Be nice to LibSL, or... ?

Since my blog comment on this is "awaiting moderation" for hours now and won't likely show up, I'll just post this here.

Source: http://blog.secondlife.com/2006/11/14/use-of-copybot-and-similar-tools-a-tos-violation/#comments

I happen to find the first sentence most interesting. What exactly does that mean... "the more you yell the more we (hacker/developer types) want to do things to the contrary"? It looks like an open threat to me. We're still playing nice right now, but if you cross us we might act differently. Sorry, but I fail to read and interpret it in any other way.

Well, we have seen already what LibSL can do. DRM never lasts, so the LibSL group has to tear it down right away instead of allowing it work as long as possible. As Chip wrote on the blog, they're kicking down a house door and stealing the furniture just to inform the house owner that it's possible. How is this any different from bringing down the grid, just because it can be done?

The grid attackers we endured in the past were of this "hacker/developer type" as well. Break something just to prove that you're smarter than the system - how would you feel if LL hired someone with this mindset, to help with the grey goo fence development? For me, developers and hackers are entirely different types. One builds something up, the other one tears it down.

The statement that the LibSL team is torn between good and evil, in combination with Cory Linden's statement that "libsecondlife is an incredibly important part of Second Life’s development and community" worries me a lot. Do we really need a programmer team exploiting every security hole, if the result is that LL tells us afterwards the hole can't be closed and we have to live with it? Shouldn't LL rather work against hackers instead of siding with them?

What these "hackers" are TRYING to do is GOOD. They're trying to make new tools that you can use to make your Second Life even better!

To sit here and question the motives of people you don't know and haven't met is just plain wrong. Perhaps Jesse could have said it better, but the point is that people have spent all day demonizing him, John, Baba, and a few others who contribute to libSecondLife and painting them all as "teh evil hackerz!" when in fact, theyre working hard to understand the technical details of SL so that they can bring you the things you're asking for!

The kind of crap that Jesse was talking about wasn't about Linden Lab saying "no", it's people like you who want to paint others in the worst possible light.

Cause I find that nothing makes SL better than copied me's running around, with the info provided in a nice little package by them as a gift to others to abuse it.

What, praytell, makes you believe that any toys you can come up with to "make better Second Life" actually outweight taking away ability of these very people to make RL living in SL?

just curious where this god syndrome of "i know what's best for everyone and if you don't agree then tough titties" comes from...

I haven't met them, other than on the blog where I felt threatened by the comment above, and inworld where their agents or copycats were selling their software. If their hard work is to tear down the little existing security we have, I'm totally against it. And I never asked them for anything. I ask Linden Lab's dev team if I want any new features, thank you very much. I don't need an open source client and I sure need no stealing tool.

Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised when we're dealing with guys who chose names like "Dr." and "Lord"?

So far, I haven't seen any evidence that anyone's livelihood has been taken away. CopyBot does nothing that I couldn't do myself, by hand. I could very easily buy anything that CopyBot duplicates, get the UUID's of the textures, and re-build the prims from scratch in pretty short order.

Aside from that, this was never intended to be anything more than a tool for testing prim creation. It's unfortunate that someone latched on to it and is selling it, but I seriously doubt that the trend will last for long, and you certainly have no evidence to suggest that sales of new items have fallen off. The one thing that IS certain is that those people who are "making a living from SL" will make exactly L$0 if they pack up their store and leave for good.

Yeah, thats why it was named "CopyBot".

:groan:

It's a bot, and it copies existing prims. It's a descriptive, accurate name. According to every naming convention I can think of, that's an appropriate name.

What would you have called it? PrimInsertionDebugTool401a?

What more evidence do you ask for? People are creating full perm copies of any unscripted prim attachment like shoes, hair, etc. That's more than enough evidence for me. I really fear the next improvement of my SL experience.

You might be able to do the same by hand. If something has no modify permission and you're unable to simply write off the values, you might be one of the very few persons able to rebuild it anyway. But then you have enough skills to develop own products instead of risking to be caught stealing. Enabling the average unverified Joe to do the same as a skilled hacker without having the skills is something entirely different. A few talented persons, careful about how far they go, I can live with. But not hordes of kids who find it cool to copy their entire avatar and hand it out to a dozen friends.

I think it'll take some time for the tool use to spread and it's hard to tell exactly how it winds up with LL changing mind whether they're going to persecute its users or not, but i think you can at least agree that it's reasonable to expect a tool which easily allows to copy items that otherwise couldn't be as easily copied... can have impact on sales of in-world goods?


Sorry, but you just pointed out yourself Copybot does something you couldn't do by hand. Creating exact copy of the item without even need to buy it in the first place.


Are you telling me none of the authors realized what its alternative uses could be? Because if they did, then i still need to question decision to include it into public source code repository in the first place. And if they didn't, then i'd have to question their common sense...

tool for testing prim creation?

Sounds so much less threatening does it not?

Of course, to test prim creation we have to intercept the geometry between server and client. Oh, and run around the grid showing it off, name it CopyBot and post it up on a website where anyone can grab it.

I would have called it "Back-It-Up", for example. And I would have implemented a check of ownership rights and creator permissions. The latter is what LL developers would have done, and that's why I don't want any freelancer team to work on client-side tools.

bull poo

You're reading in something that's not there: I can build anything I can see, whether or not I own the object. At least CB has to be TP'd to a location and be in close physical proximity to do the same. I could do the same myself from 2 sims away if I turn up the view distance.

True, I suppose I couldn't get the UUID's of the textures, but good ol' GL Intercept can get that.

Well, now everyone else can do it too. Isn't that nice?

Well yeah, what did you expect?

Hacking groups are always like this.

I can relate, my personality has always been one against negative "training"- If im doing somethin wrong, help me out of it and itll go well, if ppl just curse me and tell me how wrong I am- I get worse!


Anyway, im no surprised, im sure they have the power to completely overthrow SL, which would partially explain why LL is bent over for them. That and the fact from the looks of it they do have a lot they could offer for the betterment of SL.

Personally, i have not heard of this group until I found out about copybot, and I have not bothered to read anything on the group either. Shrug.

I can see LL bein scared to ban anyone from the group for fear of relatiation.

I mean, ya know- lets not forget about how the government highers kids theyve caught hacking them.

Everyone else always could. Setting up CopyBot from source is more difficult than rezzing a prim.

This is interesting. How do you get the prim positions and dimensions to match the original when you cannot actually view them, and are left pretty much to eyeballing from up to two sims away?

(a honest question, i can't exactly imagine it being done with any sort of reasonable precision, but then am not a prim builder)

oh really

That's plain wrong. The vast majority of residents wouldn't know how to steal a texture or to rebuilt a modify-protected linkset. And the ones who have the talent to rebuilt any linkset from scratch, just by eye, don't have a need to steal. They produce own wares instead. Now everyone who doesn't know what a torus is has exactly the same possibilities, and many of them will likely lack the conscience not to use them.

You can zoom in on any object you can see. With camera constraints turned off, you can see pretty much as far as you want - I haven't tested the limits, but I know that I've seen the other side of a sim when I first fiddled with "God mode".

It's generally simple enough to rez a prim next to another one, then drag the shape handles until I've got a match. Extremely complex tortured prims might be harder, but the point is that it's possible, and for anything that's not horribly complex, doesn't even take a lot of time.

The very reality is that many of these people make livings, not only that survive, I find these people to no less be taking the shirts of our families back, I work very hard to provide and keep up my home, and pay my bills., hours and hours a day spent here in SL, creating and designing.

Theres so much more beyond what these people who created the "menacing tools" think there is. I don't think they are evil, but the very idea they didn't think any of this through, quite astonishes me.. maybe not.. seems any fool can create a program like this..

Housewives like me, 3 kids, and another a know with disabilities who use this as a tool as a means to survive merely.

LL needs to step up, my $125 per month for land won't hold up much longer at this rate.

okay

Am not sure, but i think you're going to have lot of hair makers, shoe builders and jewellry crafters roll their eyes at this one... specifically, since if it was indeed as easy as you say it here, we would have quite a lot of copycat prim items out there for sale virtually identical with originals, and this to my knowledge is hardly a case..?

edit: or to put it simpler, would you mind demonstrating this ability in practice? i can find free hour, and we can see how well you do emulating say, a wig or a shoe i'll provide yo. Since you say it's fast process, i figure an hour should suffice...