Why is there no real help when it comes to griefers Booting, Freezing and locking peoples computers

[Yardie London]

I am sorry to have to speak my mind but I am always left feeling that Linden Labs allow some of the more nasty abusing of peoples hardware by griefers. I am sure they will be people that read this that get pleasure from screwing up peoples computer hardware. Ok it is often not easy to see who is going to cause one griefing so most of the time I just do not respond to Im's from strangers if they are the lame old, "Smile", "waves" etc. Some times I just do not have the answer to why someone wants me to know they are smiling. I am also careful not to respond to sex requests from avatars that look underage or look like greifers. Whoever they have been a few times I have been stressed and busy and I have had to tell people to keep out of my IM box. A minute or so later my avatar is flying out in the middle of nowhere and if I do not log of SL really quick whatever code is being used lock's my computer up and I have to switch the whole thing off to get control of my computer back. 

when people decide to boot you there is no time to find somewhere to sit. even if you did sit down the code locks your computer down and probably is destroying my hardware. Most people that come across this type of grefing do not report it after seeing the rather unhelpful advise. The 1st time I got boot lagged the new computer I had just got was fired with in a week. I do use the sex sims because I make animation and mesh but I have noticed a growing number of people that come into adult sims with avatars that are bordering on underage to avatars that are blatantly portraying infants. In some of the sims I point this out to the sim owner and they say that they can only block these avatars if they are seen and reported but reporting them to LL is a waste of time because LL does nothing. So it would no appear that some people with nasty boot codes are going into adult sims in infant avatars just waiting for someone to tell them to leave so they can mess up the experience of anyone that is following the rules set. I have even been booted from an adult sandpit for no reason by someone with a Linden name. I guess I am not supposed to say that but if we all say nothing then the whole virtual world will die  the same way Yahoo chat died. I do enjoy going to the adult sims and talking with like minded people about making mesh and animation but I think enough is enough with the age play avatars going into adult sims. Some people say SL is using the infant avatars to run a sting wel I say that is pure BS.

[KarenMichelle Lane]

Yardie,

This question needs to be relocated to the General Discussion Forum so that the responses can be aired out in a proper public forum. This is a Q&A forum for people with specific issues. [Moderator asked to move this question.]

[KarenMichelle Lane]

Yarlie,

I've read  your post 2 times now and given the fact that you are an old timer to SL [ Last Name is a giveaway ] I'm getting the notion that you are a bit frustrated. What is weird if I may point out is you have exactly zero focus in your diatribe. [sometimes just dumping your frustrations in a rant helps I guess.]

After all this time have you not learned how the grid works? Reading the posts in these forums is a great starting place.

In no particular order...

a) So you have been ejected from a parcel or a region. Worse yet, you were banned? Welcome to the club. We all have at one time or another.

b) You have been frozen in place on a region or on a parcel that had no properly defined security settings so "griefers" could run rampant on it. Get over it. Go elsewhere.

c) You accepted and rezzed an object or entered a free rezzing zone where a particular large textured "trigger" object could cause your Graphics System to poop out.  Go elsewhere. But first report the griefing object if you can.  Sometimes you need to return on low graphic mode to do the report.

d) You have issues with young looking avatars on Adult Regions. OK, find an Adult Region that caters to your specific philosophy and or ideals of behaviour. 

Did I leave anything out?

Take a few minutes and read the TOS - https://secondlife.com/policy/?lang=en-US

It's interesting. You can be unceremoniously booted & banned from any Parcel or Region by the owner of said place. Them is the rules. No higher court will hear your case.

If you wander somewhere where the apparent age of the avatars is disturbing to you, go elsewhere.

If a fake Linden booted you, report them.

Basically, this all depends on us, the residents of SL and the grid, to report what we observe that is actionable. "Actionable" is the key here. So many and I'll be indelicate here "Screaming Meemes" file incoherent Abuse Reports as to be totally not actionable. Keep emotion out of your Abuse Reports.

The SL Grid is huge. I don;t see how Linden Lab can police it as it is. It takes all of us to make it a worthwhile place for the population of people who inhabit it's streaming electrons.

P.S. You got a gripe regarding Graphics Card manufacturers and their products? Tired of GCs that don't render fitted mesh properly? Are you annoyed that there are easy to use exploits that cause your GC to race and over heat? Get on their customer forums and file a report there. Good luck with that too.

I'm sure others will chime in on this topic as well.

Be carefull out there.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Madelaine McMasters]

---

KarenMichelle Lane wrote:

You can be unceremoniously booted & banned from any Parcel or Region by the owner of said place. Them is the rules. No higher court will hear your case.

 

---

I've had to boot a few people in my day, but I've always wrapped that in a bit of ceremony. A year or so ago, I logged into my house to find a couple chatting on my sofa. I said hello, then quietly waited on my ottoman for them to finish their conversation. After a few minutes, I asked if they wouldn't mind allowing me some privacy in my own home. They rebuffed my request, so I decided to rearrange the furniture...

I started with just a nudge here and there, then progressed to violently tossing and flipping the sofa and setting it in the fireplace. I finally took it back into inventory to be cleaned.

Sometimes the circumstances require a li'l pomp.

;-).

[Lindal Kidd]

Well, let's just see here.

- Demanding people to get out of your IM.  This ticks a certain type of person off.  If you don't want to talk to someone, ignore the IM.  If they insist, Mute them.  Muting them will also solve the problem of them using a graphics crasher to dump you out of SL.

- Getting frozen, or booted and banned.  This isn't done by a griefer, but by a land owner.  If these things happen to you after you say something rude to someone, then you were rude to entirely the wrong person!

- Finding yourself flying off.  This is not a graphics crasher, you've been orbited...hit very hard with an object.  This can be prevented by sitting, which is something I always try to do right away wihen I find myself in a crowded sim that also has rezzing open, like a sandbox.  As you say, once you've been hit, it's too late.

- I would also suggest finding somewhere else to be.  If you like building, find a quieter, better policed sandbox.  Unless you are constructing giant penises or something, it doesn't have to be an Adult sandbox.  Separate your building activities and your Adult activities.  The BEST place to build in peace is on your own land.  Then YOU can do the ejecting, freezing, and banning.

[CheriColette]

---

Lindal Kidd wrote:

 

- Demanding people to get out of your IM.  This ticks a certain type of person off.  If you don't want to talk to someone, ignore the IM.  If they insist, Mute them.  Muting them will also solve the problem of them using a

graphics crasher

to dump you out of SL.

 

- Finding yourself flying off.  This is not a

graphics crasher

, you've been orbited...hit very hard with an object.  This can be prevented by sitting, which is something I always try to do right away wihen I find myself in a crowded sim that also has rezzing open, like a sandbox.  As you say, once you've been hit, it's too late.

 

---

Can you tell me more about this  'graphics crasher'  business. First time I have heard of it. Sounds frightening. 

[Yardie London]

God this reply of your is so annoying. You have not read a word of it and made assumption. Yeah I am an old time alright and I know women do not make such kind of wild assumptions. I have never been banned by any SL sim owner OK. so please do not try and mock me with assumptions. We all get really bored sometimes and look for ways to give clever answers to questions that we do not fully understand. Somehow whenever I post on this forum one or two people totally miss read everything I say and try and twist what my original post meant. 

So without going all over it again I will just simply say " I follow the sim rules off all the sims I visit" Meaning I would not teleport to an G rated sim with a adult rated cloths, outfit of group sign. I do not wear or have any child or infant type avatar out fits. I understand what is meant but the term Age play when looking at the pop down menu in the Report abuse. so please read carefully before replying and then also read your reply carefully before hitting the Post Button. Youtube is a much wider and potentially damaging platform I I could use to bring this matter to more peoples attention. People that do wrong and ignore any possible consequences are often left dazed and confused when they loose their account or log on one day to find they VW is no more. It is only then they have all the time to read the rules they should have followed.

[Ohjiro Watanabe]

I couldn't be bothered to read it either

[Perrie Juran]

---

CheriColette wrote:

---

Lindal Kidd wrote:

 

- Demanding people to get out of your IM.  This ticks a certain type of person off.  If you don't want to talk to someone, ignore the IM.  If they insist, Mute them.  Muting them will also solve the problem of them using a

graphics crasher

to dump you out of SL.

 

- Finding yourself flying off.  This is not a

graphics crasher

, you've been orbited...hit very hard with an object.  This can be prevented by sitting, which is something I always try to do right away wihen I find myself in a crowded sim that also has rezzing open, like a sandbox.  As you say, once you've been hit, it's too late.

 

---

Can you tell me more about this  'graphics crasher'  business. First time I have heard of it. Sounds frightening. 

---

Graphics Crasher AND Defending Against Them

 

Essentially they max out your GPU's ability and it shuts down.

The OP's claim that it fried his one week old computer however sounds overblown.  Maybe it fried his Graphics Card but if something did get fried I'd think he had a defective part in it that wasn't going to hold up. 

Heat is the enemy of all computers so yes, if you kept getting hit repeatedly there is the potential of damage.

 

[KarenMichelle Lane]

---

CheriColette wrote:

---

Lindal Kidd wrote:

 

- Demanding people to get out of your IM.  This ticks a certain type of person off.  If you don't want to talk to someone, ignore the IM.  If they insist, Mute them.  Muting them will also solve the problem of them using a

graphics crasher

to dump you out of SL.

 

- Finding yourself flying off.  This is not a

graphics crasher

, you've been orbited...hit very hard with an object.  This can be prevented by sitting, which is something I always try to do right away wihen I find myself in a crowded sim that also has rezzing open, like a sandbox.  As you say, once you've been hit, it's too late.

 

---

Can you tell me more about this  'graphics crasher'  business. First time I have heard of it. Sounds frightening. 

---

Cheri,

There are some well documented issues with various brands of graphics cards that can be exploited [dare I say] by "talented" SL scripters to cause that Graphic s Card GPU to run at it's max + some until it generates a fault. When it does this, the PC will react according to 1) The GC's Bios programming & 2)  the PC's Bios and/or OS's ability to deal with a hardware fault of this type. You will see symptoms like freezing of the PC in some cases, or the PC will shut-down in order to protect itself and the GC. In the worst case, the PC allows the GC [Graphics Card] to continue to race until an electrical failure occurs [such as an overheated condition].

None of this is the fault of Second Life per-se. Second Life is simply the 3D platform where the graphics rendering is occurring and more importantly, is the place where user created OOSD [ Objects of Small Destruction] can be created and run in sight of other avatar account PC users.

This is were the advise "Never accepting a gift from a stranger" comes from. To be sure, never rez a gift from a stranger.

Still, you can be adversely affected by merely being on a parcel or in a region where someone rezzed such a scripted object that has started to do it's thing. Most of these exploits and the subsequent attack vectors are graphical in nature.

Note: I didn't mention the exact graphic mechanisms being exploited or how this is done for obvious reasons.

I'm not sure how Linden Lab can help deal with this issue. Unlike most MMO's SL allows self-tested user created content. The game development companies pour over all the code that their hired guns create and test them in large Quality Assurance [QA] projects before releasing it to the general population of Game Users.

I wish there there was such a thing as a anti-malware detector for Graphics Cards to intercept these kinds of attacks.

 

[KarenMichelle Lane]

Yardie,

Just to be fare I read your diatribe a 3rd time..... Nope, my original response still applies. BTY - I'm one of many I'm sure who asked your post to be moved here to the General Discussion Forum where it could be discussed more thoroughly.

You'll have to forgive me in that I don't suffer rants of any kind well. They tend to hide real issues in lots of emotional clap trap and accusations. They also set the tone of the responses.

Given your length of time in Second Life I wondered where you were hanging out and why you would declare boldly and I quote: " I am always left feeling that Linden Labs allow some of the more nasty abusing of peoples hardware by griefers.."

Your description of how you were dealing with these kind of issues mixed with your experience of being orbited and abused before turning off your PC, just made me cringe.  Why? Because I can imagine how you might have tried to report this in an Abuse Report to the Linden Lab. But forgive me I'm having to read between the lines given your emotional state when you wrote your original rant.

Now, within your jewel of compact prose are mixed some facts many of us have observed as well. Annoying avatars blatantly coming into Adult Regions and causing mischief.

You'll forgive me if I fail to believe your claim that "someone with a Linden name" booted you from an Adult Sandpit.

Since you are an experienced Region owner you know full well that you have all the power to control your environment but that you need to make decisions and be proactive. So your reference to other Region owners laments and I quote: " In some of the sims I point this out to the sim owner and they say that they can only block these avatars if they are seen and reported but reporting them to LL is a waste of time because LL does nothing " is pointless

Banning these avatars when encountered on your Estate is the correct course of action. This protects your investment in your Region and your target audience's pleasure as well. Sure you can A.R. the offending avatar account and you should but you know as well as I that a persistent griefer can create more in minutes. The real challenge is to not become a target for griefers in the first place.

Comparing Second Life to Yahoo Chat speaks more about you and your view of things rather than pointing out a possible future of Second Life.

I'm personally glad that you mentioned at least one thing that you enjoy " I do enjoy going to the adult sims and talking with like minded people about making mesh and animation "  but that too was followed with "...but I think enough is enough with the age play avatars going into adult sims. Some people say SL is using the infant avatars to run a sting well I say that is pure BS." - I do agree with your one statement of opinion about SL being a co-conspirator in the infant avatar baiting plot.

 

Even with reading your rant a 3rd time I really don't get where you are coming from. Sorry, if I seem unsympathetic to your plight.

You even mentioned "We all get really bored sometimes and look for ways to give clever answers to questions that we do not fully understand. Somehow whenever I post on this forum one or two people totally miss read everything I say and try and twist what my original post meant. "

You are so correct. You presented a emotional rant. That's OK as rants are many times good clearing houses for pent up frustrations. This said,  I don't remember seeing a question in your rant anywhere. This the reason I asked to have it moved from the SL Answers Q&A forum into the General Discussion forum.

Further, you decided to post a stream of consciousness kind of rant with no proper background information provided and no specific questions asked and you blame the reader because we are left to figure out "what my original post meant". Do you see the issue here?

 

Now your 2nd post and specifically the 2nd paragraph makes much more sense, well maybe.

"So without going all over it again I will just simply say " I follow the sim rules off all the sims I visit" Meaning I would not teleport to an G rated sim with a adult rated cloths, outfit of group sign. I do not wear or have any child or infant type avatar out fits. I understand what is meant but the term Age play when looking at the pop down menu in the Report abuse. so please read carefully before replying and then also read your reply carefully before hitting the Post Button. Youtube is a much wider and potentially damaging platform I I could use to bring this matter to more peoples attention. People that do wrong and ignore any possible consequences are often left dazed and confused when they loose their account or log on one day to find they VW is no more. It is only then they have all the time to read the rules they should have followed."

You have merged [you follow the rules ] + [examples of how you follow the rules] + [an incoherent statement about the menu drop down in the AR process and how it apples to someone responding to your posts]  + [Youtube is evil] + [Youtube can allow you to have a wider audience than this forum] + [You can expose the SL platform as a place where these inequities occur]+ [a morality tale about wrongdoers being shocked to find themselves eventually banned from a Virtual World]

Did I miss anything?

 

Please forgive my [insert whatever emotion you are feeling at this time as an adverb] of your post. I'm old school and tend to analyze posts by mentally diagramming them. [Yeah I know, this is no longer taught in our schools] This technique allows me to at lease try to pull out the salient thoughts from almost any rant. [Yes this is called assuming!]

So my original post to you was made in the light that you were helpless as to how to protect yourself or your PC's graphics card in SL after all these years. That the powers that be were uncaring and didn't want your SL experience to be wonderful. That griefers run unchecked all over SL.  As I alluded to earlier, rants set the tone for responses.

 

I'm just making sure I haven't lost my mind and mistaken your eloquent post as a diatribe.

P.S. I hope you don't mind that I decided to keep my wits about me in my response as I choose not to wrap my forum posts and responses up with emotional wrappers. I found this works well in the corporate world where I spent a long part of my life and career before retiring early.

 

P.S.S. So to your question alone -  Why is there no real help when it comes to griefers Booting, Freezing and locking peoples computers - I would say all of these points were covered by the responses. Your choice of the word "real" in front of Help is an adverb phrase that you and only you will be able to measure as to being answered or not.

To summarize:

Freezing & Locking Up Computers [When griefer caused]; The only way to fix this immediately is to ban user created content from SL I'm pretty sure this isn't going to happen. A more sensible solution is for the Region & Parcel owner to control who can rez what on their virtual land and to control who can visit with attached scripted objects running.

Booting of an Avatar from a Region & Parcel [+ orbiting and other avatar physical abuse]:  Already solved. The Region & Parcel owner needs to make sure that the area has the proper security applied.

As for the rest of your post, I didn't see any questions in it to answer beyond the great advise many have given.

 

 

 

[Yardie London]

Way too much self questions and answers. I guess my life on SL must sound out of this world to you KarenMichelle. (100% thrill) I bet you would like to investigate all my clams. sure I would love to take you to the sandbox where I got my object swapped with a booter lagger.That is the place where the owner has a Linden name. sure go ahead. I really do not see why you feel the need to copy and re read lines from my thread posts. My RL and SL life are too fast for Emotes and rewinds. 

But no dough you will be copying most of this reply and serializing it cause you are meant to be the funny guy. YEAH?

BTY the Person or persons that Booted me yesterday was not targeting me. They just crashed about 6 sims at once. They do not give warnings but one can see the signs days ahead sometimes

[Perrie Juran]

---

Yardie London wrote:

Way too much self questions and answers. I guess my life on SL must sound out of this world to you KarenMichelle. (100% thrill) I bet you would like to investigate all my clams. sure I would love to take you to the sandbox where I got my object swapped with a booter lagger.

That is the place where the owner has a Linden name. sure go ahead. I really do not see why you feel the need to copy and re read lines from my thread posts. My RL and SL life are too fast for Emotes and rewinds. 

But no dough you will be copying most of this reply and serializing it cause you are meant to be the funny guy. YEAH?

BTY the Person or persons that Booted me yesterday was not targeting me. They just crashed about 6 sims at once. They do not give warnings but one can see the signs days ahead sometimes

---

I'm confused here, the owner of the place or the owner of the griefing object?

I know from personal experience that LL does not take kindly to anyone impersonating a Linden.  I know someone who tried to pull a "harmless prank" on someone who had not only their main but two alt accounts that had the same PIOF perma banned.

[Aethelwine]

"where I got my object swapped with a booter lagger" - I am very curious about this. Was something you had rezzed in the sandbox swapped for a "booter\lagger" that you found in your inventory after you had crashed?

"They do not give warnings but one can see the signs days ahead sometimes" - what kind of signs?

[Pussycat Catnap]

---

Yardie London wrote:

God this reply of your is so annoying. You have not read a word of it and made assumption. Yeah I am an old time alright and I know women do not make such kind of wild assumptions. I have never been banned by any SL sim owner OK. so please do not try and mock me with assumptions. We all get really bored sometimes and look for ways to give clever answers to questions that we do not fully understand. Somehow whenever I post on this forum one or two people totally miss read everything I say and try and twist what my original post meant.

---

That's not by intent. Whatever software you are using to translate your posts into English is resulting in some really confusing wording. If you're typing them in English - consider just switching to your native language and putting the burden on us to translate.

I for one have yet to be able to figure out what the issues you're having are, exactly. I don't think anyone is trying to be hostile, but the wording is very confusing and people above me are making their best attempts and understanding what is appearing on their screens in the first and following posts.

 

[Lindal Kidd]

A graphics crasher is a griefing device that uses very complex or corrupt textures to overload your graphics card.  Some claim it can physically damage your graphics card, but I have never seen proof of this or had it verified by any source I consider authoritative.  I do know that the things can crash your viewer, and maybe even freeze or BSOD your computer, requiring a reboot.

You can defeat a graphics crasher by muting the avatar it belongs to, or by turning off object rendering with CTRL+SHIFT+ALT+1, or (possibly) by using some of the debug settings discussed here: http://thegreenlanterns.wordpress.com/2013/05/12/debug-settings-to-make-graphics-crashers-obsolete/

[CheriColette]

Re-graphcs grievers...thanks for info Lindal, Karen and Perrie

read most of it and saved links to followup later.

One thing I did learn early (from reading forum) was NOT to except grifts from strangers

[KarenMichelle Lane]

Yarlie,

No I won't be serializing your reply to my follow up post.  I understand that you are experiencing annoying people in the public sand boxes. I'm so sorry that you are being deprived of an ability to build and create in a place set aside by Linden Lab for this purpose.

As for those places [sand boxes], I don't go to them anymore. When I started to build in earnest, I found that owning my own parcel was a much better option for building. At that time I also took a job as a land manager for the Islands I eventually ended up owning. That job paid for the parcel I kept to live and build on. I don't know if this is a possibility for you.

It is a shame that there are known issues that can both cause a LL Region to hang up [or crash] & that will cause targeted graphic cards to race and take a PC out of commission. I really wish someone [LL for server code exploits & the GC manufacturers for GC exploits] could write specific code for the sand box regions [like was done for the Linden Home Regions] that could detect this kind of attack and act on it prior to a failure.

You be safe out there Yarlie.

Yours,

KarenMichelle