Racist 'Bots' Impersonating Me

[Whirly Fizzle]

3 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

How do you block people on the forums? I read that you use a "drop down menu" and right-click. But nothing is dropping down.

Hover over their name -> choose "Ignore user".

Or,  your account name top right of the page -> Ignored Users -> Add new user to ignore list.

[ChinRey]

5 hours ago, Callum Meriman said:

12 years and you have not yet suceeded. How long until you do?

You can ask the same question to the other side. The survivors from the Woodbury clan and the inaptly named League of Justice have been fighting each other and attacking everybody they perceive as soft targets for 12 years now. Apart from being a general annoyance and occasionally getting some of their own alts banned, they haven't achieved anything yet.

Edited October 12, 2017 by ChinRey

[Solar Legion]

9 minutes ago, ChinRey said:

You can ask the same question to the other side. The survivors from the Woodbury clan and the inaptly named League of Justice have been fighting each other and attacking everybody they perceive as soft targets for 12 years now. Apart from being a general annoyance and occasionally getting some of their own alts banned, they haven't achieved anything yet.

When you consider that both groups are/were largely comprised of trolls, grefers and drama mongers you realized that the notion they have not achieved anything yet is only from our own perspective.

From their perspective they have achieved exactly what they set out to do; cause a response to their actions.

Ignoring them, reporting them and moving on works well enough for those they do not directly target or for those who haven't spent an inordinate amount of time giving them the attention they crave.

Unfortunately some of what has been discussed in this thread has been brought up repeatedly over the last decade or so and more often than not the same cycle repeats; some will listen and taken the advice given to heart and will walk away with a better understanding of how bans and such are handled as far as Second Life is concerned. Others will stomp their feet in supposed defiance and refuse to listen to any information they are given, all because they have this notion in their mind that things cannot possibly work the way they're described.

It is what it is and some of us just gave up bothering to even try beyond correcting misinformation.

[Paul Hexem]

"Don't feed the trolls."

Until LL requires a real identity for account creating and actually enforces bans on that level, they'll never stop griefers and trolls. There is absolutely zero way to stop a griefer from creating a new account when your account signups are virtually anonymous, and free.

Again, LL cannot stop griefers. It's not in their power.

As long as you keep feeding them, you'll never get them to go away, and you'll never win.

Edited October 12, 2017 by Gadget Portal

[Pamela Galli]

5 hours ago, Solar Legion said:

some will listen and taken the advice given to heart and will walk away with a better understanding of how bans and such are handled as far as Second Life is concerned. Others will stomp their feet in supposed defiance and refuse to listen to any information they are given, 

Most — not all — who lodge a complaint in the forum do not want to make the effort to take whatever measures available and suggested to them, like blocking, because they are not really interested in solving the problem. What they want is not a solution, but for LL to punish the offender. And as we see so often, that does not happen because the story they tell in the forum turns out to be not the whole story, or an outright lie. They are as invested in the battle as their opponent. They want to win.

I have yet to figure out why they come report their fabricated stories in the forum.

Edited October 12, 2017 by Pamela Galli

[Anna Nova]

Don't see how an IP ban would help.  Here in the UK, all IP's from the biggest ISP (BT, Bombay Telecom to those of us who are in their monopoly districts) are temporary.  If I want a new one, I just reset my DSL Modem.  I'd love a fixed IP address.

[Prokofy Neva]

@Callum you're still suffering from the idea that people "deserve" griefing if they have done some other X, Y, or Z thing you don't like. Let's say they voted for Trump. Or they criticized privileges classes of creators in SL. Or they rent land, which a socialist may think is grasping and greedy against "the People". And so on. But none of those things "deserve" griefing because griefing is crime. In a civil society under the rule of law, you have to tolerate views you don't like. If that society is free, it means capitalism that you may not like will thrive. You're welcome to try your own socialist experiment on your farm and not allow Trumpkins there. Or whatever. Same in SL.

There are many, many groups that experience the most intense form of griefing, but they follow this absurd mantra that you counsel of not publicizing the griefing in the hope it might go away. It's like the mafia omerta system. It's like the KGB telling you, when they persecute you, that if you are quiet about that persecution, things might go better for you. These abusive systems are only perpetuated by silence.

Religious groups that have, say, prayer meetings or Bible studies are attacked; conservative groups; groups of various merchants who want to enhance business; groups not sufficiently to the hard left of some of the griefers, say, the Edwards campaign or the Hillary campaign -- all of these have been savaged by griefers who don't want other people to use the Internet in any way except in their own totalitarian vision. Some of these griefers that people thought were edgy and cool are now revealed merely to be the alt-right in its embryonic form, complete with Pepe memes.

The kind of routine griefing that occurs by non-organized griefers, say, some angry ex-boyfriend or some newbie drunk on prim power, is easily dealt with by turning on autoreturn or being conscientious about expelling problem makers or making sure nothing is left in "share" that might get griefed if you have an open group. That sort of thing.

These ideological griefers that attack me and others who are either prominent or who have activities griefers hate like Bible studies are a different problem and that involves political will.

When you say you "can't" ban people by IP or hash ban or you "can't" ban anonymizers, this is ideological. It's hypothetical and theoretical. Of course you can, and it is done all the time by real businesses that aren't as ideological as LL and other "Better World" Silicon Valley companies. 

Mark Zuckerberg said the idea was "crazy" that Russians could exploit his platform to influence the US elections. Pundits and lefty socialists batted away concern about hate groups getting amplified by Russians as "McCarthyism". Then once they got the Mueller special counsel investigation and four Congressional committees, all of a sudden their minds were concentrated wonderfully and they found that Russian ads reach 100 million people. They deleted 470 groups that before, one could endlessly abuse report for hate speech in English or Russian and they'd ignore it. Amazing, how these people whining how these tools of identity and deletion "can't" be used because of "McCarthyism," but once a little research is done to show them how obvious agents of the Kremlin turned people out on the streets with guns to oppose Muslims in America, they saw reason. They began to see how this *hurts their business*. The trajectory that Zuckerberg and Facebook executives underwent here is remarkable, and all without any McCarthyism or subpoena, but voluntarily, because they realized it not only hurt their business, it hurt America, which is where their business thrives.

Ideologically-driven techies throw up their hands and say it is "impossible" to stop things on the Internet "because tech" or "because math" or because "analog hole". But in fact, once you decide to have the political will to at least try, you get 80%. You don't strive for 100%, but you get some success and you build on it. The Lindens used to tolerate rogue viewers with built-in copybot and griefing and privacy-busting capacity under the rubric of "open source" and "creativity". Then they decided to crack down and vet them. They realized *it harmed their business*.

Only when these companies realizes *this harms their business* do they get off the dime and devise organic policies to utilize tech which is always imperfect to at least MITIGATE the damage TO THEIR BUSINESS. That's what it's all about.

Philip Linden demonstratively banned something like 80 or 100 accounts associated with the 4chan types about 10 years ago and there was all kinds of screaming and howling that people who didn't grief were affected. But they were the people who owned the sims and silently held the cloaks while the griefers made mischief, and the Lindens could see that. If they look now, they can see the range of sim owners and sandbox owners and groups that serve as bases and respawning enablers for griefers and they can choke them off. 

[Prokofy Neva]

16 minutes ago, anna2358 said:

Don't see how an IP ban would help.  Here in the UK, all IP's from the biggest ISP (BT, Bombay Telecom to those of us who are in their monopoly districts) are temporary.  If I want a new one, I just reset my DSL Modem.  I'd love a fixed IP address.

Doesn't matter. Not everybody in SL is from the UK. Not everybody in the UK has the biggest ISPs. So you are narrowed down when dealing with the question of banning one griefer. Sure, he can reset it. But he can't ever use that one you've banned *him* with. IP bans work in SL, despite all this constant invocation of their "impossibility". That's why the Lindens use them. They use them in particular for accessing the site and things like the JIRA, even if it might be harder for logging on which can be done through various methods. Although they are banned, various products ban by IP address and merchants plagued by griefers use IP bans and they're happy to get rid of griefers because in fact "all the people in the UK with those big ISPs" are not banned from their stores when they do that. It's a hysterical hypothetical that practice shows doesn't occur, once you get over the ideological hobble surrounding it.

[Innula Zenovka]

1 hour ago, anna2358 said:

Here in the UK, all IP's from the biggest ISP (BT, Bombay Telecom to those of us who are in their monopoly districts) are temporary.  If I want a new one, I just reset my DSL Modem.  I'd love a fixed IP address.

Switch to Virgin Broadband.   The IP address is, to all intents and purposes, fixed -- as I recall, it changes only if you change your contract.

[Innula Zenovka]

I have to say I agree with Prok here.   The fact that an IP ban will not represent much more than a minor inconvenience to a tech-savvy griefer isn't, in itself, a reason for LL not to impose them.   My locks won't keep out a reasonably proficient and determined burglar, but that doesn't mean I should leave my apartment unlocked when I go out.

 

[JoeDex]

Wouldn't SL be so much better if Griefers, Trolls and bots were gone. I know it is a pipe dream. LL has known that the number one reason that people leave is due to abuse. So for all these years they have done some amazing things but they have never made a real push to clear out the swamp. 

[Callum Meriman]

3 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

@Callum you're still suffering from the idea that people "deserve" griefing if they have done some other X, Y, or Z thing you don't like.

Nobody deserves griefing Prok. I am only curious why you are atacked when others are not. I guess from your rambling, unrelated post about trump and socialism, you don't understand why they attack you either.

 

2 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

Sure, he can reset it. But he can't ever use that one you've banned *him* with.

Dynamic IPs are the norm in the world. America is weird in giving people fixed ones.

So, the huge problem is - for MOST of the world - if LL ban a griefer's IP address and another SL resident is assigned that IP address in the future, then they are banned as well.

My ISP has 64,000 IP addresses to assign. If a griefer was with the same ISP as me, and he went through - IP address after IP address - the lab banning each one... How would I be able to log in?

There would be no un-banned IP addresses left.

Don't you see this?

 

Edited October 12, 2017 by Callum Meriman

[Callum Meriman]

1 hour ago, Innula Zenovka said:

 The fact that an IP ban will not represent much more than a minor inconvenience to a tech-savvy griefer

Once that IP address is banned, no innocent person can use it.

Do you really want to stop innocent people logging in?

 

Edit: Let me put it into maybe-American terms so people can understand. Let's pretend that AT&T decided people in Tennessee would be assigned a temporary IP address in the range 138.3.45.001 to 138.3.46.254 - 64,000 or so IP addresses.

Being dynamic, turning off your modem for more than 2 minutes - or a line fault more than 2 minutes would change your address.

Joe.Griefer starts his modem and assigned 138.3.45.128, he griefs and that IP address is banned - 138.3.45.128 can no longer attach to Second Life.

No biggy, he reboots his modem and gets 138.3.46.003, he griefs again and that IP address is banned - 138.3.46.003 can also no longer attach to Second Life.

 

Now YOU, who also live in TN and are with AT&T have a storm, your modem loses power for 5 minutes, and reboots with the address 138.3.45.128.

How can you play? Your IP address is banned because Joe.Griefer was previously naughty when using it.

Edited October 12, 2017 by Callum Meriman

[Theresa Tennyson]

3 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

Ideologically-driven techies throw up their hands and say it is "impossible" to stop things on the Internet "because tech" or "because math" or because "analog hole". But in fact, once you decide to have the political will to at least try, you get 80%. You don't strive for 100%, but you get some success and you build on it. The Lindens used to tolerate rogue viewers with built-in copybot and griefing and privacy-busting capacity under the rubric of "open source" and "creativity". Then they decided to crack down and vet them. They realized *it harmed their business*.

And the people you're trying to stop are in the remaining 20%, or know how to get there.

Meanwhile, isn't it interesting that the people trying to defame you link to your own web pages? You'd think they'd want to set up fake pages to show you in a false light - say where "you" would do things like calling confused but otherwise innocent people things like "idiots", "asshats" and "clueless gits."

 

Oh, wait...

Edited October 13, 2017 by Theresa Tennyson

[Callum Meriman]

Maybe you guys are thinking MAC ban.... and using the term IP ban incorrectly.

If so, correct your terminology if that's the case. An IP ban punishes innocent people. A MAC ban on the other hand punishes the computer.

 

Most, if not all commerical sites in the world would NEVER IP ban, the risk of an innocent customer being locked out is too much. All these commercial sites, twitter, facebook, WoW, Amazon.... MAC ban.

[Anna Nova]

10 hours ago, Innula Zenovka said:

Switch to Virgin Broadband.   The IP address is, to all intents and purposes, fixed -- as I recall, it changes only if you change your contract.

Can't.  They don't offer a service in my rural village.  I can get TalkTalk, but not Fibre, so I'd be limited to 1-2Mbps - i.e. No SL.  It's BT or nothing here, and even then it's just 12Mbps, since BT refuse to do FTTP.

[Anna Nova]

11 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

Doesn't matter. Not everybody in SL is from the UK. Not everybody in the UK has the biggest ISPs. So you are narrowed down when dealing with the question of banning one griefer. Sure, he can reset it. But he can't ever use that one you've banned *him* with. IP bans work in SL, despite all this constant invocation of their "impossibility". That's why the Lindens use them. They use them in particular for accessing the site and things like the JIRA, even if it might be harder for logging on which can be done through various methods. Although they are banned, various products ban by IP address and merchants plagued by griefers use IP bans and they're happy to get rid of griefers because in fact "all the people in the UK with those big ISPs" are not banned from their stores when they do that. It's a hysterical hypothetical that practice shows doesn't occur, once you get over the ideological hobble surrounding it.

and what of the poor souls who inherit that banned IP?  I respectfully  disagree that it is the right way to go for LL.

[Bitsy Buccaneer]

Prok, I think you're right in the importance of letting others know so they don't reward the griefers and inadvertently keep the cycle going. To that end, have you enlisted the help of the owners of the other rental groups? Their groups are adversely affected so they'll want to put a stop to it as well.

I recognise that telling your story is important to you, but I would suggest requests for help from the owners of the other rental groups be succinct. They don't need to know the whole story, which can be overwhelming and takes a while to grasp. My suggestion is that you present a simply summary of the situation (griefers are impersonating you and posting racist things in other people's rental groups) and make a simple request that they put out a group notice advising their renters to AR the posts and not engage in arguing with the griefers.

This approach will target the information to those who need it most. Forum folk can't do much, those who are receiving the dreadful posts in their group chat can.

[Anna Nova]

11 hours ago, Callum Meriman said:

Maybe you guys are thinking MAC ban.... and using the term IP ban incorrectly.

If so, correct your terminology if that's the case. An IP ban punishes innocent people. A MAC ban on the other hand punishes the computer.

Most, if not all commerical sites in the world would NEVER IP ban, the risk of an innocent customer being locked out is too much. All these commercial sites, twitter, facebook, WoW, Amazon.... MAC ban.

I suggest you read this, Callum.  I love the idea, but it won't work.

https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/1118/can-i-block-based-on-mac-address

If the servers of the globals are doing it, I'd love to know how.

And BTW, I do know how to change the MAC address of my box.

[Innula Zenovka]

13 hours ago, Callum Meriman said:

My ISP has 64,000 IP addresses to assign. If a griefer was with the same ISP as me, and he went through - IP address after IP address - the lab banning each one... How would I be able to log in?

There would be no un-banned IP addresses left.

Don't you see this?

@Callum Meriman  You've been in SL a long time.  How many times in the however many years it is have you found yourself prevented from logging in because you've been assigned a banned IP address?

5 hours ago, anna2358 said:

and what of the poor souls who inherit that banned IP?  I respectfully  disagree that it is the right way to go for LL.

Now and again we see people asking for advice in these forums, and in the Answers section,  on what appears to be precisely this issue.      It doesn't happen that often, presumably because there's apparently some 4,000 million IPv4 addresses, and I doubt anything approaching 1 million of them have been banned by SL as yet (when everyone's migrated to IPV6, the problem should go away almost completely).

However, people in those cases are usually advised to reboot their routers, and see if that changes their IP address and, if that fails, to contact LL to explain their predicament and ask for the ban to be lifted.    For all I know, LL may purge their IP ban lists periodically, as region-owners need to do for region and estate ban lists.   That's what I would do in LL's position, precisely because I know that most IP addresses are recycled so it's generally pointless retaining them (and the ban) for more than a few weeks, at most.

As I said, I don't think an IP ban is much of a barrier,  though it does help disrupt the creation of throw-away alts for griefer attacks.  Precisely because it's not much of a barrier (and because it's not going to happen too often) I don' see the fact banned IP address get recycled as being much of an argument against using IP bans, since they will still do some limited good and the unintended harm they may cause is minimal and easily remedied.

[Prokofy Neva]

On 10/12/2017 at 7:43 PM, Callum Meriman said:

Nobody deserves griefing Prok. I am only curious why you are atacked when others are not. I guess from your rambling, unrelated post about trump and socialism, you don't understand why they attack you either.

 

Dynamic IPs are the norm in the world. America is weird in giving people fixed ones.

So, the huge problem is - for MOST of the world - if LL ban a griefer's IP address and another SL resident is assigned that IP address in the future, then they are banned as well.

My ISP has 64,000 IP addresses to assign. If a griefer was with the same ISP as me, and he went through - IP address after IP address - the lab banning each one... How would I be able to log in?

There would be no un-banned IP addresses left.

Don't you see this?

 

No, they aren't "the norm in the world". I watch them in Russia and Eurasia all the time and they are not dynamic as all that. They often revolve among a short list or are off only by a number and often they are static. The end.

We get the principle of "dynamic". It's not hard to grasp. But the techie claim that it everywhere prevails, as a hysterical hypothetical never to IP ban, just doesn't wash. You can be sure that Facebook is now busy banning all the IP addresses associated with the Internet Research Agency, and not fretting if someone else in St. Petersburg "shares" these. Honestly, in the real world, these sorts of crazy discussions of the SL forums don't happen.

It doesn't matter if your IP has 64,000 addresses to assign. Your IP address doesn't revolve around all 64,000. I've watched all kinds of IPs everywhere, and this is a total fiction, the kind of fiction that people who the totalitarianism of griefing to continue for their own ends.

As for "Trump" and "socialism" I have no idea what you're going on about, and your notion of "rambling" might be merely a marker for lack of comprehension. Let me help you along here: I'm not a Trump voter, I voted for Hillary. I oppose socialism, I didn't vote for Sanders. GASP such things happen and the world doesn't end.

None of these features of my political views -- even if I were a Trump voter -- would justify griefing.

 

[Prokofy Neva]

On 10/13/2017 at 8:00 AM, anna2358 said:

I suggest you read this, Callum.  I love the idea, but it won't work.

https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/1118/can-i-block-based-on-mac-address

If the servers of the globals are doing it, I'd love to know how.

And BTW, I do know how to change the MAC address of my box.

The MAC address ban has been discussed since the dawn of SL and always dismissed because "they can change it". But...not all of them can.

Just because you don't do something 100% is never a reason not to do 87%. The 0/1 binary thinking is the greatest hobbler of progress online.

[Prokofy Neva]

On 10/12/2017 at 8:13 AM, Gadget Portal said:

"Don't feed the trolls."

Until LL requires a real identity for account creating and actually enforces bans on that level, they'll never stop griefers and trolls. There is absolutely zero way to stop a griefer from creating a new account when your account signups are virtually anonymous, and free.

Again, LL cannot stop griefers. It's not in their power.

As long as you keep feeding them, you'll never get them to go away, and you'll never win.

Actually, none of that is true.

All those fake "bot" accounts bothering groups which so many were "convinced" were somehow related to me are gone now. I'm still here. The harassment has stopped -- for now. Of course, it might start up again at any moment.But the Lindens took appropriate action based on the racist content of the speech and other markers, they didn't attribute these accounts to me, and those group owners and those in this thread who thought otherwise were proven wrong. The end.

Edited October 17, 2017 by Prokofy Neva

[Anna Nova]

3 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

The MAC address ban has been discussed since the dawn of SL and always dismissed because "they can change it". But...not all of them can.

Just because you don't do something 100% is never a reason not to do 87%. The 0/1 binary thinking is the greatest hobbler of progress online.

I don't think you read it Prok.  It says that MAC addresses don't persist beyond the local network, and that is why they can't be used to filter users.  Their changeability is irrelevant.

I think you just like arguing.  I know I do!

Edited October 17, 2017 by anna2358
typo

[Paul Hexem]

3 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

Actually, none of that is true.

All those fake "bot" accounts bothering groups which so many were "convinced" were somehow related to me are gone now. I'm still here. The harassment has stopped -- for now. Of course, it might start up again at any moment.But the Lindens took appropriate action based on the racist content of the speech and other markers, they didn't attribute these accounts to me, and those group owners and those in this thread who thought otherwise were proven wrong. The end.

Just because it's not raining outside right now, that doesn't make the statement "We managed to prevent rain forever!" true.