Heralding a cloud

This is a mirror post of a SL Notecard by Wolwaner Jervil and Valie Eun:

How to make yourself visible instead of being a cloud.

1) Ensure that all inventory items are loaded completely

• open the inventory sidebar
• enter some text in the search line
• wait until all is loaded).

2) Try edit appearance

• Open the outfits sidebar
• press the tool icon on right upper corner
• change something
• save, exit by clicking the green left arrow on the top line.

3) Try Alt-Ctrl-R (Rebake textures) to reload your Textures

4) Use one of the Preset Avatars from the library (Boy next door or girl next door) to REPLACE your outfit. This will reset your avatar to a library default. If becoming visible, get your previous items back on.

5) Open the Develop Menu (Ctrl-Alt-Q), go to Develop --> Avatar --> Character Tests --> Test Female or Test Male

6) Turn on the advanced menu (Ctrl-Alt-D), Select Debug settings.....a small window will open. select "RenderUnloadedAvatar" from the drop down box and then set it to "True" then click the X in the corner to close the window.

This will stop YOU from seeing others as clouds but not stop you from being one to them. They must change their settings for that. With this setting you will be able to see what item is not loading corrctly and you can replace it with another one.

Wolwaner Jervil and Valie Eun - SL Guided Tours

WJ and VE enclosed a note card inside the note card. Here is the English text:

*** SL Guided Tours - we guide you through SecondLife

******************* English *************************
SL Guided Tours offer various services:
A maintained index with description and pictures to many places in SecondLife at http://members.a1.net/secondlife/
A copy of this index is available inworld in at the Web-Tab of the profile of Valie Eun - you can also copy http://members.a1.net/secondlife/profil/index.htm into your own web tab to have the index in your profile available.
We offer courses and help to all new residents - IM for class schedules.

All our services are free - but a tip to Valie Eun or Wolwaner Jervil is always welcome - Thank you.

Join the group SL Guided Tours (also for free) to get tour tips and other information about guided tours, great places and class schedules in SL.

Wolwaner Jervil and Valie Eun (Owners)

Thanks, WJ and VE. I will add another trick:

0) Fully clear your SL Cache

• In Second Life, select Edit > Preferences > Network
• Click "clear cache"
• Travel to a very quiet sim, such as Kara
• Exit and re-enter Second Life
• Wait quietly while your inventory re-loads, as step 1) above.

There are even more tips at the Second Life Wiki Article:
Why Do I Look Like A Particle Cloud?

Love Arth

PS I made a invisible avatar with a surrounding particle cloud and a title that says ...loading. I'd post a photo, but you know what that looks like. 0 {:-{D}

Copybot Herald III

Anti-Copybot for creators, merchants and landholders

See my prior Copybot posts for more general information.

The short answer:

• Put a watermark on your original textures, especially skin, clothing, and hair textures.
• Put your prim-builds in vendor prims or boxes for sale.
• Put your model avatars in a bot-proof viewer.
• If you sell full-perm items, license and register your buyers.
  
• Use inexpensive bot-suppression security, and encourage other land-owners to do so, too.
• File DCMA claims and AR's.
  

The Long answer:

Linden Lab opines that copying viewers (like CopyBot and a dozen others) provide a valuable tool backing up content offline for Residents, so should not be banned outright. Thus, they can be used and abused.

For now, Copybot can only copy:

• Rezzed prims: parameters, textures, floating text and particles.
• Worn avatar: shape and one "baked appearance" of skin and clothing combined.

When Copybot re-creates the a prim texture, it uploads the texture by UUID directly to the prim. The texture itself never goes to the rogue copybotter, it's not in his inventory, and he cannot distribute the texture as a texture. The apparent texture is the same one the creator uploaded. This violation is indistinguishable from a prim that had the texture applied to it in the normal edit screen.

A full-perm texture can be saved to a computer and re-uploaded with a new apparent "creator", with or without a Copybot-like viewer. Most texture sellers specifically prohibit this activity in their sales materials, and register their buyers by having them acknowledge they've seen your terms of use for the sale.

Copybot does not separate clothing layers form skin layers when it "clones" another avatar. It only renders the baked texture to a whole skin when imported inworld. The copybot is listed as the skin creator. Unless a skin has a watermark or identifying design (say, a tiny shape behind the ear), the original maker cannot be certain it was theirs. With that mark there, a DCMA complaint will stick, have the copybotted skin or build destroyed and the copybotter banned.

Emerald Viewer and other viewers have a method of scrambling the baked appearance output so current copybots cannot read it, for now. Use it for your clothing shop model, or leave out nice advertising photos, or have demo versions of your work.

For now, copybot cannot copy:

• Notecards
• Scripts
• Sounds
  
• Animations and poses
  
• Avatar Attachments
• Prim contents

Anyone can copy notecards and scripts with a simple select all with copy/paste wherever you wish, including another SL notecard or LSL script. To prevent this, scripts are almost always "no-mod" (thus not editable) and notecards rarely carry salable information.

Sounds can be captured using mechanima techniques, but will suffer pollution from other inworld noises. I've not seen a way to copy animations or poses from SL to a computer.

Prim contents and attachments can be copybotted when they are rezzed inworld. When worn or still in display or sales prims, they are utterly safe from stealing. If you are a specific target for a rogue copybotter, he might buy your stuff, copybot it and attempt to undercut you. In this case, if you've watermarked your textures, they can be protected as outlined above.


In short, almost all SL content can be captured and re-created bypassing SL permissions parameters now. However, taking extreme or expensive anti-bot measures in your shop areas are unwarranted. The rogue copybotters cannot get at your boxed stuff there.

Scripter SweetNWild Magic offers some interesting security tools on XSteetSL. What impressed me most is this analysis:

Every region gets a lag spurt when an avatar arrives. The lag intensity is variant depending on a number of factors such as attachments an arriving avatar is wearing and texture resolution in their cloths and skins etc. (Such avatars have a very low render cost ARC) Copybots come into regions/sims close to ruth and generate little to no lag spurts. Several seconds later a region will begin to experience lag spikes and heavy drain. This is signature of a copybot downloading, stealing, & pirating objects, textures, skins, etc. from the sim. [However] some avatars who are not bots can generate little lag upon arrival, hence, the system method of detection is about 95-99% accurate.

I've not tested SweetNWild's stuff, but it looks quite good in the security script market.

Odd fact: The oldest copybot programs require two avatars. One avatar is the actual bot that only has a text interface to the user... The other is the controlling avatar who observes and commands the bot thru his console and/or IM or IRC. This video from 2008 shows this at work. If one-avatar copybots don't exist already, they will soon, I bet.

If you hear of or find your stuff out where it shouldn't be, here's instructions and guides on how to get the Lab to stop it for you.:
DCMA filing
Abuse Reports
Incident Results

Love, Arth.

Copybot Herald II

To follow-up on the Copybot Herald post,

What will happen if I use a unauthorized viewer, like Copybot, in Second Life.

Short answer: Nothing, just don't copy Second Life content illegally.

Long Answer:

The official Second Life wiki post is:

the use of CopyBot or any other external application to make unauthorized duplicates within Second Life will be treated as a violation of Section 4.2 of the Second Life Terms of Service and may result in your account(s) being banned from Second Life. If you feel that someone has used CopyBot to make an infringing copy of your content, please file an Abuse Report.

Here, “Copybot” covers many viewers that can bypass the normal content permissions of Second Life content, and not a specific product or viewer. Examples include the rather nasty Patriotic Nigras' ShoopedLife, Cryolife, and the old CopyBot Viewer (video demo here). Other viewers can export builds to your computer, like Second Inventory, Inventory backup, Emerald, Meerkat, and Cool Viewer.

Some of there viewers are approved by the 2010 "Third-Party Viewer" policy, and some are not. Marty Linden writes:

"We know that there are many compliant viewers in use -- beyond the seven that are currently listed on the Third-Party Viewer Directory -- and we will not interrupt their access to Second Life."

Reading between the lines, sooner or later, Linden Lab will interrupt access into SL from viewers that are not compliant. If you try to use an interrupted viewer, you will have connection denied, but could court some trouble. July 2010 SL Third-Party Viewer standards says:

We do not guarantee that Second Life will always be open and accessible to Third-Party Viewers and Developers... If a Third-Party Viewer or your use or distribution of it violates this Policy or any Linden Lab policy, your permission to access Second Life using the Third-Party Viewer shall terminate automatically. You acknowledge and agree that we may require you to stop using or distributing a Third-Party Viewer for accessing Second Life if we determine that there is a violation... We may enforce this Policy in our sole discretion, including but not limited to by removing a Third-Party Viewer from the Viewer Directory and suspending or terminating the Second Life accounts of Developers or users of a Third-Party Viewer.

In practical terms, going with listed and compliant viewers is safe against banning. If your favorite viewer can break Second Life's permission system, be ready to drop it at any time.

Of course, do not make illegal copies yourself, please, no matter what viewer you use.



What will happen if I get botted, stolen, copyright bad stuff in my inventory?

Short answer: if it's only a little, you'll likely lose it. If it's a lot, expect trouble.

Long Answer.

Official Linden Lab® Information:

If a legally sufficient DMCA* notice is submitted, Linden Lab will then remove the identified materials as appropriate. Repeated copyright, trademark, or other intellectual property violations by a Resident may result in their accounts being suspended or terminated.

*DCMA: Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1992 heightened the penalties for copyright infringement on the Internet. In December of 2009, Pink Linden wrote how they enforce Intellectual Property (IP) complaints:

Content that's removed as a result of the IP complaint will be replaced with generic placeholder items as follows:

• Textures, bodyparts, and clothing will be replaced with monochrome items that are the average color of the items they replace.
• Animations will be replaced with a special rotating animation by Blue Linden
• Sounds will be replaced with a new sound recording from Torley Linden
• Objects will be replaced with a plywood ball that displays an IP notice when you click on it.

WHAT TO DO
Don't panic if you receive a single IP complaint about content you got from someone else, ... Residents whose content is repeatedly subject to IP complaints may be suspended.

Don't Panic. But, what if your out-of-control inventory might have lots of questionable items? There are tips in LL's FAQ on the IP procedure: [with a few comments]

1. Think twice about offers that are significantly cheaper than the prevailing market price. If the deal sounds too good to be true, it probably is. [Copiers don't usually offer content in shops.. They sell it avatar-to-avatar or give it away freebie.]
2. Most retail stores do not have live staff to help with your transaction. It may be risky to buy from sellers who ask you to purchase an item by paying them directly.
3. Be wary of Residents who are less than 60 days old, who do not have payment information on file, and who offer lots of content. Creating original content is time consuming! [Look up the content creator using the edit tool to see if the profile looks like a legitimate content creator.]
4. Many Second Life merchants have a presence on the web in addition to their inworld locations. There are also a variety of websites devoted to reporting on or reviewing Second Life content and helping you, the consumer, find great content and reputable merchants. Spend some time on your favorite search engine learning about the content creator before you make a purchase in Second Life.
5. Before finalizing your purchase, be sure that the transaction details are what you expect, and check whether the seller name matches the creator name on the content. If they don't match, consider asking the seller about his or her authorization to sell the content. [Some sales scripts make this hard to check, but you can still look at the owner of the sales prims and the content therein.]
6. Be aware that there may be greater risk in using items from boxes of “freebies” from Residents you do not know. Freebie items may be distributed more casually within Second Life, and the Residents distributing them may not know their origin, who has IP rights in them, or how the IP owners may have allowed or disallowed their use within Second Life. [Even Residents you do know might be unknowingly passing on copied stuff. ]
7. Use extra caution when evaluating items that represent famous real-world brands, celebrities, well-known artistic works, or fictional characters or settings from books, movies, games, or television. These items may potentially violate intellectual property law and Linden Lab policies. For more information, please see our Xstreet SL Branding Guidelines and our Knowledge Base article on Intellectual Property.
8. Review your inventory, and delete content that you do not need and do not know the source of. This may reduce the risk that you inadvertently obtained content that is potentially infringing, and if you don't need the content anyway, some housecleaning may be in order.

It's now official Linden advice: Use inventory control. Get rid of stuff you don't use.

Love, Arth

CopyBot Herald

The Facts About Copybot
by Mechagliel Gears

This is a mirror post for Krypton Radio

In recent times, especially with the upcoming enforcement of Linden Labs ™ Third Party Viewer policy on May 1, 2010, there has been much ado about Copybot. Accusations ranging from the reasonable to the outlandish fly around like so much debris in a windstorm, and often it is hard to tell fact from fiction. According to some ‘the sky is falling’ stories there’s a Copybot round every corner lurking to nab your stuff, format your hard drive, and shave your house cat. This paranoia cripples content creators , closing Second Life businesses and damaging its reputation - this is what griefers want. The goal of this article is to clarify and educate on three facets of the Copybot phenomenon: What is Copybot? What isn’t Copybot? And last, what can be done about it?

Copybot, is a a popular term for a viewer or tool that does not recognize or respect SLs permission systems. Often it is built on the LibSL library or adapted from Linden Labs own open source. When an asset is ’seen ‘ by the viewer most of the information about that asset , be it a shirt, sound, prim, or other item, is downloaded by the viewer. This is normal viewer behavior, and is in fact needed for the viewer to function at all. It is at this point in the process that Copybot-capable viewers differ.

Normally an asset’s information is only held in encrypted form while it is needed and then discarded. Copybot viewers omit this encryption and allow, either automatically or on demand, export of the asset to storage to the disk for later import or copying. It is at this point that the Copybot viewer is in violation of Terms of service and the TPV policy. There are several means by which this “asset nabbing” may occur, from the simple unencrypted export to the pulling of texture data directly from the memory in your graphics card.

Because of the various techniques Copybots use, you should understand that “Copybot” is a broad term covering a myriad of content theft tools, and not a specific product or viewer. Other things that Copybot is not include:

An actual ‘bot

The word “bot”, in this case, refers to a program running on a computer which drives an avatar unattended. While the original Copybot could do this, Linden Labs took steps to cripple it. Because the original Copybots had little control over what they saw and where they went, they were mostly useless for content thieves. Such users are usually much more interested in targeted theft, also called copyboting when using such tools.

A get rich quick scheme

Content thieves will very rarely, if ever, attempt to sell assets they have acquired. Doing so exposes their actions and quickly gets them removed from Second life. More commonly, copied assets will be used personally, shared with friends or, as a form of harassment intended to drive a SL business out of business by giving away the copied objects as freebies. Such an attempt was made on Redgrave skins - this attempt failed as Redgrave is still very much in business.

Legitimate Backup

There are several viewers and tools which allow users to back-up, or store to hard drive, items they own. Properly respecting permissions makes this not a case of Copybot. As example the Emerald viewer incorporates a backup like feature only for full permission items that the user owns. Until recently, this was within compliance with LL definitions of permissions and thus was legitimate. These definitions have changed to include creator verification, on a per prim basis. A new, TPV policy compliant, Emerald viewer is expected to be released shortly.

In world object mirroring scripts

There were at a time and still are scripts that when placed in modify permission objects would make a copy of that object in world, these scripts were made in response to poorly permissioned items as a form of legitimate back up. For example, if hairpiece was no copy/mod/transfer, one might conceivably ‘ break ‘ the hair accidentally and thus be left with an unusable product. It is important to note however that the resale of such a backup was and remains a violation of the Terms of Service.

Capable of stealing scripts

I must be clear on this: yes, at one time a script could indeed be ‘popped’ from the asset server independent of permissions. This happened to Strokers Inc., a popular manufacturer of love beds. This was done via an exploit , not Copybot, which Linden labs has since sealed. As it stands a viewer will only ever “see” the source code of a script the user has modify permissions for and the viewer only ever “sees” the machine code of a script on compilation, requiring modify permissions again. Thus script theft is the result of poorly set permissions, and/or exploits other than Copybot.

Ubiquitous

There is a common myth that “copybotters” are “everywhere” and that walking into a sandbox, or running a business, is tantamount to surrendering your assets. Nothing could be further from the truth. Again, content theft is usually targeted, and the vast majority of SL users have little to no interest in content theft - preferring to actually enjoy SL. This myth is in fact the most damaging and often promoted by griefers as a ‘psyop’ to drive content creators out of business, or sell useless snake oil ‘anti-copybot’ devices.

This brings us nicely to the topic of protection. There are several techniques and devices out there which claim to protect from Copybots. Some do afford some defense, but none are fully reliable. These are a few of them:

!Quit

You may have seen this text pop up at some stores, it is becoming less and less prevalent now as it does not work. This technique worked on the very first version of the original copybot which is now defunct.

So-called Inspection Shields

These are prims worn around an avatar under the mistaken impression that a Copybot capable viewer must select an attachment to copy it. While that may be true of some older Copybot viewers, it is not so true of the newer generation ones. This tool falls easily into the ’snake oil’ category. Personally, I advise people not to waste their Linden dollars on these.

Cryo-life Detection

Cryo-life is one of several Copybot capable viewers that was discussed in the SL forums at one point, where it came to bare that Cryo “told” on itself, leading to a number of tools for detecting its use. The issue here is multi-fold: firstly Cryo is only one of several Copybot capable viewers; secondly, as soon as this information was released new versions without the “tattling’ were released; lastly, and perhaps most importantly, the detection techniques can lead easily to false positives, resulting in anything from unfair banning to outright harassment of the innocent parties.

Skinlayer shields

These are incorporated into viewers like Emerald and provide a measure of protection for non-prim clothing and skin only . Even with this measure there are times when the individual layers of skin or clothing are transmitted separately, so it is a stop gap, but by no means a panacea.

I must digress for a moment to mention Gemini Cybernetics’ CDS, or ’ Client Detection Service ‘. This acts as a shared ban pool for users detected by the system to be using known Copybot-capable viewers. This system is by no means foolproof and will become redundant, even useless, after the 30′th of April when viewers not compliant with Linden Lab’s Third Party Viewer policy will be unable to log into the Second Life servers. In addition, its method of detection can easily be misused by those with the skill to collect and cross reference the data it acquires. Automated ban shares have always had problems and this one is no exception, as it can generate false positives. Inclusive security systems , meaning those that allow everyone but those on the ban share list, are better when moderated by live persons.

In the end , there is nothing wrong with utilizing protective measures against Copybot. However, understand that no measure is 100% effective. Panicking or adopting a ’sky is falling’ mentality will achieve nothing but granting griefers and doomsayers what they want. Awareness of your surroundings and watchfulness are your best tools against Copybot. If, in a sandboxm you see someone rezzing exact copies of someone else’s new build.. well it’s fairly obvious what is going on, file that AR, certainly never buy items in a sandbox .

It is my hope that I have enlightened and relieved some of the confusion about Copybot. Cheers!