Griefers and Fraud

Second Life is our world. I'm interested in a discussion on what we, as the SL society, can do to control griefing and fraud (elimination is probably too much to hope for). We can't rely on LL to ban Av's simply because we report them as griefers or defrauders--otherwise, one way to grief someone would be to report them as a griefer.

I believe being able to identify known griefers and defrauders is a great approach to take; one can then enact security measures or refrain from doing business. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any way to do this well enough at the present. Even using a credit card as identity verification, people can use "throwaway" credit card numbers such as those available online or via pre-paid gift cards. Identifying people in terms of their hardware or MAC address can be useful, if we don't mind treating multiple users of the same computers (e.g. family members or Internet cafes or computer labs) as the same people.

Avs can be "rated," and that's fine, except griefers can go around giving negative ratings and we've no way to distinguish between those who are truly griefers or defrauders and those who are simply the victims of griefers, and it in economic transactions it is fairly common for one party that has received a negative rating to respond with one of their own. Can we come up with some sort of improved rating system?

Being able to produce convincing evidence of griefing or fraud would also be helpful. I AR'd someone the other day for flopping around a certain grossly exaggerated portion of their anatomy in a PG sim, but nothing ever showed up on the Police Blotter. Am I right in thinking I may have helped my case if I'd managed to capture a screenshot of the incident from within the Report Abuse window (screenshots uploaded from one's own computer may also be photoshopped)? What other ways might I have been able to ensure the Av at least would not get away with it? (For a different kind of attack on my property today, I linked the object involved and a screenshot; if this incident doesn't show up on the Police Blotter, I'll be quite at a loss as to what standard of evidence LL is looking for.)

What about receipts? As I understand it, right now people could exchange no-mod, no-copy notecards expressing satisfaction with a transaction. Perhaps a cash register could be created and scripted to issue a receipt to two people after any objects have been linked, verifying that at least at one time both were satisfied with the transaction.

Is there a market in SL for escrow agents or notaries of some sort? They could hold funds, witness transactions, etc. But then the problem might be how to protect them from griefers whose sole object is to discredit them.

Any bright ideas?

Off the top of my head, something like punkbuster.

Have a central web server with a database of known greifers. Then have security objects on parcels, which simply detect all AV's nearby, and check to see if any of them are blacklisted. If so, they are ejected/banned.

The hard part would be creating a reliable method for entereing ppl into the blacklist. I would do something along the lines of votes. Say when someone is reported 5 times via a landowner to the website, they are blacklisted, and boom - banned from every land that has a security scanner.

It would take some scripting, both LSL and web (php), and a central database/web server. Wouldn't be too hard, i could write it in a week or so. Hehe, maybe that would be a good item to market and sell.

Your system sounds good, but as you mention the problem is the griefers guilds would probably be the biggest supplier of names of "griefers"--their victims. Or imagine a consortium of 16 m2 advertising landowners offering to blacklist the victim of your choice for a small fee.

Perhaps a system of trusted blacklisters to go with the ratings? That is, I could blacklist people that others on my trusted list have blacklisted. We could then use Lindens or some sort of SL guardian angels with good reputations as trusted blacklisters, or default to letting everyone blacklist except those on an exceptions list. Complicated, but I'd pay for it in L$. I imagine if you set it up, you'd also have strong motivation to keep the blacklist clean, and devise your own methods to do so. And if you started slipping in your vigilance, someone else would set up a competing service.

I can think of a fairly long list of avatars who have done nothing actually wrong, but who are unpopular enough that you could easily find five (or two dozen) people to vote them on to the blacklist. That's the problem with lawless majority rule.

Notecards don't carry any value. It shouldn't be hard for anyone to come up with a full permission notecard (or prim for that matter) made by anyone else, especially content creators, and then set no mod/no copy for next owner on it.

This is only likely to impact innocent people who end up on the list for whatever reason. Anyone who griefs isn't likely to hold on to their account long enough to be affected by it.

With as much political hate as is generated in forums, I would HIGHLY reccommend against any kind of blacklisting system. How hard would it be, to scare up 5 land owners to vote someone they disliked on the forums, into the blacklist? Everyone who puts down an opinion on an issue on these forums, has someone who wants them banned.

The problem with a blacklist, is that there is no method for appeals, no due process, no justice system. Just "mob rule".

So you create a system where large numbers of people use this allegedly "fair" system. Then you're out shopping and find that you can't go someplace. You get a friend to go in and get the info on the land owner, and you spend two days trying to link up with the land owner via IMs. When you finally do, he says "well you're blacklisted, so you're a known greifer"

The real issue with blacklisting systems like this.. is that This system won't stoip greifing. The greifers just roll up new accounts... and they're back in your land in 10 minutes.

I agree. No blacklisting systems... not in a world as SL. As some already pointed out it is too easy misuse the system towards someone or a group of people... and becomes a griefer tool it self.

And yes, it is too easy to reroll to another avatar.

When we talk about griefers in my opinion there is only one way to deal with it... learn, spread information about the used tricks and keep your eyes open.

Now exploiters are another matter and I think they can only be handled by Linden effective.

Morwen.

This sounds alot like Dale Glass' TrustNet HUD system. It works on a trust/referral system for whitlists and blacklists. Yes it runs on an external server.

Well, that was my idea for a simple solution. It does have major shortcomings, which is largely why i havent put much thought into actually developing it. The tougher but ultimately more effective solution is probably a combination of several things:

Landowner/Resident education on greifers
Many greifer attacks can be avoided with a little knowledge. For example, those stupid jail things people put you in can usually be escaped by sitting on them. If that doesnt work, you can sit on a nearby prim outside the jail. If there isn't one, rez one. Pushes and orbiters can be prevented with avatar attachments that 'lock' you in your current position, like the ones aubretec makes.

Good anti-griefer tools and defenses
Things like shields, security systems, anti-push attachments should be fine tuned, and possibly made free. It would be nice to develop a complete, open-source anti-griefer package, however open-source would make it too easy to reverse-engineer or defeat. However some kind of freeware or volunteer created item would be good. If something doesnt happen soon, we will be at war with griefers, they'll become as bad as spam.

Several features LL could add to help
One thing I think LL should add that would stop followers dead in their tracks, is the muting of sensors. All of these stupid follow objects, like the batman one and others use whats known as a sensor in their script to detect your position. Even though you mute the object, it's sensor can still detect you. Why not change it so when it's muted, it's sensor can no longer detect you? I realize this would have side effects, largely on land-protecting security systems--just mute the security system, and it doesnt detect you any more. However, if you dont want someone on your land, you should properly configure parcel access anyway, instead of relying on a script.

Better prevention of alternates of banned accounts. Currently when someone's account is banned for griefing, whats to stop them from just opening another one? Credit cards are easy to come by these days, so its not improbable that someone could create 10 or 20 alts. If their name was blacklisted, it would be alot harder for them to register simply with another card.

Global object ban/removal controls
From my understanding, there is currently no way for LL to remove all instances of an object, grid-wide. Each object has a unique key, including copies of a self-replicating object. This makes it difficult to quickly stop or remove a self-replicating object. I propose 2 methods to aid in stopping self-replicating objects, which may already be in place in some form; its hard to say without working for LL.

First, if every object had a digital 'fingerprint' which was generated from its properties, copes of an object would all have the same fingerprint. If anyone here understands MD5 hashes, then they know what I mean. For example, if an object is made of one sphere, of X dimensions, and Y contents, and Z properties, and so forth, then it has a fingerprint generated from all that. So no 2 items will have the same fingerprint, unless they are exact copies of each other. When a self replicating object is detected, you simply disable or delete all objects with X fingerprint. Even with the current system, i dont see why it wouldn't be possible to simply delete/disable all objects via their name.

Second, rely on information about an objects creator, or more importantly, the object ID that rezzed it. For example, object A rezzes a copy of itself, object B. Object B's creator would be object A. Object B rezzes a copy of itself, object C, whose creator would be object B. For a self-replicating object, this would create an entire heirarchy of the objects, from which you could traverse and delete/disable them all. In this example, you would delete object C, object C's creator (object B), along with any of object B's created objects. then you would delete object B's creator, and any of it's objects. You could simply follow this method all the way up/down the tree until it's all gone.

These are just a few of the idea's I'm tossing out there, i realize that there are probably side effects and/or drawbacks im not taking into account.

SLBANKLINK.COM

Have a look at this site, ladies and gents. Their system is a trusted peer based method of identifying and tracking miscreants, ne'er-do-wells and plain old thugs. There is an appeals process, and since everyone's value systems are different, it lets you choose whom you trust most to identify the bad boys. There is no unilateral judgement, and groups that churn out bans on decent citizens would quickly lose peer trust and become irrelevant. They've really thought this out.

That should be slbanlink.com (instead of slbanklink).

-peekay