Copybot? "We're working on it!!".

What a mess!!! Not only so we have to deal daily with not being able to tp half the time as well as the long list of bugs, crashes, missing images and other utterly annoying, frustrating, time wasting things in sl but now this copybot garbage too.

It seems Linden got caught with their pants down, yet again. Ok? Yet, again!! If you stop to think about it, it seems things like attacks on the gird, the constant bugs and other things like this are always popping up and catching them always asleep at the controls.

This Copybot thing thats causing all these problems and possibly even cost many people cash and loss of items was probably made by some teenager with some "chemistry set" type setup. Yet, the "experts"- Linden, are neither prepared nor do they seem to have any type of safeguard for these attacks on sl.

What's going on? Things have gotten out of hand here. And it seems the only thing that's being prioritized is money hikes on land. There's the strong possibility from what I've read of this latest plague causing much damage to residents as well as sl itself. But all we seem to hear from them as far as the defense for this latest annoyance and the countless bugs is, "We're working on it".

"We're aware of there's a problem and we're working on it". It would be funny if it wasn't clear cut true.

Just like the tv commerical, "We're working on it". Good god!!

I doubt this post will be here too long as they always delete anything said about them, even if it's true.

"catching them always asleep at the controls."

I could be wrong and if I am accept my apologies but this is not a fair statement. There are thousands upon thousands of users of SL and amongst them there are far more developers and code experts than there are employees at LL. There is no way that LL can possibly anticipate all the possible exploits and attacks that could be dreamed up by such a large group.

In terms of response, LL has to manage a lot of priorities that require both development and policy decisions and are dealing with a population explosion on top of everything.

I see a lot of complaints and while I agree that the use of CopyBot and other exploits should be prohibited and I agree that the other problems should be addressed reality is it takes time and resources, both of which have a limited supply.

I'll close with, I am new to SL and not affiliated with LL but I do have an extensive IT background including data center management and interactive web based applications so I understand the impacts on a team as they struggle to improve an environment, hence my response.

Unfortunately just like in RL there will always be a few rogues (I know, I've had websites hacked). LL seem to be doing as much as they can and the messages you are receiving from some places look to me like a simple script that's being put up to protect themselves from this "CopyBot" Fixing something like this is an enormous task so hang in there and let LL sort it out before slating them.

As if things weren't bad enough, now everywhere you go you're hit with "quit" and copybot stuff. It's very tiring and annoying having to deal with this.

As far as the game, I still say they should of had safeguards to protect the game from this as well as other attacks and apparently they don't.

Maybe there is a reason they are letting this happen and not taking it as a very serious matter to protect it's players and the enconomy...*mysterious music plays*

Cole,

I know anger is driving most peoples posts regarding this current problem. But, you have to take a moment and step back to look at the big picture.

The SL infrastructure is extremely complex, if there was truly nothing in place it would be even worse.

LL saw a benefit in allowing and supporting a group of outside programmers to develop open-source tools for the SL community to use. Unfortunately it appears that it was done with little to no real management guidance. If there was real guidance in place, someone with common sense would have pointed out that CopyBot should never be released.

LL, is working to make it right...but, it will take time. As for the !quit messages, they'll just be a part of life for a bit, much like taking your shoes off at the airport is in RL.

The !quit spammers do not work on any CopyBots except the very first ones, and there are perhaps a handful of them. The rest ignore this message, so it's not only pointless, but abusive to your neighbors and customers as well to have one in your shop. It's not doing you any goood to have one on your property, if you have one, and is only serving to drive away your legitimate customers.

To try to ameliorate some of the mindless panic that seems to be pervading these forums and SL itself, everyone should know that CopyBot was removed from SLX after perhaps a dozen of them had been sold. The source code has been removed from the online site where it could formerly be downloaded, so there isn't going to be a mad rush to get these things, because there's nothing to get now.

Here are more facts: a CopyBot can't peek inside boxes to steal their contents, it can't make permanent copies of skins and clothing you're wearing, it can't copy unlinked buildings and it can't copy scripts. Moreover, they can't operate without a human attendant, so it's easy to determine if one is being used - and they can't move, touch or sit on anything.

The CopyBot problem, while real enough, is VASTLY overblown, and you should go about your business. A handful of these things on the loose is not an epidemic, nor automatically the End of the World As We Know It.

There is a roughly similar method for ripping textures right off the screen while using SL, and while there was a great outcry against it and nothing was ever done about it, it did NOT ruin the economy, and people haven't been losing their livelihoods to it. This will be much the same - unless, of course, you closed your shop in a mindless panic. Note this carefully: the one person most likely to do your business damage as a result of the CopyBot problem is YOU.

Now that everyone knows about the CopyBot, it will be dealt with in the same manner as other griefing tools if it's used for content theft instead of its legitimate uses (and yes, there are some).

*clap-clap* Please - Join us over in the friendly thread in which we are discussing the legalities surrounding such a malighned and misunderstood device.

/13/8b/149126/1.html

EDIT: Oops, you are there. NM! =^.^=

I believe this is true.
Partially true. At least one version of the program as described to me can copy your "baked texture" (as can programs like GLintercept) so they can save your skin and clothes together as a skin, along with some approximation of your shape settings (and of course your attachments), and imitate your avatar at a later point.
At the moment it copies one prim at a time, but this is not a technical limitation of the technology.
I believe this is true.
At the moment this is true, but a copybot acting as a transparent proxy could piggyback on your own avatar, you wouldn't need an alt and could operate completely invisibly.
I believe this is likely true. It's similar to the antivirus situation, where if you are not using Windows (or, if you are, you're able to discipline yourself to use your computer sufficiently carefully) you're much more likely to suffer damage as a result of your AV software than a virus.

As for the legitimate uses of the program, while I have posted a number of examples myself... I want to repeat that I don't believe those uses justify the program and while I worry about LL going on a witch-hunt for applications like copybot - simply because of false positives if nothing else - if they are able to technically detect copybot reliably I wouldn't argue against them simply blocking it.

Finally, someone else on the forums has been told! *lets out a deep sigh*

But that is a separate tool. GLIntercept and CopyBot could be used in conjunction to steal an entire avatar, it's true, but that's a separate tool. I also hasten to point out that the discovery of GLIntercept did not cause the collapse of SL commerce as some believed it would. There was an accompanying scattered closure of shops in response then, as well, but obviously the economy is still there, and there are still lots of businesses out there that sell textures.



Not quite accurate - it can copy multiple prims at a time, but to be usable afterwards, those prims have to be linked. Unlinked prims just copy as a pile of disjointed prims. Unlinked buildings (which many are, to circumvent occasional prim drift) are uncopyable by CopyBot.



I would tend to agree, if only to calm the knee-jerk reactionaries. Of course, there is no way to for a server to tell whether an avatar is being driven by a human or by other software, considering that this control MUST take place on the client side where SL cannot reach.

Actually the last version, was able to do it. Experienced in full view first hand.

However, GLI... doesn't do the same thing...

What is this entire world made out of? Prims. And CB has the ability to take each and every one of those and copy them regardless the use.

But they don't have to detect it, all they need to do is a minor change to the protocol that would break the copybot client which would thereby render all the L$3000 copybots out there worthless.

Now I understand the argument that that just means that the good people over in libSL would just have to reverse engineer the protocol again and accidently release a new version to obsolete that change. However, how many times would LL have to do this before the value of these new versions of CopyBot collapsed and the libSL reverse engineers got bored with ferreting out yet another stupid scrambling? These only need to be the most trivial changes, reversing fields, adding a checksum, XORing with an included copy of Lolita, anything, and there's an update each week.

While breaking encryption in theory is always possible, the game has to be worth the candle. In this case, keeping ahead of the libSL people would be very low cost.

The question really isn't whether it's technically possible for LL to wipe out 90% of the CopyBot problem, the question is if they want to.

Oh, I had it demonstrated for me - it was able to copy most of my avatar, except for the flex prims, and none of my scripts - but it wasn't able to retain anything except the shape and color of my attachments. The skin, shape and clothes it couldn't retain. All it can do is wear a baked copy of your skin until it logs off - and since it can't operate as a normal avatar in CopyBot mode, nobody can run around and take advantage of the cloned clothes. When the owner logs in again with that avatar, they're just gone.

Not for a static build. The locations and rotations of the prims can be recorded and they can be placed back in the correct location relative to each other during upload.

Briefly, yes. So a copybot you bought on Wednesday afternoon would only work for 2-3 weeks before the next update broke it, at least until they started using code injection to access the stream from inside the client.

Speaking as someone who has actually written copy-protection software, keeping ahead of bored adolescents with debuggers is expensive and time-consuming.

It's a lot easier if you don't put them together and tell them to help each other out. Instead of isolated individuals working alone they were allowed to make combined team with the benefit of official Linden help.

I am so confused about this copybot thing. I keep seeing a message something like.
"CopyBotomething!quit"
Why I am I seeing that? I do not have CopyBot, at least I don't think so.

They were a combined team before they got official Linden help. Linden Labs thinks that if there's going to be a team reverse-engineering SL, they're better off keeping an eye on them. I'm not going to argue that their level of interaction was ideal, but the idea that it made much difference in their ability to work around changes in obfuscation mechanisms is naive.

It's never 'isolated individuals working alone'. Seriously. When I was working on security systems, I'd get on talkers and chat systems and see what the other side was doing. They were better at cooperating and sharing information than some professional programming teams.

So you are saying that LL thought "Hey, if this team is gonna break our ToS, let's watch!"?

The message I got from the town hall was that Phillip was actually encouraging people to break their software, which is insane. They had no control whatsoever over this group and still don't. It wasn't like some inhouse attempt to find holes so you could patch them. It was completely irresponsible and still they defend their actions, I'm talking about LL now. Does anyone really believe they wouldn't be banned from SL for doing the same thing? We used to get suspensions on these forums just for mentioning these tools or how they were used.

We used to be banned for saying "GLintercept". And LL's pet hackers are allowed to reverse engineer SL to create and distribute a theft tool.

Nice job LL.