Linden Labs Handing Over Users to the FBI

I just received a hot tip by email. Second Life's decision to turn virtual citizens over to the RL FBI has made international news.



http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/games/archives/2006/01/05/when_virtual_worlds_reflect_the_real_one_a_little_too_closely.html

How do you feel about LL turning users over to the FBI?

~Ulrika~

Makes me glad I'm not really running a 'splinter cell' via SecondLife, just tryingto make a similar game.

People screwed up the grid. Repeatedly. This is a Denial Of Service attack, in the simplest terms. Doing it repeatedly is intentonal behavior that caused a quantifiable amount of monetary damage and should not be tolerated.

Perhaps, locating and suing attackers would be more apprpirate. But LL decided to hand the names over to the FBI. It's possible more was happening that we are not privy too. (Not new with LL.)

Now. Alot of you may be thinking "OMG, The Feds R GONNA ARR3ST ME FOR SHOOTING MY FREiND LOL!". I doubt that. But...if you wanted to get paranoid... aw, forget it. Just don't say "I bombed that test" on the phone.

If something to LL appears to warrant telling the FBI, Im damn glad they did.

I have no opinion either way. I'll just wait and see how the whole thing pans out.

Sounds more like a PR move than anything substantive. No unauthorized access was used, the "platform" allowed arbitrary scripting including runaway self-replication.

There may well be a breech of contract with regard to the Terms of Service, but that is not the baliwick of the FBI so far as I'm aware. But then again with today's executive, it could entail a nasty interview and permanent network and phone taps on the doofus(es). I don't think any justice will result from this; in some ways it strikes me as griefing back.

Why not pursue it as a civil contract matter? Because it would be expensive for LL to pursue, complicated to demonstrate loss from the breech, and likely impossible to collect any judgement from the kid who pulled the stunt.

Yup, retaliatory griefing.

Strangely enough - so does this thread

A person or group of persons attacked this company and its livelihood. This attack resulted in extra man hours of labor for its probably already overworked staff, was a PR nightmare, happened on the eve of a major release and happened repeatedly. This is illegal and I'm not seeing where LL is in the wrong to prosecute. I hope they do and do so repeatedly so this kind of crap will stop. Griefing like this has been going on in MMOGs since some jackass decided it would be fun to kill Lord British in UO. The only place this kind of nonsense is tolerated is in online games specifically and the internet in general.

This toleration has, IMHO, led to viruses, spyware, and all kinds of other nasty shit that we all live with on a daily basis. If we'd bothered to crack down on this type of behavior in the first place maybe there wouldn't be so much of it.

Lets face it -- these people don't like it one bit when its done to them. I seem to remember a couple of DOS attacks against SA way back before you had to register and it had for-pay stuff on the site. Anyway I hope they really are turning names over to the FBI. Good for them. I hope they prosecute to the fullest extent of the law and I hope the prosecution is widely publicized. Time for this kind of crap to stop.

Yup, the night before the last few major releases we've had attacks. Its hurting their bottomline and if the same people are doing it, more power to LL.

LOL! Yeah, wasnt his name Aquaman? His character name that is.

I don't disagree that the attack was intentional or nasty or bad, nor do I think that LL should not try to prevent such in the future.

I'm not sure that it is a crime though. If reporting it to the FBI entailed that grid-crashing would stop, I'd say "cool". It is not clear that it will.

I don't think downtime and lost income from that downtime caused by the breech would be very easy to prove just by showing how much money they make when they are up as opposed to down.

I'm glad they did. No reason to roll over and take it when somebody is causing direct harm, purposefully, to your business.

coco

Maybe not a crime, but I'm pretty sure it's illegal. If not then hackers could try to crack amazon, paypal, try to DOS hotmail and waltz around boasting about it to their friend.

It wasn't all that hot a tip. I started a thread about that based on the CNet report covering this story about 3 weeks ago. So nyah!

I can write a forkbomb in one line of code and take down machines with it. Totally allowed by the C compiler. Doesn't make it right. If I cause the owner(s) of the machine(s) to spend enough money (paying overtime and such) to clean my mess up, the FBI will get involved if asked. They have some threshold value they use for this purpose - if you lose over a certain amount of money due to computer crime, they get interested.

The threshold is USD$5000 I believe. At that point it's interesting enough to investigate.

The July exploits required them to drop everything they were doing for about a week and a half. LL's programming team is at a few dozen last I'd heard. I'm sure they are over $5,000 in on this.

I feel very good about grid-crashers facing some responsibility.

Brilliant action!



However, I wouldn't get excited. There is a huge difference between 'turning over names' and prosecution.

Yet we don't know what followed. I suspect the action was on par with the grid crash itself.

The crashers essentially stated: "Look what I can do!" - and the Company responded with "Ok, look what WE can do!"

I doubt it will escalate much beyond that.

Not before time. Great result.

I'm all for it. The grid crashes cost a lot of people - inside and outside of LL - a lot of time and money.

Notice since LL went public with the FBI reporting (which many of us had asked for for a long time!) there haven't been any grid crashes, when before the announcement it was becoming a weekly occurance?

Regards,

-Flip

Sorry for the lack of clarity: proving to the court's satisfaction the damages is costly (expert testimony required) and tedious (the defense will present experts that say the exact opposite). I was not denying that there were losses nor that LL could put a rough valuation on them - simply that the courts typically don't accept those claims from the plaintiff without external corraboration and as justice is blind will likely take a middle ground between plaintiff and defendant valuation.

Civil lititgation is often much messier than one might like it to be.