Not just foreign governments - entire nations as well. A modern economy could be totally disrupted if all the Windows machines stopped working. It might be a bad idea to allow a foreign power to execute arbitrary code on machines in your country, which is exactly what Windows Update does. Windows Update is a very powerful weapon, all the more so because few recognise it as such.
Countries might want to set up firewalls to intercept updates so that they can be screened for malicious code before anyone can access them. All major application update mechanisms will need to be checked.
On the other hand, this will be a very concrete experiment with micropayments on an effectively wide open information network. If a fully open client with just a trusted third party to handle financial transactions (or maybe ecash) can support a viable information economy through either donations or some form of copyright respect, then it bodes well for a similar "real life" system of micropayments for information and services. Realistically, since most things digital already happen on the Internet, SL will be as real as it gets in terms of the future information economy.
I thought about this some more, and I think you're spot on. They want to be the bank. Everything else should be open in order to get it adopted as widely as possible. Now I understand what they are trying to do, I have much more respect for them.
Of course you could run your own private server, like the Construct in the Matrix. You could do things like the "jump" program and "learn karate". But unlike the movie, you can't carry your guns from the fake fake world to the real fake world.
Ah, good point. An interoperability problem. That would reduce the value of a private server.
I suppose it might be possible to come up with an open standard for object exchange, so that objects could be moved between suitably configured servers in the alternate universe. This would not provide any protection against copying though, and there would still be no way to move things into the official network.
Frankly, I'd rather pay them to host the servers than to try to host my own. What with all the griefers making life miserable for the server maintainers, it hardly seems worth the effort to try to run your own public server.
The counter-argument is this: the network would be more valuable if it was mostly composed of privately-run but publically available servers. How rubbish would the Web be if, for example, MySpace was the only company that could host a website? I dare say the WWW revolution wouldn't have happened if client and server software hadn't been freely available.
I think this is a surprising move, but for a different reason than client-side hacking, which is always unavoidable (although made easier by releasing source).
LL make their money by selling server space. You can't just connect your own server to SL - it has to be one of theirs. The network is closed. All of the PR and astroturfing that's been coming out of LL recently is aimed at getting more people to invest in SL space: the more investors there are, the more the space will be worth. They're trying to drive a homesteading boom like the one that happened in the early days of the Web, when companies started to go online.
Now people could create a SL client that can connect to an alternative SL universe: one where the servers are free software clones of the original SL servers. This makes SL an open standard. That means we can all join in and host our own stuff without having to pay LL for a server. The system is open - we can join for free.
Presumably LL are relying on "their network" being the best, so people continue to pay them for something they can now do for less money elsewhere. Bit like AOL and Compuserve assuming that their internal networks would always be worth more than Internet access.
Use the preinstalled Linux to debootstrap Debian or Ubuntu off the Net. Unless they have been clever enough to make a rootkit that can propagate itself (i.e. a virus), this will sort you out.
Seconded! This is the way to go. Your Win2K system will survive hardware upgrades so long as your virtualisation software is available for the new platform. You won't have issues finding video and input drivers for your computer in a decade's time, or issues with access to the latest storage devices. And the VM protects you from nasties: if you mess up and install a virus by mistake, you can back it out with the Revert feature.
Go for VMware - you don't want to be locked in to VirtualPC, because that will tie you to a Windows host platform. VMware is in very common use: if the company does go bankrupt or drops support for your host platform, you'll be able to find free software to convert your virtual machine files to the VM software of the day. Which might be free software too!
Windows for Workgroups 3.1 runs fine with a quarter-gig of ram (it may support more - I didn't check), boots quickly off a cd-rom, and is just FAST!!!
Someone will say this about XP in 10 years time. And it will be true - by comparison to the latest incarnation, XP will appear highly secure and efficient, helpfully lacking support for the latest DRM "features".
Yes they are. And good ones are already available. You can now use OpenWengo as an alternative to Skype - it's GPL'ed code and uses a standard protocol (SIP), making it interoperable with most VoIP software. Except Skype.
Skype is a closed-source minefield of terrifying security holes just waiting to be stumbled upon by black hats and exploited for the usual reasons. It's a ready made peer to peer infrastructure that always uses encrypted communications, just waiting to be made into a botnet. Some security holes have already come to light - check this presentation out. A decade of security problems with Internet Explorer might seem tame in comparison to the problems that could emerge from Skype.
Slashdot Mirror
Not just foreign governments - entire nations as well. A modern economy could be totally disrupted if all the Windows machines stopped working. It might be a bad idea to allow a foreign power to execute arbitrary code on machines in your country, which is exactly what Windows Update does. Windows Update is a very powerful weapon, all the more so because few recognise it as such.
Countries might want to set up firewalls to intercept updates so that they can be screened for malicious code before anyone can access them. All major application update mechanisms will need to be checked.
On the other hand, this will be a very concrete experiment with micropayments on an effectively wide open information network. If a fully open client with just a trusted third party to handle financial transactions (or maybe ecash) can support a viable information economy through either donations or some form of copyright respect, then it bodes well for a similar "real life" system of micropayments for information and services. Realistically, since most things digital already happen on the Internet, SL will be as real as it gets in terms of the future information economy.
I thought about this some more, and I think you're spot on. They want to be the bank. Everything else should be open in order to get it adopted as widely as possible. Now I understand what they are trying to do, I have much more respect for them.
Of course you could run your own private server, like the Construct in the Matrix. You could do things like the "jump" program and "learn karate". But unlike the movie, you can't carry your guns from the fake fake world to the real fake world.
Ah, good point. An interoperability problem. That would reduce the value of a private server.
I suppose it might be possible to come up with an open standard for object exchange, so that objects could be moved between suitably configured servers in the alternate universe. This would not provide any protection against copying though, and there would still be no way to move things into the official network.
Frankly, I'd rather pay them to host the servers than to try to host my own. What with all the griefers making life miserable for the server maintainers, it hardly seems worth the effort to try to run your own public server.
The counter-argument is this: the network would be more valuable if it was mostly composed of privately-run but publically available servers. How rubbish would the Web be if, for example, MySpace was the only company that could host a website? I dare say the WWW revolution wouldn't have happened if client and server software hadn't been freely available.
I think this is a surprising move, but for a different reason than client-side hacking, which is always unavoidable (although made easier by releasing source).
LL make their money by selling server space. You can't just connect your own server to SL - it has to be one of theirs. The network is closed. All of the PR and astroturfing that's been coming out of LL recently is aimed at getting more people to invest in SL space: the more investors there are, the more the space will be worth. They're trying to drive a homesteading boom like the one that happened in the early days of the Web, when companies started to go online.
Now people could create a SL client that can connect to an alternative SL universe: one where the servers are free software clones of the original SL servers. This makes SL an open standard. That means we can all join in and host our own stuff without having to pay LL for a server. The system is open - we can join for free.
Presumably LL are relying on "their network" being the best, so people continue to pay them for something they can now do for less money elsewhere. Bit like AOL and Compuserve assuming that their internal networks would always be worth more than Internet access.
Use the preinstalled Linux to debootstrap Debian or Ubuntu off the Net. Unless they have been clever enough to make a rootkit that can propagate itself (i.e. a virus), this will sort you out.
Seconded! This is the way to go. Your Win2K system will survive hardware upgrades so long as your virtualisation software is available for the new platform. You won't have issues finding video and input drivers for your computer in a decade's time, or issues with access to the latest storage devices. And the VM protects you from nasties: if you mess up and install a virus by mistake, you can back it out with the Revert feature.
Go for VMware - you don't want to be locked in to VirtualPC, because that will tie you to a Windows host platform. VMware is in very common use: if the company does go bankrupt or drops support for your host platform, you'll be able to find free software to convert your virtual machine files to the VM software of the day. Which might be free software too!
Windows for Workgroups 3.1 runs fine with a quarter-gig of ram (it may support more - I didn't check), boots quickly off a cd-rom, and is just FAST!!!
Someone will say this about XP in 10 years time. And it will be true - by comparison to the latest incarnation, XP will appear highly secure and efficient, helpfully lacking support for the latest DRM "features".
Open VoIP Clients are Safer
Yes they are. And good ones are already available. You can now use OpenWengo as an alternative to Skype - it's GPL'ed code and uses a standard protocol (SIP), making it interoperable with most VoIP software. Except Skype.
Skype is a closed-source minefield of terrifying security holes just waiting to be stumbled upon by black hats and exploited for the usual reasons. It's a ready made peer to peer infrastructure that always uses encrypted communications, just waiting to be made into a botnet. Some security holes have already come to light - check this presentation out. A decade of security problems with Internet Explorer might seem tame in comparison to the problems that could emerge from Skype.