 to our in-world and web audiences you can view the full conference schedule on our website at conference.opensimulator.org and you can post your questions in local chat on the Ustream chat or tweet your questions using the hashtag OSCC13. This hour we are happy to introduce Vanish who will be presenting I Am Avatar How to Survive the Metaverse. Vanish has lived in Second Life since 2007 and in OpenSim since 2009. Vanish creates items, writes tutorials, does talks, manages communities, and runs his own grids. Vanish also has his own opinions, ask him and he'll tell you all about them. He is also a singer, guitarist, and songwriter. He's been writing songs for 15 years and has released four albums. Welcome Vanish. Thank you Joe. Hello everyone. Before I start I thought I'd say a few sentences about questions. The way I had planned my presentation is that I'm going to be talking for about 40 minutes and then I'll leave 20 minutes for Q&As from the audience. I will be paying attention to questions typed in in-world chat and on the Ustream stream that is the OSCC6 channel. Due to technical reasons I cannot pay attention to in-world voice chat so if you have a question please type it in local chat. Okay so anyway, hi. My name is Vanish. You can call me Vee. Most of you in the audience I've looked around. I do know personally so we're all friends here. I'm going to talk today about how to survive the metaverse. I wrote that talk or that pitch for the talk in early June this year which was in some ways a much more innocent time than now. So back then I thought I could actually tell you how to survive the metaverse without being spied on, ripped off, or have your privacy intruded. And just a few days later an NSA contractor named Edward Snowden made the world aware that the secret services of the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand are spying on the entire internet. So I don't think I can in good conscious anymore tell you how to get around that. It was part of my talk and I'll get into it. It's just that we have now a much bigger question or make much bigger problem than we did have a few months ago or I guess we had that problem all along. We just didn't know about it. So back then I wrote we should do something about this. I don't think that we speaking individually, us all individually as well as we as a community can actually do something about all of the problems we are facing. We have a bigger problem than that. But I think I can at least show you a little bit of what you can do about it. The irony is that right now I'm on Skype holding this talk knowing full well that I'm being spied on but at least a few dozen secret services all over the world. And still I'm doing it because it is the convenient and easy way to do and that's a problem. So the problem that we now is not just how to survive the metaverse. Surviving the metaverse is one task for each of us individually but for us collectively the question is how the metaverse survives. Today right now OpenSim offers messaging services. All of our in-world chat is being done well through either the in-built built-in chat module or through voice chat. And we do assume that the software does what it how it behaves that in-world chat only carries 20 virtual meters that voice chat is confined to the region it's being broadcast on that private messages are only being sent to the person we are messaging and not to someone else. OpenSim also handles our inventory. Our inventory can have communications as well such as note cards or even voice recordings but moreover it holds everything that makes up our virtual identities everything that makes up the me in the virtual it holds the appearance of our avatar our clothes our skin our hair everything that we have on us and use in world is in our inventory and we we would like to assume that we are the only ones who know what is in our inventories and can access that inventory to use the items that are in it. OpenSim handles our regions which is pretty much our virtual home well they can be public such as this region for example or if you have like a shop or an in-world vendor in world maybe an art portfolio but many many regions of OpenSim users are private they're their homes they're what they use to to conduct their virtual lives around. Regents are in that respect pretty much very as private as your inventory itself and you would like to assume that when you have a virtual home that your the access to your virtual home is restricted to the people that you let in and not to just anyone who wants to come by. OpenSim further handles our contacts that is everybody who is on our contact list everybody we talk to what we talk about what our relationship is and again you would like to assume that only you know who exactly is on your contact list or what your relationship is with them when how many times you talk where you talk what you talk about. And furthermore OpenSim handles money there is a built-in money module that can handle in-world currency if a grid has in-world currency enabled and again you would like to assume that this money is being handled respectfully that everybody knows exactly how much money you have who you pay what you pay for how much you pay and how frequent. But the problem is as even Moglen put it we did not build the net with anonymity built-in that is a mistake and now we're paying the price for it and likewise we are currently not building OpenSim with anonymity built-in the 3d web as it is and that is the same mistake and we are paying the same price for it. A few weeks ago a very good friend of mine has made me aware why privacy is really important to her. OpenSim is an escape it's her home away from home it's where she can be who she really wants to be and get away from all the pressures of real world all the things that you have to deal with and yeah everyday lives. Increasingly though this home gets intruded as the editor of the online very popular online blog Grocklar put it before she closed it being spied upon online feels very much as the one time that somebody broke into her apartment in New York City and went through all her stuff it is an intrusion just like an intrusion into your real life would be and it feels the same way so today we have to pretty much live in a world where our online lives are being intruded and spied upon every day all day what do we do about this well for one thing there are a few technologies that we can deploy that have worked over the past one of these is OTR or viewer encryption chat encryption OTR has been around as a technology for a long time now what it does is it encrypts the messages that are being sent in a chat so that only the people on both ends of the chat the people sending the message and the people receiving the message can see what is being transmitted during transit the chat messages are invisible if you are wondering why you can't see a slide it is because I can't read any anymore that's a technical problem OTR has is not that hard to implement in fact we have had a viewer in second life that has had OTR built in before it was the ill-fated emerald viewer who went out of circulation early 2010 after a scandal that made as aware of other privacy intrusion problems like the viewer developers trying to spy on you through actors they built into a viewer of their own but it had an OTR plugin built into their viewer and well I'm kind of wondering why no other viewer has implemented that after that the other thing you can do is well choose who you can trust with your communication um apparently you do not necessarily assume that your open sim grid provider is going to spy on you so um um try reset setting again on the podium to present sitting on the podium this is actually the backup that I put in place just in case my slides don't work anymore so we are at slide I'm sorry about this we'll get back to you after this short interruption um the problem with trusting your grid provider is that can you trust that grid provider's government not to spy on you can you trust on the grid provider to stand up against their own government if the government goes to them and tells them we would like to have I don't know a transcript of all chat that is being conducted on your grid or better still we would like to have our own back door so we can get a copy of every message that is being sent on your system and spy on everybody who is on your grid otherwise we will have to close you down that is not a hypothetical question it is what happened to recently to the provider of lava bit which was an encrypted email provider in the United States who among other things hosted the emails of Edward Snowden when he was leaking that to the Guardian um and they got approached by the government asking them for a copy of all the emails of their users um otherwise they would have to close shop and consequently lava bit said they did not did not want to be complicit in crimes against the American people so they closed down so this is the point where I for the first time today will recommend to you to run your own open sim running your own open sim does not necessarily uh protect you against any kind of spying that is going on but at least it'll um take several man in the middle problems out of the the picture and puts you back into control of your own communications inventory inventory is a tricky thing because inventory has a number of dangers to face um one of these is that inventory can get lost and the stupidest thing that can happen to you is it is being lost because open sim has a bug and um that happens it happens regularly it's something you have to expect when you use open sim that your inventory gets lost frequently it doesn't really matter if you are running your own open sim or if you're running open sim on someone else's um grid or using someone else's service um inventory can get lost and will get lost uh frequently likewise you can get banned from whichever open sim provider you're using at the moment um bands happen also very frequently they happen so frequently that Second Live or Lindenlab rather had to face a class action lawsuit that was made out of a class of around 50 000 plaintiffs who have been banned from Second Live over the years and who um well wanted nothing more than just have some kind of compensation for the inventory that got confiscated during their ban um this can happen to you on any grid too and it doesn't always need to be justified it can it it's just something that you can you have to take into account is sometimes bad blood and things get heated or well your grid can turn that can can close shop this is also something that happens frequently in open sim i've been going through the um well the the latest hypergrid business grid statistics maria from hypergrid business does publish every month with statistics about open sim and how many grids are running at a given time how many how big they are and that just started counting and over the four years that she has had these statistics out of the um right about 400 680 grids um that are that she has tracked uh only 280 are operational today so that means around 400 grids have closed down over the past um four years which means that a grid closes around every four days what this means is that once you lose access to your inventory you lose pretty much everything um which is a sad thing for somebody to happen um a workaround for that is to have backups i kind of stress is enough make backups of everything you have if somebody wants to prevent you from making backups um which means pretty much saving an or of your region or an iar of your inventory your entire inventory um i would not recommend using their service backups are essential if only if you have something on your computer you actually own it as long as it is someone on someone else's computer on someone else's service you are subject to their goodwill of letting you access what you think you own the same goes for your region um your region is as i said earlier your home in the virtual it is where you where the center of your virtual life usually lies and the most private part of your online your 3d online presence um if you rent your region from someone else again you do not own it someone else owns that and you rent well access to your home which is i think a bad idea um so like i said before try to run your own open sim it is not running your own open sim is still more complicated than the average application you have to install but it got much much much much more easy to deploy due to the efforts of people like like diva counter with diva distro um inner hacks from who made the sim on a stick and the good people who work on um um the simian grid that um make it much easier for you to install and run your own open sim installation then we have contacts as i said before your contacts are among the most private data you can have uh your contacts are your friends your spouses your business partners your sexual relationships anything that you can think of that you visit in open sim and it is a sad thing if you lose contact to them um again here run your own open sim keep your contacts you are in control of your own contact list if you it is also always a good idea to use outside services to not just rely on open sim for everything so if you have a twitter or google plus account or if you just exchange emails that means that means you can keep in contact um in case something goes awry and uh you lose some of your contacts on your list or very good idea is always have your own website have your own online presence where people can go to and know that this is where they can go to when they want to know about what's going on with you and what you're up to and want to contact you finally money um lots of open sim grids are running their own in world currency um which means that you first start buying a virtual currency from the providers and then use that currency to conduct business in world i always think it's a bad idea to well a trust your open sim provider with everything and be trust someone else with your money so um because in the case of you for example losing access to that grid either because it goes down or because you get banned or because well again something happens and open sim has a bug and miscalculates the transaction or the transaction of the money takes place but you do not receive your items stuff like that um you have very little you can do about getting in world currency back um the problem with that is that uh well even though it is probably embezzlement or theft under if if somebody takes in world currency away for you without without compensating you for it um usually it goes unpunished and so the first idea is to only have as much money in world as you are willing to lose um in some cases that might mean not having any currency in world at all a better idea i would say would be to use other payment providers than the open sim uh money module uh there is a nice plugin for open sim that uses paypal for transactions which comes with all the problems that paypal brings um such as you know paypal having a track of all your transactions and paypal has sometimes some very arbitrary uh bands of of what they you know what they support and what they don't but at least it's um it's better than trusting one entity with everything a better idea would be to use bitcoin actually because bitcoin is a distributed payment system that puts you back into control of your own virtual wallet uh at the same time as this presentation there's in a different breakout so i'm not exactly sure where a presentation of how to use bitcoin for your grid um i'm i would have loved to attend that i'm i'm sad that i missed it but it should be live on the use stream website after the conference so if you're interested in how that works i'm sure the other presenter can tell you all about it um bottom line run your own open sim do as much as you can keep control of everything that goes on in your virtual world because it is about not just who you visit it's about your own as justin said in the keynote presentation it's your personality it's who you are online and um i would not like to uh have control over my personality in somebody else's hands use the hypergrid use um a distributed system that allows you to have your own home on your own computer and likewise visit other people's homes and um as easy as you would teleport on a on a grid itself um because a peer-to-peer system gives the control back into the hands of the individual users this is the one great chance we have now to take back control of the web as it is about to come and um have it into the hands of the endpoints instead of having it or most of the control at the center of the where the servers are and make backups and download everything you can to store it on your own computer um william gibson one of my favorite a authors was um he in in his well in his short story jonah mnemonic actually he introduced the word the word uh cyberspace and um coined it further in his first novel neuromancer and that was in 1982 when nobody really thought about a world inside a computer and um he has given a well a reading actually of his latest then latest novel idoro in second live in i think 2007 and being asked about what he thought about this cyberspace as it is now um he later said that he was kind of disappointed by the top-down hierarchy as he said of the second life system it felt a little bit like disneyland um he said that in the stories that he cooked up um the cyberspace was always run by somebody in someone else's basement or in someone's back room on cheap computers run by kids who didn't couldn't afford good networks and um these kids would make universes in their basements and that is i guess the point of my talk today make universes in your in the computers in your basements and back rooms and let's make this a truly distributed peer-to-peer virtual universe thank you if there's any questions i will i'll be happy to address them any questions anyone thank you very much while we're waiting for some questions i will make a mention here that this region is not being used next session so there's no reason to run off so if anybody wants to stick around and discuss i think you're more than welcome to uh at this point do we have any questions i'm not seeing y'all awestruck that's good so thank you vanish for a terrific presentation thank you very much i'll stick around so if somebody wants to talk with me later um i'll be around for a while okay and as a reminder um to our audience you can see what's coming up on the conference schedule at conference dot open simulator dot org and again as vanish just noted we there is nothing scheduled so he said he'll stick around has to answer any questions you have so thank you again to our speaker and the audience thank you oh okay there is a question okay go for it um question about otr does it still provide the liability in the presence of a trusted record keeping man in the middle say if the sim operator is trusted not to alter its logs um not quite sure if i understand that correctly boren the the idea is that the sim operator is the man in the middle and um if he keeps all the records of all the the chat logs or all the all the chats that are taking place um there well the thing is this um up until june this this year we have kind of assumed that um anonymity can can be possible in the case that there is no single entity who can surveil the entire internet i think that assumption is something we can now throw overboard so i don't think the man in the middle needs to be the weak point in this case if there is an entity that can uh surveil the entire internet then they can see that you are sending a message into you know from your computer at the same time someone else receives a message the message is the same length or the the packets are the same the same size so that means that entity can conclude that you two are talking together i don't think you can plausibly deny that anymore um it doesn't it doesn't really have to be a man in the middle problem even though that adds another layer to it is that does that answer the question we have another question from best it says should we just see that that we're being observed all the time um well i think that question is is i i think that you have to you have to be a bit uh more specific because the you have to have to assume that you are being observed all the time automatically um the question is who's observing you um you can assume that secret services are going to spy on the entire internet and every communication that's happening all the time it's not that you are being targeted especially it's just that every communication is being stored just in case we would somebody would need it later on um that is a secret service problem with uh grid providers i don't know i don't know if they're if they're spying on you or not um nobody asks them and even if they they would say something about it um do you trust them or not that's up to you you know there's there's there's a lot of different entities who can't spy on you and um i guess my attempt is to to lower the number of entities that can spy on you well uh cameron that is a thing that i keep hearing a lot that people you know that their lives aren't that interesting and i don't think that's that's a i don't think that is the right way to think about it um you know everybody has sex but not everybody wants to have sex with everyone else and it's the same on the internet i have of course i communicate but i don't want to everybody to listen in on my communications any more questions uh for vanish that we've missed by chance yes as borne says um there are filters that extract interesting parts and you do not really know what is interesting you don't don't really nobody of us knows what the the nsa for example is interested in or i don't know the chinese secret service whose name i don't know um they may have filters that that you don't know about um and there are numerous talks about of people who who went into the spotlight of a secret service because just because that secret service used the wrong filters and uh suffered the consequences for it um and the other thing is that you do not know what the filters are going to be five years from now or 10 years from now when your communications is still being stored somewhere else and another government may decide that they don't like people with i don't know attacks an accent or i don't know people who died their hair blonde at one point okay crickets all right if there's not any more questions then i thank you all for coming um i'm always amazed if the audience is greater than the band so thank you for coming in such great numbers and uh i'll see you around all right once again thank you for vanish for speaking and thank you for everybody for coming