llDetectedAddress()

To see the remote IP of the user could help prevent a lot of theft and griefing as we could eject people with the wrong IP or even have an IP BanList with wildchars.

Much though I'd like this to be able to detect when someone's created an alt to get around my banning them, I have to give this a resounding NO vote. I don't want someone being able to get my IP address. It's kind of nice the way it is now, that it's relatively difficult to get someone's IP. You can use someone's IP to stalk them in real life, to determine RL relationships that people might not want to share (from multiple people in a household using a computer), and, of course, as a starting point to launch an attack against their home computer, if you're really that motivated to harass someone. Also, alts aren't against the rules, and right now we're well within our rights to keep our alts secret. This would contravene that entirely.

Especially with something as simple as llDetectedAddress(), someone could easily get my IP and I would never know about it. As it is now, I can at least disable streaming media and know no one can get my IP.

You must be joking. Give away my IP address to any so-and-so in SL? No thank you.

I suppose if you want to have this kind of functionality do it like this.



bool llCheckAvatarIP(key avatar1, key avatar2);

if the IP address of avatar1 == the IP (or last known IP) of avatar2 then return true, else return false. You'd never get the IP address of anyone, as the function compairs hidden data.

*Shrugs* Only way I can think of implementing it w/out givign out personal information.

At the *most* I could see, if things got bad enough, something like "Ban IP address of..." becoming possible. It wouldn't inform you what address was banned, and it wouldn't inform you when someone was blocked by IP address.

But it's really up to LL to stop people using alts for griefing. See my recent proposal for "free but accountable" accounts for one way they could keep their investors impressed without letting any tom, dick, or harry set up 500 griefer accounts for free.

I have to agree, excellent points. Still I think with all that's going on it might be something in the right direction, maybe we could have an option to not allow someone to see our IP. A simple options to Mask IP in the preferences that defaults to 'Yes'. That way I can deny people with masked IP not to purchase from my vendor or not to enter my land.
You can have your IP masked and if you encounter a Vendor that requires an unmasked IP you can allow it for a while or go somehwere else.

But yes there's way's around everything I guess, just a thought.

Thanks all for your input!

Couldn't parts of payment info be hashed together using a one-way method (such as md5 encryption, almost completely impossible to reverse engineer without huge processing power, and with parts of payment info would be a useless thing to reverse anyway) in order to create a sort of person ID. This can be used to identify individual avatars belong to the same person.

This of course relies upon LL admitting they're wrong and removing the blatantly foolish anonymous sign-ups =S

I can't imagine that more than a few percent of the population would *not* turn that on, immediately after they find out about it. Any vendor that required it would immediately get tagged as a stalker, and would probably find themselves banned from malls that wanted to actually get traffic. It's happened before, even to "big names", over much less intrusive things than this.
Even letting people in-game identify avatars as belonging to the same person is likely to generate quite a bit of pushback.

It would be criminally irresponsible for SL not to set that as opt-in, and to be frank I don't think it should be included in the functions at all (not that it will be). Neither should an option to see someone's RL name and address.

I think Argent's idea is the best way to go on this, and I honestly think this should be built into the existing land tools. Have an option to ban User X, User X's Computer, or Both.

Hmm, just thinking evilly for a moment, if it was just the last IP of avatar2, and I wanted to avoid having this function be effective on me, I'd hire someone to use some libsecondlife tool to "log in" briefly as my account after every time I logged off, sanitizing my IP for me.

*Rubs his scaley chin* Mm....other possibillities:

1. All used IPs of av2 (dynamic IPs could really start screwing things up)
   
2. Last 5 (?) unique IPs of av2 (partially aleiviates above problem)
   
3. All IPs in the last 24 hours (if logged out longer, then the IP used for the most amount of time in the 24-48 hour period)
   
4. Other?
   

Or just have the thing I said (use payment information or something more concrete) to determine avatars and their alts. Then if you ban an avatar, all their alts are banned too, handled by the system rather than by script, so it's invisible to all but LL (and people getting banned).

Same for mutes.