Latest 'Anti-Copybot' Spammer

We have all TPd in to some location and found our chat suddenly spammed with the old anti-copybot stuff that said "!stop" or something like that.

Well, last night I was in a store, looking for a hunt item. As usual, I TPd in and moved just slightly from the TP landing spot and then waited for things to rez a bit. I suddenly had a blue dialog box claiming it was some sort of anti-copybot protection, and asked me to verify that I really was LittleMe Jewell by clicking on the Yes option within a certain amount of time or I would be ejected and banned.

Okay, fine - I clicked the Yes option. The place had rezzed enough for me to find the store entrance and I proceeded to fly in.

Now, the way I do hunts (and even shopping for that matter), is I tend to fly to an area and hover there while I use my camera to look. Wouldn't you know it -- apparently this anti-copybot crap somehow keeps track of whether you have moved or not. EVERY freakin time I stayed in one spot for more than a few minutes, that damn verification dialog popped up again.

I think I clicked YES to verify I am LittleMe Jewell at least 10 freakin times before I needed to log out -- and I still have not found the damn hunt item, meaning I have to go back there. If I did not need the LM from the hunt item to get to the next location, I would not even bother -- and I will probably check a few of the various blogs to see if I can find out the next store without going back to this one.

I have every intention of sending this store owner a message to let them know that I will never ever shop in their store - it would have been different if it had only been the very first one when I landed (even if I still consider that to be dumb also). I most definitely do not want to have to click a dialog box every few minutes when shopping -- not to mention that I will often get tied up in an IM or even go afk for RL things while shopping.

So....... have any of you been seeing this latest and greatest pain-in -the ass spam product? Are store owners really so clueless as to think that their customers will stay customers with that kind of crap?

Those have been around for a while, fortunately they haven't been very popular. Maybe word finally got out that "copybot" stuff isn't just for bots any more?

I saw one like that.. it asked if I was Kokoro Fasching, with a Yes/No/Maybe. I keep meaning to go back there and click maybe. It only asked once though. One that keeps asking is just griefing now. It only needs to ask once, period.

Which hunt are you working on, so I can avoid that hunt.

Sounds like a great way to get you to agree to something you might not want to.

Pep (The question on the screen need not be what you are really clicking "yes" to! )

I've seen those a few times. Some seem to target NPIOF avatars only.

The one time I griped about it I got back "you must be a copybot and now you're on my ban list" despite the fact that I'd not only successfully negotiated the dialog but thought I had passed the Turing test with her.

It is the Satisfashion Hunt - stop # 46. I actually found that the Hunt's blogsite has all the stores listed with small hints -- of course I found that website right after I actually found the damn hanger in this spamming place.

In any case, if you do that hunt, just skip that stop and use the website (http://slsatisfashion.blogspot.com/2009/07/hints-and-stores.html) to get to location #47.

The truly sad thing about those is that it is very very easy to code a bot that can respond to the dialog. I did so once as a proof of concept because this guy kept insisting that it was impossible to defeat his super-failsafe-crackproof-anti-copybot-system. I just threw some code in that listened for dialog messages, compared against a regex, and responded appropriately. He did get the point, though.

Probably took all of fifteen minutes to code, compile, and log in.

.

Yeah, but obviously she failed the Turing test with you.

I had no idea artificial stupidity was that advanced.

I encountered this on a hunt back last Easter and I noticed the store owner was online so I IM'd him and told him how annoying this was and how ineffective the protection was. We had a surprisingly civil conversation and I told him he was more likely to be turning customers away than protecting his stock from copybot. He was surprisingly receptive and more worried about lost sales, so he decided to turn the damn thing off (which I went back to verify a day later just out of interest). He was disappointed as the device had cost a lot and he had not understood the technical reasons, until that point, of why protection was just so much snake oil.

Ooh, true. Scary. :/

LittleMe I haven't run into this, no. But a neighbor at the roadside place has copybot on something or other (nothing that I can see would be worth a copybotter's time but oh well) and the thing spams me every time I land there. It's very annoying. They have their land up for sale too but so overpriced...sigh.

But that store is going about things the wrong way in my opinion. Talk about losing every customer in order to possibly protect against a few.