Has anyone seen ANY sign of the old "copybot"?

Someone is selling new and "updated" versions of the spammy old "copybot protector" script that IM's people with "!quit". This one is particularly annoying because it mutates its name so you can't scan for it and let the buyer know.

Now so far as I know only the original version of copybot accepted "!quit" messages, later versions ignored them, and those old versions were broken pretty quickly by changes in the protocol. So they serve no useful purpose at all, and haven't for about a year... all they do is annoy people.

And because of the quirks in the SL scanners you can be at the opposite end of the next sim over and still get messages. I've had people thinking *I* was running the things because I had the only other parcel in official scanning range.

Am I off base, is there any technical reason for this creaky old placebo to still be around?

No reason at all to have them anymore. By the time people started putting those silly things out, they were already useless.

With the client open-source, you don't even need a bot nowdays.

there's defatly still a copybot problem of some sort floating around. my best freind is getting her unique clothing copied and resold by some rather lousy artists lately.

If the clothes don't look exactly the same, it's somebody copying her ideas. Not that that's a good thing, just that it's not a copybot.

You don't need copybot to copy clothes, there are much simpler ways to do that sadly.

Copybot doesn't work anymore, but there are manual and semi-manual ways to copy everything but scripts- and these things have been in place since before the CopyBot scare of Aught Six.

I beg to differ, Stroker Serpintine is suing a guy who figured out a way to copy his scripts...

I personally have no idea how he's doing it, but it apparently can be done.

I think that's more likely to be a permissions exploit than something like copybot, Johan.

I'm talking about well-known and documented procedures. Scripts in protected objects cannot be easily obtained by the general SL public, although all other assets can. The Stroker thing is either a privately-held exploit or the result of a permissions screw-up/bug, so I consider scripts to be more or less safe.

/me sighs..

Not really a very effective way, but if it's constantly spamming, try a "fake crash" (unplug the network cable) and/or logging off to try and get the scripted IM to go offline which will give you an exact location in the e-mail message.

Scripted IMs really should have their origin location listed in-world as well .

(messages of the form 'there's still some kind of copybot program around...')

The fact that people are copying textures has nothing to do with this.

The "copybot protector" will do nothing to stop anyone from copying anything. People can copy textures because the only way Second Life can display a texture on a surface (be it avatar, prim, or particle) is by sending that texture to your computer. Once that texture is on your computer, it can be copied from one part of your computer to the other.

* Encrypting the texture makes no difference. It has to be decrypted to be displayed on your screen, and it can be decrypted at this point.

* LibSL makes no difference. You can still extract any information you want without libsl.

* Open-sourcing the client makes no difference. The client is on your computer, under your control, you can patch, trace, monitor, debug, and crack it.

The only thing that can even hope be protected in SL are scripts, and the limitations of LSL mean that it's not that hard to reverse-engineer any script just by monitoring its behavior.

Copybot was one particular mechanism to extract textures and prim shapes from SL, one that required frequent updates to remain compatible with SL. The particular version that responded to the "!quit" message was obsolete and no longer functional within days of release, and later versions (yes, there were later versions) did not pay any attention to it.

At least that's what I thought. But there are people buying these things and swearing that they're "logging kills". I suspect that these are agents moving into and out of sensor range within one sensor cycle of the script, but I thought I'd check here to see if there's anything more than that.

Doesn't seem there is.

/me sends an IM to Argent saying that she's logged a kill

No! 2 kills!! 3!!!

Have you tried my new version? 27 kill messages, guarenteed.

Thank you so much for making my day! Goddam hedgehogs are too much trouble to eat, too. Muttergrumble.