Fear, Uncertanity and Doubt. Or: CopyBot, a review

Well, here we are... another big change is upon us, and the masses are screaming again. This time, it's not exactly LL that's at the heart of the issue, though they certainly seem to be going along with it.


That said, here's the bottom line, right upfront:

If all you sell in SL is piles of prims and textures, fear CopyBot.

However, if you have other things about your products, this, too, shall pass.


A Detailed Look:

So, I finally unearth some info on CopyBot with my Google shovel, and as luck would have it, one of the bots is online. I IMed the bot, and was presented with its menu as a response. Seeing it instantly accepted teleports, I fired off the limo, and as advertised, he came right over.

I moved him into a neighboring parcel, as my own little slice of real estate was insufficient for testing.

The first thing, I thought, would be to make myself a back-up of a piece of expensive furniture, and so I dutifully scanned for the UUID, and had it copy that ID. Now, keep in mind, I'd lost a pair of blocks that had cost me about L$10,000 due to an asset server failure way the hell back in March, and with the asset servers being duct tape and paperclips anymore, wanted to protect my investment.

Well, in just a few moments, I had a bed floating over the bot's head.

"Sweet," I thought, looking at it. "How good a job did it do?" So I looked at the contents, expecting to find everything that was there. No such luck.


"Ah well," I thought, and remembered something that had been bugging me for awhile. An av head I had done some modding on had gone completely no-mod (Luskwood avs.. you know how they are) on me during the permissions 'fix' LL deployed, and it annoyed the bejeezus outta me.

So, I rezzed the 100-prim+ head and instructed the bot to do his thing. Took awhile, but he delivered: a complete copy of my head, sans scripts, animations and texture in the Contents tab. Figuring I'd not need the old one anymore, I pulled the contents and stuck 'em in the new head. Mission accomplished.


By this time, I wondered just HOW I could get it to copy scripts, as I wanted to look one over to confirm or dispel something fishy in an object some of you may remember me mentioning awhile back. I couldn't do it. Nothing at all would happen.

By the time I'd remembered an item I had (unavailable now) that I had wished was +mod that I wanted to copy, the bot had been logged off.



After a bit of searching, I happened upon a place where it was being 'sold' in-world, where a crowd had gathered, jeering the seller from SLX, who was in attendance.

After having the contents of the notecard the L$2900 buys one read out into open chat, I downloaded the application itself (hey... if you're making things free for all, why charge for the methodology, right?). Got it running, and loaded up an alt I'd had sitting around doing nothing.

In speaking with a friend about it, I had her put on a freebie av that differed from what the alt had at the time, making sure she had nothing else on (after all, I was gonna have the bot clone her... she knew this going in, as I was demonstrating it to her).

So, I fired the command. This time, it took quite awhile, as it was a fairly detailed furry av, with lots of attachments (VERY nice for a freebie). After it did, though, I noticed the bot completely mimicked her, as it went into the typing animation as she did, and even tried to walk in place. She noted it was quite creepy, to which I concurred.

At that time, I showed her the 'prims-only' way it copied, and had her check a head (from the freebie av again, as I'd given it to her) against the original. At this time, I was needed elsewhere, and so ended the testing.



So, I guess the best way to defeat this is to make sure your avs and items actually DO something or can verify their authenticity somehow and report the knock-offs.




The bottom line: SL WILL weather this.

Riiiight...

And with LL turning a blind eye to this, how many days (hours?) do you think it will take for these thieves to mod CopyBot to version 2.0, and copy the scripts as well? Do you really think this will stop where it is, if LL keeps their fingers jammed in their ears and their eys closed to this problem?

It dosn't matter if it's crap right now. What you just described makes all home sales worthless, because a good home is almost entirely prims and textures, and only has a few simple scripts for the doors and windows - which are trivial to replace.

What you described takes 95% of the work out of stealing a full copy of a furry avatar. Again, the prims and textures are most of what you pay for. The scripts are trivial by comparison.

If they don't take a stand RIGHT NOW, that ripping of copy-protected work and defeating the in-world permissions system with this or similar apps is a BANNING OFFENSE, then it will only continue to get worse.

Unless LL decides to sent all scripts to the client again, copybot won't get no-mod ones. Of course, it's not much work to re-create a script.

Either way, LL, the answer is clear: Just start sending scripts again because it's not fair to only get the object and a linked texture.