ac14hutson

Not always true, at least for sounds. I had a few greifing incidents in my sim where the sim crashed well before the physics load would have crashed it. I assume the crash was caused by the insane number of sound requests at once (too many can usually crash a viewer also)

Tengu Yamabushi

We're back to 'Nobody Home At The Lab (tm)' - yesterday's account still here, the latest one still here and so is the goo - an hour after it hit.

Maybe something is going on over there on Battery Street.

Nebula

Back in my day grifffin was a pop gun full a sperm and 5 people bumping into each other and the sim a crashin' mmmm hummm

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I used to program once, then I took an arrow to the knee.

Joshua Nightshade

What a crock of shit.

Let me tell you a story.

Years ago, I was having an Internet Argument with Anshe Chung and some rather gratuitous liberties she was taking with her Wikipedia article. I edited it and had those edits reverted by Urizenus, who at the time was taking money from Anshe in ad revenue and thus any involvement of his on the page was a clear violation of Wikipedia rules, since it was an obvious conflict of interest. When I brought this to the attention of another moderator there, they locked the page to prevent further edits from him.

Fast forward some months and the PN had been trolling the Herald aggressively and somehow they stumbled onto the discussion between myself and Urizenus on the Wikipedia page and google-foo'd me, thinking I was Urizenus. A bunch of stuff from my real life ended up on ED under the guise of being Urizenus, whom they were actually going after, but I got roped into it by mistake because of the Wikipedia article. They even did a denial of service attack against my website.

At the time, I had no idea who the PN were or how to get word to them that I wasn't Urizenus, and a good friend of mine (and, for a while, my SL business partner) told me of the JLU. I didn't know who they were either, but I trusted this friend and I trusted her when she told me that the PN had been harassing people in real life and the police were involved along with several LL employees.

It was around this point that the PN "leader" discovered by accident (I had been discussing the mistaken identity on another forum and he found the thread by googling for Urizenus) that he'd made a mistake and he got in touch with me by email to apologise. All things considered I found him to be polite and cordial and we had brief correspondence in email and gtalk before he went on his merry griefer way and my website stopped getting hammered. He even gave me a temp login to the PN forums, although I never really used it. I didn't think he was really all that bad, though obviously I found the whole "griefing syndicate" thing juvenile, but when my friend assured me that they'd been stalking people in RL and harassing others with physical, criminal threats, I agreed when she asked to read the emails and get the PN forum login.

At no point did she ever tell me that she was giving anything I sent her to anyone else.

At no point did she ever tell me anyone from the JLU was going to be posting, in their entirety, word for word, the contents of those emails, forum threads, gtalk chatlogs.

At no point was this even brought up, much less my permission ever sought.

So you can imagine my surprise when years later the whole wikidump happens and I start getting asked about the PN thing. You can imagine (actually, probably not you, since you guys think that's all okay -- but NORMAL people can imagine) how astonishingly creepy I found it that not only did I have a whole page devoted to me and my role as JLU informant (which happened despite the fact that to this day I've never been in contact with anyone save my former friend), but it was full of stalkerish shit like my RL name, RL photos, where I lived in real life, and some retard's version of a biography.

Then at the end of it, some bizarre line about how I'm a friend of the JLU.

I am not a griefer, nor am I even referred to as one in your stalkerwiki, nevertheless I have reams of personal information not only in your current, up-to-date personal wiki, but the public dump too. All things considered the RL information isn't a huge deal, although it's certainly bizarre and fucking lame, but the fact that personal messages given by me to a friend I mistakenly trusted were dumped on a database that you guys use for your "I'll never get laid" crimefighting network is really ridiculous. If that's what information you guys keep track of on your "friends," I'm glad I'm not a griefer.

Might I fervently suggest, however, you all devote your time and energy to a pursuit that's actually important to the real world instead of masturbating your egos because your mothers never did?

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Nebula

What josh says is true seeing pages written about you is odd. Even more so when you do not know they exsist. I freaked the heck out when it was dumped. I had allready quit my activities by then but still was odd. Really really odd, a feeling of shock and wtf pretty much. I just feel that it is a violation of my privacy. I actually did do things that were wrong, but two wrongs do not make a right.

Jahar Aabye

I don't know whether it would crash a sim, but the insane number of packets generated by intentionally excessive soundtriggers certainly isn't good for sim performance. However, the more serious concern isn't for the simulator or even the client, but rather the bandwidth and network of the affected residents. LL has attempted to put in throttles to try to prevent this, fortunately, although who knows how effective they ultimately will be.

In an extreme situation, the result would appear, from the perspective of the administrator of the resident's network, to be a DoS attack originating from agni.lindenlab.com.

And before GL once again insinuates that I must be a griefer for knowing this, I should mention that the soundthrottles were instituted after I filed an SEC JIRA ticket a few years ago, after learning that someone was selling a product that used such an implementation as a griefing attack.


Well yes, what it could potentially be used for is very problematic. That is the entire point. You can say "we will only use it for this, but not for that," but this does not change the fact that it could be misused very easily. It might not even have to be by someone within that organization.

It could be that you have someone new, they get access to the database, and they see an entry and they think "hey, there's that guy my friend keeps ranting about, he sounds like a real asshole. Hey wow, they have a lot of info on this guy, my friend is gonna think this is hilarious." That's all it really takes. The friend might decide to stalk the individual, or could then spread the information within their group to someone else who stalks that individual.


The day the JLU shows up at my house is the day that law enforcement starts investigating a ring of cybercriminals who distribute "hit lists" of personal information on their targets for their followers to locate and harass. Think about it, police are called about a stalker, stalker is apprehended and gives the defense that he was just pranking someone over a video game. Officer asks stalker where he got the address and identifying info. Stalker says some group was collecting it and gave it to him, that they routinely collect this information about evildoers.

What is the most reasonable outcome from that?



As for my definition of danger? I'd say if someone is mentally deranged enough to collect RL data and show up at an RL residence over a dispute in a video game, that could become a dangerous situation.

Kate M.

I think they fixed this issue recently, for a while people were making sim crashers that worked by flooding the region with sound requests and they stopped working a bit ago.

Little bit by bit, they ARE improving the platform.

Artemis Fate

Sorry, I'm getting ahead of myself, while the JLU may be new to you, I've known about them for years, and had a few run ins with them. I've had a few debates about this stuff, and seen the kind of ego they toss out first hand.

When they showed up in my sim, I only knew them as some random peacekeeper group doing a job that I could do with admin tools, so after a debate with one of their people, I ended up kicking them out. Kalel IMed me later imploring me not to do so because my sim would be "unprotected" without their expertise. Their Wiki is full of little side anecdotes about how they met some person griefing a sandbox who was "really scared of them", or pretty much everytime someone goes "Hey, it's superman!".

Well first off, just because you can't see them, doesn't mean they're not there or not getting that response. They could be on an alt (since the accounts used to do those griefing are often throwaway), or they could just be waiting for the IMs from people who look up the owner of the objects and complain, or the whole thing could have been a frame-up, give a grey-goo rezzer to some newb and say it's a sex bed, then laugh as he rezzes a sim crasher. There's just no point to trash sims for the sake of trashing them, if it's not funny to them then it's not worthwhile.

Let me also say I'm not really talking about all peacekeeper groups here. The JLU (as far as I know) is the only one that keeps a secret database, and the other groups don't dress up and have a whole "roleplay" about fighting griefers, this is important since for the most part if Gridwatch is doing something, you wouldn't even notice. If the JLU is doing something, then there's a guy wearing a superhero costume with his JLU tag active, and sometimes with a big superhero effect (like a giant green lantern bubble) floating in the sky, very noticeable.

I define "Griefer" as someone who dedicates all their time in SL to griefing, they join a specific group, they use almost nothing but throwaway alts, and they treat getting banned as a mark of distinction. I don't consider newbies who haven't understood that SL isn't a FPS game, or people who're simply pissed off at something and griefing a sim once in revenge, to be griefers. So when I use that term, I'm referring to a specific type, and that type is in it for the lulz, and nothing is more lulzy then make-belief superhero police.

I've seen a group of people in griefer groups follow around a JLU member in the sandbox, playing up to his ego, he was so enamored that he never realized they were trolling him hard and laughing their asses off. I was also an admin for one of the largest rental estates in SL, Azure Islands, we rarely if ever had to deal with griefers, except once, when the "Blue Lantern Corps", which is connected to the JLU, moved in to one of our sims. The PN attacked them in hopes of getting some amusing responses, which kept up for a few days, after they moved out we never had the same trouble again. The JLU and all the other super hero groups connected to them are definitely a target.

Well the issue is assuming that something they're mass-ARing actually is AR worthy. The JLU wiki keeps listings of what they AR, and some of them are ridiculous, like ARing a car in a sandbox with the license plate "JLUSUX" for defamation. The problem is, when you can get a bunch of people to AR one thing without making those people look to be connected, then the "minimum wage contractors" as GreenLantern put it, don't tend to look too closely. They just assume that it bothers a lot of unconnected people and get rid of it, regardless if the AR is valid or not. This is partly LL's problem for having terrible customer service, but it's also the JLU knowingly exploiting a loop hole.

I've specifically seen this happen, where over a period of a few hours, numerous fully costumed members of various superhero groups will pop up in the same exact spot, (suggesting a landmark), hover for a bit doing nothing (suggesting writing an AR), then poof. A bit later, another one will show up. Looking at their groups, they weren't even all in the JLU (unless it was hidden), some were in some of the various Lantern groups that the JLU is loosely affiliated with.

Tsukasa Karuna

Ah, fair enough. Combined with some of the stuff in the wiki, this really makes me wonder about the JLU guys..

As someone who has at least two active PN's on my skype list, that's just not the case. The amount of effort required to trash a sim is **minimal**. "I'm bored, I'm going to go ruin llGetRandomSandbox();" is a line i've seen pop up more than once. I know it seems weird, but it's true. Lulz are not always the deciding factor with these guys. "Because we can" applies better.

Okay, thanks. I think that's why I was taking such issue with your post is because you seemed to be slamming all of the peacekeeper groups.

I'd count the "simply pissed off at something and griefing a sim once in revenge" type among that number too, but okay

I can't speak for the JLU, but I've never in my time with ANN ever seen a false alarm raised. All of the calls I've seen were legitimate sim bombs. While I agree that it's a loophole ripe for exploiting.. what can you do? When the griefers abuse the content creation tools to ruin everyone's day, I think it's only fair to "abuse" the AR window in order to reverse or mitigate that ruining. If there was a better recourse, I'd love to use it.

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Jack Abraham

Artemis, just for the record: I do fly around the sandboxes in my GL uniform at times. I'm part of a group that makes power rings for role-play use, and I do use mine when called for to help clean up other people's messes – at which point you'll see green glowing sweepers and prim pushers, rather than grunge-textured or whatever – because in my opinion it's the best multi-tool available, and certainly the one I know best. I know a few other people who use a Lantern theme without being in the JLU as well. My points being, not everyone with a superhero-themed effect is in the JLU, and effective sandbox cleanup tools are by their nature big and noticeable.

I first saw my Brainiac wiki entry when the wiki leaked. It was entirely accurate and composed of public information easily gleaned from my profile.

Also, my understanding is that *Police Department*, another peacekeeping group with a relatively large grid presence, is also involved in alt-detection and investigation efforts. (If I have this wrong, I know the PD members here will correct me.) Darling Brody of Quantum Products has suggested that future versions of the Quantum HUD will do likewise. I support their attempts to help residents with all kinds of problems while condemning their invasions of residents' privacy.

Jahar Aabye

I also make weapons for roleplay use, but I think that they should generally be kept for roleplaying. I mean, I see nothing wrong with using something to sweep a bunch of physical junk off of a sim, but not much beyond that.

There are plenty of places on the grid where one can roleplay as a police officer, sheriff, SWAT member, soldier, or even a superhero. I've seen some pretty creative roleplaying sim builds and roleplaying gadgets and such. It's fun to work on stuff like that, because you're sort of building a roleplaying game piece by piece.

The most important part of rolePLAYing is the play part, though.



Yeah, this is the stuff where it goes too far. Investigation and alt-detection ought to be left to Linden Lab. They have the resources (in theory) to do it correctly. More importantly, it's honestly none of our business, as residents, whether people are using alts. It's not our job to "investigate" anything. If someone is misbehaving in your sim, ban them, return their objects, etc. If it's someone else's sim, contact them or see if they have sim administrators who can handle it.


The root of the problem lies with accountability and authority. Linden Lab has authority as the providers of the service, we give them certain authority by agreeing to the ToS. There is, in theory, a certain amount of accountability as well. If a LL employee does something illegal or unethical, they could lose their job.

However, some in-world group of residents called *Police Department* has no authority outside any parcels or regions owned by the group or group owner. If you set foot on their land, then sure, they have the right to enforce certain rules and eject/ban/tphome as they see fit. Outside of their land, no. And where is the accountability? To whom are they accountable except themselves?

Similarly, the history of people creating and selling products aimed at alt-detection is not promising. Currently, they are placed in devices scripted to add people to parcel pan lists. It is a bit disturbing to think that it might be escalated to having some half-assed "alt detector" located on a device next to the "Relog" menu. So now instead of being banned from a parcel because some alt-detector doesn't understand the concept of dynamic IP addresses, we might be map-spammed into relogging, or soundtrigger-packet-lagged into massive bandwidth spikes (also forcing a relog, eventually, when you can finally manage to get the program to close). Yay, progress!

Seriously, though, if someone is experiencing griefing at the level that they feel the need to do these sorts of things, then they need to be contacting Linden Lab.

Tsukasa Karuna

I'm confused. Who cares what the tools look like and what the avatars wielding them look like as long as they are used responsibly and are effective? I carry around a star sapphire ring myself that, yes, has a couple of my favorite cleanup tools in it, among other things. It's a nifty system and I like it - I'm certainly not a card-carrying member of the lantern corps though.

(If i'm misreading you, please disregard)

I don't even see anything wrong with "detection" as long as that information is not shared. I mean, look at your average shoutcast stream. It's trivial to see that the same IP address is accessing your stream twice (literally one click on the admin interface of the stream), and the correlate that with when people are stepping on your parcel for the purposes of your own security. There's nothing nefarious about that.

But that's never how it is. You get easily abusable things like the now (thankfully) defunct BanLink that make lives easier for the estate owner at the expense of everyone else. Nobody ever wants to handle their own security.

Turning around and telling your best friends and the rest of the world that XXX is an alt of YYY on the other hand is not cool.. it's a privacy problem, it's a disclosure problem, and you should probably get smacked for it.

There's also the issue of the linden sandboxes which was discussed ad nauseum earlier. The "someone else" has the lights on but nobody's home rather often

Finally, the problem with leaving anything to linden lab is that it never gets done.

It's not about "authority" as far as the peacekeeper groups go. Authority denotes access, to a level of tools and abilities that most residents don't even know exist. It's about being a volunteer, for better or worse. Some of the groups do good, some of them do bad, but only the most idiotic of them all claim to have authority to do anything. Not even the JLU steps over that line. And they are only accountable to the ToS and Linden Lab, the same as any other resident.

Jack Abraham

It's a rezzer with style. I have stuff in it for role-play, and because it's always there, I also keep stuff ready for dealing with any kind of problem I can prepare for, from fashion emergencies to falling cubes. My point was only that not everyone who looks like a superhero and cares to pitch in when sims get griefed is in the JLU.

To go back to the original post, there's a slice of residents who feel the Lindens have failed in their responsibility to police the commons. They would like the Lab to delegate that responsibility to volunteers, with the authority and powers to do it, and hold those residents responsible for their exercise of those powers. I believe that would be an appropriate thing to do and would be an effective use of the Lab's budget; you obviously disagree.

Unfortunately, the Lab has updated their privacy policy in such a way that makes it clear they don't care and won't do anything about it.

Seriously, people are. And the Lab ignores them. Which brings us back to the beginning of the thread.

Rock Chick

1 point, you're talking about volunteers, so they wont be paid and the resources they would be giving said residents would basically not cost anything since those controls exist but currently can be used only by Lindens (or perhaps moles as well, not sure). Now the question is how does any of this effect the Lab's budget then?

Now regardless of what side of the fence you sit on this 1 I have serious doubts LL will give said residents these powers, not because they could be abused but mainly because LL probably wouldn't want to touch the subject with a 40 ft pole considering the strong feelings of people who disagree with it, that and well it's LL, they haven't even fixed the ??? issue yet!

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"Only question I ever thought was hard
Was do I like Kirk or do I like Picard?" from Weird Al Yankovic - White & Nerdy

"You see, truth is like an eternal flame. You can try to conceal it, try to shade it, but it cannot be extinguished." by Pat Shelton from the game Secret Files 2.

Jack Abraham

The cost, Rock Chick, would be the manpower required to supervise those residents; if no one's monitoring them, then it shouldn't be done. The alternatives are to hire enough Lindens to effectively police the grid's trouble spots, or to just allow things to continue as they are. Since this is a thread about fixing the problems, the last is off the table. : )

Rock Chick

Actually this thread is a real mixture of 3 ways of thought.
1.Residents policing or whatever you want to call it the grid.
2. LL hires staff to help do the job instead.
3. No change.
No option is off the table because the OP is just that, an opinion, threads evolve and this 1 has too.

Look like I've said before my vote goes for option 2 but I don't see that happening but as I've also said before I don't see LL introducing option 1 regardless of my or other people's feelings. It's been mentioned that on and off for 3 or more years now this same issue more of less has been mentioned and the same option offered but they never implemented it. You need to ask yourself why and also what would be different than now than before to make them change their minds? Seriously truth be told this forum (even though it is the biggest to my knowledge third party SL forum around) let alone this thread only represents a small population of SL users, so I cannot gauge how the majority feels about the issue.

DanielRavenNest

4. LL sells the sandboxes and infohubs to Residents with the restrictions that they cannot be re-purposed or subdivided, and a reduced or no tier in exchange. The intent is they are run by builder and newbie info groups as a service.

Imnotgoing Sideways

5. People calm down, shut up, lighten up, mute, and ignore. (^_^)y

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Link

Rock Chick

Immy you know I meant 3 was referring to that, cheeky girl!

And Daniel, I was merely going by the opinions I'd already seen expressed, not ones after, stop being unfair dude. Okay if we look at it from lots of different angles maybe we could come up with over 10 options, can this be an option?

Imnotgoing Sideways

6. Pie (^_^)

Joshua Nightshade

And mine? Granted, it contained information that anyone could piece together if they'd been a regular on Second Citizen at the time, but there was nothing in my profile that made up the bulk of the RL information disclosed there.

None of it was a secret, but the act of compiling so much of it in one place after someone had to have trawled the forum looking for things to add, including RL photos, was astonishingly creepy. Unbelievably so, and I don't care if it was available publicly or not. For a group of roleplayers I had absolutely no interaction with at all except through an intermediary who never told me that wiki even existed, much less would have my information dumped onto, it's obsessive, weird and unbelievably lame. There is no wiggle room on this, it's fucking black and white.

Then, to say nothing of pages upon pages of private emails uploaded without my permission. The JLU sure liked abusing the DMCA to try and get "copyrighted material" taken down on other sites, but I'm willing to bet they wouldn't appreciate it if I'd used that tactic on them over MY emails published on their site without even asking.

Jack Abraham

I agree with you entirely, Josh; you were mistreated. Not every wiki entry was like yours, but even one is a problem. It's the same problem I have with people associating IP addresses and avatar keys. And I told Kalel at the time that I didn't think he had a leg to stand on with the DMCA process.

Beezle Warburton

If the problem is New Resident Experience -- Lemon party cubes have NOTHING on some of the crap I've heard come out of the keyboards of "Infohub* Regulars".

*Ahern, in my case.

Personally I withstood it as a newbie because coming from some other MMO's, I was familiar with the "Newb Zone Hanger-On" thing, and I just wrote it off as that. It was great motivation to find somewhere else to be

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Han Held

Quite. the time i've spent in infohubs has also put me off of using voice for any duration of time.

You're absolutely right that infohub hangers-on are undoubtably one of the largest factor in turning new users off of SL.

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Drama is easy
with eyes closed
misunderstanding all you read

GreenLantern Excelsior

I've never seen a false alarm in any peacekeeper group. Anyone who becomes "the boy who cried wolf" probably wouldn't be in such a group for long. Sure, people make mistakes when they're new, but no one does a group callout on purpose when there's nothing to report.

Yesterday afternoon a newbie named "Cock Admiral" wearing a PN-looking head showed up in the northwest corner of Sandbox Goguen and started editing an object.

[2011-01-15 13:06:48] GreenLantern Excelsior: "Cock Admiral" is in NW Goguen, and the World Trade Center is burning once again in Newcomb.

I was trying someone's suggestion about a new way to find a chat spammer, and as I was flying around, I noticed people moving toward the Admiral. I zoomed in and saw that it was ANN/GridWatch members and sandbox rats. The Admiral's hands went into typing animation, so they were talking to him. It struck me just then that we have reached a tipping point with respect to griefer attacks. People are not willing to stand there and watch griefers fill the sim with cubes any more. They've seen the peacekeeper groups helping to clean things up, and they want to be part of that. The old idea of "Screw this, I'm out of here, let Linden Lab clean it up" is gone. It has been replaced with "Screw you, griefer. My friends and I will write ARs on you and then we will dump your cubes into the ocean." And really, I don't give a rip if people don't want to wear a superhero uniform while they're doing it. Some of them aren't a member of any peacekeeper group, and that's fine. It's like the guy who sees people filling sandbags to prepare for the upcoming flood, so he runs over and grabs a shovel to help. The spirit of volunteerism is alive and well. I've given ANN some shovels in the form of scripted objects that can help to clear up some of these things.

It took the Admiral 19 minutes to set it up. I turned to look at something in the south end of Goguen. When I noticed something fly past me, I turned back, and the entire north end of the sim was full of replicating cubes. It was amazing.

[2011-01-15 13:26:11] GreenLantern Excelsior: Replicating cubes in Goguen, owner Cock Admiral
[2011-01-15 13:27:30] GreenLantern Excelsior: AR submitted
[2011-01-15 13:30:44] GreenLantern Excelsior: WOW Goguen is clear
[2011-01-15 13:31:01] GreenLantern Excelsior: Amber Linden

Amber does a great job, but she's not always around. Later that night, Wanderton was so full of cubes that physics died and they couldn't be pushed into the ocean. That whole mess filled the sandboxes to overflowing with cubes for more than an hour before anyone responded. It's frustrating having the knowledge to fix the problem but not having the ability.

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