Some Thoughts on Texture Ripping and Theft

Easy right?

Hmm i just tested it with my Dominus and couple other items, but clicking in any of them with eyedropper produces only tooltip "you do not have this texture in your inventory" and that's it. Does the copying thing work in the 1.11.0.11 build? Didn't upgrade to that one yet. o.O

edit: oh wait. now i see... eek. result of million monkeys with code typewriters approach, i guess >.<

This is still unacceptable.

Never before have I needed to worry about what my textures were set to when I applied them to an object because there was no way they could be removed from the object by an end user. Now LL has given everyone the ability to rip off textures from an item. I did not sell those items with the agreement or intention that people should be able to reuse my textures on other items they own.

Now, after 2 years of creating objects that people had no easy way to rip my textures from...and thus never having to worry about what perms were on the textures when I applied them...LL has decided to hand people access to my work for free.

If its true that these ripped textures can not be transferred afterwards, that is at least a small blessing...but does not make this acceptable at all.

I never needed to worry about what the perms were set to before, as the texture could not be removed from the item. If I wanted to work on my alt...I simply gave her a full perm set of textures to use. Did I think to set that full perm texture back to no perms? No, of course not...no one was gonna have access to it but me and my alt why bother? Now LL has just handed everyone the key to the vault...great job.

Imagine that for the last 3 years, no end user of a purchased product had the ability to access the "content" section of a product. Scripts couldn't be accessed by a buyer, so most scripters would likely not bother with permissions on them as there was no way to get at em to rip off the scripts, right? Then one day LL just added a lovely new "tool" that opens the Content section of items you own...what would then happen to all those scripts that could never be accessed before then?

This sort of drastic and massive change to how a core process works should never have been considered without also considering that all existing products needed to have the textures on them set by default to no perms as part of this change and there should have been a massive info campaign alerting content creators to such a damaging and drastic change in something that has never had to concern us before now.

Hell..they thought to change the default settings on prims set to "light" under the old light settings to "full bright" under the new change and advertised it to content creators rather extensively so we knew of the backend changes. Here? No warning, and apparenyly no change of existing textures on objects to a default of no perms either. Completely irresponsible.

Zoe, I was able to do it on a no permissions texture setup by Fade Languish.

Great! Guess it's time for me to find another line of work. Seems LL has decided to kill off Texture artist as a viable option.

The fallout of this will likely have extreme and far-reaching permenant effect on the economy if they do not disable this theft tool immediately.

(Yes, I know I am being a tad bit dramatic. But for the first time in 2 years here LL has really managed to piss me off...and that is neigh on impossible to do actually. Livid would be a better word actually. As if content creators didn't have enough trouble with texture theft already...lets just make it so the theives don't even have to work for it!)

I suspect it was an accident. It apparently was not possible in 1.11.0.9. See Joannah Cramer's post.

I would certainly hope so, but in the end it doesn't matter if its a bug or intentioanl, the effect will be the same.

People bitch a lot every time a new update comes along. People bitch at change just because people don't like change. Yes, and LL has made many bugs, many mistakes and some that have even been severe...like the big perms issues a year or so ago now. But never before now have they so completely secrewed up a single update so badly and with so many potentially disasterous results as this one.

I work in the game industry on MMORPGs. I understand the complexity, the stress, the long hours and the huge work load that must be completed with far fewer people than is realistic. I know the challenges of this sort of platform well. That is why I have for 2 years been more likely to explain to others how easy it was for a bug to be introduced and how hard it can be to find and fix it than I was to bitch mtself. People have called me a fangirl and a LL apologist...but I considered it more simply being realistic.

This update however is in my opinion a flat out shoddy piece of work. Major back end changes were made without proper supervision, testing, and in the case of this "tool" apparently without even basic understanding of the ramefications.

The Issues with Estate tools, the Script disabling issue that allows you to in a single stroke destroy your entire sim, the snapshot tool that fails to take into account all the uses people put snapshots to and has now made many of them impossible, and this...this "tool" that apparently was not thought out for more than 30 seconds before implementation.

Yes...I am angry now. I was opening my new store in my new sim next Friday and releasing two months worth of new content I had been saving up for the event...and in the past few days I have had to worry instead about if one of my estate managers might destroy the sim accidently with a bugged button, have had the preperations for the opening brought almost to a halt by bugs that make texture selection, naming and photo taking for the new products take 4 times longer than before...and now THIS!

EDIT: Oh, and lets not forget the other potentially devasating bug that Michi just reported...that members are now randomly becoming officers in groups. Nothing like having your entire business, land and builds sold out from under you by someone in a simple update group that gets their hands on officership and sells the whole store to themselves to ruin your day...

Just batten down for now and delay opening if you must.

I'm still waiting for Torley to reply.

To clarify; the behaviour of 'colour picker' thing seems to be the same in both 0.9 and 0.11 client -- you still get the message texture doesn't belong to you and that's it, it doesn't get applied on your own object or anything. The way to get lower quality texture no matter what permissions seems to have more to do with texture picker itself and now that i've upgraded to new client version i have no way to tell if it was like that in 0.9 ^^;

Either way i seriously doubt it was intentional but then intentional or not hardly matter given the damage that can be done with it :/

Well, we better pray they fix it fast. Because I don't like the look of what I'm projecting.

Torley!!!!!

What are you all doing?!

Discussing exploits is a great way to get your stuff stolen. Don't want your stuff stolen? Don't discuss exploits!

Please bug report them with "EXPLOIT" in the title and then IM a Liaison or Bug Hunter with the RT number you receive in your email. Explain it's an exploit and that QA needs to know about it *now*. The Linden will email us and we'll get on it ASAP.

If that's not fast enough for you, IM Brent Linden. My IM's go to my phone and I'm very willing to jump on bugs like this for you.

Please, to protect your creations and your fellow residents' creations, do not discuss exploits. You're only hurting yourselves when you do!

All that said, this bug has been entered (thank you to all who did bug report it) today and I am lobbying to get it escalated. However, I can't promise a fix time frame. Please know that we do consider this a serious issue, but we do not want to run the risk of releasing code that has not been properly tested.

Hey everyone, as you know, we're on it. I apologize I didn't get here earlier--SL Answers is relatively slow. MUCH faster is to contact Brent as he suggested.

If you need to reach me about something essential, please use direct email (torley@lindenlab.com) *not* forum messages because they can't be prioritized and scanned easily. Especially on a weekend where I've been crying all day (long story, I won't get into details).

I'm watching for all incoming Resident feedback on this. Super important, but just wanted to reaffirm we are aware.

Whew

Aw Hope you`re feeling better.

Oh I say, this is comforting, good to know.

Sadly the seriouness of this issue means that many designers are taking breaks or packing it in altogether and this is pretty sad for SL over all and for the SL consumer who will be losing all the wonderful new designs that these talented people won't be making anymore. Just today I was told another designer is planning to give it all up and that is a tragedy I think.

I hear your frustration but if it weren't discussed here most people who could be affected by it would never have known it was a problem. When someone reports a bug there is no contact afterward, that person has no way of knowing if someone is immediately recieving it and dealing with it or if it is waiting to be added to a long list at 9am monday morning. It seemed logical to warn fellow residents I'm sure.

It is good to hear the problem is being worked on. However, wouldn't it actually be fairly simple to just take the new toy away, no new code involved? Forgive me if I'm clueless, just wondering.

I do believe what he ment was that we shouldn't give out details explaining how the exploit is done, or details that may lead up to how the exploit is done. It's one thing to say "There's an exploit out there that does this; you can help protect yourself if you do that", and another to say "There's and exploit using the *whatever* when *whatever* is done" and such.

I will quote (with their permission) something the developer of this so-called program said to me in an e-mail discussion...

The conclusion this developer came to was digital watermarking. I know it's not 100% fool-proof but that and credit card verification (or some form of trustworthy contact information to track guilty ones down) are pretty much our only options as far as I can see for now.

EDIT: Oh yea, those and then just not creating anything at all is the other option. Which is where people have mentioned will be the fall of Second Life's talented, creative economic community.