Copying objects and textures by reverse engineering the cache

I think the "Creator" name should not change and should be a stamped code that cannot be removed and protected by encryption of some sort to varify validity of the Product owner.

Actually Blake thats a good Idea but, what some are refering to here is streamed data and or data stored on your HD not what can be absconded from within world.

When its passed as pure data its kinda hard to put a ownership stamp on it as it would have to be layered in the data stream.

the other thing people mentioned is the CTRL+PrintScreen Command kinda hard to disembodie that app from game function.

Shadow

Understandable, but with Secure Data Encryption and Data Records at Linden Labs, that would be a verifiable way for them to conclude who the original Creator is, and therefore take action from evidence using a backup system of all objects in world and monitor registered creator products, as they do a weekly data read out someone would be assigned to wipe all data of non-creator products continuasly. May be a pain though for LL having a Registered Creator Division that manages that.

I love you Alicia Eldritch.

Yes, that phrase is a lovely euphamism for "I don't wanna pay for it and you shouldn't make me, waaah. ME ME ME ME ME"

I don't know whether she was explaining it or justifying it, and this isn't oriented at Alicia in particular -- i just take offense at the phrase and the attitude. Monopolies in SL? There are no barriers to entry to doing anything in SL, save skill and time.

You can't patent a "hug" animation (nor should you be able to, imo) and now you see several on the market. The new hug animations that were created from scratch are legitimate competition, and drive the price down.

Enough demand arises within SL for a particular product and you *will* see other products on the market from people that can build from scratch rather than needing to steal. And if it takes a long time to create alternatives, then kudos to the creator who made something so hard that no else can do it. If you can't afford it, then suck it up or make your own. If you're gonna steal, then call it stealing and leave the pathetic justifications at home.

I can't afford a ferrari in RL, but that doesn't mean I'm gonna go steal one. And yes, ferrari has a monopoly on ferraris. Oh, yeah, but I can buy a lotus instead! (or in my case, a suburu -- more practical anyway)

Monopoly... what nonsense...

You know Blake you keep this good Idea thing up and I'm gonna have to change my opinion of you ....lol

Actualy for in world transactions I thought of this before but never mentioned it as I figured there would be some tremendious uproar that would beat me to death with multiple rezed cubes of spam.

I think that would be a fair monitoring accesment system that could be put in place with little modifications as the inventories are full of No Creator Content.

Only thing left then would be Items that were clearly created by some one and then how could one derive where the owner got it from. Was it a legitimate purchase or was it a stolen article? This is where it would start getting sticky and LL would back away. The No creator thing "easy to fix" the other....rather tough if you ask me.

Shadow

a monopoly does not mean you are the only one who produces a given good, it means you have enoguh control to ensure that you are the only one who *CAN* produce a given good... like the old standard oil, where they had enough market capitalization that they had no problem destroying or buying out any possible competitors.

aka its not enough to create, or enjoy a market of one, its that you actively can ever prevent the market from opening to more. Microsoft had monopoly power on bundled opterating systems with pc oem manufacturers, they at the time had the only OS that would run on those machines, and the were able to leverage that to corner out multiple other competitors for other products, such as netscape, or real player, etc.

That sort of market does *NOT* exist in SL because there are no public companies, no manufacturing costs other than time present a barrier into entry of any given SL market.

everyone has equal access to SL's build environment so there can be no actual monopolies, simply people good at what they do. Therefore saying cracking and robbing things from those pepole is breaking a monopoly is a fallacy... yer not taking down 'the man', yer takin down jus another random person who thought they could do somethin cool with their skill and time

Well Put Eltee and I echo the Sentiment ...

an example of what a 'monopoly' would be in SL is imagine a clothing creator in SL who makes amazing wares, so amazing they make absolutely ludicrous amounts of money, so much money that they are able to somehow invest back into SL as a board member, and convince philip to change SL's client so that only they were able to get free texture uploads, and for everyone else uploads would now cost L$100. Everyone else would have to pay tons and tons of money for each small revision, while they got to import all their goods for free.

this would effectively lock pretty much everyone else out of the SL clothing market, and make a true monopoly

Ghaaa...dang it Eltee just as I emdimnify you you out me with my sinster plan..LOL

For what it's worth, the cache directory has files with an extension of DSF which are just wav files. If you change the extension to WAV then you can play them with no trouble. Most are things like mouse clicks and footsteps.

I have wondered about the possiblity of decrypting the files in the cache. I examined them in a so-called hex editor, didn't see any obvious pattern to it.

A reader that had a variety of different data structures built in (such as various floating point number formats) might enable one to pick up patterns.

I would assume the cache holds information about the objects on it needed by the client to draw the world on the screen, but that is not necessarily the same thing as having the objects data stored in the same way that objects would be stored at Linden Lab.

It doesn't look like it will be too hard to extract images and sounds from the cache.

Well, It appears the cache is not compresses or even encrypted, in fact I've succeeded in doing "something". (I don't want to give the bad ones ideas). Note to LL, at least use special data headers on the files so there not standard.

I haven't tried anything else and won't, and no I won't tell you how.. I just hope if its abused LL will perm ban them right away. I don't think there's much to worry about though, at least I hope so.

CM I do know what your talking about and it was being reported last night again to my knowledge as we found a twist about it.

Sorry folks the Texture thing is not fixed...totaly...I seen it with my own pixels last night which sent a red flag up about my textures.

Due to this I will no longer be making textures for Inworld use as their protection is totaly circumvented.

And CM thank you for not letting them know how to do this as its bad enough that it actually exists in the first place.

To also eleviate CM he is not the one that showed this to me either as I have other "Technicaly profecient" friends that looked into this after this thread was started.

Those friends reported it and hopefully we hear an answer back on it soon.

Sincerely, Shadow

The cache is not secure at all and easily broken... I did it within about a month of joining SL, just for the challenge of it.
No, I haven't stolen anyones' textures or sounds, nor would I want to.
No, I won't share my code, because I don't trust the general public to be responsible with it.

But really, it's not much to be worried about.
The only things that it holds are textures, sounds, and what i'm calling 'outfits' -- it appears to be an ascii list of the textures that are on your avatar.

As others have already noted, this information is pretty easy to obtain in other ways -- the .DSF files that get left in your windows temp directories are the exact same as the ones in the cache, and you can get textures by doing screenshots or any of a bunch of other ways.

Reading it from the cache may actually be *more* difficult than doing those other things, because the cache is only referenced by Key... no names or anything to go by, so if you wanted to rip off one particular texture you'd have to extract them all and visually inspect each one, unless you happen to know its key already.

If LL were to attempt to encrypt the cache it would just add a bit more load to the CPU, for no real benefit, as they must be decrypted somewhere in order to be displayed on your screen. Someone talented enough could just read the data straight out of newview's memory, for instance.

If you want to refrain from uploading textures and sounds because of this, that's your choice -- but given how easy it is to get that data other ways, this problem will ALWAYS be around, no matter what, and to me it's just not worth worrying about. I'd rather just enjoy SL.

Shadow, the fact that this is possible has been an open secret since about the beginning, and I don't know of any incidents of someone using it to steal textures.