Welcome Katharine Berry

Katharine Berry is the creator of the web based SL client AjaxLife. I got into contact with her on Plurk, and over the course of the past 18 months or so we formed a friendship and talked often on GTalk. Katharine's birthday was on the 26th and she reached legal age, meaning that she could (and had to) transfer from the Teen Grid to the Main Grid. The process involved some bureaucratic procedures and was delayed due to the holidays, but about an hour ago Katharine finally arrived at the Main Grid. Some months ago I promised to pick her up upon arrival, and indeed she offered friendship as soon as she came over. On the pic above I took her sightseeing to Bentham Forest.

Welcome to the Main Grid, Katharine!

The model railroad that is SL

Maybe December and the time around Christmas is when the children of all ages dream of model railroads. In a rather insightful post a few weeks ago, my dear and close friend Zippora compared being in SL to playing with trains:

"But wait... did I just mention "Second Life" and "model railroad" in one line of thought? Suddenly something became clear to me: SL is simply the contemporary equivalent of building model railroads! [...] We don't want to make our hands dirty any more and hide safely behind our computer instead. But the crafting virus is inevitable and we start building our little dream world there: on our screen. Instead of gypsum and glue we use prims and to make things move the electric circuits are replaced by scripts. Basically it is all the same."

Zippora is on to something here. What is definitely one of the major success factors of SL is the ability to - literally - build your own world, and collaborate in buildings. There has been social media interaction before (chatrooms, IRC), there have been 3D worlds before (Myst or any other 3D game), there has been the ability to create before (Photoshop, Blender), there have been online games/worlds before. Only SL brought it all together, brought it all in one place, provides a world that the inhabitants build themselves, and where everybody can see and share what the others did.

I know a few people working on model railroads, and usually it is a lonely task. Those railroads are not for playing - they are for being watched in awe. Often the builders are organized in clubs, but the worlds they build are their own. The world we build in SL is open to everybody. The social interaction, based around - and even inside - our own creations, makes this fascination. The comparatively crude building tools level the playing field. Everybody can build, everybody can contribute, the starting threshold is small. If you feel your creativity flow, you rez a prim and simply start. That is the magic of SL!

And that is the reason I see newer virtual worlds like Blue Mars critically. Yes, Blue Mars looks fancier, way fancier. Yes, Blue Mars is faster. But Blue Mars is not a world built by the residents. Blue Mars is a world built by an elite, and our role is to admire (and eventually pay) for it.

SL might seem crude. SL might seem full of horrible (and sometimes perceived as inappropriate) content. But it is us who build it! And if I want to go and redefine "ugly" by building an abomination of a statue, I can.

And that is freedom.

New neighbours

There has been quite some reshuffling of sims close to my mooring place at Sailor's Rest, due to the arrival of the SS Galaxy and the opening of the dearly missed Treasure Cove passage, connection the Sailor's Cove sims in the East to the Blake Sea in the West without the need of doing a large detour northwards.

All this new land messed the Artificial Isle sims northeast of me up - Gulliver Airport is still not fully recovered. In all this transition the peaceful slip for my boat got a new neighbour - a (military) airport by all means.

My boat is my refuge as well. I often come there just to get some rest. But this airport has a severe impact on the peacefulness and quiet of that place. I have paid my slip 6 weeks in advance - time enough o find a new place to anchor.

Update: I checked out quite a few potential marinas in the United Sailing Sims (USS), the New England sims and other sailing sims around the Blake Sea. all of them are rather large marinas, busy with boats, not really what I want. One spot was quite nice, only that it was a caribbean island and those are so ubiquitous in SL that I rather avoid them. The good news is that my rent paid is good for all the USS slips and can be transfered.

Diversity

Ten of my female friends, posing naked for my camera. Not only 10 different shapes, but also different skins, expressions and attitudes. This is just a glance at the rich diversity Second Life has to offer!

The "Diversity" project was inspired by a RL project I saw on Tumblr a while ago. Ten women, naked, showing the variation nature has in stock for female bodies. In SL we tweak our own shapes, select our own skin, and create our own appearance. I chose 10 of my friends for their unique way of appearance. All 10 of them defined femininity for themselves - making it very diverse to look at.

All women were asked to pose topless, but other than that, no requests were made. They should use whatever accessories, hair, tattoos or jewellery they feel most at home with. Ten poses were created for the shot, loosely inspired by the poses of the RL photo, and I selected the pose fitting the model best. Some poses look a bit shy, others show very self secure femininity and nakedness.

I took about 20 photos of each avatar with different lighting settings and arranged them in a hopefully harmonic way. Countless times I shuffled the single photos until a balanced collage was achieved. I only did very subtle post processing on the images, mostly smoothing edges where the SL mesh did not have enough nodes for pleasing stretching of the skin.

I am showing you some diversity. And this is just a glimpse. There is so much beautiful diversity to be found in SL. So many people living their dreams and fantasies. Go and find out for yourself!

My thanks to (in alphabetical order): Chav, Jenn, Lectra, Marx, Natsumi, Nissa, Quest, Trinity, Uccello and Zippora

Nautical rules

[8:00] Peter Stindberg: Well, there's a rule for female guests on my boat though
[8:03] Vextra Messing: what's the rule?
[8:05] Peter Stindberg: Bikini(-top) is strictly enforced - taking it off in mid-cruise is encouraged
[8:07] Vextra Messing: hehe, that's a cute rule, I suppose it improves aerodynamics
[8:07] Peter Stindberg: oh, absolutely!
[8:07] Vextra Messing: They put tits on the front of ships for good reasons.
[8:08] Peter Stindberg: yep, knowledge of the elders

Random thought

Lectra made me think...

I know a lot of amazingly crazy, creative, kinky, wonderful, strange, complex, artistic, benevolent, wide-hearted people in Second Life. And all of them hide inside the atomic bodies of "normal people", office workers, housewives.

I wonder how many of the people I meet each day in the atomic world have amazingly crazy, creative, kinky, wonderful, strange, complex, artistic, benevolent, wide-hearted souls inside them? And I wonder how many of them have discovered these souls already, and dared to set them free - if "only" inside of SL.

A short history of copying

[This is a post I made for Rez Magazine in July 2009. Since Rez Magazine is closing down, I saved the post for my own blog.]

Copying is a fact. Copying has happened over the millenia. The first cavemen copied fire from lava flows or burning trees. Cultural advancements were based on copying. Things like a number system and written language got copied. Copying helped win wars. Copying helps fighting AIDS in Africa. Copying comes with a whole variety of names like "learning" or "inspiration". Babies copy their parent's behaviour when growing up. Copying is deeply ingrained in the human nature.

I am not saying copying is right. People spend a lot of time and effort into creating things for commercial gain. Those people have all the rights to be extremely pissed if someone copies them and threatens their business model. Again it is not as black and white as it seems, when it comes to cases were the copy is superior to the original, or where the original is so simple that it could be considered as public domain, but that is a different blog post altogether. Someone whose fruits of labor get copied should have a way to seek compensation, and most countries have legislation in place where this can be achieved. The machinery grinds a bit when it becomes international or when different standards come into play, but basically it works.

Exact digital copies change the game

Admittedly, the digital technology we have since the Seventies/Eighties makes copying extremely easy. While copying a painting by a Dutch Master took the contemporaries an equal, if not longer amount of time and work, copying a DVD in 2009 is a matter of 30 minutes instead of the 15 months the movie making needed, not to mention the cost. If you look at copying as an arms race, the side of the copiers has quite an advantage nowadays.

The answer to this is Digital Rights Management - DRM. It's the technological answer to the technological reality of exact digital copies. But DRM is nothing more than an illusion of security. DRM puts up a huge smokescreen and repeats the mantra "You are safe, you are safe" over and over. It's the 21st Centuries equivalent of dried frog pills and love potions. If digital content is to be consumed by humans apart from being encoded digitally it needs to be decoded again. And the decoding process can be reverse engineered, and sooner or later will be reverse engineered. So while DRM does not discourage the determined, it does however annoy the compliant customers by limiting their experience.

What is the best protection?

What is your best protection against being copied? Innovation! Let's take the fashion industry - a prime target of copying not only in the atomic world but also in Second Life. What Diesel or Armani or Calvin Klein or Gucci show on the catwalks in Milan and Paris will flood the trash boutiques on High Street all over the world a few months later as copies "inspired by...". The large labels are definitely not thrilled about that, but do they call for "Design Rights Management"? Do they ask that at airports or railway stations or in police controls, women get stripped who wear copied dresses? No. Do they demand show trials where women who bought copycatted dresses get charged for thousand times the worth of the dress? No! They do two things:

1. From the commercial side they make their initial, innovative releases incredibly expensive. This enables the folks who can afford them to feel part of a rich elite, as well as as cover the design and production cost plus a hefty margin.
   Or they may take the approach of going for the masses, showing their new creations on the catwalk only to sell it by the millions themselves as long as they have the head start.
   


2. While the copycats pick up on the new releases and the sales of the old collection starts to dwindle, they are already busy making the next collection, working on new designs, only to surprise the fashion world with their new creations in Milan or Paris again. They either sell few for high prices, or many for low prices, they collect their margin, eventually they get copied but by then they have their next collection in the works already. Lather, rinse, repeat.

From the atomic to the virtual world

Let's finally come to Second Life, a world with a DRM system weaved into the very fabric of the system. The DRM system was certainly part of the success of SL, since for a while it gave content creators security and a commercial model that allowed them to receive economic gain for their work. I do not blame anybody for believing this system was foolproof. Not everybody is technically interested, and the advocates of DRM never stop claiming that DRM is safe and the answer to all problems.

However it was only a matter of time until the inherent vulnerabilities got exploited. Intercepting the the OpenGL protocol to retrieve textures was the first step, working on the viewer protocol to retrieve prim parameters and other attributes only the second step. Rika Watanabe made a short but drastic summary what can be copied and what can not be copied. It should be mandatory to read for every content creator.

Was it foreseeable that copying happened? Yes. Could it have been prevented? No. The way Second Life works is that your viewer gets a kind of blueprint, and recreates what your avatar sees locally on your computer. And for that, all parameters and all textures need to be transferred to you. The only way to prevent this would be if the Second Life servers would transfer only frames of a kind of movie to you - every action would happen inside the server. And this is simply not feasible.

Accepting copying as inevitable is one thing. Making it too easy is another thing. Burglary is as inevitable, but you don't leave your door open to make it easier for the thief. So when earlier this week UK-based metaverse development company Rezzable announced the release of BuilderBot, a tool that could copy a whole sim regardless who owns the items on it, emotions ran high. Rezzable back paddled two days later, announcing it will keep the source code of the program under tabs and implement DRM conformity. The discussion is the same since over a year ago the tool "Second Inventory" was released. In its first versions, "Second Inventory" did not bother as well who the creator of items was. Quickly, the author was convinced to include DRM checks as well.

As of today, copying of all content from Second Life (with few exception - see Rika's article linked above) is possible for everyone. However, special technical understanding is required not many people possess. Tools like "Second Inventory", export features like included in the Gemini Viewer or BuilderBot, aimed for the masses, limit copyable content to content you created yourself or where you have full modify rights for. And I think this is good as it is. You can't prevent the determined from copying, but that does not mean to make the technology available to all.

Getting copied sucks. Getting copied hurts. Getting copied wants you make to drop everything and go lick your wounds. But it is a fact, and throwing technology at the problem will not prevent it from happening, but make life more difficult for the legitimate users. If you got copied, by all means, report the person and seek legal action if possible. But stop asking for a technical solution, because there can't be a technical solution!

Copybotters don't innovate! Copybotters can only feed on what actually exists. Beat them with what you can best: create! Create amazing content for Second Life! Refine your skills. Don't waste energy on worrying about being copied. Use the energy to innovate. Be ahead of the copybotters. Don't focus on people who don't buy in your shop anyways (those who buy copied content), focus on the people who are willing to spend money! Don't let the copybotters win. Show them you are better, faster, more innovative.

Stop worrying now. Start creating now!