason for showing this application around was partly we were proud of or achievement, and then on the other hand, if it’s this easy, we should tell people that relying on the Second Life systems to protect content is not feasible any longer.

For a while now we’ve had this project on the back burner that has been asked for so many times by content developers, an ability to back up content to your hard drive and restore it in Second Life. Basically import and export functions.

That’s the basis of CopyBot as well excepting the permission check. The problem is the difference between CopyBot and and import export tool is little more than 1 line of code that is easily commented out by even novice programmers.

What you see in CopyBot is the same capabilities that any import/export tool would have.

It’s not something easy to deal with, and we’re struggling ourselves with the issues that CopyBot has brought. It’s caused many personal conflicts as well between developers and their friends who do not see the merit in what we do.

Robin Linden responded to the issue with a post on the Linden Blog here.  [ Edit: New Linden post here. ]
Also, Ordinal Malaprop has dedicated half a blog post to this subject which you can read on her blog, An Engine Fit For My Proceeding, here.

Finally, for those of you with a strong stomach you could wade through the Second Life Forum, specifically you might find the script “Short Term CopyBot countermeasure” useful or informative which Ethan Cinquetti posted in the Script Library.

Get Ready to RAMBLE!!!

Right, definetly time to ramble on some more, this blog ain’t going to write itself.

I find myself sitting with SL running while browing the net looking for things to do. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve a few things in the To-Do list but can’t seem to work up the drive to actually get started. Putting To-Do to the side, what have I done? Recently I’ve been working on a secret submarine base, I’ve been meaning to work on underwater themed builds forever. One of my first builds in Second Life was an underwater themed home, made of bubble-shaped sections, air-locks and of course a machine which blows bubbles. However, when I moved to Lasiocampa and bought waterfront land which would suit such a build I discovered a massive flaw in the design: A texture which uses 32-bit targa (i.e. transparecy layer) or has a transparency of greater than zero shows up like a sore thumb through the waters surface. As my work so far was made to look like a completely glass structure it didn’t look too appealing from above the waters surface and so I have left the thoughts of an underwater base/home/build to boil until now. With the transparency problem at the forefront of this design I decided I should attempt to blend my build in, hide it perhaps. I’ve done this by taking a snapshot of the ground texture underwater and attempted a seamless texture with it. Now, I really ain’t the best texture-er but I think it turned out all right, if only I could get around to lining up the textures.

The building houses a submarine or two, I had fiddled with the basic car/boat/whatever vehicle script a long time ago to make a simple submarine script and now I’ve put that script into a larger submarine with the intentions of improving the script and having fun with it. While on this submarine project I also decided to start making some scuba gear, having recently gone back to Scuba Diving in Real Life (that’s Second Life’s competitor). The scuba gear I’ve seen in SL so far is a little under-detailed in my opinion and I wanted something more, so I got to work on a tank, mask, fins (flexi of course), regulators and BCD (bouyancy control device, an item I have not yet seen in SL). Ideally I would make these items suitable for sale, perhaps several sizes of BCD and mask to enable more flexibility but for now I’m happy touring SL with my scuba gear on, much to the bemusement of others.

So, rambling complete for now, watch out for more later.

Second Life makes the Fox 11 News but thats not all…

Not only did Second Life make the Fox 11 News (see it here) but they interviewed two of my friends for it, now what are the chances of that? Both Cher Harrington and Lazlo Wombat did a good job and I’d say the interview put across a positive and exciting perspective of Second Life.

Good job guys!

SL brought to it’s knees

Griefers strike again. Second Life is restricted to Linden log-ins only.

Sadly Second Life is currently undergoing some repair after “griefers”, which are the Second Life equivalent of anarcists, attacked using self-replicating objects. Effectively spreading a virus-like grey goo accross the grid/world.

Reading the Linden Blog it is clear that the Lindens are trying their best to squash the bugs and holes in the security which allow this self-replicating attack. I recall when the first (or at least one of the first) replication attacks occured, the defence to that was incorporating code to allow the Lindens to turn off simulators (sims, the 256×256m segments of land which make up the grid) in order to stunt the growth of the attacks. This helped with containing the outburst of the virus, much like amputating a foot to save the leg. However it wasn’t until more recently we had the “grey goo fence” incorporated which uses a formula to decide how many objects and how often can be “rezzed” by a resident on a per sim basis (if I recall correctly). This should manage to stunt the lightning speed spread and allow more time for the Lindens to react to outburst. Unfortunately, as the defences become more elaborate as do the griefers weapons and we see a more distributed attack which somehow sends the self-replicating objects to other users (I myself recieved many when I logged in yesterday), upon receiving these objects they lie dormant in the residents inventory, only if the resident chooses to rez (load into the world/sim) this object can it continue it’s spread. Unfortunately the defence for this at present is trying to educate residents not to accept objects from people they don’t know. Immediately deleting objects from strangers is imperitive at these times, especially ones for which the name is completely made up of numbers (well, as far as I have seen so far).

But then remember how e-mail virii spread? the I Love You virus spread by an attachment to e-mails. Is this not the same thing? How do we defend ourselves against similar threats within a virtual world? Anti-Spam software for our Inventory? These griefers appear to be using the LSL, Linden Scripting Language, without any direct “hacking” of the Second Life system. Playing within the boundaries (if only just) that the scripting language imposes. Unfortunately the answer might be to further limit the scripting tools, an answer I would dearly hate to see actioned. So many wonderful things have been developed by playing against the boundaries (Startax wand anyone?).

Ah well, back to RL for me, hopefully I’ll get my fill of SL later on today.

In the beginning

Well if you’re reading this you have found the fantastic beginning of nand Nerd’s blog. nand Nerd (no capital on the nand) is a resident in the virtual world of Second Life (SL). What is Second Life? A very good question, I could attempt to answer that by saying it’s a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) but that generalisation doesn’t encompass all of Second Life’s patrons. I’ve heard mention SL is the next generation MySpace, however having never looked at a MySpace profile I’d be the last to comment on this description. The list of possible answers to “What is Second Life” could continue, and perhaps it should by interviewing a broad selection of SL’ers (Second Lifers or Second Life Residents) but thats beyond the scope of this opening blog post (damn I’m padding this out way more than I had intended). Second Life to me is a medium for which to build, script and interact. I like nothing more than spending a few hours pottering about with the Second Life building tools. Perhaps spend a couple of evenings working on a script. But mostly I like the interaction with friends I have made through Second Life, friends who range from all over the globe.

Well if you made it this far congrats, heres hoping I’ll not ramble as much on my next post and we’ll see some descriptions of the types of building/scripting/interaction of which I mentioned.

Until next time, take care.