There is no danger to ‘paternalism’ from implementing minor usability tweaks. If we can’t accept even this without being buried under the weight of analysis we can’t hope to agree on the nature of the long overdue major perms overhaul.

How the Lab responds to the JIRA says a lot to me about whether perms are a micro issue or whether the coders check in with the “suits” by way of verifying whether the governing philosophy allows changes to the usability with due consideration for a broader, clearly articulated approach to something so central to the Grid.

Will it change DRM, or perms, or is it ONLY usability for a minority of users? Again, I’d propose that the anthropologists, economists, sociologists and “world builders” would say that there’s a strong possibility otherwise, or at the very least would say “let’s map this out in a thoughtful, measured way.”

(BTW, where do you get those stats from?)

Thanks for the response, although in some ways I think you made my point FOR me. What you point out is that there are things in the system of perms that go beyond usability: the current system has embedded in it a form of paternalism or, as you say, acts as “a third party lurking over our shoulder”.

Yes, they do, and that’s my point. What is being proposed is a change in this paternalism. I am not SAYING the perms system is usable. I am not SAYING it’s not incredibly frustrating. I am not even necessarily saying that this paternalism is the desired state of the world.

Look. I build. I make my own textures. I sculpt. I work with others, and with groups, and I forget to wear my tag, or share with group, or set my perms right and it drives me out of my mind. I UNDERSTAND how borked it is. I’ve listed in this blog and elsewhere things I’d like to see changed, but only within the context of a broader statement of purpose, a road map, and an articulation of strategy and philosophy.

A change in the philosophy….from paternalism (sloppily executed) to choice, say, is still a change in philosophy, and I’m proposing that we need to be clear that it IS a change and not be confused with the idea that the result of usability and choice is simply improved usability - even subtle changes can have wider impacts, as Boellstorff and all the economists would agree - a butterfly in Brazil kind of thing.

I suppose the argument I’m hearing is “screw the Lab, we’re going to make the platform better with or without them”, which is what OpenSim is trying to do…and maybe in the end that’s what the world needs - one that’s truly built by the imagination of its users (just wait, oh wait, until they open source the server code, what fun THAT will be)….but I’m of the opinion that those leading the charge should include those who will look beyond interface design into policy, sociality, culture, economics, and law, with code and design being supporting infrastructure for a reasoned view of these factors.

For now it’s the Lab who’s in the lead, whether we like it or not. On OpenSim it’s the coders. Maybe tomorrow it will be the dress makers. Who knows.

obviosly you havnet used a “modern” paper ballot to vote in the last 20 years.

youre subcribing to the idea that MORE is always BETTER.?

who are you people? really?.. i mean lets stop this avatar shit… it really is just allowing more stupidity to spread. But more is better, itll just magically transform us into a borg collective.

im getting too old for this .

the insistance that “technical” solutions are free from politics and economics - false

the dogmatic belief that the media does not influence the message– just damn stupid.

i read jjacek posting stuff… it was i believe wrong about IP/licenses/TOS and ownership.

dogma strikes again.

If folk wish to use it to express copyleft principles, or to make life difficult for pirates (and usually themselves in the process) then that’s up to them. Politics has nothing to do with the engineering UNLESS the system is engineered to restrict the choices you have in how those permissions are applied. The current system does this - it makes decisions on your behalf as I will explain.

If people want to use permissions simply then by all means provide a simple interface for them. That interface likely looks a lot like C/M/T by the way. That is not however the full story as C/M/T can not encompass all the possible behaviors of a permissions system. If you enable debug permissions (an advanced option in the sl client) you will see LOTS of extra info about the permissions of your objects - this extra info shows the decisions about how permissions look different to folk other than yourself or how permissions will change if the object changes hands. These changes to permissions happen automatically.

Put another way, this is the hidden information about decisions the permissions system makes on your behalf. Intentions - which by their nature somewhat political - are encapsulated in these rules. These intentions are the ones that decide on our part and in our absence that we shouldn’t be able to modify the objects we create, for example.

They are the reason that I can’t sell an item in SL to a client without giving them full perms if i may wish to provide any customer support modifying/customizing/fixing the item. The SL permissions system is particularly idiosyncratic in that way and locks up and breaks content more often than not.

A proper granular permissions system is not political in that way. It needn’t be difficult to use either - just as windows networking has simplified model and full control permissions systems, one can provide a simple and complex interface to the same system.

You will find that engineers such as Jjacek, Tateru Nino, Ordinal Malaprop, etc who actually work with these systems daily usually argue for a “propper” permissions system, and do not mix metaphors between permissions and drm. Folk who’s primary thing is IP rather than coding however often mix up permissions, drm and IP politics. The FUD (fear uncertainty and doubt) JJacek mentions in her blog post is exactly this, a domain confusion built out of a simplistic and flawed view of how a tool works and it’s implications for IP.

As for myself, I am very anti piracy. I refuse to use photoshop for work for example, though it inconveniences me greatly, as I don’t own a copy. It is estimated that over 80% of photoshop installs are pirated and nobody else seems to think twice about it. This has not stopped me using the tools of piracy to unlock my own content when it has been borked by the idiosyncrasies of the SL permissions system. No digital content protection system is bulletproof, and I’m quite happy to break them when they lock me out of my own content that I created or paid for.

Now here is the issue. If i make an object in SL, and due to idiosyncracies in the permissions system it locks it so that I am unable to transfer/edit/copy it - this is 100% my own creation here - I have no choice but to use one of the many methods available to break those permissions. In doing so I am circumventing DRM which makes it a criminal act. Off the top of my head I can think of at least 7 ways of committing this criminal act, so clearly DRM is failing to do it’s job of protecting the content. The only way in which it succeeds is by turning me into a criminal for editing an object I created in the first place.

If the permissions system was more granular I’d be able to set things up so I didn’t have nasty surprises like this. So the simplified permissions system we have is already political as it makes decisions behind our back about what is right and wrong, and by making it more granular we would be making it _less_ political.

There are no mysteries about what makes a granular permissions system - they have been around since the 1960s. It’s not rocket science - there’s one in the computer you’re using right now. Jjacek, myself and others have been arguing for a long time that the permissions system needs an overhaul to reveal the hidden data that I spoke of earlier and remove the ways in which it makes decisions on our own behalf. This is so that the technicolor rainbow of approaches to content management can be encompassed rather than the stupid mix of copyleft meets IP paranoia that we have now. I leave you with a final example.

Right now I’m making an orientation path, with some 40 or so signs that i spit out of keynote whenever revisions go through, and upload in bulk, and each time I do…… I have to manually go through every single texture uploaded and set permissions to allow the textures to be reused…. why? Because SL assumes that I don’t want anyone else to be able to edit these items ever and that selfishly I wish to ensure that those textures are useless to anyone else. Now I may think that’s braindead having spent countless hours working on teams setting these stupid permissions every time or chasing folk who’ve set them badly, or using tools to re-rip the textures cause someone has screwed up their perms and we need to edit a build or wotnot….. but who am I to criticise? Surely in _some_ universe this is the most sensible way to deal with permissions on textures……. it just sure as hell isn’t in mine, nor is it in the universe of anyone I know. As for scripts, which are more likely to need modification after the fact, it’s even worse.

So in conclusion.. sure the lindens are silly and do strange things and need to strategise and communicate better, but that’s got nought to do with how borked the permissions system is. The perms system just needs to be normal and act normal like a perms system should, rather than as a third party lurking over our shoulder, which we need to placate in order to get anything done.

killer apps and 3dweb are 1995 all over again…Linden is looking very CA.-)

almost all these vr worlds are toys…when run by children they try to have it both ways… my toy and ill take it home with me. “transparent” is an illusion they hide in CC and singular (arity) speak:)

we need a media and platforms to build an industry.. not these vanity experiments that even i am forced to do ever few years.

youre asking the right questions…. i only wish they were asked and listened to 3 years ago…3 years ago you didnt see much of these questions blogged, all you saw was “evangelical exuberance” and whore to millionaire rhetoric..

anyhow
here’s another experiment: tonight at 10 pst. web based vr movie screening ,,,its buggy but thats the techworld:)

http://horrorhostnews.blogspot.com/2009/05/cinema-insomnia-screaming-room.html

not sure it;ll work, but not asking for 1000 dollars and 295 a month to try it:)

btw– tribalnet is dead;;no moany made or gotten via bankers..:)…my open sim there gone..
i did reach out to folks like maria and “reactiongrid” as well…started up a test there…

i would love to see Opensims grow to apache type ubiquity…. but people made money on html servers in 1996.:0— and the web 1996 was a “presentation” media for the mass,,,, time will tell, again..