About temporary attachments and RLV...

Hi there,

I have not posted in a while, because not much has been happening lately. But lately Linden Lab has released their newest feature, "temporary attachments".

In short, temporary attachments are attachments that do not belong to you but attach on your avatar anyway. This is a nice feature for many use cases, but it is problematic with the RLV.

If you are a scripter, see for yourself : http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/LlAttachToAvatarTemp

Why is it problematic ? The way I understand it, what distinguishes temporary attachments from regular attachments is this :

1. You do not own them (that's the whole point), but your viewer thinks you do (somewhat).


2. They are destroyed when you log off (hence the "temporary" part).

If a temporary attachment was able to send commands to your RLV, Point 1 would be a real can of worms, a dream for any griefer because they wouldn't need you to wear an open RLV relay to send commands to you, nor to give you an object that you'd have to rez yourself. All they would have to do is to ask for your permission (and then maybe that permission can even be auto-granted, I'm not sure about that yet), and then it is open season.

Furthermore, if a temporary attachment was able to send commands to your RLV, Point 2 would make its interest rather limited, because as soon as the user relogs, all the restrictions would be lost (since the object would be destroyed).

Finally, I cannot think of a use case that would need a temporary attachment to send a RLV command, that would not be possible with a regular attachment or a RLV relay.

In consequence, it seems important to me not to let a RLV execute any command sent by any temporary attachment. Unless (and until) proved wrong, this is the route I'm taking about this new feature.

I just wanted to make that clear early enough so that scripters do not start projects that involve temporary attachments and rely on them sending RLV commands, it wouldn't work and they would be confused.

Feel free to discuss about it on my issue tracker here : https://bitbucket.org/marinekelley/rlv/issue/67/llattachtoavatartemp-and-rlv


Have fun !
Marine