Any word on hardware baning?

I know this came up somewhere on the forums before. Is there any hope or "plan in motion" for hardware banning? It seems like too often now the same griefer comes back as an alt and it's quite annoying to have to keep banning the same person LOL.

It is in practice from what we understand.

Where in the preview Grid? I know LL has the ability to do it administratively when banning an account and their alts. I mean providing resident land owners and/or island owners this ability. If an avatar is banned...add an option for:

How would you like to ban this avatar?
===========================
_ Ban Avatar Only
X Ban Hardware
_ Ban this Avatar's entire network and/or ISP (<<< Not really but who knows)

Hmmm. The ability for a landowner to ban by hardware hash is most definitely an interesting idea, and I can't currently think of any drawbacks to this. It would indeed stop the endless flow of alts.

Can anyone think of any reason this should not be an option?

You might want to search the Answers forum MadamG, I believe it has been discussed there as something only to be under Linden Lab's control. I think the reason mentioned was because of family members sharing computers, or at least I believe that was one example given.

Hardware banning -- or banning by IP address -- is usually not a good practice since very few people have a truly static IP address. You can usually force your IP address to change and/or you can be sharing the same IP address via a Firewall, Proxy, or router ... so by banning one IP address you effectively ban a whole group of people (in a univerisity dorm setting for example) ...

Hardware banning means to ban a system based on its hardware profile represented as a hash value. Each comptuter is fairly unique in its hardware profile. You can avoid this by using a different system ;0 That gets costly so it's somewhat more effective than IP/Mac bans.

Hardware banning is different from IP banning. Hardware banning is banning a specific computer based on their hardware ID. Yes stuff like the MAC address can be changed, but not the unique hardware setup of the entire machine. It'd get really expensive for griefers to have to go out and buy new hardware every time they got banned to get back in.

Thanks Ron for clarifying this. I was going to if no one else did. :3

Did I just get like TOTALLY ignored? ;0 Oh BURN!

Banns on Mac's are useless easy way to bypass them,
(start / run / winmsd , you can see your current one in network/adapter/mac adress)

Hardware
Some nic's can change mac' adress using advanced in network

Software
google it shouldnt be hard to find (macshift)

Registry
This is more tricky to boarderline to annoying to change as its all over the place


Hardware ban (guid's)
far more efficent alright
way more annoying to get rid of , its not impossible though, but nothing is -.-

Your current guid?
C:\WINDOWS\setuplog.txt , search guid

The only catch to allowing Land/Island owners to Hardware ban:

How does one prevent them from indiscriminately banning people based on some petty idea the owner has?

I agree - Bans based on IP or MAC addresses are useless as they are both quite easy to change.

Bans on credit cards were more secure even if they didnt tie back to a machine as obtaining several different credit cards is a little more irksome.

Isn't it their Land?

I mean, I know nothing about you personally but I don't like you so I tell Linden Lab to ban you through a checkmark in the land management tools that says,

"[x] Hardcore ban this mo'fo aight?"

True. But you also have land/sim owners with a "god complex". Say something wrong, look the wrong way, not be into their idea of RP, and Ban! Land/Sim owners can get weird about what they allow/dont allow. What if they dont like Prim Hair? Blingy Jewelry? Certain AV shapes? Certain AVs? Certain colors? Or even ones who dont like certain content creators?

It would get mighty frustrating to new people.

BUT- I like the idea that for something like this to happen, you'd need proof that this person was doing something to deserve it. Not just a Furry in a Gor sim, but real griefing or something to that effect.

Why? these sim owners with "god complexes" pay anywhere from 200 to several thousand dollars a month for the right to that land...

Now if you ban someone and they come back two days later you're fricken pissed... A user doesn't have the right to circumvent a ban... They were banned for a good enough reason in teh first place(the owner doesn't want them there) How they are banned doesn't really matter at all.

So what? Their sim they can ban for ANY reason or NO reason.

If you own the sim and pay $195/month you should be able to keep anyone who you please off of it. I understand your reasoning, but sim owners will just have to keep this into consideration and realize that getting a reputation for having a "ban finger" (preferably the middle one) will not help the popularity of their sim.

Another option which I can see raising quite a bit of controversy is to assign each mac/ip/hardware address combination some sort of identifiation ID so that ppl know who is logged in at the same PC. I guess this brings us back to posting alt accounts on the profiles, so maybe not. Same idea (ugh) :/

But all in all I don't see a big problem with allowing land owners to hw ban people. It's true that some will change their network card and etc and log in as another alt and continue to create accounts in this manner to annoy others. But it will either get old and they'll stop or LL will hopefully catch them.

I think providing a hardware ban is a good idea. Even though some may "easily" be able to spoof their hardware ID, it would still have an affect on those who don't know how, are too lazy, or can't for whatever reason. It's like locking the door to your car in a parking lot. It will keep out those looking for an easy hit, but will do nothing to stop someone who really wants in it.

One thing I think is interesting about this is that the land owner might be able to snoop out someone's alt. For instance, the owner knows a couple of avatars and thinks the one might be the alt of the other. So they wait until one is on their land and HW ban the other to see what happens.

In my opinion, that's not enough of a reason to not have this feature though.

Usually in collages people have the same brand and model of computer, or popular brands that are bought that have the exact same hardware. In such a hashed banned multiple computers would be banned right? Cause say the latest popular Dell happend to be used by a griefer .. got banned. Now someone else bought that same exact dell dude, cause it had a super deal. Anyways that dude would be banned too under hardware hash ban.

A friend of mine brought up a possible drawback about hardware banning in that it allows someone the theoretical possibility of outing someone else's alts. He and I have a bit of a disagreement about it. I'll try to explain how it goes by a basic example:

1) We have a land owner and a parcel.
2) We have two other users.
3) Land owner is suspicious that the two other users *might* be the same person.
4) Land owner bans User #1 without saying anything to that user about it.
5) Afterwards, land owner then watches to see if User #2 is able to get on the parcel.
6) If User #2 is stonewalled when he/she tries to get on the parcel (in the case that it IS the same person), we have an outed alt.

I contend this really wouldn't be much of a problem. I can't see someone doing this to their friends just out of some misguided sense of curiosity...and in the case of an "enemy"...well, who cares? Banned is banned; couldn't care less who the guy's alts are! :3

The hardware hash is more than just Dell Model XXX, it incorperates the processor serial number and other unique hardware stuffs.
However, it'd be trivial to code a random-hex id0 spoofer, since it's only transmitted on login.

This can happen already just by banning an avatar. The only difference the ability to hardware-ban would be that the banned person does not return as an alt.

No I was typing up mine at the same time you posted yours. This is what happens when I walk away from the keyboard for a min to take a leak and come back.

My only concern would be false positives. And that's at the SL end, not at the user end.