If You Can See It, You Can Steal It

The other night I went to the Metaverse Meetup, a group of people interested in Second Life and other Virtual World technology to hear Zha Ewry (David Levine of IBM) and Adam Frisby (Adam Zaius of Azure Islands and OpenSim). Of course they were there to talk about interoperability and the wonders of open source and of course I was there to ask questions from the audience. And yes, approximately once every 47 seconds, we were told earnestly, flatly, aggressively, confidently, and exclusively that if you can see it, you can steal it, so don't bother trying to lock the barn door.

But first, a mis-en-scene. We're in one of those old Manhattan low-rises in the E. 20s converted into an office building, the air conditioning is waning, there's nothing to drink except the D'Agostino's overpriced Odwalla you thought to bring yourself (and most didn't), and here's 4 geeks, completely immersed in their laptops doing something for about 40 minutes while the rest of us sit there, uncomfortably unsticking one buttock and then the other from the plastic office chairs, and staring at our seat mates -- who don't look like any avatars we know. The ever-ebullient Eric Reuters is there up in front, and the nauseating Joshua Meadows (yes, I washed my hands after).

The lovely Zha Ewry made a fabulous entrance with a laptop, with a dress so diaphanous you could barely see it, legs up to here, and heels dyed to match equally invisible (the rumply jeans and polo projected were just something malfunctioning with my wearable). Adam was looking his usual cross between Dennis the Menace and Wally Cleaver, if you know what I mean. We were here to witness the dawn of the Metaverse -- or something. Of course Annie Ok was there, looking even more slender and vivacious than the last time she expertly conjured us together out of the ether, if that was somehow possible. Jerry Paffendorf was conspicuous by his absence, out in San Fran working on The Secret Project. So there, it's out. The Secret Project has to be metaversal, if Jerry is in SF. I asked if it was "like Loopt" and drew a curious stare from Otaku/Otape/Offtopic (please, don't make me go in the game and look up the spelling of his name). I get OT doesn't ever take a New York taxi cab or he'd have been bombarded with Loopt by now. I asked if it the Secret Project was bigger than a breadbox. As OT couldn't tell as OT was NDA, we fell to talking about, uh, Nova Scotia, and therefore we very rapidly ran out of things to say, or rather, I didn't say the things I did have to say about NS because now Zha was booming over the transom, and continued to do a marathon talk for about the next two solid hours, causing several would-be metaversals to sneak out in boredom.

OK, then. I'm going to let Tish Armstrong/Ugotrade explain all the technical stuff because no doubt she will have taped the talk or had copious notes, and I'm going to focus on what concerned me, because what the hell else do you expect me to focus on.

OpenSim isn't a world -- roughly every 52 seconds, after the 47-second cycle we had telling us ifyoucanseeityoucansteal it, we were told OpenSim is not a world. It's a not-a-world, not a not-not-a-world. It's a platform. It's software. It's just a bunch of people working on stuff they call "towers" (not to be confused with evil silos in evil walled gardens, but just, well, towers). I observed that this Platformed Thinge had three features which I believe are required to pronounce something a virtual world (Caleb Booker will disagree):

o a community, a group of people around some shared purpose
o a place, a sense of place, a common space to put stuff together
o drama (Tish says the blogosphere has disagreed about OpenSim, therefore drama)

Now I ask you, are there REALLY any other things that make up a virtual world?! Of course there aren't. I noticed a big sort of cherry tree with pink blossoms in Wright Plaza which is named not for Will but some other unknown dude who is the actual founder of OpenSim even though it's Adam's World. I wondered, now, hmm, is that Barnesworth Anubis' tree? Looks awfully familiar. Straylight's tree? Seems very similar. Adam says it was some other guy whose name I forgot. Point is, they had a world, they did stuff together. Zha began to wax enthusiastical reach mystical escape velocity about how when you are putting a prim out and somebody is building with you, you lay something out and there your friend in SL is sliding a prim toward you simultaneously, you know how you just get together like that, and I said, bingo, that's a world, and I don't know WHY you insist on calling this socialware a platform, so very geek.

Adam, who like I said is a cross between Donny Osmond and Kurt Cobain, said oh, no, it's a platform, but you can build worlds on it. It's like those tedious geekoid explanations about how ohno, SL isn't a game but you can build a game on it. Blah, blah blah. Yeah.

Ok then. So, tell us about how you can steal our stuff. I'd like to think if I weren't in the room, these happy geeks might have talked about all kinds of their fun little nerdy stuff instead of those awful thorny social and political problems that they claim a curious right to identify and control and yet not remain accountable for. But, nobody in the room was talking much, and, guess what, when people asked questions, like William Leandros, they in fact asked about these very issues of asset and data transfer. William asked why you couldn't have digital signatures. He had a longer explanation about this later that seemed to me to be saying "These guys in fact don't understand the technology fully" not "it's futile to encrypt". I thought the problem with the key idea is that you always have to send the key over the wires at some point and then it gets taken under that seeit/steal it concept that is so well exemplified by the Lindens' eye see/hand steal logo.

But Zha assured him oh no, that won't work because of 120397812349087a;sldkfj;alsdf101987;lang.

I do want to hear more about that some time from both parties.

Alrighty. So moving right along, here's where I asked about five questions, none of which got answered satisfactorily.

1. Call your lawyer. This is of course the recipe of these young studs, who want to dispense with all those boring things like copyright protection through technical means, and just make people do DMCA notices and trials. I raised my hand and said, let me explain how open source is just the opposite of what you claim:

a. SL had a beautiful concept -- permissions with mechanical implementation so that you didn't have to register a business, ensure copyright by hiring lawyers, filing suits, etc. -- you just click off boxes. Zha loves to talk about this as "marking intention". I love to talk about it as deterring bad behaviour. Different. Even Eric Reuters was saying, you know, just by putting the price tag on stuff you do get people to pay even for copyable downloads, etc. This brilliant concept of LL's, endorsed by Lawrence Lessig (but not really to its real logical consequence), enabled anyone to enter the economy and make and sell stuff. A woman in Brazil can log on, make a dress, sell it, and get at least 80 percent protection mechanically from theft; and even though some of her compatriots might be busy stealing her dress or somebody else's dress, that person, if they are a wealthy first-worlder can hire a lawyer, but hey, they only in the end settle out of court and get some measly sum. So...lawyers are not the answer, and this is an elitist and non-accessible solution and also even for those who access it not so viable.

b. Zha responds by saying the companyies will have some sort of EULA or TOS to ensure these things and then you ask them to do takedowns -- it was rather vague to me what she said precisely because it seemed to leave it all up to the company and not the individual or the object -- and that lead to my next point:

2. By refusing to engineer the implementation of permissions (they're all on strike from this "futile" job), this gang is, in my view, driving other companies to other solutions, instinctively. The harsh reality of non-IP protection and porous permissions; the stark absence of any economy interface and all sorts of concocted finance problems then leads other people to make more walled gardens -- big ones, small ones, downloadable ones, flash ones. Like the Sheep's new Webflock, which is like those generic white plastic plates you buy in bulk at your kids' school and then they all paint them and then bake them by some process, each to have some unique work of art to have in your home. They call it "white label". So it remains deep and proprietary and expensive ($100,000). Or you get something a million miles wide and two centimeters deep (Google's Lively) for free.

a. Here's where I have to LOL at Tish and the gang, as they are all curling their lips at flash worlds that don't come to Jesus and get saved with open source, but as soon as these other folks do the "run free at last thing" and run off and make all kinds of separate worlds that aren't open standards and linked up, they cry foul. But, sorry, you don't get to insist on "open" and include within that also "closed" as the free, open option. And my very point about this soi-disant "open" is that it leads to elitism and lawyers as solutions rather than check-off boxes for the masses, and it also leads to companies running off to secure their problems with "adjacency" (flying phalluses) and IP protection (their own, for starters) by simply bundling up and shrink-wrapping their own world you have to buy and have the key for.

b. And here's the other undesirable problem flowing out of the opensourcedness: creators can't get IP protection so they go to stables maintained by oligarchs or big investors like Rezzable which creates a Disney effect. Then VWs become about "experience" and are event-driven, not content/object-driven, and the creators don't have to worry about their corporate-driven concoctions, as they can wither up and die or be stolen and virally spread to give brand recognition -- it doesn't matter. They will have been paid. Handomely, hopefully.

Zha does make explicit in this meeting that "shallow DRM" is merely "marking intent" and c/m/t is merely a mark of intent since anybody can hack it. Sigh.

3. Zha then, as usual, talked confidently of Real Life Analogies That Apply. "You can't apply technical solutions to social problems," this Big Blue worker tells us, although of course IBM is among the many giant corporations that does that all the time to prevent theft. Zha tells the dressmaker in Brazil essentially to get stuffed if she doesn't have a lawyer, but the big corporation can demand and get its own firewall arrangement with the Lab. Firewall is the new DRM.

Of course, in real, there are all kinds of technical solutions to the social problem of theft like "jail" and even in the Rite-Aid, all the stuff is tagged and if you try to talk out the door with it, the buzzer goes off on the metal detector by the door and you are asked to kindly return with your purchase to the register. So, naturally it doesn't seem like that big a deal to tag stuff in a digital world and put in a metal detector but no, let's just find backwards arguments for legitimizing theft instead.

There was another moment when I was reminded of how funny the opensource extremism is, when Zha talked about the dreaded "forking". See, forking is what gives the lie to openness of opensource. Because if you disagree, you fork. That's to be discouraged. Therefore open source isn't open. It's full of internal contradictions like that.

Zha spoke of that mystical brotherhood, where people come to the OS group and are "judged by their work" and if its good they get to stay, etc. -- that awful horrid tribal stuff that is so unscientific around coding projects, which is a kind of glorified penis measurement contest because nobody makes a universal set of criteria that can stand above the group as a rule of law, instead it is merely heavy subjective and visceral "get it or don't" "patch or GTFO" sort of bullying.

Several people commented later that while it had 4,000 sign-ups, most people were just prototyping on their own computer offline, realizing that geeky dream of being able to work offline with more prims. But then their sims didn't connect up to anything and they got bored. That may mean it never comes to anything. Some had connected up their sims, but there's still a lot you can't do. Of course, Adam and Zha kept holding out the prospect that all these other people were going to come along and make other modules that would make all the other worlds.

I can't help thinking there is something backward about this approach. People making platform technology that they envision lots of worlds being built on top of are making a bid to be the platform of choice and the connector and the owner of a business model that makes everybody pay for names or domains or connections like the troll at the bridge. Instead of making separate worlds, that then join if they have a reason to, working out standards that people gradually and organically make work, this bunch of Bolsheviks is trying to preset the standards and pre-dictate what "open standards" should mean for everybody. I find that high-handed.

Oh, of course Zha will loudly declare that they have no idea how it will turn out and don't dictate it, but frankly, they do. There was the predictable moment in this long lecture where she said something about Prodigy in order to evoke the usual malicious glee in the room about how backward and stupid they were not getting the first Internet revolution.

So I pointed out that no committee of geeks like them sitting around now and claiming that this or that model is "dead" like Second Life or walled gardens in general, had any validity. They were projecting based on the last iteration's perceived obstacles, which in fact weren't the obstacles they imagine. Walled gardens went on being built, with proprietary software sitting on OS software precisely because you cannot make a world exclusively with something "open" that doesn't protect the space to *keep* it open by enabling monetarization.

In discussing DRM, naturally Adam airily dismissed any notion that there is any company that uses this anymore and implied with exaggerated certainty that all companies are moving away from this and why even the iPhone is hacked (people in these discussions often point out the iPhone as something that is proprietary and not OS).

I guess they never read articles like this or this. The fact is, people don't need 1,000 different kind of players, they tend to have one. So if their only issue is being able to play a tune *cough* then what is their beef? That vast fiction is of course what the anti-DRM lobby is based on, although of course what they really feel entitled to is a Napster.

Zha indicated that her dream was to be able to fight a monster in World of Warcraft, cut off its head, and then go into the social space of Second Life, say, with that head, with the artists of WoW comfortable with that porting, and lay the head triumphantly on a bar and dance around it with friends. Sigh. Why? Because WoW is a bad social space, and is only good for war, and SL is a bad war space, and is only good for socializing.

Of course, it doesn't seem to occur to her that both SL and WoW will advance within their walled gardens and add things that people want that will make it unnecessary to go outside the walls. And the demand for going outside them isn't great enough to spawn a market needing to be served.

Just as its very hard to find criticism of Linux on the Internet (Wikipedia is totally rolled, and even the "Criticism of Linux" page has been eviscerated). An article like this lets you know how extreme the lunatics are (called at home -- sound familiar?)

In the same way, it's impossible to mount a critical attack on the OS religion in SL without suffering heckling in meetings and even really nasty griefing as a byproduct and of course undying withering hate. However, I'm confident that just as the real world and the market and free economies and societies have consistently been able to rebuff the extremism and lunacy of Linux, and used whatever was useful from it in a practical way, the same will occur with virtual world extremism -- which begins with the social nihilism of saying that people in a community in a place with drama aren't a world.

Comments

[ichabod Antfarm]

Gareth,

It is disingenuous to cite OpenBSD as a counter example to Prok's assertion that open source is inefficient and amateur. Theo de Raadt has made the same criticism of the Linux community time and time again. You know that. The development regime of OpenBSD is utterly foreign to the accepted precepts of the movement known as Open Source. Yes, OpenBSD falls under the broad category of Open Source and its developers are staunch in their defense of source code availability and unfettered usability; however, as you know, they are the last group of people to accept that 'many eyes make all bugs shallow' or however the matra goes. Code audits by people who actually know what they are doing make some bugs shallow, make some bugs appear, make some bugs more easily solved, make some bugs die. The rest is ideology.

[Gareth Nelson]

"The development regime of OpenBSD is utterly foreign to the accepted precepts of the movement known as Open Source"

OpenBSD is just the BSD development model (the "cathedral" model) taken to the extreme in terms of security audits.

"Yes, OpenBSD falls under the broad category of Open Source and its developers are staunch in their defense of source code availability and unfettered usability;"

The OpenBSD team are some of the most absolutely insanely fanatically ideological developers i've ever seen. The results of their fanaticism include an OS that is widely considered to be the most secure on the planet. Other projects have similar excellent reputations, or have really bad reputations.

My point was that a piece of software being open source does not make it inefficient and amateurish. For the record, propritary software can also absolutely suck OR be absolutely amazing too. QNX comes to mind here in the operating systems space as an example of propritary software which is highly reliable, and windows comes to mind as being highly insecure and unreliable.

[Gareth Nelson]

"Theo de Raadt has made the same criticism of the Linux community time and time again"

Actually, his main criticism revolves around the Linux community's fanaticism for the GPL. The problem is, Theo himself has his own fanaticism about the BSD license. I'd say this is where most of the drama comes from, rather than from technical differences in the 2 projects. Theo actually goes way, way beyond most people in terms of his temper and yet still manages to be an incredibly talented developer - the kind of guy i'd trust to code almost anything, so long as I didn't need to get into any debates in the process.