(I'm not entirely comfortable raising this topic here, but it very much does affect Snowstorm viability, so, with apologies in advance...)
Certain alt-matching systems have attained enough grid saturation that there is widespread hesitancy to enable Media at all. (https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-24746) One part of the problem is that _AGENT-specific parcel media commands force a viewer connection regardless of the "Allow Media to auto-play" setting. Even with that changed (presumably, "corrected"), heuristic matching based on regular Parcel Media and Audio streams is easily done. To date, it is unclear what (if any) plans LL has for addressing this matter, and that rather ties the hands of developers, to know what (if any) technical response is appropriate. The developer of one such system has publicly claimed that he is privy to LL's plans about this issue; if opensource developers have been similarly informed, it would be news to me. In lieu of LL guidance, a patch has been developed for one 1.x-based TPV that would at least reduce the threat from the Media vector, by inserting a user-selectable white- / black-list before enabling stream connection. This approach does not conveniently apply to 2.x-based viewers with Shared Media. Regardless of interface, it is unclear that any user-controlled filtering can be effective for Shared Media, given the potential number of simultaneously proffered sources. A possible approach to addressing these threats is for LL to interpose an IP anonymizing service at its network periphery through which all connections including streaming media would pass. This would have significant bandwidth implications, and may also interfere with certain third-party content as long as studios and publishers persist with geo-specific licensing. At this point, I think developers really need to know LL's plans to address these this matter. Personally, I'm especially interested in the fate of Shared Media, which seems gravely jeopardized. _______________________________________________ Policies and (un)subscribe information available here: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/OpenSource-Dev Please read the policies before posting to keep unmoderated posting privileges
