New Estate Managment Tools

[Alexa Linden]

Good morning all and Happy Friday!  In case you missed it, we've added some new Estate Managment Tools to help you with Estate Access Management.  You can check them out here!

 

[animats]

Nothing new to help find script overload, though.

[Count Burks]

Why do you not provide some actual useful tools like banning based on IP and mac address.

You do not act when griefing takes place, you discard abuse reports. You do not provide assistance and you do not provide any tools to effectively ban griefers.

Changing a number from 10 to 15 in your database and trying to upsell it as a feature is not enough.

[bigmoe Whitfield]

On 4/27/2019 at 8:45 AM, Count Burks said:

Why do you not provide some actual useful tools like banning based on IP and mac address.

You do not act when griefing takes place, you discard abuse reports. You do not provide assistance and you do not provide any tools to effectively ban griefers.

Changing a number from 10 to 15 in your database and trying to upsell it as a feature is not enough.

Banning by ip or mac address or heck even hardware address is not worth the time or effort,  it takes me 5 mintues in total to change ip/mac/hardware addresses.    Banning by such things worked when the internet was less common and newer, in todays world,  it's not going to work.

[Aethelwine]

I thought Estate bans already included a few hours of an IP ban, enough to deter a casual griefer but limited to prevent unintentional and unreasonable consequences. 

[bigmoe Whitfield]

4 hours ago, Aethelwine said:

I thought Estate bans already included a few hours of an IP ban, enough to deter a casual griefer but limited to prevent unintentional and unreasonable consequences. 

There is the automated one LL includes, but easy as changing the ip address can get around that and most trolls/griefers are very aware how to defeat the system, these kind live to do it over and over and over and know there is no full proof way of blocking them (unless you want to black list a whole ip range with a geo block eeep.)

[Adamburp Adamczyk]

you know, Governance DO hold an in-world user group meeting every two weeks or so.

 

@countburks if you're having problems, pop along to it and speak to Kristin Linden (Governance supervisor) there - a lot of us landowners attend and she DOES listen to our concerns.

Personally, I've noticed a far greater presence inworld by Governance since these meetings started.

[Aethelwine]

4 hours ago, bigmoe Whitfield said:

There is the automated one LL includes, but easy as changing the ip address can get around that and most trolls/griefers are very aware how to defeat the system, these kind live to do it over and over and over and know there is no full proof way of blocking them (unless you want to black list a whole ip range with a geo block eeep.)

Alot will know what is going on when they have been IP banned temporarily, and how to get around it, but I think it deters sufficient numbers of casual amateur griefers for it to be worthwhile. Any more than it is would be pointless, but its inclusion helpful. Even with a determined griefer with an army of alts, it can give you a bit of time to turn scripts and rezzing off, shut things down for half an hour or an hour while you return stuff and hopefully they get bored. Some breathing space to deal with all the advice and concerned messages coming your way.

[bigmoe Whitfield]

6 hours ago, Aethelwine said:

Alot will know what is going on when they have been IP banned temporarily, and how to get around it, but I think it deters sufficient numbers of casual amateur griefers for it to be worthwhile. Any more than it is would be pointless, but its inclusion helpful. Even with a determined griefer with an army of alts, it can give you a bit of time to turn scripts and rezzing off, shut things down for half an hour or an hour while you return stuff and hopefully they get bored. Some breathing space to deal with all the advice and concerned messages coming your way.

while you do all that they have moved on to another target, it's a rinse and repeat system for them.   we had a big set of headaches in the forum (message board) that I still run, back in the early 2000's when we became quite popular in the car culture scene, because of fast and the furious,  talking about a nightmare.   but once we shut the board off they went and found another target. 

[Prokofy Neva]

This feigned futility that you "can't" ban by IP or Mac addresses is one of the banes of SL. It is a contrived geek hypothetical that in reality doesn't play out as imagined. In real life, no, not all IP addresses dynamically update -- some stay the same. In real life, if you ban IP addresses you might succeed in at least curbing the problem of griefing by some useful percent because not all griefers will keep making new addresses through proxies.

If the Lindens would pull up their socks and ban by proxy companies and stop pretending the changing of IP addresses is "needed by activists in Iran" then they will make progress. Sure, there are always some percentage of people who are in oppressive countries or who are victims of partner abuse or whatever who need anonymizers but most anonymizers do not fall in those categories, let's not be children here.

If the full class of people using particular European anonymizers realized that their advantage of using this feature has been threatened by a few who misuse it, they themselves become part of policing their own community. Because it is not unrelated. The population of SL is not that large and concurrency means it's a village. Groups who use anonymizers come in packs. Get the pack to keep their others in line. Not a perfect solution -- I'd rather have independent media and an independent judiciary, democratic elections, separation of powers and the rule of law, but since we can't have that and have to live in Lindenstan, let's at least have Lindenstan be an authoritarian country that has some publicity of crime and some abiding by its own rules.

It's either having the Lindens start doing this, or losing customers and facing constant efforts by the user population to make their own devices with IP bans which is always invoked as a privacy issue, because it outs alts or supposedly has false positives. Supposedly there are entire dormitories or large housing complexes with hundreds of people logging on to SL and OMGODZORS you can't ban all of them for the sake of one miscreant. Except....look at the IP addresses and geolocate the servers. It's some kid in Omaha, not entire complexes in New York City. Again, let's be practical, let's look at field experience and stop invoking fake extreme hypotheticals.

I haven't heard that the governance group still meets inworld. It does? If it's anything like the Concierge group, it cancels all its meetings instead of having them.

For weeks on end I have some psychopath threatening me with RL harm -- I have no idea why because I don't understand anything he is talking about and referencing -- and it's his fifth similarly named alt. The Lindens can't see their way clear to banning that name generically always, and banning his new appearances. Why would someone be able to threaten to kill you in RL, invoke your RL identity, and continue to do that for weeks on end after multiple abuse reports? This isn't an IP address problem or a proxy problem.

When the Lindens publicized the "police blotter," which was only a partial report, at least we had a better idea of what was going on. They should bring it back. Like items purchased, it should show ALL reports and then report honestly on which were acted on. We all get it that some ARs are frivolous or stupid or involve vendettas. But most don't. It's real griefing and real harassment and stalking. For bonus points, put the names of those who weren't just charged, but sentenced, i.e. the Lindens disciplined or banned the account. As in RL, this will help deter crime. 

 

 

Edited May 9, 2019 by Prokofy Neva

[Adamburp Adamczyk]

just an FYI on the above I said earlier.

 

I had a pretty nasty incident earlier on today on my mainland holdings, Governance responded within ten minutes.

 

@Kristin LindenMany thanks to your team for this.

[bigmoe Whitfield]

9 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

This feigned futility that you "can't" ban by IP or Mac addresses is one of the banes of SL. It is a contrived geek hypothetical that in reality doesn't play out as imagined. In real life, no, not all IP addresses dynamically update -- some stay the same. In real life, if you ban IP addresses you might succeed in at least curbing the problem of griefing by some useful percent because not all griefers will keep making new addresses through proxies.

If the Lindens would pull up their socks and ban by proxy companies and stop pretending the changing of IP addresses is "needed by activists in Iran" then they will make progress. Sure, there are always some percentage of people who are in oppressive countries or who are victims of partner abuse or whatever who need anonymizers but most anonymizers do not fall in those categories, let's not be children here.

If the full class of people using particular European anonymizers realized that their advantage of using this feature has been threatened by a few who misuse it, they themselves become part of policing their own community. Because it is not unrelated. The population of SL is not that large and concurrency means it's a village. Groups who use anonymizers come in packs. Get the pack to keep their others in line. Not a perfect solution -- I'd rather have independent media and an independent judiciary, democratic elections, separation of powers and the rule of law, but since we can't have that and have to live in Lindenstan, let's at least have Lindenstan be an authoritarian country that has some publicity of crime and some abiding by its own rules.

It's either having the Lindens start doing this, or losing customers and facing constant efforts by the user population to make their own devices with IP bans which is always invoked as a privacy issue, because it outs alts or supposedly has false positives. Supposedly there are entire dormitories or large housing complexes with hundreds of people logging on to SL and OMGODZORS you can't ban all of them for the sake of one miscreant. Except....look at the IP addresses and geolocate the servers. It's some kid in Omaha, not entire complexes in New York City. Again, let's be practical, let's look at field experience and stop invoking fake extreme hypotheticals.

I haven't heard that the governance group still meets inworld. It does? If it's anything like the Concierge group, it cancels all its meetings instead of having them.

For weeks on end I have some psychopath threatening me with RL harm -- I have no idea why because I don't understand anything he is talking about and referencing -- and it's his fifth similarly named alt. The Lindens can't see their way clear to banning that name generically always, and banning his new appearances. Why would someone be able to threaten to kill you in RL, invoke your RL identity, and continue to do that for weeks on end after multiple abuse reports? This isn't an IP address problem or a proxy problem.

When the Lindens publicized the "police blotter," which was only a partial report, at least we had a better idea of what was going on. They should bring it back. Like items purchased, it should show ALL reports and then report honestly on which were acted on. We all get it that some ARs are frivolous or stupid or involve vendettas. But most don't. It's real griefing and real harassment and stalking. For bonus points, put the names of those who weren't just charged, but sentenced, i.e. the Lindens disciplined or banned the account. As in RL, this will help deter crime. 

 

 

My cable modem stays the same, UNLESS I change my mac address on the router, and very simple because I run dd-wrt on my router.  that instantly changes my ip to another fresh out of the pool.   I can do this anytime I want, simple with a mac change. 

[Prokofy Neva]

11 hours ago, bigmoe Whitfield said:

My cable modem stays the same, UNLESS I change my mac address on the router, and very simple because I run dd-wrt on my router.  that instantly changes my ip to another fresh out of the pool.   I can do this anytime I want, simple with a mac change. 

And...so what? Read what I wrote. You don't take edge cases and make policy; you don't take *some* cases and make policy. You make policy by an acceptable level. MANY IP addresses do not change OR people don't figure out how to change them OR as you point out, it's a *pool* (if you mean like mine, a range, that is the same range) and therefore it is not the endless defeat of a system you imagine. Even if it is possible *for you, as someone determined to defeat the system by endless "whatabouts" and "buts", IT DOESN'T MATTER. Because some griefers -- likely most, in fact -- will be deterred. Especially if you block the proxy addresses related to persistent groups you see. When you decide not to be ideological but practical; when you decide that "good enough is good enough"; that it doesn't matter if there are some people who create the exceptions and the edge cases. You will accomplish a curbing of griefing. Same concept with gun control.

Edited May 10, 2019 by Prokofy Neva

[bigmoe Whitfield]

Goodbye forum.

[Kyrah Abattoir]

On 5/9/2019 at 4:35 PM, Prokofy Neva said:

This feigned futility that you "can't" ban by IP or Mac addresses is one of the banes of SL. It is a contrived geek hypothetical that in reality doesn't play out as imagined. In real life, no, not all IP addresses dynamically update -- some stay the same. In real life, if you ban IP addresses you might succeed in at least curbing the problem of griefing by some useful percent because not all griefers will keep making new addresses through proxies.

MAC addresses are OSI Layer 2, they are only locally unique and can't be verified on Layer 3 (that's why we use IPs on Layer 3)

This is 2019, ipv6 is a thing, my ISP gives each of their users a 65536 block of IPs.

The only somewhat effective method to deal with a griefer attack is to have some sort of "panic bunker" script that, when enabled essentially kicks home any avatar it hasn't seen while it was disabled.

You don't get any "new visits" but all your existing visitors are fine.

[Prokofy Neva]

This is overly technical obfuscation.

The Lindens can pick up an IP address used multiple times out of a block because there are enough repeat log-ons. And they can get a set of repeat uses and ban accounts on that basis alone, let alone other technical features, which they could also decide to use -- again, not perfectly, not verifiably, but enough to make it worthwhile.

The Lindens basically default to an encouragement of every and any log-on to their service rather than accidentally ban any paying user, as they need the concurrency.