Cloned

I've recently just had my avatar cloned - skin, tattoo, clothes. I just wanted to know is there any protection out there that can prevent this happening again?

Maybe someone with more technical knowledge on the subject can verify, but I think Emerald may have some sort of protection mechanism. I'm not 100% as I don't know exactly what it does. I haven't even tried it, so I don't know if it works.

Change your clothes.

You don't even need Emerald or any other program to "clone" an avatar (or any other object in SL). All it takes is a good eye for detail, maybe a snapshot to disk, and knowledge of the particulars (image editing program, scripting, shape making, building, etc) to make a pretty good copy without doing anything against the ToS. If you purchased your avatar, skin, shape clothing, hair, eyes and all that makes up your avatar anyone else can do the same.........and look just like you. There is not such thing as total uniqueness in SL (except your personality).

Could you describe in a bit more detail what happened? Was it someone simply "copying your look," or was it someone actually stealing the content of your avatar for their own?

There are a couple for recent threads over at the SLU forums with videos of a hacked client that can copy things quickly and easily. It looks like it interacts directly with the SL database, so my guess is that there is no way to protect yourself from it. You can AR the person, but usually people using a client like this also know ways to get around being banned.

LOL you jokeing right ? if they was away wouldt happen in the first place . lol that be cool to see a clone just pop up out air . oh man that funny

It's no joke. Cloning a complete avatar (skin, shape, clothes, attachments, hair etc) can be done within a few minutes. Today I watched a video about a new hacked client that can copy literally everything. It was very disturbing. I won't say the name of the new viewer here, because it could give people bad ideas.

This is real, and LL doesn't do anything about it.

There is always going to be someone who will find a way to copy, cheat, or grief. All anyone can do is submit an AR and support ticket. Content theft is pretty high on LL's priority list but they need both the fact that occured AND supporting evidence in order to do anything about it. Saying your avatar has been cloned without some sort of supporting information will get you no where.

The first question that came to my mind (and would certainly be one of the first that comes to anyone trying to investigate) is how do you know your avatar has been cloned? Where it happened, who it was, how did you arrive at the conclusion, etc.

Maybe he came home and found the clone sleeping in his bed.

That clone thing makes a note of your visual attributes and tells its own avatar that it has the same ones. In essence, this is what the regular viewer does, it takes a generic avatar and copies your attributes to her in order to draw you on the screen. (The regular viewer doesn't try to put those on your own avatar, but the rest is the same.)

And there we are: an avatar's appearance is just a list of numbers, we *have* to share those numbers in order to be anything but Ruth, and what we have to share can be spoofed because it is public information.

I've heard about this from ages ago, but I thought when the person who made a copy of you closes their viewer and restarts it, they lose the copy. Or is this some new thing?

Yeah, the cloning thing that most people have seen will be temporary, and disappear after a clothing change or rebake, that trick doesn't try to save the information. It would not be a big leap to write those numbers to a local file and use them again later, but the "popular" versions of this thing don't bother.

Yes, Emerald does have a clothing layer protection in it which it states "Masks your individual texture layers to prevent theft". I think that it includes skin? Don't know if it works or how well though.

The Emerald thing doesn't prevent grabbing a baked avatar, it only gets in the way of grabbing the separate skin, shirt, etc.

The hacked client in the video making the rounds does that. He was saving things to XML files, and could then load them to his av from there.

I'd be very wary of using the hacked client if anyone is thinking it's a good idea.
It's highly possible that it could send your login details and maybe much more to a database somewhere.
These things are made to crack, it's what they do. Could have key loggers or anything in there.
Will you be safe if you use it?

This is real, and LL doesn't do anything about it.[/QUOTE]
Thats my point. LL dont do anything

To reiterate a point already made: in order to render an object on your monitor your viewer has to know all about what to render. It's difficult to see how your viewer could render anything as anything other than a blank grey default cube without this information.

Perhaps if LL enforced the use of text-only viewers this problem would go away. Or, better still, why not adopt and extend some Emerald-like customisation features, so that you, the viewer user, specify what an object or avatar looks like instead of making the creator's design public.

ZOMG, you're alive! Yay!

Hi Oryx! I've got a new SL-capable computer on order, so I'm getting back into the swing of things. Still haven't gotten over my extreme unhappiness with LL, though.

Back on topic: As long as the SL platform works the way it does, with the user's computer doing the rendering, there will always be a way for people to intercept the information necessary to copy content.

Thing may be different in the future, though. There is work going on to host 3D game rendering on centralized servers, and send the visuals to the user as streaming video. It's still pretty preliminary from what I've heard -- the lag is considered unacceptable for action-oriented games -- but it's expected to improve as broadband speeds increase. The other upside of this would be that people won't need a high-powered gaming computer to get good performance in 3D virtual worlds.


Back to new computer: Just got the shipment notification! My new baby is on its way!

Someone cloned me when I was looking round a freebie centre once. A nearby male avatar said 'look at me' and he morphed into an exact replica of me, including my female shape, skin, the clothes I was wearing. The only thing that wasn't duplicated was the bun I had my hair tied in at the time. I couldn't AR because the person was gone within a few seconds.
I think some of the big outside viewers, like Emerald have just as much of an interest in staying on the right side of residents as LL do themselves. After all, if they develop something that enhances the SL experience sufficiently, LL might one day offer to buy them out for a small fortune!!

They do. There is absolutely no possible technical solution to this problem. The only thing that can be done is to respond to a properly submitted DMCA complaint, by the impacted creator, in accordance with the law. Linden Lab does not ignore proper legal documentation. If there was a real way to impose a technical solution I'm sure they would impose it, and the users would absolutely hate it. This is a lesson already being learned, or in some cases it has already been learned, by people like the MPAA and the RIAA. EMI for example knows it quite well, that's why they were the first label to publicly authorize their music to be sold without DRM. Independent artists know this too. The rest of the recording and movie industry is getting the message too.

My assertion that we have to once and for all eliminate all anonymous accounts and require people to register their RL identities for all avatars with LL and keep it on file once and for all still seems to be the best protection possible, and look how many people have already come out against that. Crippling our viewers to implement technical protections (which can still be easily broken by those who are criminally minded) would be millions of times worse than merely identifying yourself.

Hmmm so once again the bad guys get away with it - and yet if you name and shame the culprit - LL will ban you.

I sent AR and have pictures and gave the name of the person, but nothing has been done.