If the earliest days of Second Life resemble the first century of American history (and they do) then the most recent years of the world seem to be replicating the last couple decades of the Internet in miniature form. Throughout 2004, SL was an obscure medium for gamers, techies, and assorted early adopters— not unlike the Net’s Usenet groups of the 80s and early 90s— then somewhere in mid-2005, began attracting substantial interest from real world businesses and the mainstream media. Which, much like Netscape’s initial public offering in 1995, led to the mini-dot com boom we’re awash in now, with massive brick-and-mortar corporations throwing money at the world with a kind of frantic urgency. (And like the original boom, usually ending up with lightly-trafficked sites of ambivalent success.)
Right on schedule, the peer-to-peer, open source movement that
consumed the Internet of the late 90s arrived to Second Life’s community in
recent weeks, beginning with the idealism of talented hackers creating cool
applications— which quickly careened into widespread protest, accusations of IP theft, and
economic chaos.
Welcome to the Napster era of Second Life. This time, the part of Shawn Fanning is
played in part by a tiny pink cat, while everyone else in the world gets to be
Metallica. But if I recall right, Lars
Ulrich never tried to crush Fanning with a giant boulder.
First, the cool hack from idealistic coders: it begins with libsecondlife,
a group of Residents attempting (with Linden Lab’s explicit blessing) to reverse
engineer an open source, modified BSD-licensed version of the Second Life
client. The ultimate goal are limitless versions of the client, operating on thousands of independent servers
insuring Second Life’s spread through the entire Net. While the group has been operating for months,
in the last week or two they introduced an in-world demonstration of their
client that very quickly became the buzz of the community. The libsecondlife team had figured out a way
to log automated avatars into the world, using their scaled down version of the client.
With Eddy Stryker
“The client is a
small command-line program written in C# that has all the code needed to ‘speak
Second Life’, so to speak,” libsecondlife member Eddy Stryker explained, when
he showed me the technology last week. “From the server's point of view it
looks and acts exactly like a normal client logging in to the grid, going
through all the same steps, it just sends less data… Basically they look and
act just like a normal client with a lot of options turned off or turned down.”
The hack suggested a way of finally introducing AIs and non-player characters into the world,
creating endless possibilities for game development, simulation, and more, but
that wasn’t even the coolest part. Because not only had they figured out a way of introducing artificial
avatars, they’d also hacked up a way of cloning existing avatars, clothes included. Not just one or two clones, but over a dozen,
dropping out of the sky like godspawn.
Edited in double-time, this video demonstration features me, Talila Liu, and Gwyneth
Llewelyn and our several dozen doppelgangers:
See the video here. Incidental music generously provided by my friend Mr. Nolan Cook, freelance composer and guitarist with DIMES and THE
RESIDENTS.
“It logs in to SL, reads the appearances of the closest
avatar, and sets its appearance exactly like that person had theirs set,”
Stryker explained to me, while I stood amid a forest of Hamlets. “If someone else moves closer it clones that
person instead. It's fairly simple code actually..." And libsecondlife was able to do that with a single server, running multiple mini versions of their open source Second Life viewer. It was the
first public demonstration, but clones had already been released into the
world, he added, “silently teleporting from sim to sim collecting data, or running tests
on private islands.”
“So the one bad thing I see with this is designers of clothes and stuff
bitching,” Talila Liu observed, after her run through the cloning process.
“Yeah,” Eddy Stryker acknowledged, “it
could be a problem at some point, and that's a general issue for Second Life
overall. This specific bot, though,
doesn't save any information, so when you turn it off all the temporary data is
erased.” Eddy already had an application
of his own in mind. “I am working on a
project for a client right now that needs these mannequins,” he said, “which is
going to have an early preview in the first week of December. But at the same time, the libsecondlife
library is open for anyone to use, and we have a channel of developers that are
all working on their own projects.”
He said that last week, and in retrospect, it was an ominous statement. Because while libsecondlife’s cloning bot
didn’t save any information about the avatars it imitated, a similar libSL application,
CopyBot, did. Intended by the group as an offline
debugging tool, it existed in their site’s source code repository, and someone
took advantage of the group’s open library to compile a version— and start
selling it in-world. Several more people got into the CopyBot sales business.
And
within a few days, as Talila Liu had predicted, CopyBot was savaging the community of Second Life content
creators. But they did more than bitch about it
