What libsecondlife does is not converting the machine readable format back to a human readable one based on the client program but instead they monitor the network traffic and try to guess what it means. This machine readable format will then be given to the world (e.g. This format is very minimal and is not easily to convert back to the original form (and hard to understand for humans in this form).
Programmers write source code which in turn will be converted to a machine readable format. For those who are not familiar with programming let me quickly explain that the source code of a program is the human readable form of it. Actually I think they are changing those things on a regular basis already but people keep adjusting.īefore I come to the content creators let me first talk about Open Source a bit.
Beside it might be cracked at some point and then LL would need to implement another mechanism which would be cracked again and so on. This might help but with Linden Lab’s plans of opensourcing the client it wouldn’t make much sense as they would provide the source code for decryption later on as well. One solution might be to add encryption to the protocol. The data needs to be transferred somehow to your client and on this way it can always be copied. Of course there are also bad uses of such a program such as copying copyrighted material which in fact is the fear of many content creators these days.īut there is not much Linden Lab can do about it and this is what people need to understand. There is no way to do that right now but work based on the CopyBot source could possibly provide such a service. Imagine you created something and want to get a copy of this on your hard drive. And apparently the existence of a program to copy objects is not necessarily a bad thing.
It also seems to me one of the few (if any more) true collaborative open source projects in the realm of Second Life (but then again Second Life also makes it hard to truely collaboratively work on a project in-world).ĬopyBot now started (in my understanding) as debugging tool for libsecondlife.
So in fact it is the deciphering of that data stream I talked about earlier.Īdditionally this project is an open source project which means that the code is freely available and can be modified and used by anybody as long as they do their work in terms of the license attached (some open source licenses, as for instance the GNU public license, need changes to be made public again so that everybody can profit from this derivative work again. A protocol can be seen as a sort of language in which the client and server talk to each other. It is a result of the people who are doing research on the libsecondlife project which aims at documenting the Second Life protocol. And it happened already as with the GL intercept program or similar tools (only for textures though).ĬopyBot is just one application which can do this task of copying objects. prim data will be converted into actual 3d objects constructed from points and vertices).Īs this description implies it is always possible to copy this data. The important point to note here is that all the objects (in the form of prim data) and textures (as bitmaps) will be transferred to your client which constructs the image from it by sending that data in a processed form to your graphics card (e.g. In my understanding this will be a direct connection between the sim server on which you are and your client while the sim server talks to the asset server if it needs additional objects or textures. Now in order to display objects and textures on your computer screen these need to be copied from the server to the client. login or provide the complete set of objects in existence (the asset server) which you can e.g. On the server side there are first of all the servers which serve the sims (for each sim one server basically) and then there are some additional ones in the backend which handle e.g. Second Life consists of clients and servers. Now what is this all about? Let me try to clarify some things first. in front of a CopyBot reseller have been happening. I received several votings on proposing to ban either CopyBot or libsecondlife, many shops have closed in protest and at least two demonstrations e.g. The effect in-world also has been quite huge. Additionally there are two posts by Linden Lab on the topic, one is by Robin Linden and the other one by Cory Linden where he states again that the use of CopyBot is a violation of the Terms of Service and will be handled accordingly. One discussion with Robin Linden can be read here, there were some articles in the Second Life Herald, Eric Rice commented on the RIAA-style rage and even Reuters reported on the case here and here. Recently there has ben lots of discussion and drama about a tool called CopyBot.