Philip Rosedale Wants His Old Second Life Avatar Back

Second Life's Third Birthday 002

When Second Life turned three, Torley took the above photo, it shows Philip Rosedale, founder of Linden Lab, in his iconic avatar.

Moving on far more years than most of us want to admit, Philip Rosedale can be found in High Fidelity, looking much more like Philip Rosedale does outside the virtual world. In the below image, Philip is on the left side of the stage talking to Kent Bye of Voices of VR Podcast.

Philip and Kent

The video of that chat can be found here by the way, it was a fascinating and very interesting discussion, if you have time I definitely recommend that you watch it.

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Kent Bye of Voices of VR Podcast Visits High Fidelity

Philip and Kent

Here in the UK we’ve been dealing with the Beast from the East meeting Storm Emma and all too predictably, chaos has ensued. … wait wait wait, I’ve done that!

Ah yes, you may want to stop me if you’ve heard this one before but after visiting Sansar Kent Bye of the voices of VR Podcast moved on to another virtual reality world in the shape and form of High Fidelity where Kent and Philip Rosedale enagaged in some extremely interesting fireside chat before a pretty decent sized audience.

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Net Neutrality Debate Requires Compromise To Move Discussion Forward

The text of the FCC’s “Restore Internet Freedom proposal has been published in PDF format and can be found here. I’m firmly against the proposal and find the name to be extremely misleading.

The FCC have also linked to a “Myths and Facts” PDF document, which is actually very light on facts and engages in a lot of speculation, that can be found here.

MYTH: Broadband providers will charge you a premium if you want to reach certain online content.

 FACT: This didn’t happen before the Obama Administration’s 2015 heavy-handed Internet regulations, and it won’t happen after they are repealed.

That’s not a fact, it’s a hope. There is support for FCC Chairman, Ajit Pai’s proposals. A decent article has been published by Ben Thompson at Stratechery – Pro-Neutrality, Anti-Title II :

  • Regulation incurs significants costs, both in terms of foregone opportunities and regulatory capture.
  • There is no evidence of systemic abuse by ISPs governed under Title I, which means there are no immediate benefits to regulation, only theoretical ones.
  • There is evidence that pre-existing regulation and antitrust law, along with media pressure, are effective at policing bad behavior.

The problem for Ajit Pai and the FCC is that even that article points out flaws with Ajit Pai’s proposal :

I believe that Ajit Pai is right to return regulation to the same light touch under which the Internet developed and broadband grew for two decades. I am amenable to Congress passing a law specifically banning ISPs from blocking content, but believe that for everything else, including paid prioritization, we are better off taking a “wait-and-see” approach; after all, we are just as likely to “see” new products and services as we are to see startup foreclosure. And, to be sure, this is an issue than can — and should, if the evidence changes — be visited again.

Ajit Pai and the FCC are not looking to address the issue of blocking with new laws and furthermore the article points out that the cornerstone of Ajit Pai’s proposals, the markets, aren’t competitive enough.

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DigitalOcean Spaces Now Offering Object Storage For High Fidelity

JimJamz Studio High Fidelity

Open Source Virtual Reality platform High Fidelity this week announced their support for DigitalOcean Spaces, an object storage solution that fits in with the way High Fidelity works.

Now if you’re not familiar with how High Fidelity works then the concept at play here will sound a tad confusing. In High Fidelity you don’t upload content in the way that you do with Second Life or OpenSim, your content is hosted on a server and this is where a solution such as DigitalOcean Spaces fits in.

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High Fidelity Roadmap Highlights New Currency And Content Protection

High Fidelity’s Philip Rosedale has published a couple of blog posts regarding High Fidelity’s roadmap for currency and content protection. The posts really need to be read in full to be fully appreciated and they are rather lengthy and technical, but I would certainly urge content creators to read them, there are some very interesting ideas and proposals at play here.

The first post, Roadmap: Currency and Content Protection, outlines plans for a new currency, HFC :

We are getting ready to deploy blockchain software to create a new currency for virtual worlds, called HFC. This currency will be a public blockchain with a consensus group made up of multiple parties, and ultimately independent of High Fidelity’s control.

That line about being independent of High Fidelity’s control is important for a few reasons, the glaring one being what would happen if High Fidelity went away, which is answered in the post :

Q: Will my money and digital assets survive if High Fidelity goes away?

A: Yes. Because the HFC blockchain is a public ledger, anyone can (and many will) make a backup of the data. If High Fidelity were to disappear, someone else will startup a new blockchain from that backup and provide the same service of accepting new blocks to write to the ledger. Also, both High Fidelity and the blockchain software we are using are open source.

There’s a lot more in the post, it covers security, privacy, wallets and stable exchange rates. The last point is relevant because it explains why High Fidelity want to create their own currency rather than using existing options. This is definitely worth reading.

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