By Prokofy Neva, Virtualtor
Yes, you can combat Copybot, although not in the ways you imagine, and the knowier-than-though geeksplainer -- Contraption's scripter -- on this subject actually don't have it all right, either. Particularly outrageous is the idea that his notion of "best practices" that he's pulled out of his posse's trading-post culture will work. I'll light a prayer candle to St. Jude, thank you, Patron Saint of Lost Causes. PS The notion that you could combat Copybot in 2006 because the viewer was closed leaves out the part about how it was crowbarred open by libsl reverse-engineering it, leading to Copybot in the first place.
If you find it hard to read anything longer than a tweet or a short thread or anything bigger than your hand, it's unlikely that this text will help you to understand the all-important SOCIAL history of Copybot and how it was fought, but then, it was always beyond your ken, anyway.
The Copybot of 2006 copied prims and sculpties; mesh didn't exist yet. The mechanism for this function wasn't the same as the function of today's Copybot which copies mesh. It doesn't matter. The nature of the mechanism is not the issue.
Top content kings like the people of Contraption can't really imagine what it is like living in the lower depths of the SL economy and the "long tail," as much as Walton styles himself as a helper of the little guy, and his arrogant scripter -- who thinks he can substitute his imagined best practice as law when code-as-law fails him (!) -- likely can't imagine what it is like trying to make a living in SL as one of the "people with no talent," either. I can, and I can only watch as my tenants and others do this; I never quit that day job. I'd advise them not to do so, either.
When the Copybot of 2006 happened, there was first an interesting series of events that the biased account from Glyn Moody, himself a copyleftist and extremist on these issues (although compelled to be more measured when filing copy for certain more mainstream tech magazines) only partially reports the story of the wielders of Copybot.
libsl was a group in SL of reverse engineers, or as those of us trying to run small businesses or live our little second lives called them, perverse engineers. They reverse-engineered the viewer not because they altruistically wanted to find bugs and help their beloved Lindens as fanboyz, although there was some of that, but because they wanted to terrorize anyone who didn't want to use Second Life -- or the Internet in general -- as they believed it should be used in their radically fanatic software cult. They particularly hated people who wanted to use SL for commerce, in virtuality or reality; to use it for religious meetings or self-help meetings or education; to use it even for a critical discussion group on the nature of SL itself. They griefed and harassed and destroyed all these activities mercilessly in the way Something Awful, WHat, 4chan, Voter5, etc. do in the Internet at large, often accompanied by outrageous racist, sexist, homophobic, antisemitic, obscene, and grotesque textures spewed as particle spam across sims. I doubt Walton Wainright ever had to spend days on end getting !@#!@#$!$@ textures rapidly spewed into his inbox so he couldn't even log on by the same people who created the Phoenix, then Emerald, then Firefox viewers. (Yes, I'm aware that history is erased, and the current devs think all these projects are separate).
So first, in a staged operation, knowing that my blog was among the most popular at the time with high traffic (hardly the case today, 16 years later), they sent a script kitty to tell me lurid tales of a new invention that could completely and instantly copy avatars, their clothing, and attachments -- and proceeded to do so before my eyes. I think even Walton, with his identically-dressed adoring fans arrayed around him in one of his tableaux, might be shocked to suddenly see 100 identical versions of himself overpopulating and then crashing a sim. I was deliberately told this was a project of a then-popular consulting agency, one of the "Big Six" of the day (none of which exist anymore), the Electric Sheep, and that they needed to copy avatars in full for a RL client who with a clothing store. Later, this was corrected to say only one of their number had a client who wanted to put on a rock show on shards, with identical band players and dancers on every shard (sim); still later this was amended to merely some staff who crossed over to membership in libsl as well prototyping and bug-testing. As a journalist, I got at least three sources; at least two were in libsl; another was a known griefer with relevant information; two I met in RL; a fourth had to be discounted once he told me he had been deliberately paid to misinform me. Sadly, completely separately, one died in a car accident in RL.
A lot of money was at stake in those days when the likes of IBM, CBS, Coca-Cola, Sears, etc. all came into SL, all bought sims, all hired the top designers -- something I complained about to the NYT in that era because the world was dealt a severe blow from which it never recovered. SL became not a world, but a platform; the talented people who bootstrapped themselves to livelihoods and made money for themselves and the Lindens were stepped on, hard. Only a select few of them -- and as in RL, not necessarily the most talented, but the most connected -- were hired by the RL companies, who sucked them away from the world, leaving it the worse. And it wasn't an accident that this happened because a consultant for big-name clients was cynical about the world and -- as the expression generated at the time had it -- indifferent to the suffering of "little dressmakers".
It's hard to convey to cynical and literalist programmers or designers with their nose in blender and convos in Discord who rarely touch the earth of the Mainland what a shock and horror this was at the time. Most life still occurred on the Mainland, where everything from griefing to grey goo to rumours to fashions rippled quickly across the contiguous simulators unchecked.
When griefers deliberately came in and started copying entire people's avatars and outfits inworld, it spread panic and fear and hatred -- but in fact, the cohort exactly like the griefers (and intermixed with them) -- graphic designers who were also technical experts and in some cases programmers and scripters -- quickly organized to combat this menace. The first thing that an organized group of merchants did was organize a strike of sorts. They locked down all their stores, refused to sell anything, and put up CLOSED DUE TO COPYBOT signs, and assembled for visible demonstrations at the telehubs and welcome areas.
At that time I didn't make anything myself, but in solidarity with all the merchants in my multiple malls, I enabled "no access" on groups (something I never do in my rentals), so that no one could enter the stores (I had more of them then because commerce took place in them in ways it doesn't know, since the advent of the MP and the large shopping events). Many creators began using what they thought was an effective antidote, a spam script that sent a string of text that ended in "quit!" -- which was supposed to force the Copybot to stop. It didn't work much of the time.
The strike grew and people began to complain vocally to the Lindens and the crisis was covered in the blogs and Alphaville Herald, the top resident online newspaper of the day. It was a smaller world, and the Lindens didn't adopt the pose they often did with certain exigencies in the world -- for example, saying they "couldn't" deprecate the bounce script used by Psy and other security merchants to teleport people home merely for flying near somebody's private home -- because they "needed it for elevators" -- of which there were about...two...in SL at the time. (In fact, remarkably, first Philip Linden conceded that the obnoxious script should be deprecated when he saw its effects; then his own staff rolled him because as I've often commented, the Lindens never met a script they didn't like (they love scripting creativity) and because the top resident forums and photo site, beloved also by Lindens of that era, were funded by the maker of the bounce script.
The Lindens, like Walton's literalist scripter sent out to make more public pronouncements today, even disagreeing with Walton's concession about some uses for these scripts, could have held town halls and workshops patiently explaining to their user base -- their beta testers and early adapters who had handed over thousands of dollars to them for sims and content, from which they took a percentage in LindEx sales by that time -- that nothing could be done. On the Internet, not only nobody knows you're a dog; dogs can copy your stuff because if you can see it, you can copy it (a phenomenon known then as "the analog hole"). Of course not only could anyone screenshot a texture and copy it; more relevantly, they could use a device like Copybot on a rogue viewer (this was the dawn of third-party viewers and they had not been accepted yet by LL which did not formally open source its viewer until January 2007) simply to copy quickly an entire avatar, and entire house, an entire vehicle - oh, except the scripts. The scripts, if they were on no-mod and no-transfer, could not be copied because they were server-side. This gave scripters a corporate advantage over other kinds of creators which continues to give them an arrogance all out of proportion to their actual social value.
PEVERSE ENGINEERS
So what did the Lindens do to combat Copybot? Obviously they had a number of urgent -- and private -- talks with libsl, which their COO, Cory Ondrejka -- had encouraged privately and even publicly at various SL and RL meet-ups, to the chagrin of some of us who felt that reverse-engineering of the viewer -- technically banned under the TOS -- shouldn't be something that a few special friends of the Lindens get to do, who -- like Eddie Haskell on Leave It to Beaver -- say "Gee, Mrs. Linden, such a lovely dress!" as they stick out a foot to trip us up and make us fall and crash our sims.
If you think griefing is just a lark, if you think you solve it by ban tools or closed groups or closing your island, I think you have no idea what it is like to be endlessly targeted by people who can circumvent those tools. I do. And when you read the comments of the word-salad chefs, you realize the chief feature about them: they lie.
Many people think that you shouldn't give trolls air time; that you shouldn't publicize griefing because it only encourages them; I don't, as a person relentlessly griefed for my outspoken criticism of the tech bro class and as a person who had changed my gender in SL, I knew that as in RL, you had to publicize abuses or they only grew worse. You had to document them, take names, file abuse reports, publicize them, and while it took awhile, justice would eventually prevail. And it did.
The Lindens decided to declare that Copybot was illegal. It wasn't just a fun sandbox tool to do "debugging"; it wasn't just something that people who took themselves too seriously should "get over"; if it didn't affect all the economy (weapons makers always do well in any season), it was still very wrong and threatened the Lindens' bottom line. They understood that, even if the hackers didn't -- and still don't.
And libsl, which included some people who either worked in RL tech jobs or who worked as consultant to big companies in SL realized that they looked bad if they seemed to be destroying the world and ruining its capacity for creativity and commerce.
So the first thing that happened, and likely at the Lindens' prompting, is that John Hurliman (eddie Stryker in SL), stepped down from the head of libsl. If you still have doubts that he was the engineer of Copybot, do some Googling, it's not a secret. Like some politicians leave to "spend time with their families," Hurliman said "all he wanted to do was code" and didn't want the "drama".
That the drama was inspired by griefers who used his took as intended and not "not as intended" wasn't admitted, although every script kiddie and WHat loser in SL grabbed it to harass people and actually steal and flip content. "Business in a box" appeared all over with hot property and the fences, if banned, merely retrieved the copies from the group notices or sandboxes where their friends hung out, some of whom were always careful to keep their hands clean to help perpetuate the gangs' activities.
"WHERE'S DAD?"
I once went to a tech conference in San Diego where one evening a group of us had an intensive and interesting conversation with famed game designer Raph Koster, in which we tried to get him to appreciate not-a-game SL, and he laid out his plan for making a better open-ended game world (which he did do and ran for awhile before it folded and he did many other things). There was a shy, overweight young man -- a teenager -- sitting on the edge of the group, never talking. Finally, as people began to drift away, he came up to me and introduced himself as the griefer who had shown me copybot. It turned out that he literally lived in his mom's basement. I didn't ask "Where's Dad." He did some sort of work and paid her part of the rent. He acknowledged his griefing escapades.
"Why?" I asked.
"Because the Internet poisoned my soul," he said -- sincerely.
Of course, now our entire society lives with this poisoning, that still might have been stopped 20 years ago, but that's a topic for another blog post.
THE FIRST RULE OF FIGHT CLUB...
The next thing that libsl did -- again, not as a coded, mechanical activity but a social, organic activity, if you will, was to make a rule for their club. Only core devs could be in their group. If someone wasn't a core dev -- and presumably peer-reviewed in some sense or kept honest by those who wished to be decent and not steal from others -- they couldn't be in the group.
Now, we totally get it that this hardly stopped the proliferation of the code called "Copybot," which sits on github or whatever to this day. We're not stupid. But these two actions -- changing the head of the group, and cleaning up the membership -- went a long way to restoring faith in the group (of course, not by me, who had personally and severely and repeatedly been griefed by these criminals).
When the Lindens declared Copybot "illegal," of course they couldn't catch every log-on. Whatever hashmarks or identifying features of IP addresses there were could be easily undone by anonymizing or by the Lindens' agnosticism -- if someone logged on from a cornfield in Nebraska, whom we knew to be a griefer because they wrote obscenities on our blog and their IP addressed traced to that cornfield, the Lindens would claim that maybe it was a dorm or a house in which multiple people were logging on, and you couldn't punish all of them. The Lindens refused to block anonymizer addresses, saying that freedom fighters from Iran might be logging on (they showed perhaps 2-3 people, likely foreign journalists or government officials who managed to log on at that time). Corner cases, thy name is Linden.
The Lindens and their code-cave denizens have always been impossible to deal with for us norms, although they have become somewhat more civilized over the years as their staff is recruited not from the user base or "the Internet," but from companies like Microsoft, IBM. Amazon, etc. Today, Cory Ondrejika works at Meta heading up the mobile team; Hurliman runs his own robotics company. Creative! Geeks! They rule our world! Better Living Through Codistry!
TRIANGULATION
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the Lindens used other methods to stamp out Copybot. It wasn't rocket-science. The same people who used Copybot, with that invisible or anonymized log-on, were still in certain groups. They still had all those anime and Bronies etc fetishes. They were still in the same sandboxes or at the same Vore clubs. Even as the world got bigger, you could find them because they victory-danced, that is, they always bragged about their exploits in the IRC channel if not in group chat inworld, and someone with a conscience would eventually AR them. Or they would crash enough sims, and harass enough people even outside the group of me and my tenants, that finally the Lindens had to permaban them and seize their islands. They did this multiple times as they kept coming back on alts, with various Medicis bank-rolling their "transgressive behaviour".
FIRESTORM IS EVERYWHERE
So fast forward to today. Yes, I live in 2022 quite solidly thank you, not in World War I in the steampunk era, actually. How could you combat Firestorm, which rules the world in more diverse and deep ways even than Casper, the Friendly Monopolist Vendor?
Look up all the groups they have in multiple languages, with multiple purposes, totally infiltrated throughout the entire user base even more than the Lindens who essentially gave up their non-English orientation work, once so robust that they even had offices in other countries.
When confronted by reporters like me, Oz Linden would claim the Lindens "couldn't know" what percentage of log-ons were from Firestorm because the same person might use both viewers. Or that dorm room in Nebraska in fact was really only one person with a bunch of alts. Why, IP addresses dynamically change. Blah blah.
Of course they really know and we all know that it is probably at least 90% or more of the population. Only newbies, critics like me, and a few animesh avatar creators who need to test on multiple viewers ever use the bog-standard SL viewer.
SAVING SEARCH AND SHOPPERS
One of the chief reasons is that Oz and company killed search back at the dawn of 2.0 in about 2012, and continued to cripple it especially in the last two years. Meanwhile, Firestorm kept it as it was in 1.23, imagine that, these "people who live in 2022" who are "not stuck back in the dark ages with Copybot I" kept an old viewer's search arrangement because it was better, and helped shoppers more, and that made our economy. If they hadn't existed, you'd have to invent them to save the world, as the Lindens acquired a religious fervour about their mangled search that we can only explain by some curious internal development like the way they ruined their auctions by buying the ebay guy's auction software instead of using the original inhouse version they had, which was better as it showed who had bid, how much, and who won, and kept a record. Now all of that is missing, and even the winning bid disappears after a week (which is why I try to save some of them at the castle in Sylvia).
The huge debacle caused by the Phoenix-Emerald-Firefox DDoS attack, for which Fractured Crstyal is blamed (but for my bird, Lonely Bluebird was always the more sinister gangster; Fractured was just a teenager) also got the Lindens to finally clean up the third-party viewer mess.
The Firefox team of today some of whom remain from that era constantly tell you that these different versions of the viewer are separate, that you can't speak of them collectively, but when Phoenix dies, and the next thing is named Firefox -- the fire from which the phoenix arises -- and that name still appears everywhere on their literature, you don't have to be Sherlock Holmes.
Like policemen who try to solve old cases by pinning them on a newly-arrested crook, the devs try to put all the blame on Emerald and a few devs. But we've been to the sandboxes because we were griefed from them and we've watched all the victory-dances on the YouTubes where all the name tags were visible. So let's not be children here.
Yes, that's my RL head in effigy, eating the Emerald logo on the eve of Emerald's banning. These children were obsessed with me merely because I AR'd them and publicized their antics to expose their endless lies and claims of innocent "debugging".
At any rate, the viewer was used to ensnare its unwitting users in a DDoS attack to make a point in some sandbox fight, and Pathfinder Linden (who plotted in the IRC channel to get me banned, another sensational story of the early years) scolded the boys that you just can't abuse your customers or web sites in that manner. Those directly responsible got permabanned; those who held the cloaks remained to victory dance.
WHO THREW WHOM?
Fast forward another half decade or more and there is only me to remember any of this, and all of it is utterly sanitized. The Lindens held very tense pow-wows with the Firestorm gang, and it's not clear who threw whom. Either party was capable of throwing the other and destroying the world to make a point, I suppose. Somehow they reached a deal. The Lindens insisted on a cooperation agreement, a kind of treaty. There was a list of demands the FS devs didn't want to meet. Possibly they demanded RL names and locations that some of their griefers didn't want to yield. The Lindens muscled them and they finally knuckled as others before them. Telehub mall land barons anyone? VAT taxed?
Today, Firestorm continues to be used to Copybot. The Firestorm devs claim they can't stop it, as you can see from their routine answer to my routine question just to see if they still say the same thing.
Our software is opensource. There is nothing we can do to mitigate users modifying our code except to close source our code. And that is not possible without violating license agreements and user trust.
— The Firestorm Viewer (@PhoenixViewerSL) July 7, 2022
But taking a page from the 2006 book, if Copybot grew more extreme and widespread -- and I don't think it is at this time but we are always only one crisis way from the collapse of our little world -- the Lindens could, in theory, if the situation warranted:
o demand that Firestorm CEO Jessica Lyon step down, and another CEO be found who can better rein in their goons -- and goons are their best customers, and the "users modifying our code" because they can't control their crime;
o demand that the Firestorm team create a core dev group in which others are not invited and not cleared -- obviously that leaves those Self-Compilers of Firestorm and other free agents to do what they wish but at least there is some optical effort at quality control -- optics matter, as generations of Linden PR people will tell you;
o through social ostracizing, group expulsion, land bands, etc. the people who persist in developing Firestorm in non-transparent ways or using it for non-transparent and criminal purposes (Pantera says she knows the forums where they all hang out and has urged me to go tell them not to be bad anymore; to which I can only say "No, you" -- because it's YOUR viewer and YOU are responsible;
o if this doesn't work, block Firestorm from logging on to SL.
Now, would the Lindens do this?
I can only say: watch them.
The high-end creators who sneered and heckled and harassed the makers of gatchas -- some of the finest craftspeople in SL and head and shoulders above the elites simply as people in some cases -- imagine "it can never happen to them".
I'd invite you to think clearly about the Gatchapocalypse. No RL prosecutor or legal authority of any kind in the state of California -- where it matters, because the US is a republic with states' rights and the state law on gambling is what matters -- had indicated in any way, shape, or form that gatchas were in any kind of violation. The lawsuits about children and lootboxes which are a different in phenomenon in games which were launched against Google and Apple failed. They failed.
Instead of taking an adversarial or even just practical attitude toward these developments, the Lindens, under their new owners, who included a politically-connected Harvard-trained lawyer and former US Trade official, decided to pre-emptively remove gatchas to "limit liability for litigation". There was no litigation. You can't say "But Japan" in California even if you have Japanese customers.
If you think they can't do that regarding a widespread IP theft issue, especially as they bring in more and more RL companies as they did in the past, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. Or jump, the viewer will catch you!
LAW AS LAW
Then there's another factor that people in the UK and elsewhere may not fully grasp, even though their own EU is bringing big tech to its knees these days. Section 230, the safe haven for big tech against any claims regarding the content on their servers, is more than likely to be redacted or even abolished.
Again, if you think laws that have been around, oh, for even 50 years, I invite you to look at Roe v. Wade and remember that in our common law system which is NOT LIKE your civil law system in X country, the interpretation brought by Dobbs can undo a federal law completely, devolving it back to the states. And here we all are.
You don't know. The electricity could go off or a comet might hit the planet.
But more to the point, your notion that "Copybot can't be stopped because Copybot can't be stopped because Science" is not immune to organic law and organic politics.
If top creators draw their wagons around them and tell the little dressmakers to go file a DMCA, or even offer magnanimously to help them (um, that doesn't scale, you do realize, right?), maybe that buys them some time, but ultimately, if enough people get angry or simply discouraged, either they leave SL completely, as quite a few merchants have done since the gatcha ban and then the application of the US sales tax and the cashout expenses, or they get more and more desperate and angry over copying, and they fight back.
CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE
You can't know that they may fight back with inserting anti-rez scripts in their clothing just to piss you off and keep you from their RP sim, even though they know how it works.
You can't know that they might not decide to boycott Firestorm en masse. There's always Alchemy or Catnip.
Of course, the Lindens are in very, very deep with Firestorm. Listen to any of these office hours and you might be horrified. There are more Lindens than residents in these meetings -- the residents don't even feel they need to bother to come. The summaries are on Inara Pey's blog later. The Lindens nearly grovel to theSE Firestorm devs, thanking them for fixing this or that thinglet. The Lindens apologize profusely -- you would think that Firestorm was holding office hours, and Linden fanboyz were coming to symp them.
Now, why doesn't LL just buy Firestorm? That is, Firestorm isn't "for sale," being such an altruistic volunteer open source bunch.
Why doesn't LL just retire its own viewer and pronounce Firestorm as the official viewer? After all, they buy Windlight or various other services for voice, etc. Why not the viewer? Since they can't turn back from having open sourced it back in the day.
Because they can't accept the liability of Copybot and any other criminal use of the viewer.
If they insisted on packing the core dev group, perhaps they could clean it up.
And it's not like there aren't other models for doing just that out there, for whatever reason. Look at Overte. A fork of the High Fidelity software (from Philip's company) decided to go non-profit, rather than commercial. The commercial part has likely formerly Lindens/High Fidelity staff in it -- they refuse to name them, which is of course irresponsible, but then they're coders.
What they are making, however, is a club. You have to be in the club if you want to be central to the development AND VOTE ON IT. (That touch was particularly nice; I presume they aren't going to just hum like the IEEE engineers, and unlike the JIRA, people will be able to vote "no" -- that's crucial).
Of course, when you hang a towel in the men's locker room in the gym, anyone can wipe their ass with it. And so the Overte people, like Firestorm "can't" control what happens to their open source wonder. And yet...and yet...they seem to have built an efficient hedge around it.
And yet...they are creating a cadre of responsibility around it which they have found necessary -- and we all know that it is vital for their to be TRUST in their world. Any open source world that doesn't have grown-ups and quality control in the form of at least a voluntary club of this nature ends up like Open Sim -- unpopulated. Let me suggest that they better make up their minds quick what their attitude is to IP theft. Open Sim failed there; so will they.
If you put permissions in your world, they have to be meaningful.
If the Copybot problem worsened, if Walton couldn't help all the little dressmakers, if the tide rose higher over people's heads, the Lindens might start taking actions. They might remove some of Firestorm's massive privileges, like all their access to newbies in their help islands, which of course brings them into their commerce circles.
Nothing is certain and everything is possible.
Point of order: Phoenix came *after* Emerald Prok, hence the name.
Posted by: Agatha Macbeth | 07/11/2022 at 08:41 AM
And you are...? Is this you? https://mobile.twitter.com/agg3rs
Checking because of my blog rules.
Would appreciate some linkie-links to prove this point. Seems likely, but still, let's make sure this history stays on the record!
Oh, and you do agree that Emerald and Phoenix are intimately related then, don't you. And you would know.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | 07/11/2022 at 11:16 AM