How to protect yourselves against RedZone and other IP tracing technologies

RedZone was a tool for banning potential content thiefs and griefers, including known alts of known perpetrators.  It could also warn you if someone in the vincinity was a know alt.

The question is: How did RedZone know about your alt accounts?  The answer is that the RedZone servers used a loophole in SL to track the IP adress of the users computer, and when it discovered multiple accounts using the same PC it was fair to suspect they where alt accounts.

As you may know, your IP adress is also quite useful for tracking down your RL location and identity, so the privacy issues here goes far beyond alt tracking.

RedZone is now banned from SL, but the basic technology loophole that can be used to track down your IP adresses is still available.  In other words, nothing can stop other people from doing the same thing.

The problem is the handling of media and HTML in the SL client.  Whenever the viewer plays media or shows a web site, it will contact the media or web server directly.  So if you walk into a store with a music URL, media URL or HTML on a prim, your viewer will get the URL from Linden Labs servers, but will proceed to call that URL directly.

Now, whenever you contact a server, that server will know your IP adress.  So the following sequence may happen:

1. You walk onto someones land
2. The parcel have a music URL pointing to the land owners home server
3. Your PC will call that server and dutifully tell it your IP adress
4. The land owner have a visitor scanner that will know your Second Life name
5. The visitor scanner will send your second life name to the same server that serves the Music URL
6. That server will log that your SL avatar walked onto the parcel at the same time as your PC requested the music URL.  

It's a no-brainer to deduce that the two are connected, and your IP is busted.

How can you protect your IP adress?  The simple answer is: Don't play media or music unless you trust the owner of the thing.

The following setting should do:

That is, remove the check from "Allow Media to auto-play" and "Play media attached to other avatars".

Update: I guess you should also remove the check from Streaming music: Enabled" (forgot that one).

The drawback is that you have to press Play in the viewer whenever you really want to listen to the music or watch the HTML-On-A-Prim thing, but that may be a small price to pay to keep your RL identity safe.

Eat, Pray, Love my Ubuntu Netbook

Amazon has made a kind of a silent success with the Kindle reading tablet.  Apple has got a lot of publicity for its music distribution system, but the Kindle is a bit more anonymous.  

What I did not know until a coworker told me the other day was that Amazon also distribute the Kindle reader as an application for iPod/Pad, Mac, Android and Windows.  In effect, what Apple did for music distribution, Amazon has done for books.

The service is really fascinating.  Amazon.com has, at the time of writing, 580,208 titles in the Kindle eBooks store.  There are 6,091 titles published the last 30 days alone, of all kinds: "How to write a sentence: And how to read one", "The Day After the Dollar Crashes: A survival guide for the New World Order" and "Two to love [nights in bliss]" all listed in sequence if you wish.  It's like a kind of treasure hunt in an old book store, the only difference being these are new titles!

When you find a book that seems interesting, you can download a sample (the first few chapters) and read a bit, just like in a real bookstore.  The only difference is that you can be anywhere; on the train, bus, airport or the beach.  Never again a day with no book to read!

Sadly, both Apple and Amazon have chosen to ignore users of Linux.  But there is a difference:  Using Wine it is possible to run a lot of windows applications on Linux, and while iTunes runs badly in Wine (if at all), the Kindle reader flows like a breeze on even a slow netbook.  And when we talk about books, a netbook is really the second best thing after a real kindle tablet....

After getting a preview or buying a book, it is synchronized to your home folder in the Kindle reader.  

Lyra, my MSI Wind Notebook, is running Ubuntu 10.04 Netbook Edition.  It's a tiny 10" 1 kg thing, not very fast, but each time I try to put it away on the shelf to use a more powerful computer I find myself returning to it in within a week.  Its just so functional when it comes to surf, email and write on that I can't seem to live without it.  And I am sure that Kindle will make it even more indispensable.

Amazon has made a very functional GUI.  When you are reading, you can put the book up on full screen, so that nothing else disturbs the mind.  Instead of scrolling you turn the pages one after another, and that really makes for easy reading.

There is one major difference between iTunes and the Kindle book store:  While Apple has abandoned their copy-protection scheme, Kindle books are only usable on readers connected to your Amazon account.  There seems to be ways to break this scheme, but I guess it's not really worth it.  With books selling for less than US10, it's less than half the price of buying the same soft-cover book in Norway.

I am now starting on chapter 5 of "Eat, Pray, Love", the first eBook I have purchased on Amazon.  (Btw, the literal Norwegian translation of the title is "Eat, Love, Live"; I suppose Pray is not really as catchy here in Europe as it is in the US.)  Anyway, Lyra and me will hit the sack really soon now; I think I want at least one chapter before I close my eyes:-)

49 of 52 - Stacking Prims

 

Victorian outfit for a Victorian Castle Builder

SL's model of payment for server space is the use of Prims.  The price of a Prim vary, as do the amount of land you get for each prim.  In a normal SIM, prims and land are tied together with the constant of 2,295 sqm/Prim.  This is actually a fairly high value compared to the real world, and it limits the level of 3D detail that can be recreated virtually.  As I am writing this, I am looking at the bookshelf in my living room (a home-made 28 prim piece LOL) that contains at least 400 prims worth of books and CD's. And there are lots of other stuff in here that would require lots of prims to recreate truly.  Even being a bit conservative, this 32 sqm room contains at least 1000 prims, requiring the constant of just 0,032 sqm/prim.  Thats two orders of magnitude better resolution than SL, and if it where to be matched would require each sim to hold 2 million prims instead of 15.000....  Virtual worlds still have a long way to go!

To cover up this loss of details, builders commonly paints what should have been individual prims onto a surface; that is a complete bookshelf with books is just 1 prim with 2 different textures: Front and sides.

The same things happens with prefab houses.  Builders draws windows and other details on textures.  This looks nice from a distance, but close by you notice the lack of true 3D windowposts and the like.  Also, most prefabs I have seen using this technique has a kind of "blurry" feel. 

Anyway, building my own homes I prefer to build using discrete prims.  So, in my castle-in-spe, the thin glass window prims are truly recessed into the thick stone walls.  And since all the windows uses the same texture, and all the walls are using the same texture, the viewer can render the outside walls of the castle loading just 2 different textures, even if the layout of the walls vary.  This leads to faster rezzing.  

Meshes might change all this, allowing us to create true 3D details without using prims.  However, it seems that the lab will still count "equivalent prims" - that is one mesh object will count as several prims.  Noone knows these rules yet, but I do hope they do not "punish" detailed 3D design too much.  If they do, we will still get prefabs with painted windows, and that would really be a vaste of this new technolog.

But I think stacking prims will still be the most engaging way to  build!

45 of 52 - Linden Lab and Moore: Do they keep up?

In 1965, Intel Co-funder Gordon E. Moore formulated what has later been known as Moore's Law:  The number of transistors we manage to squeeze into an integrated circuit doubles each year.  In 1975 he amended it a bit, reducing the growth rate to a doubling in two years.  A colleague of his factored in the performance gain made from this, and predicted that the performance of computer components doubles every 18 months.

In practical terms, it means that if you buy a new computer every 3rd year, you would expect a 4-times increase in performance if you run the same programs.  Often enough, you don't, because the new computer comes with a new version of Windows that consumes even more of the machines resources, but that's another story LOL.

I've been in SL for 3 years now.  And I wonder: Has Linden Lab kept up with Moore's Law?  Have Second Life performance doubled twice the last 3 years?

It's easy to forget how bad things where in "the good old days".  I could never expect to be able to be online for more than an hour at a time without crashing.  Several times a month, the whole grid would be down because of unexpected or (sometimes) planned maintenance.   Remember the pictures of the monkeys:  Clearly inspired by the novel 2001 by Arthur C. Clarke, it was clear to all that Linden Lab was run by cool people who also knew their sci-fi literature.  It kind of made us all happy to feel that we lived in a world where our creators was still busy shaping it.

I have not seen this picture for ages.  One reason might be that the grid is almost never down anymore; clearly a performance increase we all love, even if it is seldom prised.  And when we talk about performance: It's now generally possible to walk around a dense club with 40 other avatars with no problems.  In short, a SIM mostly just works.  I remember my first beach party; we where about 15-20 people, and everyone was happy about how smooth things worked:  Somehow, 20 people in a sim was a great feat!  Sure, nowadays we complain when 80 people tries to get all their attachment in at the same time, and long for the day when technology will allow 40.000 people in one place, but the hard fact is that NO VIRTUAL WORLD IN EXISTENCE TODAY OUTPERFORMS SL.  So yes, actual capacity has at least doubled.

When I joined SL, median concurrency was around 30.000.  During the next 18 month, that figure doubled to more than 60.000.  So, at least during that time, Moore's law held true.

Since then, concurrency have flattened, to say it nicely, but somehow I feel that technology is not to blame for that.

A more important reason for the absence of the monkeys, however, is that the Lab has somehow "grown up", no longer profiling themselves with these kinds of images.  And it seems to me that this is what the long-term residents and bloggers miss the most: The feeling of being "pioneers", of being loved by the kings and the queens and the demigods that used to be around.

Now, we have a world with a few well-defined options for server space rentals; options that has mostly remained stable during the three years I've been in SL.  As we are used to when we order a web hotel or a virtual server on the net, we use automated systems that fixes everything, and have no rational need for a spike-haired arch-angel to show us around or care deeply about what we do.

Is that the simple reason while SL is not growing anymore?  Because we just miss the monkeys and the punkhead CEO and the magic bean plants growing outside Gov' Lindens mansion?

Whatever, in 3 years I expect to be able to invite at least 160 people to my 6-years day!