Whip & Chains excite me

The new third party viewers policy has been updated by linden labs a few days ago and has already gotten a few people worked up wondering about the future and what will happen with all of the goodies their viewer of choice offers which the official V3 doesn't for one reason or another.

Those old enough will remember what happened to the very popular Emerald Viewer, whose inability to promptly comply with the third party policies got it removed and blocked in a matter of weeks. Linden Labs claims that these changes are aimed to protect the users' privacy and overall experience, so all users feel both safe and equal when experiencing the virtual reality we all hold dear.

Here are the new sections of the policy:

2.a.iii : You must not provide any feature that circumvents any privacy protection option made available through a Linden Lab viewer or any Second Life service. (simply put, your viewer cannot show when so and so is online if they have made themselves invisible to you or others)

2.i : You must not display any information regarding the computer system, software, or network connection of any other Second Life user.

2.j : You must not include any information regarding the computer system, software, or network connection of the user in any messages sent to other viewers, except when explicitly elected by the user of your viewer.

2.k : You must not provide any feature that alters the shared experience of the virtual world in any way not provided by or accessible to users of the latest released Linden Lab viewer. (no color beams, no teleport screen overrides, no auto replies and so on)

To explain it simply, all Linden labs wants and is aiming for is for more usage of the official viewer or to have (if possible) all third party viewers behave and perform in the same way their viewer does -basically, if we didn't think on implementing such feature, remove it so we can consider it in the very distant future and claim we did it first)

I've seen some users out there, who are active in the RLV feature be concerned on where this change on policies will leave them and their lifestyle -as RLV is a simple add-on granting complete control of an avatar on another-. I am particularly not very fond of submission, slavery or anything that gives anyone power over another person -I am sorry, there's something in RL for that and is called therapy-, but I do respect each person's lifestyle choice and RLV, much like Bloodlines and many other franchises in-world which move millions of linden each month, will be severely crippled if these new measure are implemented literally by third party viewer developers.

I am sorry, but myself, like many users out there believe that restriction cripples creativity and these new policies are a clear attempt to get all developers, scripters and creators out there who rely on these "special" features Linden Labs did not take into consideration at first, to jump through the official viewer ring that most of us, simply don't like.

https://www.facebook.com/spikecls