Security issue: stealing

Hi, somebody told me: "If you knew about SL security, you would know there are programs out that allows others creations to be stolen. It's a biggest complaint known in SL to clothes and skin makers."

My questions: Is this true? And where can i read more about this?
Regards,
QW

Search these forums for copy-bot. That will give you some basic information about this subject.

Morwen.

Copybot is not the major problem for clothing and skin makers: something else is. I'm not going to post exactly what but it has been addressed here and on the blog several times.

no one would give you a link to it unless they are one of them

I wonder when the day will come that this problem is so pervasive it will solve the asset server issue.

Since if any content can easily be stolen - you might as well let people keep the content they bought and paid for backed up on their own hard drives.

OK, here are the facts, that content creators might want to know, without making it too easy for would-be content stealers.

First, background: SL sends the sizes, shapes, and textures of objects (including textures of avatars, i.e., skins and clothing) to your client. The client program can be modified (or built from scratch) to save this information in a way that unscrupulous people can use to make imitations of the original objects, skins, or clothing.

Also, the UUIDs (keys) of textures on a prim can be determined using a funky key combination. This was probably intended as a debug mechanism but should be removed. It doesn't give anyone an ability they couldn't get using a modified client, but it's a LOT easier; takes less technical skill and time investment. Given the key and a trivial script you can apply the texture to any surface of any prim.

Things that are relatively easy to steal:

* Textures -- easiest to steal.

* skins -- Pretty easy to steal. Takes some trivial photoshopping and use of a slightly modified client which has a VERY slow frame rate, along with sifting through captured files. Also requires being close to someone naked wearing the desired skin.

* clothing -- Similar to skin stealing, but also requires additional photoshopping skills -- not particularly high-level skills, though. I'm talking about non-prim clothing; prim clothing is made up of one or more objects.

* objects -- requires a substantially modified client (or 'bot'). Copies the appearance and structure of the object, but not the behavior (see scripts, below).

Things that are NOT easy to steal:

* scripts -- script contents are NOT sent to the client; they're executed on the server. Therefore, while someone can make a perfect-looking copy of a vehicle, the vehicle will not operate.

The remaining question is whether this kills content creation in SL. IMHO, it doesn't. But it sure does piss off content creators to see their works distributed for free; rightly so.

In the case of stealing skins and clothing, a new texture is created. I don't know why, on AR, LL can't delete the offending texture asset from the asset servers. True, this would render "missing image" for people who *thought* they got their content legally, but I still think LL should do it. This way, the most egregious cases of content stealing would be remedied. Folks might steal them for themselves, but would be less likely to unleash them as freebies or sell in quantities at low prices, so the scale of the harm done would be substantially lower.

Another form of "stealing" happens, when someone buys content with full permissions but only has authorization (by sales agreement) to pass the content along with restricted permissions (no copy or no xfer) -- and then goes and gives it away freely. There's little LL can do about this other than to add a new kind of permission for these cases. There was a better proposal for textures, but I don't remember the details. This problem happens for people who make stuff that they expect to be modified and/or bundled into other products.

IMHO, if LL had a better model for "OEM suppliers", content creators would make LOTS of innovative items that could be used by others to make really cool stuff, but they don't because they know that it will leak out. A great example of this is the MLP scripts, which are free, and make lots of great furniture possible. The reason that worked, though, is that the creator of MLP gave it away for free, bless his heart. SL could be a better place for residents if we could also have a profit motive for doing things like what the MLP creator did out of generosity.

Oops, sorry for the sidetrack!

/shrug - I wont link it here, but its so insanely easy to find with a Google search, I'm not sure how much good supressing discussion of how its done will be. If anything, I think content-creating folks should really grok just how easy it is for someone motivated to do so to 'rip' textures.

From what I understand, this isn't specifically an SL problem, but rather something that applies to any game that streams textures. What makes SL special, is users 'own' their content here, unlike other games. It has absolutely nothing to do with permissions in SL, and there really isn't much Linden can do to stop it, short of rearchitecting how Second Life works, and making sure residents understand the DMCA process.

if supressing this is a bad thing, lets just say the name on how to do it like some other idiot did it in another thread for #1 google result

hell, lets just paste the url in here to save them the trouble to open another tab and type in a google search

every one here knows how stupidly simple it is to steal textures, but luckily, not many know how to do it yet, so yea, supressing this issue is any thing but bad