A way to deal with texture theft... but it will cost us, would you put up with it?

Oh, I was talking about how it's getting "abused". I suppose there really is no good solution, being that it really is something out of LL hands. That is unless they go out and start investigating each case, which will only tax the staff even more.

And no, I wasn't joking. He was having like a mad man stating the idea of a program that checks to see if a certain program is running is comparable to cops busting down his door and searching his house.

A better analogy would be letting the cops search your house daily, with no probable cause or due process, as cost of living in a city.

I would not want to live there.

Hit control alt delete... see those programs?

Thats what a scan would do, it would just read the names of those programs and check them against a list of known hacks just as any virus scanner does.

It wouldnt delve through your C drive, your D drive, or your secret stash of pornography.

Unless, of course, you have those open while running SL....

Not really, the porn would show up as winamp, windows media or whatever you use to play it.

Your c:/ and d:/ wouldn't be scanned, they're part of explorer which is the windows browsing program, even if you opened notepad, it wouldnt read the text in it, just check "notepad.exe" against their list of hacks.

Obviously a good hacker could hex the name into a new name, but a good hacker is one that is descrete... not these kids selling loads and loads of textures they don't own.... unless someone does it for them they'll be posting (on the programs page, or a hacker site) "Omgz, ur program sux, it crash SL lik erytime I play!" and that will be that.

So no, it wouldn't be delving into your love of furry chicks welcome to the fandom ^_^

Ever heard of a rootkit anyone? Hello!

Ever hear of punk buster?

Rootkits are how you get past punkbuster--I've seen it in action.

Rootkits hide behind $ and & calls. I know all about them myself and they are easy to ferret out now that they've become popular among hackers and virii people have had to learn and make software to detect them.

Funny thing is most of these kiddies wouldn't be able to find the file after hiding it with a rootkit... wasted harddrive space and a lesson they should take to heart I guess.

It doesn't (shouldn't) pay to cheat.

I know HOW it would work. I've also said why I'm absolutely against it. I'm NOT submitting to such a search to prove my innocence. And to Tren I never said anything about busting a door. The point is just because a search is ONLY looking for something illegal/cheating doesn't mean it isn't an invasion of privacy or that it should be tolerated. What part of freedom did you not learn? Just because this is a digital "vitual" world doesn't mean we have to give up all our freedoms in the name of security.

I'm just gonna throw this out one more time since it seems to keep getting forgotten:

NO COMMUNICATION WITH THE OUTSIDE WORLD = NOT SPYWARE.

It does not bother me that Valve Anti-Cheat is required for me to play HL2 online. As for GLI etc., I see three problems.

#1, if GLI or any of the others are open source, or if they're closed source and the person working with them knows a thing or two about how executables work, it would be child's play to modify either the source or the binary to have a totally different signature than any known copy of any interceptor out there. You'd have to write some kind of heuristic check to see whether the opengl32.dll you're using was the real opengl32.dll that talks to your graphics card, or whatever interceptor, and that is not trivial.

#2, there are legitimate uses of GLI etc., such as have been mentioned already - exporting meshes and the like. I saw a picture of the dragon sculpture in the Welcome Area suiperimposed over some 3D scene that was definitely not generated in SL.

#3, let's say LL decides to take a hard line and say "we don't care about #2" and figures out a really keen way of handling #1 (heuristic check or whatever.) This will stop SOME people, but not all. Eventually you'd have someone writing wine-SL-texture-stealing-HOWTO and anyone with a Linux partition and a few minutes could get in and pick up where they left off.

Worth doing? Maybe! Complete solution, or even close? No. Would I stop using SL? No.

I think from the user standpoint, the best solution is not to base your business on textures. It's not fair and it stinks, but that's the environment.

The day SL starts using anything like this is the day I pack up and leave. I absolutely love it here, but after working as a computer tech (aka spyware killer) for a year and a half, I refuse to submit to a monitoring application because of a problem that doesn't even affect me (my textures are all specialized, so anyone stealing them would either be advertising for me, or they'd look pretty silly).

I just think that anything that could reduce the performance could potentially be a bad idea (not saying OUTRIGHT that it's a BAD idea). I'd definitely still go on SL, but I'd be really disappointed in getting lower framerates. I've never seen a single cheatblock/punkbuster type of protection system that doesn't affect performance.

The preformance hit would by my only concern really.

If it isn't sending out data and just closing the client... thats not spying.

As for open source?

I think its going to be the end of SL for profit... because SL creations are a lot like music, someone just has to move their character to a sim run by another person who hacks the client and controls, drop an object for them to pirate and boom, they've got a copy...

The business might become the game again.

What's really funny about this thread is you don't even need GLI to swipe textures, nor does SL need to be running and this has been the case for quite some time. On top of that, there's other ways of skinning that cat beyond what's already out there that would be far more efficient than GLI and could be made completely outside the bounds of Waden-like scanning.

So, yeah, sure, have LL waste their time making a *cross-platform* (good luck) Warden-like that essentially does dick to solve a problem with no real solution. It'll also shut out the few people doing actual creative things with GLI/OGLE like exporting builds to actual decent modelers for further work.

I don't want it on my computer. Its spyware if it gets installed beside the client program, and runs parallel.

This is a vehement NO to this proposal.

I try to keep my computer clean. I definatly don't like spyware, which is why i don't play world of warcraft (unless it's emulated). I know how the emulators work, and even have one installed so i know that part is safe. As i stated before. Warden was created by paranoid game developers... Just let the hackers have their fun dammit. They will get bored and leave eventually.