Spambot backlash.. need help

Advice which you should follow yourself. Your association with this abuser does not look all that good on you.

How would you like to be roused while offline?, by a script used improperly by someone, who DEMANDS you to log into SL to fix something that does not exist.

Somehow, I don't think you'd appreciate that.

ahhhh Newgate I wasn't chastising you. You know I am your number one fan And maybe this was good, opening up this older, dead thread. I think the W-Hat example was a very good example and hopefully even more can understand the cruz of the problem now. In either the case of W-Hat or LibSL, the "cream of the crop" of programmers are attracted to them. I am certainly not in that category but I do share one trait with others. A deep desire to see what makes SL tick and see what we can do to make it better. I am not very good at programming so I spend my time in Beta looking for bugs. After a while of finding bugs you then start to next ask "what is this bug and what is wrong on the back end that caused it?". I don't have access to the backend but am finally getting to the point of making pretty good guesses of where the problem might lie and include that in the bug reports now. Hopefully it makes it easier on the QA team. I wish I could claim that I personally have turned in some exploits but I can't. I have reported two but they ended up not being exploits. One day spambots will be behind us and we will get on with our SL lves. By now the fear that drove the hysteria has been squashed. So many worried that they would be loosing thier incomes. The economy in the last month has proven that wrong. The only income lost was from the stores that closed thier doors for awhile. I too have seen the sign that was mentioned here. It was a store I use to go to all the time. She has not lost income due to CopyBot but she has lost income now from the people that refuse to go there now. Hopefully one day she too will open her eyes.

You know, it's interesting, in retrospect, to note that not any of the bigger content creators have made any noise about the copybot "issue". Nor AFAIK did they employ any of the "defeaters".

*Mash Mandala didn't close down The Depoz sims
*Tim Hoffman didn't close down Hoffman Designs
*Jack Feaver didn't close down HTJB
*Luna Bliss didn't close down her garden center

The list probably goes on, but those are the "big" names that come to mind, and it's somewhat telling that they didn't seem to think there was a reason to make noise about it, when they have invested in some cases substantial amounts of money, and it is high stakes for them, while the "Suzie's Nugget Shops" were boarding up their stores all across the grid.

I won't spell out the implications of this as I see them, I think they should be fairly self-evident.

The in-world reactions to this thing, coupled with the threads here in the forums, say alot about the mix of content providers we have, and the accompanying capacity for rational thought.

Constructing arguments with facts not in evidence is akin to trying to argue for or against the existence of God. Believers cannot prove that he/she/it exists. Non believers cannot prove that he/she/it does not exist. So it results in conversations such as this.. where no party to the conversation can provide any actual evidence to support their particular contention. In such cases, the burden of proof falls upon the folks contending that "issue x" does in fact exist, not the folks offering rational, informed contentions to the contrary.

And as for the statement that "at least the anti copybot people are doing SOMETHING, what are YOU doing?" I would respond thusly:

"A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many a bad measure."

Happy Generic Holiday Greetings
zk

One of those in your list of four did use a Copybot defeater, but only for a short time. And also put up signs banning ANYONE from LibSL from the store.

So I would say what you consider "telling" is flawed.

I certainly wouldn't go so far as to say that the content creator in your list of four who did use the Copybot defeater and put up those signs lacked "rational thought."

I never used the copybot defeater. I closed down my store, though, till I figured out how likely people were to actually use it, the extent of the threat, and how I could best protect my items.

Really. It's just too much to not only have this thing unleashed upon us, but also to be insulted for taking what paltry steps were available to protect ourselves from it. And that would include the individual in your list, whom I highly respect, who used the Copybot defeater.

I myself didn't use the Copybot defeater because (1) it was ghastly annoying, and (2) I figured the Copybot could be easily and quickly altered to defeat the defeater.

coco

a script listinging to channel 0, can pick up IMs (from objects) of persons in the area

you forgot to turn the alpha on, and send it 5,000M in the air ^^

The defeater never worked in the first place.

Instant Messages are unaffected by objects spamming in open channels.

No it can't. Instant messages can't be overheard by scripts.

Try it yourself: put this script in object A...

default
{
    state_entry()
    {
        llListen(0, "", NULL_KEY, "");
    }

    listen(integer c, string name, key id, string msg)
    {
        llSay(0, "Heard " + msg);
    }
}

and this in object B...

default
{
    touch_start(integer total_number)
    {
        llInstantMessage(llDetectedKey(0), "Touched.");
    }
}

then touch object B. Object A will not hear the message, but it will hear anything else said in open chat.

There seems to be some confusion here between instant messaging by scripts to avatars (using llInstantMessage) and chat (using llWhisper, llSay or llShout). To the avatar hearing them, they both look alike, objects IMing you don't open up an IM window and just seem like regular chat (because you can't IM them back - scripts can't receive IMs) but they're not. Only you can see IMs that objects send you, they can be sent regardless of distance, they will go to email if required, etc; IMs from objects are just like IMs from other people apart from their appearance to the user.

"this thing unleashed upon us" and similar statements are what continue to get my goat about this subject as a whole. As has been stated previously in this thread and in others, thus far not a single business owner has come forward with any evidence whatsoever of actual IP theft, or actual dollars lost as a result of copybot. So this "thing unleashed upon us" and most of the reaction to it is nothing more than a tempest being stirred up in a teapot, is it not? The only effect copybot has had in-world has been to feed rampant confusion and inspire knee jerk reactions in the form of the various counter-measure scripts, which in-turn annoyed the hell out of thousands of patrons of the very places they were intended to "protect".

The plain and simple fact of the matter is this: Copybot or no copybot, there is no way, on any technical level, to prevent something that is able to be drawn on your computer screen, from being copied, saved and repurposed, for good or for bad. Period. The battle against IP theft must be fought on some other level. Furthermore, the specifics about how copybot worked were absolutely no secret. It was known very early on that the !quit countermeasures would not work. The voices of reason began in a polite tone, and only became "insulting" when they were ignored, or responded to in increasingly nasty ways.

There is little doubt that the !quit scripts were also contributing substantially to performance degradation on the grid, aside from the "human annoyance" factor. It was a really, super bad idea from the start, and the "at least we were doing SOMETHING" argument doesn't hold water. Not then, not today. My hope is that when the next "copybot" scare comes around, and it most assuredly will, people will simply take a more rational approach to solving the problem - which invariably requires a better understanding of the problem itself, BEFORE deploying a solution.

zk

It is not ok for everyone to jump on Coco, the Copybot fiasco sucks for everyone. It happens in life, where there is no high ground and only mud. No amount of talking will make it better but talking may help you move through the stages of grief.

The PN reference & posting of IM's is not ok.

I did remove the names in my post. Although the name that was mentioned was someone who is banned from this forum and yet somehow was able to read all of the posts here and sent out nasty late night messages to people on Christmas Eve. But as far as Coco, I did respond to her post that basically states anyone that has stayed in LibSL is not a decent person. A lot of us do a lot of work to make SL a better place for all people and I will continue to defend my name and reputation. I would agree that some will never change thier views but as you can see in the thread here, some are learning that it was not a decision made by all of LibSL to release CopyBot.

We will survive this episode in SL and hopefully we will grow and learn to look past stereo types and group affiliations or nationality to see the individual.

Would like to add a couple last thoughts to this and then I am done..

First, I would like to apologize to Coco - I just went back and re-read my posts and my frustration was clearly getting the best of me, and I came off overly harsh. I mean no disrespect to anyone, and it's not my intention to flame. I'm sure that she can respect the fact that others have differing opinions, and we chose to put more emphasis on other components of the overall issue that in the thick of it, weren't being given adequate treatment. I do strongly feel that applying a bad solution is not necessarily better than no solution at all, and there comes a point where it just becomes indefensible. And I do think that we've all come full circle on that issue and agree that the defeaters were silly and annoying and did more harm than good.

I also believe that the folks at libSL are not getting a fair shake in this.. they are still being placed in a bad light in other, current threads on other forums. I think it has a lot to do with lack of understanding of the group, what they do, what they don't do. Nobody talks about the fact that in the course of developing the library, they have provided Linden Lab with invaluable information about bugs, exploits, etc that they have discovered along the way. Things that in the end, help you and me, and make our online sessions safer and more secure. Nobody considers the value of the project as it gets closer to completion in terms of extending the capabilities of Second Life at the client side, eventually offering more choices and interesting functionality not present in the Linden viewer. There are many positive aspects to what they are doing that have gotten buried by all this copybot fiasco. They had a couple bad apples who did something terribly stupid, and that has been dealt with, they have regrouped and tightened controls on the project's various code repositories. It happens. It's over. Can we stop trying to nail them to the cross now?

I realize this is way OT now and I'm partly responsible for it, and I apologize. If anyone wants to slam me, correct me, crucify me or otherwise comment to me, feel free to IM/PM me. I can take whatever you can throw at me (I won't be posting further to this thread)

zk