Programmed Grief - Just my opinion but.....

Okay I am not sure if anyone besides me has considered this......
But I think that the people who are responsible for all of the grid attacks,
yes the ones who have created some brilliant objects in SL which will cause grief to the whole grid, while yes they should be punished for all of the problems and down time they have caused would make valuble assets to Linden Labs.

Reasoning?

Why not have someone who knows how to cause grief be on the right side of preventing grief? Why not have a hacker trying to prevent hackers?

The down side to this however is that if they are insistant on causing problems giving them any power would only further agitate the problem.

But this is only my humble opinion, feel free to let me know yours.

I don't think the griefers are very intelligent people at all. They're probably just bored individuals that figured out some scripting and thought, "Hey, if I turn this up to incredibley high numbers... and added some other annoying scripts that spawn when this spawns...I CAN CAUSE ANNOYANCE!"

Supposedly those scripting the actual programming at LL are as smart as these griefers to understand their own scripts. I'm sure an LL programmer could crash every sim in one corner of the map or more with the knowledge he should know as well as causing a mess that takes days to clean up. We don't need any trouble makers working at LL.

I would have voted but there wasn't a choice for "Put a bullet in their head"

I'm not good at scripts myself but I understand the concepts of them and it wouldn't take a massive amount of intelligence to make "greifer" scripts.

Like any programming system the more power you put into the programming the more alternative ways to use and/or abuse it.

the fact that people can greif is a testiment to Lindens somewhat trust in building some very good tools for people to use. The fact that people are abusing this privilage is by no means a reason to give them a job.

if you relate this to internet virus "script kiddies" and I think a good chunk of these greifers are. Its not the genuis of the person releasing the attacks its just information that they've havested from smart people that wouldn't abuse it and a few settings and script tweaks.

Intelligent people wrote the scripting laungue. Intelligent people wrote tutorials and offered exellent code examples and assistance for good scripting. People with few skills turned that around and made all that they where given and learned into "greifing"

Welcome the "script kiddies" to SL. 13-18 year olds with very little parental guidance and to much computer time.

Lets play FBI and do a bit of profiling. Obivously the grid attackers dont want to be in SL very bad, as we all know and certainly they do too...the grids will be down for hours.

They must be above average scripters..and know the inside workings of SL, holes, weak spots, achilles heals, etc...

They must not really give a flip about the game or its players...hmmm its almost as if its a disgruntled x employee..or someone that knows the bones of the game extremely well...

and they can hide behind alts to their hearts content...

hmmm makes you wonder..if a new game is about to come out..maybe they are taking care of the competition ahead of time...

just a few conjunctures of my own, but then i thrive on conspiracy theories

btw, the best firewall i ever got was from a hacker, the only one he couldnt get thru, just a tidbit for thought...

Yes, unfortunately writing griefer scripts is fairly trivial. Hiring them would not be the equivalent of hiring highly skilled hackers to help with your bank internet security.

It's a lot easier to break stuff than build it up. The attacks that I've seen have involved techniques that aren't hard to figure out, some of them I'd already thought of but hadn't had the time to track down. And getting rid of all of them would impoverish SL... you can't get around Godel's Theorem with clever coding.

So there's no great untapped source of scripting skill in the criminal community that LL can draw on. They'd just be hiring people they already know shoudln't be hired because they're untrustable.

"Hire a crook" schemes rarely pay off, and where someone labelled a crook is hired and does good it's almost always someone who just screwed up technically and an experiment got free... not the people who deliberately launch an attack. This wouldn't be any exception.

These people are not particularly intelligent.

As has been pointed out by others, bringing down the grid does not take a lot of smart coding. I would bet there are at least a thousand current SL residents who could take down the grid, but don't because they are responsible and respectful SL citizens.

The only real requirement for bringing down the grid is the attitude of a petulant 5 year old child.

Fully aware that this will get lost in the mix but I just thought about it and here's my idea:

Due to the fact that I'm an admitted "scriptard", I honestly don't know if this is feasible.

I realize that replication is a major factor of the in-game economy. However, even the most popular and sought-after item [probably] wouldn't be replicating at the rate that the griefers' items do.

Therefore, what about a check set in place where the system would run a check when a self replication hits a certain point.

For instance:
Each time a vendor or a notecard giver or ANYTHING that's set to replicate itself hits x-amount of items in x-amount of time, the system runs a check to make sure those amounts in that time frame are reasonable.
Reasonable could be set to 50 in 3 minutes (I think that's relatively fast by any standard). If the script is moving at a faster rate or higher volume, that particular item is shut down.

If it's do-able that might alleviate the problem of having the entire grid shut down, as that particular item would be disabled.

Again, I'm self-admittedly NON-TECHY. It made sense on my first cup of coffee, though

You forgot an important choice:

Ban for life, then track them down in RL, and get their criminal Player arrested!

These crashers are breaking several US Federal laws, regarding making attacks across state lines to interfere with the services of a business. It does not matter whether the service is a game, or a national bank, it's still a denial of service attack, and their are laws that make that illegal.

Of course, I personally favor tracking them down and hanging them in a 'crows cage' below the Golden Gate Bridge, until they die of exposure, and then leaving the corpses there to rot, as an example to would-be future offenders. But sadly, they won't let us use such methods any more.

Andrew Linden had the same idea a few days ago, it seems: /54/90/105838/1.html
It's a great idea, but there are always possible drawbacks for crafters who use these functions for legitimate work, like automatic rezzing of large houses.

If we restrict liberty to attain security we will lose them both.
Benjamin Franklin.
Old Benny had a point there. As much as I appreciate all tries to block such attacks, I still think that the old simple credit card / paypal verification during account registration would do the same trick without potentially affecting existing sales objects.

its gonna turn out to be a 10 year old from Sheboygan (sp). mark my words

I'd just like to share my experience as an Island Owner.

I originally left my estate open to all comers.
Result: daily griefing and mysterious rezzed objects

For four weeks, I then set my estate to ban "no payment info" and set no create and restrict push.
Result: one particle attack from a defined individual who I could ban (the griefer could not rez a particle object and had to use an attachment).

After complaints that some genuine visitors could not access the sim as they "could not get a credit card", I opened it up again to no payment info accounts. (fortunately I left no create on so I have entirely escaped the gray goo attacks).
Result: daily griefing.

I then closed down no payment info.
Result so far: one particle attack in the three weeks from an individual who I banned. Also, many genuine people who "could not log payment info" magically managed to log payment info with LL.

For me, this experience speaks for itself regarding "free" accounts and payment information.

/esc

yeah reward them for being a pain in the ass. No way!

Sad thing is, it isn't kids all the time. It's grown adults.. who have nothing better to do with their time.

All these griefing techniques are things i could have done on day 1 of my account creation. To think that these methods havent been shielded yet really upsets me. Sticking a particle script into a ball that gives out copies to everyone using a sensor is as easy as slicing bread... The thing that keeps me from doing this is i dont wish to piss people off. I have this thing inside me called common sence.