Spambot backlash.. need help

Your comments are uncalled for and unwelcome here JoshBear. Everyday Winter helps people in this very forum.

What Jesse just Said.

A rant about ppl wanting to remove the spam bots is about as useful as the orginal script.

OMG! I heard there's a new version of CopyBot out there!

If you (or one of your objects) send a !quit to it,
it starts copying everything you own!!

--
gninraw emertxe msacras

You say this in jest, but I, for one, wonder why someone hasn't done this yet. It fits in well with the griefer mentality.

This copybot issue is like fluoridate water. We should ban discussion of it like some talk shows ban discussion of fluoridate water.
Even without copybot EVERYBODY have a cache copy of the objects you are looking at. You just don't know how to read it.
People have been working hard for an importer/exporter into SL, now that's is almost here, it's like, "But I didn't mean that."

/me curtsies

The main threat from this whole fiasco.. in terms people can relate to.. is that my brother, who lost SL connectivity for several weeks due to a computer overheating issue.. having just heard about this mess.. was all:

"SL is ruined! Why should I even bother to come back?"

His anger ran the gambit from blaming the libSL guys, to Linden Labs, to the paranoids closing shops and running these spammers. He was mad at everyone, and everything.. and I'd dare say that he probably kicked something in RL. (hopefully not the doggies!)

Next day, he logged onto SL, and started building again.

It took a lot of work, to keep my brother coming back to this game.. but I managed it, with a lot of help from SL'd addictive nature. I Build.. most everyone I know builds, or scripts, or animates.. SL, for me, is an artist's dream. hundreds of collegues in a collaborative space, and unlimited materials and tools.

If someone rippped off my car, I'd make a plane. if someone ripped off my plane, I'd make a boat.. rip that off? a hoverboard, or a jetpack, or a cute wodden box, bunk beds, a refigerator, a TV studio camera, a baked potato, a sex chair, a painter's easel, a giraffe, a candy bar.

Sure, it's rough if someone steals your work. But you know what? It's useless to copy my products, because I am always one product ahead of the copiers. I'll still be here building long after you all leave in a huff. (though.. I highly encourage other auto makers to close their shops.. I need market share!)

What am I doing to combat the damage done by copybot? I'm going on with my life, having fun, and building. I just opened a new store, and I spend time hanging out with my friends and Brother (when he's around).

What are you doing, other than pointing fingers, labelling people, trying to assign blame, and panic-mongering?

yes, the current copybots needs a human controller , the !quit beacons would make it easier for the thieves to code a copybot to find shops on its own.
so much for the spammers trying to do somthing about copybot - they're making SL easier for copybots and harder for innocent residents.

A better way to do somthing would be to make a script to keep a daily(or more frequent for busier stores) visitor list and email it to yourself. then if you find a copy of your items(s) and can prove the creator visited your store before creating the copy, file the complaint properly with LL, they then have an obligation to remove the all the copies in-world.
This wouldn't stop copybot but would help LL identify accounts using copybot.
if LL ever find a way of accuratly verifing accounts all over the world without requiring payment info meybe they could get rid of unverified accounts then this method will get rid of copybot almost completely

Thanks Ordinal for the script.

We just moved to Plush Micron. I love it there except for two things.. camping pads and a serious overkill of copybot "defeaters". The lag there is horrible at times as a result.

A shop close to mine sells business suits, tuxes, high end type clothes. I won't mention the name here but I went in to buy some stuff there and first had the copybot spam coming every three seconds.. then when I walked into the building I was slapped with a notecard pop up warning me not to be a thief. Since the owner of this place marketed way more to the thieves of SL then me coming to give him some money I turned around and left. He is still close enough by me that I get his spam on one end of my prop. Ironicaly it appeared his stuff was all boxed up.

I will take the script Ordinal made and see if the owner of the place will pull his spammers before I resort to AR.

You seem to have missed the part about how the anti-copybot spammers DON'T WORK. In fact, I bet the users of the copybot love people that have the spammers out, because it gives them a false sense of security and they let their guard down. So it's much easier for them to come in and copy their stuff.

If you want an intelligent solution to the "copybot problem" try using a bit of thought. The copybot has to run a script to do the copying, and it has to actually rez prims in order to create the copies. Logic would say that the best way to defeat them isn't to spam every person within 96m with a worthless IM, but instead to just set your land to "No Build" and "No Outside Scripts" (and get your neighbors to do that as well).

Wow, how about that, thinking actually works!

You also seem to be ignorant of the fact that there were several programs out long before the copybot that could make exact copies of objects, so even if your spammer did work (which it doesn't), the thief could just use one of those other scripts to steal your objects anyway.

Yes, very true - all you're really doing with a CopyBot spammer is sending out a beacon to the CopyBot that there are materials within immediate sensor range that are worth stealing. While objects in SL cannot receive IM's, CopyBots can and do, and they can be altered to act on this information by a moderately skilled programmer. All you're doing is sending up a flare that marks your shop as containing potentially copiable goods, and potentially increasing the CopyBot problem rather than decreasing it. All it would have to do is wear a sensor that scans for objects with the word "CopyBot" in their name.

Regarding the rest of your post, though, you fall into the same trap many people do when trying to solve in-world problems. If the Lindens did this, this and that, while completely ignoring the deleterious effects of the suggested actions, or flatly ignored all the stuff that would break as a result of fixing this one problem, then everything would be wonderful.

One must remember that the current system evolved over years, and that rapid untested changes to the way it works rarely have positive consequences.

copybot does not run a script to do the copying, it is a client program that recieves information about the prims it sees so it can display them, but instead of drawing them on a screen it goes into build mode and creates new ones with the infomation it saw.
but 'no build' will work if the 'no build' zone extends beyond the distance you can see the items though!

But you do bring up one valid point Vares that people still aren't understanding. For copybot to work the alt has to be within sight of the objects to be copied. They can not hide behind anything, nor can they operate thier camera controls. It looks more then slightly suspicious to have an avatar in a store with prims being assembled over thier head recreating an object they are looking at. Yes they can of course buy a copy of the item and bring it home to recreate in thier secret underground lair. But still, copybot is not the huge threat that some have come to believe. As pointed out many times in all of the forums, there have always been means to copy prims and textures. And yet with all of these threats the economy and buisiness opportunites continue to grow. Eventually SecondLife will calm down and return to some amount of normality. Unfortunately as also pointed out, the spam may continue for far longer. Hopefully LL will start enforcing AR actions against the owners of the devices. I also hope that with continued education more will come to realise just what Copybot can and can not do. That they will understand that SL will survive and thrive.

I suppose in theory, there's no reason why it has to build the copies there and then - it could save them to build later.

/me prepares for hate mail

very true. after all it did start life as a debug tool for an OFFLINE building tool

I just want the finished product. I wanna build in sketchup, fire up an importer program, and watch it go to town. I realize that's quite some time down the road... but a girl can dream, right?

there is a way to build offline at the moment, as long as you dont mind working with just plywood prims (no texturing yet) using prim.blend by Jeffery Gomez in blender. you can import the build into SL using his importer object aswell.

There is already a way to import Sketchup. Do a search for it in the forums. I'll take a look in a little bit also.

EDIT: Here you go Winter:
/8/a2/144809/1.html

Not Quite.

"Each face in your SketchUp model, you end up with a flat, rectangular prim which represents the bounds of that face."

(see below)

So a .5m x .5m x .5m cube in SketchUp will become 6 prims in SL.

I read this whole thread. I don"t think I've read this particular forum before so I do not know who the participants are or what there functions or motivations are.

This thread strikes me as very indicative of a major polarization among SL people. I think the comments above sound arrogant and non-helpful. Two posters objecting to Copybot use are criticized or slammed and store owners and creators are just "paranoids." And you want to boycott their stores. You are totally riding roughshod over the main point of all of the objections to the copybot use.

If you have a better tool to defeat copybots that doesn't spam then please produce it. People will pay for it--more then will want to violate creators rights.

You all might look at SL with a Sandbox mentality, but many do not and instead hope for SL to be a secure place to create and run businesses of all kinds. people have money and time invested in SL and don't want the wild west here, sponsored by errant code writers who wish to show off their skills by essentially hacking under the pretense of trying to make SL safer. If they want to do that then do it officially to help improve Sl and make it more secure.

If Sl is going to succeed it will have to have a robust economy. You can't have a robust economy when theft is rampant. Just like the big record chain Tower Records in the US is closing all their stores, since the music business was killed by the entitlement theiving mentality. There are many other examples.

The End User, myself and all the present and future of SL (not the multitude of devious alts) want a throughly secure environment with tremendous freedom as well, within the boundaries of the SL mission statement itself.

Then, as this thread headed to it's conclusion, some private copybot jokes and god-mode pretensions leak out along with the insults to regular users.


Many kids with the wanna-be hacking mentality seeking out ways to grief the world or disrupt the world and to get all they can for free, will simply ruin SL as a place to create a business. There will be a zillion people hacking SL and stealing content from all over the world. So would all Sl programmers please be helpful and not assist that Wild West to happen.

If the Lindens need so many new employees why don't you all join them and get to work protecting the world instead of arrogantly promoting insecurity, because you feel superior to the other people in SL who do not see SL with the Sandbox mentality.

Those that think that someone's creation is just pixels and codes and thus have no real rights so it's okay to take it if they can, are working to destroy Sl in the big picture--whether that comes from griefers, hackers or those over-reacting to griefers and hackers. People who see Sl as more then pixels and code are not being paranoid, they are being realistic.

This copybot incident was the wake up call for many business people who are putting money into SL and the security issue is the most important thing for SL to fix right now or most people will not feel that SL is trustworthy enough to warrant lots of effort, time and investment.

We all know that Sl has been having performance issues and I think most serious people are patient and understanding and have faith that SL will become as great as it can be, but clearly, if a zillion griefers end up in SL, and all serious investors pull out, then it's no fault but your own.

That is why this thread exists. The tool you have is worthless. It does nothing at all except spam everyone. There are no tools that can be built to snoop out and detect what someone is running on thier home computer. The tool you want can not be built. We have said it. Linden Labs has stated the same. Your other points I really don't care about. This is not the General Forums or Resident Answers.

If you have a script to discuss then please discuss. If you only come to try to create division or rant, then go elsewhere.

I was not posting to rant I was posting as a reaction to reading this thread, which was somewhat insulting and your reply as well was just an insult. Don't worry I won't hang around this forum.



You wrote:


"There are no tools that can be built to snoop out and detect what someone is running on thier home computer. The tool you want can not be built."

This is not true and just as World of Warcraft was forced to build and run one (Warden) then IMO, SL will be forced to build and run one too. The reason is because it makes economic sense to do so.

I can't speak for anyone else but I'm not trying to be insulting. I'm just utterly exhasperated that some people are still defending their use of objects that in any other context would be considered nothing more than griefing tools and treated accordingly. If these "defeaters' actually stopped anything you might have a point but as has been pointed out many, many times before they aren't doing anything but spamming people. I also personally take offense to this psuedo-McCarthyist theme that anyone that is against these worthless objects is pro-theft. It's polarizing groupthink at its worst.

As for WoW, the reason they and other online games can use the invasive methods they use is because they do not allow their players to create and upload content. If they did, they'd be facing the same issues as SL.

Rebecca.. this is a scripting discussion, not an ethics debate.

Here we discuss the project we have, and seek the assistance of people who wish to assist. We have had some side discussion on whether producing the script originally envisioned would be feasable, and later practical, and finally responsible. We discussed the TOS as it applied to our use of the script to report the users of another script.. who are violating the TOS by sending unsolicited IMs in rapid succession to all users in an area.

Linden Labs asked us to abuse report these devices, and the people who are using them.

The script being discussed attempts to assist in the locating of these devices.

Linden Labs has announced that there are uses for CopyBot which do NOT violate the TOS, and these spam devices additionally constitute a grid-wide distributed denial of service attack on anyone who might wish to use the tool for legal purposes, even on land they "own". As has been pointed out ad nauseum, those who would use it for illegal purposes, will remain unaffected by this DOS attack (since they need only alter the source, and recompile).

Additionally, some have pointed out that these alleged "defense spambots" could easily be used as locator beacons, and with an elementary scripted attachment, the copybots could locate and home in on these copybot defeaters.. and since they no longer respond to the !quit message, they could use it as a "tell me where to look first" system. (like putting big signs on your door that say "My door isn't locked and no one is home... don't steal my expensive stuff".)

If the original author of this device had taken a few hours to get forum response to his script idea, instead of just pushing it out in the heat of the drama, and offering it on SLExchange.. the odds are that we would not be writing THIS script now, to help find all of his "blue goo".

The simple fact is, like the borg.. the bad guys can adapt faster than the good guys can plan attacks on the program. in this case, quite literally. It takes 5-20 lines of code to scan the area and im all the avatars found. it takes only a few characters to comment out the "if I hear !quit" in the source code. Heck.. you only have to change it to !close or !die or !lemon.. and all the !quit spammers are harmless to your copybot.

The problem is, simply.. that the bad guys are GOING to use this tool, and you can't stop them. PERIOD. Linden Labs is not going to get into the business of playing cat and mouse with trying to detect a process on the end user's computer. Since the copybot is actually a faux client, any changes made to the SL client would be useless against this. Even if they had the manpower, and the inclination.. it's such a monumental task.. for a program that can be used for legitimate purposes too.

In the end, the responsibility for misuse falls on the misusers.. and the responsibility for catching them falls on the copyright holders. Just like in real life.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of users (who are not copybots) are each receiving hundreds of pieces of junk mail every hour.. many of us are getting them shunted to email, and even when we have them muted, they're using processor cycles like crazy. (those "precious server resources" we hear so much about) . As it is, LL is having to reprogram servers to handle all the added system load of the last few days.

Is it a coincidence that this trouble started around the time that these spammers went online en masse?

No one here is "defending theft". We're just acknowledging that "IM spam is bad", and these things also need to be stopped, since they really don't work anymore.. if they ever did. AT the very least, it's "disturbing the peace" at the worst, it's harassment and a distributed DOS attack on legitimate users of this program. Either way, it's treating every avatar within 96 meters as a potential criminal, before they've had a chance to do anything.

Winter Ventura writes;

"The problem is, simply.. that the bad guys are GOING to use this tool, and you can't stop them. PERIOD. Linden Labs is not going to get into the business of playing cat and mouse with trying to detect a process on the end user's computer. Since the copybot is actually a faux client, any changes made to the SL client would be useless against this. Even if they had the manpower, and the inclination.. it's such a monumental task.. for a program that can be used for legitimate purposes too."

It is a "monumental task" and if Blizzard can do it, so can LL.

I am talking about banning people who use the copybot or other means to copy, by catching them in the act.

Blizzard just banned around 10,000 people a week or so ago for botting. They catch them with a program called "Warden" which can in fact look into the computer and read all open files, looking for processes and open windows and any executables already known to be compromising the game. In a perfect world this wouldn't be necessary, but it's not a perfect world.

Someone above said I was making an ethics argument and that might be true to a degree but really I am talking about business and creative rights and SL being viable for what people investing in SL want it to be.

Again I went to this forum because of the title of the thread out of interest and I saw more insults then I saw scripting discussion. I'm sure this forum can be very informative with scripting, but it was not me who began the non-scripting discussion.

[...]



So.. back on task here...

Can we get this script to target the objects with a particle stream? I'd love to be able to "follow the dotted line" to the nearest instance of the object with the name I've specified.

(be nice if we could generate a dot on the map, but a slinky-line is a good second alternative)