Third Party Viewer Policy coming soon

I understand your points, but one (or LL) can't sit back and do nothing!!

In RL we go about our daily lives having to abide to rules, regulations & laws.....if we choose to break them and get caught...we pay the consequences.
I think really that's the only deterrent LL can offer, knowing that not much can be done on the technical side.
There are many ways to skin a cat......and if i were developing a copybotter viewer, in the back of mind will be the thought of the possibility of one day having my Viewer ending up on the screen of a Linden Employee. In such a case LL should pursue legal action for illegal use in the SL enviroment.......likewise with suspensions for Residents that choose to use them.

I think long term, that's all that can really be done.


It's the law of averages....you break a rule a hundred times over.....and on the 101st attempt you get caught!

I don't think anyone if trying to argue that .

But if you want to prevent non-certified viewers from connecting (which is something they have no intention of actually doing) or if you want to ban people who use a certain viewer then you're dealing with absolutes: you have to be able to identify a malicious viewer with 100% accuracy.

If there's any possible way for a viewer to masquerade as another - legitimate - viewer then you're not going to be able to either prevent it from connecting, or find who used it and you wasted a few weeks of development time getting things set up with nothing to show for it the second day it's up and running.

The "notecard exploit" was apparantly known about for the better part of a year which is really inexcusable. I'd much rather see LL act prompty on things that are less of a PR success (fixing an exploit that noone or only the reporter knows about won't get you cheers since noone will ever know) than spend time and effort on something that looks good rather than fix the actual root cause.

Like Kitty says, I also don't think anybody is saying that nothing should be done.

What I'm worried about is that something painful and destructive will be done that doesn't do anything to actually help the problem.

Blondin has mentioned "alt unification" publicly, so perhaps this is a possibility. I would imagine that it would be voluntary, though, so perhaps not so very useful in controlling grid access.
It may be for a reason which is not directly related to content theft - crime prevention in general. It is one thing for a business to encrypt IMs by employees (commonly done), another thing for a publicly accessible social networking site which aims to make 3D collaboration simple to do so. Specifically, the feds/CIA etc. may think it less than helpful for LL to provide an IM encryption feature.

ETA: I mean, end-to-end encryption which is not easily decrypted by LL. Encryption PROVIDED by LL for the purposes of preventing general eavesdropping, I could see.

Wow. You've managed to trot out that same tired analogy you used in the Age Verification /Adult Content discussions, dust it off, and get it going here. I AM, impressed Teggster.

like everyone keeps saying on this thread...there are no long term technical solutions for copying.

Fair enough, then make the punishment fit the crime (breach of TOS)...so those that choose to operate in that way, when caught....are severely punished. LL should not rule out legal action for those caught developing an "infringing" viewer and being used to log into SL.
If i were LL...i would make the very 1st legal action very high profile in terms of media coverage....that at least will send out a message to all the other script kiddies out there.

Listen...you don't even have to detect these viewers in game....all you need is just 1 person to step forward with information to the Lab where to download it from. LL can test the viewer and view the code...and take it from there. How does everyone know about Cyro Life, Thug Life and Neil Life....word of mouth & Forums of course.....LL knows them too!

Just as long as in the rush to do something, they don't make things worse.

So LL, WoW, and Online Banking shouldn't bother trying at all?

I think tthere are a lot of people arguing exactly that, they don't want LL to attempt anything at all incase it makes them jump through even one more hoop or god forbid lose any of their their god given right to 100% worldwide anomyinity.

And yet again we still have no shortage of people campainging for absoutely nothing to ever be done for fear of losing som misconseption that they and theives have a god given right to remain completely anoymnous.

Passwords aren't 100% effective either so might as well remove them to, they are a waste of time too.

Drivers Licences and car registration don't stop people having accidents or driving around without them so they are a failure too, why should anyone have to identify themselves in any incident on the road when there are people out there using false plates and licences.

So they should do something, ANYTHING, even if it doesn't help the problem at all?

LL don't have to come up with any technical solutions.....just make the punishment stiffer and enforce it......that and RL information of developers upon registration of 3rd party viewer.

Boy Lane also mentioned there should be some Server side work being done, now I'm not techie enough to know if those changes would help overall

No, I don't want to see Linden Lab do something for the sake of looking like they're doing something and they kill viewers that have functionality that the LL viewer doesn't. Nothing to do with anonymity. I don't want to lose that functionality while people running the content theft viewers continue along their merry way.

Are you saying that verifying users would have less than 1% effectiveness in preventing or dealing with content theft?
Sure it's not 100% solution, but it sure beets the 0% "stick your head in the sand" solution being called for by many people.
Locks don't stop 100% of theives either but yet wer still jump through hoops using them.

You can't punsh people if you allow them the right to infinte free anoymous accounts.

Stroker must have magic powers then since he managed to track down a "no payment info" to take to court without issue. There is no anonymity online, your name and address are always just a few subpoenas away.

If viewer creators won't submiot their RL details to LL for the priviledge of connecting to their grid, I would have to suspect they have something to hide.

And it's not impossible to stop unauthorised viewers connecting to the grid, many other servers restrict access to their data pretty well, sure a top level hacker can get past anything eventually but we are talking about low skilled content theives, not decent hackers.

Currently we have about 1% protection and many people seem to believe in the 21st century we can't improve this so we shouldn't bother trying anything.

Stroker was lucky and willing to put serious cash into the search, you don't hear about the people who haven't been able to be tracked down, and what are you going to do if the thief is tracked down to a small village in heckoslovakia, sue them with the mighty US court system? Or get them extradited for prim piracy?

So where's the threshold? If it meant alienating, say, 50% of the "good" people who work on the viewer & on bots, would you want LL to implement something that got content creators an extra 0.1% of protection?

What numbers are acceptable to you?

You keep insisting that people shouldn't be anonymous, but when it's pointed out that noone is really all that anonymous to begin with you contradict yourself by countering that it's not all that useful to have RL information.....

People alienated by the action of simply informing LL who they are for the purposes of the privilage (it's not a god given right) connecting a viewer of their creation to their grid aren't worth trusting in my opinion

Sure you can nearly track anybody down with enough effort and cash, but there always will be some you can't and even if you can you can't touch them short of paying a international hitman, I did not say nobody is capable of being anoymous, so no contradiction there.

You keep insisting that there's nothing that can be done to 100% fix the situation so we should try nothing?

No. Please re-read for comprehension.

No, we should not try any cockamamie scheme LL dreams up. They have shown they can't handle it. They need to start asking for help on these things, or outsourcing SL's management to someone who can.

There's a rather big difference between pointing out that you can't "fingerprint" *malicous* viewers with any kind of accuracy because identifying the client invariably relies on the client being honest about reporting itself which malicious viewers aren't going to do by definition and saying nothing should be done at all.

A year ago (more or less) people reported a permissions exploit to LL which subsequently ignores it until a few weeks ago a/several malicious viewers are freely available which use it to steal content (it's not *all* of the problem they present but it's one of the bigger ones compared to things like copybot) and (some) people start running around shouting that LL should ban all those naughty viewers.

If all that shouting was aimed at LL to ask why on earth they apparantly ignored those reports for the better part of a year then that might maybe be a bit more productive.

Again, it's not the whole problem with those viewers but take out the exploits and they're just a fancy copybot which has been around in various forms for 3 years now and the world hasn't ended so not that much of a big deal there.

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The other part is being naive in thinking that if you lay down rules that people who are by definition nefarious/malicious are actually going to somehow be impressed or inclined to play by those rules.