Jump to content

What can users do about copybots?


You are about to reply to a thread that has been inactive for 3133 days.

Please take a moment to consider if this thread is worth bumping.

Recommended Posts

First I should say that I am really angry and disaapointed that so many people have their heads in the sand about copybotting.
If it didn't happen to them most people don't want to know.
I have had meshes deleted, scripts damaged and I have no way of counting how many non-copy items were lost because they were in the contents of the meshes .... on top of all this well meaning people are happy to waste even more of my time telling me to check my 'Lost and Found', asking me if the parcel was set to auto-return, did I rename the item? etc. etc.
Their problem is that they just don't want to acknowledge that this happens (including LL) and it's easier to blame the person that it happens to than to do something about it.
My problem is that I come here to create.
I don't mind taking simple precautions to protect my work as far as possible but I don't want to get bogged down in the technicalities of viewer software and server hardware. That is taking me too far away from what I want to do which is to create.
I used to work in IT but I don't do that anymore .... that's LL's job isn't it?
Moving forward - If I create a really fancy geranium meshed from 126 prims down to 1prim plus I put a gorgeous humming bird emmitter inside .... Do I really care if someone copies it? Provided they don't destroy it, probably not because I've had all the fun I'm going to get out of that. If I put weeks of work into creating really complex vendors with 1000's of lindens worth of other people's no-copy items inside then I do care a great deal. The cheats can't tell the difference.
My first response is to carry on creating. That is what I come to SL to do and the bulk of my time should be spent doing just that.

Elsewhere on the internet, I am a huge fan of sites that trap the scammers. I can't publicise the sites here but it really does my heart good to see the scammers get a humiliating slap plus having hours of their time and their financial resources wasted. 

What can we do to make life difficult for cheaters and scammers in SL?

Where do we start looking for our copied items?

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Replies 52
  • Created
  • Last Reply

Top Posters In This Topic

of course i don't want to waste your time, as you state so clear.... but ever found out WHEN it happens?.... because you specificly mention no copy items... Please refrain from rezzing no-copy objects and making in world L$ transactions, and remember to save all builds ... Thats what is told around restarts... they don't write that without reason.

just a thought....

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I don't mind helpful suggestions when they actually help.

Can we assume a couple of things here ...

1. I  can read .... I've seen those messages around region restarts and I understand them just as well as you do.

2. When I say my objects were destroyed. That is what happened. I am not incompetent or making stuff up.

 

Going back to the original post ....

Where do we look for the copied items?

How can we make life difficult for the scammers?

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites


Chance Acoustic wrote:

Indeed.

 

I may have to post a new thread to get some answers

 

Posting something remotely coherent would help.

What you're complaining about is obviously not a copybotting situation.  Perhaps, if you explain it with more specificity, people might actually be able to understand what exactly you're going on about.

...Dres

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hi Dres,

I wasn't there when the items got trashed. 

I had 60+ vendors on one of the markets in-world. 

They had been in place working with no problems for over 1 month maybe 2 months.

They are gone except for a couple where the scripts were deleted.

LL have confirmed there was no inventory return by me.

Two nights later another two were deleted. 

So it's malicious not accidental and sim rollback is not a possibility because others would lose even more than I did.

 

The most important thing is to move forward, so I am splitting the thread- if you have experiences like this and can  answer the questions  where to look for copybotted items? How to be more proactive against the people who do this?

We can keep this thread going for suggestions about what might have caused this

Link to comment
Share on other sites


Chance Acoustic wrote:

Alwin - these are vendors !

the items inside are (no copy)

the transactions are in lindens.

There was no region restart when the items "disaapeared"

I am not sure why that is a problem

Many Intan dance balls are set up a very similar way - a scripted object full of no-copy innards. Intans occasionally disappear without a trace and have been doing so for years. It's a problem, certainly. But it has nothing to do with "copybotting."

A true "copybot" client takes the OpenGL graphics communication necessary to draw anything in SL and "reverse-engineers" it to make a copy of the original object. Scripts are separate from the OpenGL graphics communication so there's nothing a copybot client can do with it.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

What you are describing, and copybot, are not the same issue. In fact, they are not even remotely the same.

I'm not going to assume you are in idiot here, but for the sake of others reading, let me explain a little bit, because your post is going to confuse all sorts of people(oldies and newbies alike)

Copybot...

Copybot is, quite literally, the copying of *something. Now, that something could be all sorts of things including but not limited to, prims(including sculpt and mesh prims), textures, and other attributes that apply to prims which one is able to copy. There are numerous different programs, many of which involve using a specific viewer(again, multiple exist) in order to copy items. Nearly all of those viewers, are malicious. If one uses those, he or she does so at his or her own risk(I'll explain this further down, and why it may apply in this kind of situation). 

Copybot process...

Person A makes a couch-permissions need not matter here

Person B decides "hey, I like that couch, I'm going to copy it"

Person B then uses a program/viewer set up to allow items to be copied, and makes a copy of Person A's couch(I'm not explaining how they do it, you can figure that out on your own)

Person A likely has no idea person B has made a copy of his couch

Person B now has a replica of the couch and can decide from here what to do with it. More often than not, person B has copied said item so he can sell it, but that isn't always the case, he may just really like the couch. In any event, what person B did was make a copy of something he did not have permission to make a copy of. Whether he sells it, gives it away, or just keeps it, he still did not have permission to copy it.

Person A still has his couch, it was never stolen, it still exists, it was never removed, it never disappeared. Person B just has a copy of it.

As for your situation, your items disappeared, they were not copybotted. They were either removed from the sim by some technical glitch/bug/error, or removed by a person. They could have been returned to your inventory-in which case sometimes they do not show up right away at all and a re-log is required(though I have had things returned to me that took a day or so to arrive back in inventory, and a couple that took a few days, but that was a few years ago). A person could have, maliciously, removed them. This can happen when our accounts get hacked-though it's not as common as people would like to believe, it happens. Where does a copybot viewer come into play in this scenario? Well, IF one chooses to use a viewer with these copybot capabilities enabled, he or she is risking his or her account and information in doing so. Most, if not all, of these types of viewers are coded to allow someone(the creator, a group, whatever have you) access to more information than you believe. If you choose to use a viewer not supported by LL's third party viewer policy, you also run this risk. Because you have no idea what the back end of that viewer really looks like, you have no idea if any malicious code(aka, back door) has been added. When/if one uses that kind of viewer, it has the potential to send information to *someone* that you don't want them having. That is just one way someone can hack another person's account. If an account gets hacked, the hacker has access to do whatever the heck he or she likes. LL can help, to the best of their ability, when it gets reported. However, the responsibility of letting LL know rests on the shoulders of the person who owns the account that was hacked.

Does that mean your account was hacked, or that you have, at some time, used a viewer not supported by LL? No, not necessarily, it is merely ONE possibility. It just happens to be a very strong possibility, especially since you said other vendors were left, but now broke because scripts were removed. Even if an account gets hacked, it doesn't necessarily mean the actual account owner loses access to his or her account. They most often do, but that is not always the case if the hacker doens't change your login information. 

People cannot just steal your stuff as in, take it, poof, it's gone, without having access to your account. They CAN however, return stuff to you and that can cause stuff to disappear into the abyss of the unknown. No copy items that get returned do, sometimes, disappear for good. It's not always the case, but it most certainly can happen. I have had it happen, lots of others have too. There really isn't anything we can do about it, other than contact LL and hope maybe someone there can fix it. If they can't, then they can't. I don't like it either, but it is what it is. No amount of "why can't you fix this" ranting, will change that.

One thing I have had happen when items were either returned or seemingly just poof, vanished off my sim(both related to restarts, as well as other bugs/poorly functioning sims) as well as countless others, is have items returned to what I lovingly refer to as the dump of a sim. That location is at 0.0.0 on each sim. It somewhat acts like a void, or a garbage dump, of sorts. Things can get returned there, when a glitch happens, or during restarts, etc... Any number of reasons can lead to items that should have either been returned to inventory OR placed back at their original location when a sim gets restarted(for whatever reason). It doesn't happen as often as it used to, but it does still happen.

You see, your issue, and the issue of copybot are NOT one in the same, at all. I know what copybotting is, and I believe you are extremely confused about what is and is not copybot. No one has their head in the sand about copybotting, we all know it exists. The problem lies in the fact that just because many know what it is, or what it might be, does not mean they actually understand it entirely, how it works, or what it can do. That's not having their heads buried in the sand, that's simply not understanding. Your issue, items being lost/removed, is not related to copybot, at all. Copybot would not do what happened to you, it's not what copybotting is, what it's used for, or what it's capable of. The term copybot literally means to copy. Your items weren't copied, they were removed from the grid, and in the case of your other vendors, broken. That's not copybot!

I'm not blamnig you, just explaining why you ahve two separate issues/topics here, and I don't want others continually getting confused by the two.

Link to comment
Share on other sites


"If I put weeks of work into creating really complex vendors with 1000's of lindens worth of other people's no-copy items inside then I do care a great deal."


and


"They are gone except for a couple where the scripts were deleted."


Buggy vendor scripts? (Or maybe even malicious, depending who wrote them.)

(Also, unlikely, but just in case: Were these vendors set to a land group to which others belong? And to account for missing scripts, by any chance, "shared" with group, perhaps to let the market owners move them around?)

Is there any rational reason to think the contents were taken (or, even less likely, copied) rather than simply deleted?

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The group setting is a small group of careful people, all of who I have known for more than a couple of years and who don't go around destroying other people's stuff. 

Does that answer your question?

As for buggy vendor scripts these are widely used and likely to be exactly the same as all the other vendors around me that didn't get vaped.

Who is irrational? I never said the contents were taken - they are gone with the objects and cannot be replaced

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Ok I never said I understood copybots - I am not a crook and don't think about things that way.

In-world , a couple of people who know more mentioned that an illegal viewer could do this.I am guessing these have more functions than just copybotting.

I do use a couple of different viewers apart from the SL viewer .However these are  both very widely supported in-world, downloads and updates from the main sites only;Singularity and FS. So no! I DO NOT think there is any coding in the back end of these that is giving away my account details. 

Here's something that none of the posters who are so anxious to shoot me down in flames have missed ... I have been on SL for nearly 5 years. I don't post a lot and I'm not especially whiney. Whatever is happening here is not my usual experience of SL and I wouldn't be posting if it was!!!!

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites


Chance Acoustic wrote:

The items in side are transfer /no-copy/ no-modify. 

 

Ah OK. I know some people who had problems that sound similar to this dealing with RFL vendors, but I'm not that hot on scripting, so don't know what it might be.

I'm pretty confident, though, that it isn't this...

 In-world , a couple of people who know more mentioned that an illegal viewer could do this

Seriously, if there was a viewer that could do this, griefers would be hitting every big inworld store and wiping them clean. There wouldn't be one sim left standing. So I wouldn't worry about cybercriminals, sounds like it's something far more boring (but still annoying).

Link to comment
Share on other sites


Chance Acoustic wrote:

Ok I never said I understood copybots - I am not a crook and don't think about things that way.

In-world , a couple of people who know more mentioned that an illegal viewer could do this.I am guessing these have more functions than just copybotting.

I do use a couple of different viewers apart from the SL viewer .However these are  both very widely supported in-world, downloads and updates from the main sites only;Singularity and FS. So no! I DO NOT think there is any coding in the back end of these that is giving away my account details. 

Here's something that none of the posters who are so anxious to shoot me down in flames have missed ... I have been on SL for nearly 5 years. I don't post a lot and I'm not especially whiney. Whatever is happening here is not my usual experience of SL and I wouldn't be posting if it was!!!!

 

Stop being so defensive and read what people are saying. I never said you're whiney, and I also never said you're a crook. 

I'm well versed on what copybot viewers can do, and I am telling you that what happened to you, has nothing at all to do with copybot. Stop associating your issue with copybot. What happened to you is something entirely different.

We can only help you figure out what that different thing is once you let go of the notion that it as anything to do with copybot.

Again, stop being defensive for no reason. I don't know, or even care, what kind of reception you got in-world to this problem, most of the people that have responded to you here have given you no reason to be defensive. We're all just residents here, regardless of how long we have been in sl and folks, generally, are quite helpful here if you leave yourself actually open TO the help. If you come across as aggressive and overly defensive, people are less liekly to help. I understand that it is upsetting, more than upsetting actually, but we'renot the enemy ;) 

An illegal viewer could not simply take your stuff. Whatever they told you, is wrong. UNLESS a person has access to your account, in which case it wouldn't matter what viewer they used. An illegal viewer can do all sorts of nasty things, but actually physically taking your objects off sim and taking them, is not possible without access to your account, OR, simply returning them to you-which can be done with ANY viewer. 

I mentioned viewers because *IF* you use a viewer(I didn't say that you did) that is not supported by LL, you run the risk of having malicious code. The most widely used viewers are all supported by LL.

Whether or not you trust the people that also share this particular group with you, is irrelevant. Someone could still, very easily, have returned items to you. It is possible that when this happened, the items were essentially "lost". It happens. It sucks when it happens, but it does happen. It doesn't happen nearly as often as it used to. Have you checked the  o.O.o location on the sim yet? Try it. It's at least worth a shot. Anywhere on the 0.0 coordinates(at any height) has the potential to gather stuff.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I should also add that yes, a sim rollback can indeed cause this very issue. Most will say it can only happen to items that were rezzed(or moved around) within the last few hours before the rollback, but I have seen a few cases wherein items that had been rezzed int he same places for ages, vanished.(or seemingly vanished, to be returned at a later date). A sim going wonky can do all kinds of things, including break scripts and cause things to disappear (or make it *seem* like they are broken).

There are quite a few different explanations for your issue, or potential ones anyway. I am going to assume you have already checked your entire inventory for all coalesced objects(they look like a bunch of boxes in the image in inventory-and they are actually multiple objects that have been, or need to be, picked up as if they are one object) and tried to rez them. We often get coalesced objects when multiple items get returned to our inventory, it's just how the system works. Typically things go to lost and found, but...not always. If you have not yet tried that, please do so. Go to a sandbox where you can safely rez coalesced objects(since you have no clue how many prims this might take, be cautious) and rez them one at a time. Take a look at all of the objects you just rezzed. If you need that set of objects to remain coalesced, then pick them all back up, as one object and rez the next coalesced object. If you do not want them to be coalesced in your inventory pick eahc individual item up one at a time. Check ALL of your inventory for these. You may not recognize the name of the object, so look at the little image icon instead, that will tell you if it is a coalesced object or not. Don't judge by the name of the item next to the multi-box icon, because it could show the name of any one of the objects in that set.

If that doesn't work, and checking the 0.0 location on the sim doesn't work, along with logging out, or waiting a bit, come back and maybe someone else will have thought of another possible fix.

Link to comment
Share on other sites


Venus Petrov wrote:


HughJegow wrote:


Chance Acoustic wrote: Where do we look for the copied items?


Boot sales. Auction rooms.
Dodgy pubs
. Christies are also not above making a commission on an item lacking full provenance.

I first read the bolded as 'doggy pubs'.  :catvery-happy:

At least it wasn't "doggy pubes".

...Dres

Link to comment
Share on other sites

You are about to reply to a thread that has been inactive for 3133 days.

Please take a moment to consider if this thread is worth bumping.

Please sign in to comment

You will be able to leave a comment after signing in



Sign In Now
 Share


×
×
  • Create New...