 Hello, everybody. My name is Maria Korolov. I'm the editor of Hypergrid Business, and I'm here today to introduce you to a discussion panel about the current state of the Hypergrid and possible future developments on a Hypergrid. Topics will include issues such as Hypergrid user identification, transfer permissions, security, and distributed asset fetching. We have here a panel of core developers, including Intel's Mimic Bowman, Hypergrid inventor Diva Kanto, also known as Crystal Lopez, OpenSim Overhead Foundation Head, Justin Clark KKC, and Avination founder, Melanie Millard, also known as Melanie Thielker. Up first is Crystal Lopez, who's a professor in the School of Information and Computer Sciences, the University of California, Irvine. As I mentioned, she invented the Hypergrid, and before that she worked at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, which you guys may know for having invented the mouse and the graphical user interface. She's the co-inventor of aspect-oriented programming, which is a programming technology featured in the MIT Technology Review, and she also serves on the Board of the Overhead Foundation with Justin Clark KC. Crystal, thank you very much for speaking, and you will be making some remarks about the current state of the Hypergrid. Thank you, Maria. If I knew that my bio was going to be repeated so many times, I should have given people a better bio. Okay, so let me just start by making some general comments about the Hypergrid, because I know that lots of people here are very familiar. In fact, there's lots of people here hypergrading already from other worlds. And for some of you, this is very new, and you probably don't know much what the Hypergrid is and what it can do. So I thought I would just give a brief overview about what it is. So what is the Hypergrid? In technical speech, it's a federation protocol. Okay, I think everybody understands that the concept of a federation, and these are independent units that decide to cooperate with each other. So that's what it is. Even more concretely, it's a set of optional services in OpenSeam that allow you to link your world to other worlds and teleport seamlessly among them. So I can have my own virtual world just like I do. In fact, I am hypergrading here from my server at UCI. And then sort of conceptually, what happens if on the left here, this is my world and this is my map over here in my world, I can conceptually place an hyperlink on my map that if I go there, I'm actually teleported to another world. Okay, so conceptually, it's sort of an hyperlink here, a map hyperlink between virtual worlds. So there are some frequently asked questions. Does this work between OpenSeam and Second Life? No. And the reason why it doesn't work is because second, you know, in the labs not interested. They were interested in interoperability at some point, but then they let off everybody and they continue to do the garden model, which is fine too. Second question, is it sort of mandatory to run the hypergrid when you run OpenSeam? And the answer is no. In fact, the hypergrid is turned off by default. When you install OpenSeam off the box, if you don't do anything, it's not hypergrid enabled. So you actually have to do something to run the hypergrid. Another question, with the hypergrid, since you're moving people from one world to another, can just people be impersonated? Can somebody send someone here to this environment saying that they are Justin? And they're actually not Justin. There's some impersonator pretending to be Justin. And the answer is no. This is not possible. The identity is verified. And in fact, that was work that happened at some point early on. So the hypergrid is my inventory protected. Yes, right now, only items under my suitcase, this is a special folder in no inventory. Only those items are exposed to the internet. If your virtual world operator does the right thing, they should protect all of their internal services on the firewall, behind the firewall. And the only things that are outside the firewall are things that are exposed on the my suitcase folder. So the next question is assets. Okay, so if an entry is protected, how about general grid assets? Are they protected? The answer is no, not yet. There are some protections in place. There's things that you can say that the virtual world operator can say that for example, scripts can never be accessed. But the mechanism for doing that is still not very expressive. So we are working on, this is one of the things that we're probably going to talk a lot here on this panel. So the assets are still not completely protected. And so that we just have an idea, this may be a bit technical, but I think everybody will understand if a virtual world is something here inside the blue box, the blue box means that everything is protected inside the firewall. So all the assets, inventory is all protected and these are all for internal use of the virtual world as a world garden. What the IPergrid does is to place these green boxes which are extra services that are exposed on the internet. And these are additional services. They don't interfere with the internal ones. They use the internal ones, but they don't change what the internal ones do. They do something different. They do something with a lot more security in them because they are exposed on the internet. So that's the idea. And sort of in a bird's-eye view, what we end up having is this federation of virtual worlds in which you have many of these and it's the green boxes that talk to each other in according to this IPergrid protocol. So that's about it. And it's just a little bit of history. The IPergrid 1.0 was the first one that I worked on. It's just an exploratory study to basically trick the viewer to do it. I had no idea if the viewer could actually do it. And there was no security whatsoever. Security was not a concern. Feasibility was a concern and understanding how the viewer, how we could push the viewer to work beyond its original design. Then it was pretty clear that one of the very first things that needed to happen was identity protection because if we didn't do anything, then impersonations could occur. So that was the very first thing that I addressed was identity protection. Better security inventory in that intermediate 1.5 version. The current version is 2.0 and we have again identity protection. This inventory now is finally completely secure except for the suitcase folder. We have some access control policies for users. So you can say, if you are a virtual world operator, you can say, oh, I can only get users from certain origins or I don't want to have users from that origin because they agree for it or something like that. So there's that already in place. And there's the beginning of access control for assets, but as I said, that's work that's going to happen in the future. Okay, and this is my opening statement just to give a little overview of what the IProgrid is and where we are. And I'll let my fellow panelists talk. Thank you, Krista. Thank you very much for our presentation. Next up, we have Mick Bowman, who's from Linden Labs and he leads their virtual world infrastructure research project. And his team develops technologies that enable order of magnitude scalability improvements and virtual environments, opening the door to new levels of immersiveness and interaction of players. You may know him best as one of the people behind the distributed seam graph which allows to 1,000 avatars or more on a single open seam region. Mick, can you do your opening statement, please? Sure. And I didn't realize I changed companies recently but I'm not telling my boss that. Did I not say Antel? No, like you said Linden. Oh, shit! I'd go on sabbatical and come back for a different company. That'd be really interesting. Linden, I mean Intel Labs. I said it again. Let's take you again to find the like Intel Labs. Great, thanks. Thanks, Maria. So, you know, we started a little bit of this conversation this morning in the first keynote session about grids and hypergrids. And one of the things I just wanted to start talking about for a minute here is what is a grid? We sort of think of it right now as a set of simulators that creates some space. There's usually a set of services where we have assets stored in inventory, user accounts and other things like that. And kind of more broadly than that, it's kind of a community. It's a set of people who interact with one another that way. And the basic premise behind this is that there's a set of these sort of independent communities and each one of them is very large and there's a relatively small number of them. What hypergrid does is it really changes all of the rules that if we go back and take a little look at, for example, community, the community that we have here in this conference is not made up of people from a grid. It's made up of people who have a shared interest. When we see education things, sites and applications starting to appear, it's people who share a common interest, not necessarily share a common grid. If you look at the people who are in Moses, it's not from a single company. It's people who have a common interest in the training and simulation spaces that way. The communities that we have and we participate in many of them are not tied to the grids or tied to our interests and the social relationships that we have. One of the things that hypergrid does is allow us to have those communities across multiple grids. The second thing as far as grids go is this kind of core set of services. We store assets in a location. We have inventory on location. We have some sense of login and authentication that way. But again, what hypergrid does is allow us to break that tight binding business between our avatar and that set of services. The fact that my inventory and assets are principally stored at OS grid does not prevent me from moving around from grid to grid using the hypergrid. And so that set of core services that we would normally have associated with a grid really doesn't define the grid either. In fact, grids are really what it comes back to, just space, that each grid is a set of applications, a set of simulations, run in a certain space. And what hypergrid allows us to do is to separate our identity and our inventory and our asset management almost completely from the space in which we're operating. It separates us completely from the set of people so that we can interact with a much broader community that way. So really, what a grid is, is space. What hypergrid is, is all of those other things, all of the things that are associated with me as an individual. One of the things I'll talk about tomorrow in the Simium presentation, this is just a little advertisement for it, is how to actually do an implementation that separates out that set of core services intentionally and architecturally from the simulation and map management pieces of it. So again, what hypergrid and the real core, for me, principle behind hypergrid is that it separates space from the rest of the things that give me an online presence in virtual worlds. And that's all. Thanks. Thank you very much. Next up, we have Justin Clark. Casey, the president of the Auvert Foundation that oversees OpenSim development. He's one of the core contributors to OpenSimulator, core developer. And he works on areas ranging from assets inventory to performance and infrastructure issues. He's created some of the things we love most about OpenSim, including the ORs or files, where you can save an entire region to an OR file and IAR exports where you can save an inventory or an inventory folder. And these are things that are unique to OpenSim and they're one of the benefits of OpenSim. He also provides OpenSimulator related consulting services. And he's one of my favorite developers. He always answers his emails immediately, no matter how dumb my questions. And I have some really dumb questions. So Justin, your opening statement. Right, I do want to be clear. That was a very nice introduction Maria, but I do want to be clear that Auvert acts really as a container, acts to resolve some of the licensing issues and IP issues and may become an organization for helping promote OpenSim in the future. But the actual project itself is controlled by OpenSimulator controls OpenSimulator. The technical decisions and all the stuff remains with the core developers. So I just want to be absolutely clear about that because that is the question people ask sometimes. So about the hyper grid. So let me actually stay on this side. Some of you have put myself as chairman of Auvert. I keep forgetting what I actually am. So I don't actually, a lot of my work is done on the core simulator itself, mainly because that is kind of the way I do do consulting and that's the way I continue to do consulting because for that to happen, things have to work. We have to actually have sort of for that's valuable. So I tend to work a lot on the core simulation aspects or the no hyper grid, but I do, I think as I said earlier today, I do find hyper grid extremely interesting. And really kind of just go through this slide. So, yeah, I mean, I think isolate OpenSimulator, by that I mean an OpenSim instance that stands on its own whether it's a stand on it or whether it's a grid, say running in a school or running as a kind of a social grid or whatever is a valuable thing. I mean, you have a lot of features you don't find elsewhere like a lot of the interactive building. For instance, you do see that in things like Minecraft, but it's not a particularly common thing as of yet. And you do get a lot of social features. So for instance, I think on the Moses grid, when people are trying to be mass role playing, that's very interesting because you do get, there are kind of inbaked in systems for communication in place, which aren't necessarily there for, games which don't handle the same number of users as of yet. But I also think that OpenSim can never be as good as a game engine. There's a lot of legacy craft in the protocol because Second Life has evolved. I mean, Second Life, because we do, as I said earlier, a lot of what we do is taken from SL from in the lab and they've evolved a code base over a very long period of time. And when you do that, we do tend to get a lot of, a lot of kind of oddities and a lot of kind of fall off systems that we should never do if you're doing the same thing from scratch. So I do think that if OpenSim would just kept isolated on itself, just as a kind of a standalone thing, it can and will be overtaken by something sooner or later. Some other, either another proprietary product or even another open source project will come along and be able to do something better and OpenSim will become another project, which is fine. I mean, that's not unusual. But I think the interesting thing about the Hypergrid is that it does potentially allow a different kind of model. Something that is more web-like rather than a single instance of a virtual world. Instead, you know, as I said earlier, people can move content and identity between independent worlds. They're not, there's no single point of control or single company in charge, which is the gatekeeper of what you can and can't do. Instead, anybody can kind of come on and do anything. Yeah, that's the extreme and you do have to obey protocols, which is where they become immensely important. But there's a potential for kind of a multi-source innovation. Anybody can really do these things. And the question is, you know, can that avoid the kind of cycle you see of a lot of multi-user systems and multi-user games where there's a strong period of growth at the beginning and then they kind of hit a peak and other better things come along or users lose interest and they slow. They enter a very long kind of period of survival, but it's kind of a slow decline. You see it with games like Autumn Online, EverQuest, the early MMOs, and maybe arguably, you see it with Lindenab's Second Life Now, where there's been a peak and there's just kind of a continuous slow decline. So the question is, by being more web-like, can you kind of survive that? Can you do something different? And does enabling a kind of common content and arguably culture of common protocols allow you to produce something and allow you to get that network effect of where every single simulator or grid that joins the system, both games are a benefit from everybody already there and also benefits everybody already in the system. And so you get a virtuous cycle of growth. Oh, blank slide. How did that get in there? Sorry, I produced these a little bit in a rush. Okay, as soon as this is gonna res in. Okay, good. So yeah, actually, the other slide had a little text and it never mind. Okay, I might extemporize slightly. So I think there are kind of a number of challenges to this kind of thing. So really, okay. So one of the difficulties is bugs. I mean, I'm sure Christopher and Miley saying that this is pretty fresh code and it relies on an awful lot of things to go right. And so it is quite possible for bugs to enter the system. We all know that hyper grid is far from perfect. I open to myself is far from perfect. I mean, we've seen issues even preparing for this conference issues with permissions and bringing stuff over and that kind of thing. And to a large extent, I think that's kind of inevitable at the moment. We're kind of trying it all rather crystals for the main part is squeezing these things into a second life protocol, which is never designed for this kind of stuff. I mean, we see it with things like, for instance, the caching of bindings between usernames and their identity, the viewer by default just takes these things at once. If you've seen it, if anybody's seen the unknown user bug, where we kind of give a particularly you a new idea of binding to unknown user, your MMT gun eight at the moment. People might think I'm speaking gibberish and too little that I am. But that binding persists forever. There's no idea that well, one system might give you the wrong binding. So you've got to ignore that and look for the binding later on. Instead, one system effectively can pollute the wealth for everybody, which is not a particularly good thing. So we're kind of vulnerable on those kind of side and the hybrid itself does rest on a lot of protocols with an open sim as well, which are kind of been evolved as well. So things like the way that scene objects are transmitted all the day to day. I mean, we've kind of effectively tried to get around these things by having more dynamic attributes or being able to put in attributes and not have them upset other readers for the same experiment if they don't recognize them. But there is this thing where it rests on a lot of protocols which are not documented and sometimes have big idiosyncrasies. And one has to be constantly aware of security issues of hypergrid, because it is something, I mean, Chris is of course doing a very good job on that, but it's the kind of thing you continually have to think about as a very personal general, but with hypergrid, you know, there are these questions of, of not exposing content you don't want exposed and all those kinds of issues. And also at the moment the system we have, the federated system we have, I'm not a big fan of because it does allow the backend servers a lot of control. It's not, in a way, it's not like the web because if you've ever teleported to a simulator, which isn't working very well, that simulator can kind of trap you there. You can't get out of it because to actually teleport to another location, which is analogous to going to a different website, you actually have to have the cooperation of the website you're leaving, which is kind of bizarre in web terms, but in what we have at the moment, that's truly the only way to get out of that is to be logged, which isn't exactly an elegant solution. So I guess the challenge to me is, I'm sorry, I'm taking a bit of time here, is a web-like approach to viable because I think virtual world development is much more complex than the web. OpenStim in itself has a built-in web server inside it. So you're already kind of layering a huge amount more on top of that. And there's a greater room, I think, compared to the web for different kinds of approaches to things. I mean, Second Life has a very kind of stereotyped graphical approach, whereas you can imagine, I mean, there's huge numbers of games and other systems out there which take kind of different approaches to things. And I didn't do a lot on the viewer side, so I don't know if that's some, I don't know how irrelevant that is, but it is vastly more complicated. Okay, it looks like, I don't know, with a lost voice or not. So I guess the question is kind of web-like over kind of a silo is about culture and content about distributed innovation, open research and collaboration, as we've seen with things like all these companies and individuals coming together. And I think innovative multi-grid services, like some of the things we've been seeing in this conference, like marketplaces, maybe profiles, which can be accessed anywhere and between multiple grids and things like asset and inventory storage. And I think some of those things might even be more centralized. I can imagine if there's one place to go for profiles, for instance, and that's a more viable thing for just one single centralized system much as people don't always like that approach. So that's all I wanted to say in my opening statement. Thank you. Thank you very much, Justin. And our last panelist today is Melanie Philker, the founder of Revenation Grid, one of the largest commercial open sim grids and a core developer. They've contributed a lot of interesting code to open sim most recently for export permissions. I'm very interested in what's gonna happen here. She's a long-term, second-life resident, has a lot of experience in using virtual worlds, and there are up to 12 developers working for the last two years on her team. So Melanie, if you'd like to make your statement. Thank you, Maria. Well, you've already mentioned it, the export permission, whereas it's definitely also my direction to think about getting more web-like and having a means to have a transient presence for viewing only and consuming information. Obviously, the export permission is a vital part that is needed for those parts of the metaverse that need to remain grid-like. The main thing that we have to deal with is momentous inventory and assets. Those are the points that in the protocol as well as in the implementation still have things that one could loosely term security holes. There's currently no way to indicate with a more than very coarse granularity what one is allowing to be done with one's work. There is no way to definitely state where one's work can be taken and where not the export permission certainly is one step in the right direction there. It's something that we have been developing in cooperation with the Singularity viewer team with members of the Singularity team, helping it along on the viewer side and us implementing the server side and sending that to core. Inventory is a difficult topic at the best of times and permissions even more so. If you have noticed the banging of flip's head against the wall when permissions were mentioned, then you know what I'm talking about. They are difficult. They are extremely difficult in the second life. They didn't make them any easier. Lintel Labs rather. The protocol implementation of permissions and the systems that work with permissions are definitely completely geared towards a closed virtual world, a single closed virtual world, a walled garden. We cannot easily transport this permission scheme to the high upgrade. So new ways need to be found and the export flag certainly is the first of them. It's not going to remain the only one. Divas mentioned the export or other access permissions that are going to be implemented on the protocol level to make the high upgrade secure. Just to sum it up at the moment, people believe that once you are connected to the high upgrade, basically every content that you have can be taken. Is this true? Yes, at the moment it is unfortunately true, whereas it's not easily possible to access anything outside the suitcase of the traveler. The traveler themselves can place anything in a suitcase, take it with them and as soon as they take it with them, it's effectively fair game. Unfortunately, not all people are honest. The micro economy that's been driving virtual worlds for the last decade has been a blessing and it also has been a curse because of the micro economy that deals with virtual currency in very, very small denominations. It is not really practical to start a real life lawsuit over the infringement of virtual content other than the real internet, the 2D internet that what I call the flat web where lawsuits are definitely be practical and are definitely happening. The virtual worlds do not currently enjoy that protection. So because of that, copying is right. It's wholesale, it's everywhere and technical means are helping a little bit to at least curb the casual copying of people who don't even know that they're infringing a copyright. The export permission is a strong statement because when it is made, when this statement is made, the export permission is set, it unequivocally states, I want this item to be available to everyone. I want this to be open. I want this to be content licensed under a permission license that everybody can take and use as they see fit without any borders. This is the traveling kind of content that the hyper grid is going to need. There is a lot of it already. All we need to do is finish the work and flag it. Thank you. Thank you very much, Melanie. Now we've had some questions coming in from the audience, both here in world and through the streaming chat. One question is about the barriers that legacy viewer presents to the hyper grid protocol design and whether having branched off open sim only viewer will improve hyper grid travel ability for the users. Would somebody like to tackle that? I can do it, I can try. Oh, thank you, Krista. You're the best. So, you know, when I started exploring doing the hyper grid in the beginning, and when I came to the conclusion that indeed the viewer could be coerced to do something that it had not been designed to do, I thought about different possibilities for how to manage all of these things, in particular identity. So, one different possibility that's not what the hyper grid does is that the identity would be completely done on the client side. So it's the user's software, so the viewer, that knows who the person is and that decides where to go. So, more like a, you know, sort of like the web, although actually I don't agree with what Justin had said. In fact, if the web is not prepared for single sign-ons, and then when you have single sign-ons, that's a whole other issue. But there is, in fact, an architecture where it's the client component that does identity management. And I actually prototyped something along those lines. I didn't change the viewer because I didn't want to look in yet another monster piece of code. What I did do, though, was an experiment that I called Grid... What was it called? Gridder? Gridder, yes. It was based on the Libo MV, the Grid Proxy software. So I just see the wrapper around the viewer. And it was that wrapper that basically controlled the teleports and identity analysis. So it's possible to do that. I did it and it worked. I sort of stopped because, you know, we would have to go and change the viewer substantially. I mean, I mean, substantially. I was doing that wrapper around it and that wrapper would have to be integrated in the viewer itself. So, you know, although it was possible, it was a really bad idea to go at the time because it would just not, you know, it would take me forever to integrate that in the viewer. People would not use the viewer. That would be different from the official In-N-Out viewer. So it's strategically, it seemed like a really bad idea. Technically, it's a possibility. Now, there is a more subtle question here about who owns the identity. That's a technical question, a social question, a philosophical question. It's the interesting question, like, who owns the ITR online identity? You know, who owns your Gmail identity? Right? Is it you or is it Google? So, right now, the way that the internet is taking shape is that the service providers basically own everything that you do with them. And if they suddenly go out of business, you go out of your identity. That's sort of how it works. So, I believe right now is also doing that sort of thing. So it's the server side that, in a way, owns and controls the person's identity. It's not the client side. Now, there's a possibility of having these personal nodes on the cloud. You don't need to sign up with a, you know, a grids operator to have your identity. You can boot up your own OpenSim instance, even in your own machine at home, and operate from there. And you have virtually your own service provider yourself from your computer. So that's sort of how I envision that, you know, doing client-side identity management also opens up a whole can of worms because, you know, people don't use the same computer, for example. They switch computers when they travel. If that computer dies, they lose everything in it. So things are moving more into the cloud in many ways. So it's a very deep issue here about who owns identity and assets. And it's an interesting one. So there are many options indeed. I decided to go with one particular one, which is the server owns things, the service owns the identity and the assets. And so that's, it's possible doing it both ways. Okay, here's a... Sorry, may I say something? Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean, to be honest, I think you're right. I mean, the pragmatic part of me says that regardless of this, people will be lazy, if you like. And I don't mean that in a bad way. I myself am very lazy. And I think if somebody will manage all that data for them, even if it's something as, which might be as strong as their own kind of identity, then that's what will happen. It'll be more efficient for somebody else to manage it for you. And maybe they'll advertise to you, which is the classic web model, I guess. But I think that's the way it will go. I think what... And I think on the broader point, I don't know, I think it's very difficult to even now. I mean, I think there will come a point, but I think it's difficult to, certainly for somebody like me, to split away from second life, because that's where... Because all this stuff is very experimental, right? I mean, it's all almost kind of research stuff to me. The kind of stuff that you can actually have to maintain kind of a business and maintain being able to actually consult and sell something, is stuff that has to work. And that's kind of the stuff we have today, which is the stuff that comes from in the lab effectively. To a large extent, I know not all of it does, but that's still the case to a large extent. So actually spreading away from that and going off on your own is, I think if a difficult thing at this point, I think there has to be a point where there's a lot more third-party development effectively one way or another before that can happen. I have a follow-up question on this. Since we were already seeing open sim only viewers because of the Havoc pathfinding code, like the latest Firestorm release, are we ever going to get the 4096 issue fixed where you can't teleport more than 4,096 regions in any direction? Isn't it going to be a panel for viewer developers? Did it happen already? That's a fever bug. Yes, it is, but I believe it actually got something to do with type width. So it's not easy. Yeah, I've never got a clear answer out of anybody on this, but that's what I suspect as well. It seems to have protocol and some bit limit. It's not going to repeat. They're probably hacking something somewhere. Yeah. Another question is, what do people think? What do our panelists think is the best way or steps needed to increase hypergrid adoption? And I can say I've been tracking these statistics and the number of users of the hypergrid. I mean, among ourselves, everybody we know travels to hypergrid, but in the general population of some users, many don't even realize that it's there and how it works. Well, I find actually with questions that users ask me that they are very much aware of how it works, but I also get people who are telling me if you're turning on hypergrid, I'm leaving and I want all my content taken down because everybody still believes that the hypergrid is the open door to theft. So what's needed in the user's perception is to have a sense of security that is provable by code, by audits, so that we can actually say, yes, your content is secure in a hypergrid environment. I agree with Melanie. Basically, it's the missing security for assets that we just haven't gotten to do it yet. And it starts with enabling this actually. Melanie's saying, yeah. Melanie's saying it's more than just access. If you're putting something in your suitcase that you're not allowed to put in your suitcase, it becomes exposed to the wide internet and anybody who's a black cat can just grab it out of your suitcase. The point is that at the point of origin, there need to be controls that allow to set not only whether something can leave the grid, that's an important first step, but effectively, everything needs to have an access list that specifies exactly which grids it can be taken to. Yep, yeah, exactly. This brings up one thing that I wanted to comment on on this, which is when we're talking about a relatively small number of grids and hypergridding is still very small, relatively speaking, it's pretty easy to kind of understand the relationships between the grids. At some point, as the numbers of these separate kind of identity services to use Krista's concept here becomes more and more prevalent. Now we have this, how do we represent the trust relationship that we have between these different providers? So we talk about technically think can be validated, that we can identify, we can author, we can verifiably identify a person who came from a grid, but why do we necessarily trust the person who's coming from that grid? And so kind of understanding all of these relationships is something that's critical. The flip side of that is maybe what we need is not to figure out how to lock down the content and lock down identity, maybe a better thing is to figure out how to express new business models and new content sharing models that are more appropriate for the kinds of things that we see here. I don't really believe that's gonna happen anytime soon to be honest because right now as I said, I called it a blessing and occurs is the micro payment economy. It requires the make once sell mini model because the individual item is priced so low that there's no way to amortize the time that goes into the production of the item from just a few sales. Unfortunately, as I also said, people are not generally honest. Many people are not. There are so many black hats among us that I should have to think of it. So any kind of protection that relies not on technologically locking down something, but rather on specifying an intent or having an alternate model, but that can be subverted by people to get something for nothing will be subverted by people who get something for nothing. And with micro payment amounts, the avenue of philosophy is not open. They may at some point be an arbitration or a court system that allows actual recourse to such means for content creators who have been infringed, but until that's there, I don't think any other model is viable. No, okay, we don't all believe in technical DRM. I think there's many people as developers for sure who know how to circumvent most technological DRM. But the thing that is most worrying is not the actual black hat thing. It's what I call casual copying. It means somebody sees something, they like it, they copy it. They're not aware that they're infringing. They use the item instead of paying for it and using it after. And they are not even aware that they're doing something wrong. We have many people who have come into our grid at one point, they came in, they spent $4 on currency, they uploaded the copy-botted skin and they wore it. I asked why they did that, asked why they would upload copy-botted items. They said it's not copy-botted, I bought it in SL. So there. All right. A question about interoperability. So you've talked about the open sim, does the open sim situation where the hypergrid connects different open sim grids? But there's other types of virtual worlds out there and other groups working on more general virtual world interoperability standards. How does hypergrid fit in with those? Okay, that's a good question. So we are just a bunch of very independent explorers here in the project and I don't know, speaking for myself, how can I put this nicely? Don't put it nicely, just say it. You know, I'm in a point of my life that I just decided that I just spend my time on things that I really give me some sort of pleasure. So participating in standards meetings, I totally, you know, rationally understand that it's very important and it should happen. It's that's something that I just cannot myself to force to do. So one of the things, Krista, though, that I think, and again, you've made incredible contributions here is to just move forward. It's much easier, I mean, you and I were both a part of those, you know, Linden Labs sponsored interoperability discussions and everybody brought a bunch of kind of concrete expectations and business models and other things into it. And there was this approach of let's build a standard and then see what we can actually do. And the approach you've taken here, which allows us to actually make progress, is let's go build something and then we'll figure out what worked. Let's test it by code and then standardize what works rather than trying to build a standard that none of us can implement. And I think that that approach that you've taken is really why we've been able to make as much progress as we have. So, you know, I'll publicly say thank you for what you've done. Yeah, yeah, no, I mean, I will go on about standards and protocols being eventually essential, but I very strongly believe that they can only come out of working code and demonstrable useful things. You can't sit down and say, oh, I'm gonna create a virtual world from scratch and create this specification with a million holes in it because we then actually have something real to implement and then throw it over the wall and say, hey, isn't this this great specification that's all in print? And that's never ever gonna work. And I can't get why people who try it don't just don't know how, to me just don't know how it goes. They don't know how this stuff works. So, you know, I think actually, and that's what's enormously interesting about this community is that we actually have something that people are using and can actually get to work in various situations. And that's, you know, and to actually get that kind of feedback and that's something very rare. And I think it's easier almost, even though OpenSim is really imperfect and does have, I know I keep saying this and people don't always, it has a lot of bugs. There's a lot of issues, right? But actually having something that people are using and working, I think, and actually has kind of a culture is something you can actually go places with rather than trying to start something completely from scratch, which is might on paper be better and more perfect, but it's also requires an enormous investment. As you said earlier today, I mean, there's always gonna be already $10 million or something worth of investment in OpenSim. So, you know, it's very difficult to replicate that and the community as well. So, you know, I think these things have to fall out of working code, not the other way around. And so we've got time for a couple more questions. Melanie, with the export permission getting put into place and support from the Singularity viewer, commercial grids will now be able to say that their content stays on their grids if the creator so wish. Will Avination be opening up hypergrid connectivity anytime soon? Avination is not going to do that until the hypergrid is fully secure and people's perception of that is in place because right now there's unfortunately too much to lose and not enough to gain. So we need to work on security and we also need to at the same time work on public perception then when our users feel secure and feel that their content is secure, then we will do that, but only then. And what pieces are missing? What's missing is that it's still possible to take something out of the grid and by just putting it into a suitcase, you can take it to where it's accessible, you can take it to a grid where you can easily circumvent the DRM controls like OS Grid and just spin off as many copies as you like. It's not secure yet. Currently Avination would have to open up a significant portion of its assets to the internet in order to enable hypergrid. So the export permission doesn't prevent people from putting things into the suitcase? Currently not. That would need viewer side code that's not in place yet. And people can have different viewers. We could use, somebody could use a different viewer exactly to put the item into the suitcase anyway. There are lots of things that still need to be addressed. We've made a good start, but we're not quite there. Okay. How important do people think the hypergrid is to the whole idea of our virtual world metaverse future? Say one where we're all wearing those Oculus Rift headsets and living in a matrix like virtual reality. Do you see the open sim and the hypergrid as playing a central role in that? I do. I definitely do see that it's going that way. And I guess the virtual worlds with Oculus Rift and us all meeting in virtual space is a great vision. I mean, I definitely would like to see that happening with open simulator. It's definitely the direction to move forward in. The grids as we have them today certainly have limited shelf life. What about everybody else? Well, if I, so I, you know, I started doing the hypergrid, but I actually am very agnostic about it. I think there's, there's uses for it. And there's uses that don't require it for virtual environments for some certain applications and virtual environments, you know, they don't need to be connected at all. They just are standalone virtual environments that are done for certain specific purposes. And they're not social environments, you know, things like I'm also involved in tools for urban planning. And those tools need to be very sort of standalone-ish kinds of tools. And that's how it is. So, you know, it doesn't make sense to connect those environments to the rest of a social world because that's not what they're there to do. So there's a place for everything. I mean, for social environments, I can totally see how, you know, the federation of some sort is a good thing because you escape the sort of the dominance of certain players. And you basically decentralize authority all over the place. And that's a good thing for social environments. So, yeah, but that doesn't mean that that's all that the platform is good for. There's lots of other applications that are not social. I think one can drive the other as we've seen with the web where, you know, it has been very driven by the wider internet, but you also get things like intranets and things where the same tool to use privately, I think one can drive the other. I mean, personally, sorry for leaping in here. I mean, on the broader question, I don't know. I mean, I think there's some really interesting ideas and approaches, but I think we have to remember that we'll be worried don't. But I always like to remember that we're a niche of a niche almost. I mean, Second Life is not a really huge presence out there. Open Sim is another subset of that. And then the Hypergrid is also yet another subset of that. So, you know, we can't get that to overblown with this kind of stuff. I think it's just trying to work out what's useful and slowly go forward on that. And I think other environments, to me, this is not gonna be the thing that takes over the whole net or anything like that, right? I mean, this is a particular kind of environment. I think there's some very interesting things when you do things in a much more distributed manner, but I think other systems are always gonna exist alongside it. But maybe that's looking too far in the future. I can't really do that far, but I think, you know, there are so many different kinds of 3D systems and games out there that I don't know if you'd really go to that extreme or whatever, or if people want to. I think it remains to be seen. And we have one last question. When you guys are rolling out and adding these new security measures to Open Sim, will individual grids be able to opt in and out of these security measures, depending on their particular needs and interests? Yes, of course. I certainly hope so. Yes. I mean, Open Sim is the configuration paradise or hell. Paradise is one word for it, Crystal. Not the one I would use. Everything is configurable. So, yeah, we would never make anything mandatory, nothing like that. If there isn't an option for anything in Open Sim that you're aware of, let us know, we'll put it in. Yeah, exactly. Amen. I've seen an option you didn't like. Just one last comment on that. And that configurability really is a reflection of the Open Sim community as well. And that is one of the great things and strengths of our community is rather than enforcing a particular set of policies on our users, we give them an awful lot of opportunity to make those decisions. And Maria can have, or excuse me, Melanie can have her closed grid as my turn. Melanie can have her closed grid and limit the access to the assets. And the OS grid, people can have something that's completely open and it's all part of the same basic platform. Evil people say that we give them enough hope. And we've also been getting some questions coming in from the EU stream. People wanted to know if there's any way to have automatic indexing, like a DNS system for hyper-good addresses. And we've been discussing this in the local chat as well. Or right now it can be difficult to find new hyper-good destinations. I'm sure an option for that can be added to have the gatekeeper advertised in a defined protocol so that they can be queried and they can be centrally stored somewhere. Yeah. We love options. It's a mere matter of programming. Yeah, and configuration. We have so many configuration options. Don't want them even working. We don't know how to interact. Come on, we removed some of them then once the other day. All right, and we are past our time limit and there's some social events going on this afternoon. Some open houses from a number of different places. I believe AvaNation has an event today. Melanie, is that correct? Yes, that's correct. We've got a DJ event for the next hour and then after that we have a live artist. And during all that time, there's going to be stuff there to answer the questions to help people along. There's also an Air Force... That's happening on the Expo 6. There's also an Air Force Research Lab, Discovery Lab, Open House. In the evening tonight, there's going to be a community dance on Little Field Grid. And there's also an event right now on the Metropolis Grid going on to celebrate diversity. And you can get all the details on the schedule at conference.opencivilator.org. Thank you very much everybody for coming. Thank you, Krista. Thank you, Melanie. Thank you, Justin. And thank you, the guy from Linden Lab. Thanks, Maria. And thanks for the laughs. And if anybody has follow-up questions, you can email me and many of the panelists have their email addresses up places as well or maybe they will type it into a local chat. And our panel is closed for the day. Thank you very much.