!quit !quit !quit !quit !quit !quit !quit !quit !quit !quit

Am I the only one getting absolutely sick and tired of hearing this every 10-30 seconds?

I've been going around and ARing every last one of these I find, but some have been linked to other objects that don't show up on scanning...

Worse yet, there seems to be a type that can't be ignored!

For god's sake, people, first off, it's only v1 that works on.

Second, it makes your stores unattractive to shoppers.

Third, it's SPAM. Do you really want the Lindens on your case for harassing avs that aren't even on your grounds?

I'm tempted to write myself a little script that does nothing but spam the owners of these items with... something, anything, that makes them realize what they're doing to people that are just passing by.

But I don't want to get booted outta here myself.

If it is contained to an owner's property, how can it be abuse? If you don't like it, shop else where. Now if the words cross property lines, and the owner of the trespassed property is griefed by it, I would call it abuse. But otherwise it should be the right of the property owner to broadcast this.

Typically they are not contained to the owners property.

But it is not the right of the owner to broadcast to people who are not on their land, which is far far more common.

Many people who put these damned annoying and completely useless broadcasters on their own land still have them set to scan for avatars that are within a much longer distance than their own borders.

Absolutely worthy of an Abuse Report.

It sucks you're hearing this, but it's a typical "hoax based on a hysteria."

Tell the owners it's a hoax. That's all ya can do.

I think it's COOL...

While we're about it, can I abuse-report a Lucky Chair owner whose chair SHOUTS every 20 minutes? To add insult to insult, the "prizes" he/she is giving out are not just freebies but broken.

Not only do I think that you can do so, but you should do so on principle if for no other reason. It is inexcusable for people to create and or use objects which shout beyond the range of the owner's land.

If they're on an island, it may help to tell the estate owner.
As estate owner, I found one on an island I own awhile back. After finding out they were ineffective, I had all the ones on my islands returned to their owners, and sent a notice to all landowners/renters on my sims that such things were 1) annoying, and 2) ineffective.
I've not seen any more since.

If it's island land, contact the estate owner, they can often do a lot to combat these annoyances. If that doesn't work, or you're talking about mainland, then contact the owner... wait a day, then contact LL.

I would not describe the anti-copybot "!Quit" device as a "hoax based on hysteria."

It's not a hoax, because it did work against the first version. Moreover, it was distributed free. Many respectable store owners used it (not me), because they had zero else to protect themselves with.

It's hardly hysteria when a group has disseminated the means to copy everyone's stuff. It took a while for LL to even respond by making the use of Copybot to copy things without authorization against the TOS, and meanwhile, at least people had this.

So I would tend to call it a first measure, and I'm proud of those who came up with it for us. I'm glad that LL saw fit to finally issue a statement, weak though it was, regarding Copybot, and I'm proud that store owners took a stand against the theft of their goods, which some people unfortunately considered - and continue to consider - nothing to really get excited about.

It's unfortunate that those responsible for making the "content stealing" tool couldn't see fit to use any of their considerable skill to come up with something that might help SL residents, rather than harming them.

In fact, I would say that categorizing the store owners who used this as "hysterical," and the individual(s) who devised it as perpetuating a "hoax," indicates a disturbing lack of respect for other SL residents, their rights, and their goods, and is most unfair to those who came up with this device in order to help us.

Having said all that, it would seem that the thing doesn't work - according to the Lindens. Or if it does, it works only against one version of Copybot, an early version, and we've been told that those who are eager to steal have already improved on that first version. (I hope that is false.)

Moreover, the anti-copybot "!Quit" device is hugely annoying. I would hope the word gets out that it isn't that effective - if at all effective anymore - and it is certainly making residents lives miserable who live around it.

Altogether, it is causing more harm than good at this point.

coco

FROM WHAT?

from the massive amount of people using this imperfect, unable to make quality resellable items - program to steal stuff from their stores? LOL. Use was restricted to people messing around with it and playing practical jokes. Anything of any value could not be copied well enough by this program, and I haven't heard of any massive amount of art gallery or texture theft by it just yet so....



why not just start with that rather than trying to justify the complete over reaction of a large part of the SL community's store owners?

This !quit program was not a valiant defense of the IC rights of all second life retailors, it was a buggy poorly planned little hack that has caused far much more trouble than it could have ever hoped to seriously have helped.

A.P.

I hope you are right about that. That's not what I have read, though.

coco

P.S. And that quickly devised "little hack" was a lot more than any of the people who designed the Copybot did for us, or ever will do for us on this matter, apparently.

Coco, it's attitudes like yours that are the real problem here. While you continue to do nothing but spread more Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt, you overshadow those who genuinely ARE trying to make a positive difference.

The more I hear about copybot, the more I realize it was just a bunch of bad moves that got blown out of proportion. The guys that put it out there are exteremely embarassed and apologetic about it.

If you want to have a bad attitude, I suppose you have that right. But I also have the right to call you on it and tell you that your bad attitude isn't doing anyone any good, least of all yourself. Instead of convincing people that those evil programmers are going to ruin SL, you're just convincing everyone here that you're just bitter and obstinate.

Grow up and get over it. Everyone else has.

Where? I've read a lot about store closings and protests, but not a single article about ACTUAL theft. I would love to see a link if one is there though...



I disagree. A functioning, third party open source client for SL? Fantastic work. As SL has mentioned themselves, that is what they want for the future, no? SOME of the members may not have had the best intentions, but I doubt any of them want to steal the picture of my ferret I sell for 5$L in my tent of a store. The other was a spam machine that I can hear from half my plots on the beautiful non-cookie cutter mainland Boo-urns!

A.P.

Dr. Tardis, I most assuredly hope you are right, and I realize that pretending it is nothing is a good way to make the whole thing go away. And I definitely want it to do that. Continuing to talk about it, or consider it a potential threat, doesn't help that.

I didn't start out against all things LibSL, it took this to cause that. Look to LibSL and how they run things if you want people to have less antipathy toward them.

If they are extremely apologetic and embarassed about it, why haven't we heard a bit of that?

In any case, I'm familiar with the way people try to minimize other people's concerns, and I certainly got a good dose of it in the Copybot business, where those with stores selling things were supposedly a bunch of ninnies upset over nothing. And supposedly still are.

But I'm not about to go along with that revisionist history. It takes arrogance to write off people's valid concerns and actions the way many tried to do then, and are still trying to do. I, for one, am not about to agree that all these residents are hysterical overreactors.

That's absurd.

And what I read of Copybot was that it does a very good job of copying things, but it takes time, and expertise, to make it work.

I'm not going to argue with you about it any further. Just understand that at least one person doesn't go along with this business about brilliant Copybot creators and the stupid little store people who actually got upset.

If you have to tell me that I have a "bad attitude" and need to "grow up" because I don't agree with you, I would say you have a rather overly high opinion of your own opinion.

coco

My experience over the last couple of days is that while the stupid anti-copybot devices are still there, there are less of them now. Gradually the message may be sinking in that these things only cause grief.

The continued use of it, and the "improved" versions that are still being distributed and promoted in world, definitely qualify.

Coco sees this as "techies vs everyone else" - the fact that !quit has been useless from the start (even for the bots that listened, see, you didn't have to copy right there.) doesn't enter into it. She finds the idea that someone is saying folks are reacting thoughtlessly offensive, and that's pretty much all that counts.

Well I have never heard this spam cross borders. Must be the spots I hang out in . But as I said, if the "sound" crosses borders, then report it. It is all a matter of property rights. The land owner should be free to do what ever he wants unless his actions trespass on to another's property.

bad moves hehe ya ok
what apologey? i havent seen it link please...
did they return all the money they made from selling copybot too?

-LW

Who has had some item they created assimilated by a bot and recreated and put on the market? Ive seen some prim for prim hand copied items ( that may or may not have even been copies, since two bakers using the same ingredients on the same type of cake will have as an end result, comperable Boston cream pies) but other than that, havent heard any horror story yet about financial damage by a bot. So Im assuming theres all of these !quits everywhere as a reaction to the 'potential' problem . Overall, with all the noisy spam, objects, attachements, and whatnot that announce when you land at any given place, one more !quit isnt going to matter much, whether or not its got any value.

If anyone *has* any such report, Hamlet is looking for such things on New World Notes.

I've not heard of a single occurrence, personally, though clearly that's not proof of anything. I've heard of a few people who think they're being "attacked by copybot" but it turns out to be, ahem, anti-copybot spammers.

I've put up with this message spamming me on my own property for days. I never knew it was a machine set up by a neighbour. It was bad enough getting spammed in the chat channel, but upon looking at my email yesterday, I had three IM's full of it!

I'm going to see if I can find it and ask the owner to deactivate it. It would help if I knew what I was looking for. What do others use to 'scan' for the devices?

/54/41/149101/1.html

Here's a thread in Scripting tips that has been discussing back and forth, how to develop a tool for doing precisely this. I suggest STRONGLY that you read through the whole thread before implementing *ANY* script found in that thread though. (there's a few in there that are actually joke-scripts).

I've made up a sensor based object that will scan for "Copybot Securty System (ignore this msg)" and I'm looking for the names of other common ones. One of the nice bugs in sensors, is that attached sensors seem to allow for an extremely large scan area. The scanner in question is probably not healthy for sims, but it's also only meant to be used to find an object once you know there's one around, and it's arguably more sim-friendly than the security systems themselves.

If you'd like one for free, ask me in-game, I'll probably make it full perm so you can adapt it to find other versions.

(and if you already have one of these, ask me for a new one, I've reduced the scan interval)

Yes, sometimes these security scripts can scan into another sim, and I know of one that does.