Question about griefers

[Suki Hirano]

2 griefers came into my sim today and littered the place with griefing objects. It caused so much trouble that logging into here often causes a crash. I'm not sure how they're doing it, whether using hacks or not, but:

- They can't be ejected/banned. I ejected+banned them, then a few seconds later they came right back. Further attempts at ejecting/banning does absolutely nothing

- Their objects can't be returned for some reason

A while later I got the sim co-owner to ban them, somehow she is able to do it, and they're gone for now. I'm not sure why I wasn't able to do it as I had the same sim privileges as her. But anyways these grifers are very nasty and persistent, and I'm sure they'll come back with alts to cause trouble because it's not the first time it happened. So anything we can do to keep these people out? Does LL use IP ban or only account ban? I've already reported both of these people to LL, but not sure if LL even cares about these matters.

 

Update: so in continuation to the original question, I recently found out the identity of the griefers. You might not believe it, but they're actually alts or friends of a storeowner who had a disagreement with me. Basically I left negative remarks about his/her product due to defects, then s/he got really angry so I muted him/her. A few minutes later, an unknown person started IMing me a pageload of very nasty insults so I muted him as well. A few minutes after that, the same person I muted trespassed onto our sim with an accomplice then started littering the ground with griefing objects that made the entire sim completely unstable.

So my question is this, is there anything I can do in retaliation to this? This is completely unbelievable. I mean if it was just random griefers then fine, I'll just send in an AR, perm-ban them from our sims and let LL sort it out. But a shop owner in SL sending griefers to terrorize our sim due to not being able to take negative comments on his/her products (which is funny because the product is defective anyways)? I really think this is unheard of. I'm 100% sure those people who attacked me verbally and terrorized our sim are alts or friends, because I can easily tell from their profiles, and also why would I get attacked by random strangers 10min after having a row with that shop owner? But how do I report this to LL? Technically the shop owner didn't come to our sim, so I have no visual proof (but I did AR the two griefers). People like this don't deserve the right to open a store in SL.

[ChinRey]

It can often be hard to get LL to act on abuse reports but griefing reports are one of the exceptions here. As far as I know they always act fast and efficiently on those. You shuoldn't have to worry about those two guys anymore.

More info here:

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Griefer

 

[Sassy Romano]

Doesn't really matter, both are trivial to circumvent so not much point.

[LlewLlwyd]

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Sassy Romano wrote:

Doesn't really matter, both are trivial to circumvent so not much point.

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AGREED But as a matter of record, they use both.

***Although sometimes not covering all LL web-properties that they should, and sometimes the records revert spontaneously***

[ChinRey]

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Sassy Romano wrote:

Doesn't really matter, both are trivial to circumvent so not much point.

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It is but at least it'll slow them down a bit. Slows them down quite a lot actually. Griefing isn't a major problem in Second Life today. It's bad when it happens but if LL hadn't had good routines for dealing with it fast, griefing might well have been so bad it would have threatened the survival of SL.

It's easy for a griefer to just start a new account when his first is deleted. But open a new email account, use it to register a new SL account, go through the whole welcome process, go find some good griefer's tool - over and over and over again. That's not fun, even by a griefer's rather unusual definition of the word. Besides, there's always a chance you make a mistake so LL can identify your main account an delete that one too with all your precious inventory.

Blocking by IP address is tricky. There's never a guarantee you get the right guy that way. He may use roaming access or a proxy server or a public access computer. Should LL block an entire collecge because one student misbehaves in the computer lab?

Fortunately most griefers are like lightning, they never strike the same place twice. A new unsuspecting victim is always more "fun" and an easier target than somebody who's already been hit once and is better prepared next time.

[Bobbie Faulds]

Actually, they use MAC addresses. That's the address on your network card. They usually only do that in the very worst cases, like one we dealt with. That one would create various alts names to abuse the sim owners and managers and grief using replicating cubes....so much fun to be drowned in a wave of 10 m sq cubes rolling at you. He also rezzed our a mega megaprim the size of the sim that went up at least 300 meters. LL had to come get rid of that one. He was also logging in on the cumputers where he worked the night shift. This went on for several months. Ultimately, his place of employment was notified about the use and his personal puter was MAC banned. He also lost his job and somewhere in the neighborhood of 1 million Lindens total on the various banned alts.

LL is serious about serial griefers and does get them eventually.

[LlewLlwyd]

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Bobbie Faulds wrote:

 He was also logging in on the cumputers where he worked the night shift. This went on for several months. Ultimately, his place of employment was notified about the use and his personal puter was MAC banned. He also lost his job and somewhere in the neighborhood of 1 million Lindens total on the various banned alts.

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ERM . . . while not actually wishing to accuse you of mendacity, LL is notoriously unwilling to discuss the actions it takes against its customers (unsurprisingly, as the legal ramifications are as dangerous as the public relations effects) which implies that your "facts" may have been provided by the individual concerned - with the corresponding degree of unreliability - or are hypothetical musings. The alternative is that you are a Linden, Mole or Scout, and that your loose talk here is likely to get you into very hot water in respect of your relationship with the Lab.

***If you would like to provide a verifiable source, of course, I will retract my incredulity***

[Sassy Romano]

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Bobbie Faulds wrote:

Actually, they use MAC addresses. That's the address on your network card.

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That doesn't matter either, it's trivial to spoof the MAC address of the network card.

Their main issue is that the viewer is open source, so any call to any function that gains anything like IP address, MAC address, UUID, a hashed hardware figure, can be spoofed in the return back to the SL server.  I agree that it will get rid of the casual muppet but anyone hard core will not be deterred.

They should have gone down a route of enrolment of an X509 certificate to the PC and used the private key in that for authentication.  It could have been purely background, hidden from the user and also used for digital signing of assets, created by that individual instead of the woefully inadequate "Creator Name" that we have.  If they had provided that part as non open source because lets face it, SECURITY is quite important and not exactly something that the whole community needs to be involved in, like viewer improvements, then things could have been different.

 

[Bobbie Faulds]

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LlewLlwyd wrote:

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Bobbie Faulds wrote:

 He was also logging in on the cumputers where he worked the night shift. This went on for several months. Ultimately, his place of employment was notified about the use and his personal puter was MAC banned. He also lost his job and somewhere in the neighborhood of 1 million Lindens total on the various banned alts.

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ERM

. . . while not actually wishing to accuse you of mendacity, LL is notoriously unwilling to discuss the actions it takes against its customers (unsurprisingly, as the legal ramifications are as dangerous as the public relations effects) which implies that your "facts" may have been provided by the individual concerned - with the corresponding degree of unreliability - or are hypothetical musings. The alternative is that you are a Linden, Mole or Scout, and that your loose talk here is likely to get you into very hot water in respect of your relationship with the Lab.

***If you would like to provide a verifiable source, of course, I will retract my incredulity***

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Actually, I'm an admin in the estate. As you can see, no names were mentioned. I witnessed the sm-blocking cube myself as well as drowning in the wave of cubes and having to clean up cubes that didn't get returned. As for the consequences, we were so informed by the player's now ex spouse, since they got the computer in the divorce.

[Suki Hirano]

Thanks for all the responses. I've updated OP to include some new information.

[Magnus Brody]

Putting to one side your original question was answered, AR them, many thanks for the update which adds more peanut butter to the peanut butter sandwich.

Irrespective of the peanut butter level, or even in fact the very reason for the existence of the peanut butter, or your views on the peanut butter, you were told about the peanut butter.

So thanks for the extra helping of the peanut butter.  You should still AR them.