The Alphaville Herald

28 Responses to “Silent Sheep-bots Invade Ambat”

1. 

   nimrod yaffle
   

   Jan 3rd, 2007
   

   And I’m *sure* they paid for all those accounts they are creating, plus all those AVs (plus the old ones they use). *eye roll*
2. 

   Prokofy Neva
   

   Jan 3rd, 2007
   

   I had covered these same Sheep-bots on my blog Dec. 1:
   http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2006/12/sheepbots.html

   I see some of the very same names here at Ambat out grazing in the same pwned avatars — which the gal, under an NDA with the Sheep according to a reliable source, claims were each individually purchased and gift-wrapped for their bot buddies.

   Basically, I think the story goes something like this:

   John Hurliman had a client, evidently a rock group, that wants to log on multiple instances of the avatars of the rock group. So he or his “friends at libsecondlife” (he always tells us that the original maker of copybot is “unknown”) worked on this issue of how to create a program to log on alts to run with IM commands.

   In the course of doing this he or “the friends” found out that the bots made copies of stuff, too, and wasn’t that neat, and said, lets sell it and have W-Hat and our alts grief with it, and sell the antidotes. They yakked it up and hooted it up in the IRC channel or lib channel because it was “cool”.

   The Sheep, who were also, as Johnny Ming stated explicitly in a podcast, interested in multiple instances for things like the NBC gig, their hugest, were keenly following the libsecondlife efforts to do this sort of stuff — by being in the group, hearing about it, testing it, and, if we are to believe Sheep FlipperPA, even attempting to stop CopyBot before Baba and friends unleashed it on an unwilling world.

   But sure, the Sheep can say legitimately and honestly, “We didn’t make CopyBot”. They were likely only interested in MultipleInstancesBot from the get-go. CopyBot itself is only of scientific interest to them for grander things.

   MultipleInstancesBot is related to CopyBot and possibly related by only an X or Y chromosome’s difference.

   Along the way to making his RockBot or MultipleInstancesBot, John Hurliman also enabled — and other libsecondlifers actually operated — Campbots that have drained down millions of Lindens from casinos. This is all being reported now, and even being reported to LL as an exploit or a griefing.

   ESC aren’t likely to bother to go around draining casinos with campbots, they’re too busy draining RL big corporations for real money! So its kids in libsecondlife possibly still on winter break or whatever fooling around and playing crusader as they know people hate camping — but they’re also making a good buck off it, just like they did off Copybot sales and other sales of stuff made in libsecondlife.

   John Hurliman is likely to deny that his RockBot, his use of CopyBot, his relationship to SheepBot, is elated to misuse of CopyBot and use of CampBot to steal from casinos. And only if someone starts printing IRC channels or IMs or whatever will we see the red threads light up connecting them.

   But he is all part of the “enabling environment” where there is never any responsibility because everybody in the group can always say it’s a group, and you can’t have guilt by association in a group, eh?

   The fact is, a few individuals, and the Lindens who are in this group themselves and have server logs know who they are, have made, and benefited, from CopyBot and other Bots. They clearly don’t care that this has happened. That it harms others, they evidently aren’t prepared to do too much about now other than to wave around some new TOS language.

   Another way that libsecondlife is being accessed now is by folks wanting them to create a land-scraper/first-land finder/packet sniffer thingie:

   http://libsecondlife.org/protocol/index.php?title=Bounties&diff=2633&oldid=2600

   If this story is different than what I’ve just said, I’d like to hear it.
3. 

   Eddy Stryker
   

   Jan 4th, 2007
   

   Prokofy, since you are earnestly asking for corrections to your story I’ll give you the rundown.

   “I had covered these same Sheep-bots on my blog Dec. 1:”

   Just want to make sure we’re talking about the same thing here. With a bot you have the account that logs in to SL, and you have the code that is driving that account. While many of these may be the same accounts it is definitely not the same software. I wouldn’t know what any of the ESC bots do as they aren’t my client.

   John Hurliman had a client, evidently a rock group, that wants to log on multiple instances of the avatars of the rock group. So he or his “friends at libsecondlife” (he always tells us that the original maker of copybot is “unknown”) worked on this issue of how to create a program to log on alts to run with IM commands.

   You can read more about that on my blog here: http://www.jhurliman.org/index.php/2006/long-range-in-second-life-or-cleverly-disguised-robots/ which goes in to some technical details on how libsecondlife was used to run a part of the concert, and has a video clip of the event. I worked on the program that ran the concert actors. As far as the CopyBot issue, the original author is known but unless he asks me to release his SL name (I don’t know his real name) I’m going to choose not to.

   “In the course of doing this he or “the friends” found out that the bots made copies of stuff, too, and wasn’t that neat, and said, lets sell it and have W-Hat and our alts grief with it, and sell the antidotes. They yakked it up and hooted it up in the IRC channel or lib channel because it was “cool”.”

   I didn’t start working on the concert bots until a few days before the show, and the code was written from scratch. The first time I’ve communicated with anyone in the W-Hat group was just a few days ago when I made my first visit to their sim “Baku” to check out their builds. I’ve never heard of this antidote you’re referring to, how would it work? I’ve been saying the !quit stuff all along is bogus, the only thing I’ve provided as an antidote goes was a suggestion to LL to block clients with the User-Agent string “CopyBot” which they did do.

   “MultipleInstancesBot is related to CopyBot and possibly related by only an X or Y chromosome’s difference.”

   I’m going to be honest and say that you probably aren’t in a position to make a statement like that. I have never seen the code for MultipleInstancesBot, but I wrote my own for the concert and I can say that the code necessary to write something like that shares nothing in common with CopyBot which only logged in a single avatar and was all based on object recognition and rezzing code. I would be very comfortable saying this is an incorrect assumption.

   “Along the way to making his RockBot or MultipleInstancesBot, John Hurliman also enabled — and other libsecondlifers actually operated — Campbots that have drained down millions of Lindens from casinos. This is all being reported now, and even being reported to LL as an exploit or a griefing.”

   Yes, libsecondlife does enable you to write camping bots or multiple instances bots or rock bots or anything. That’s the whole point of having libsecondlife, and it speaks a lot for the progress that libsecondlife has made that we now see things like this cropping up in the wild. Just the other day I was randomly teleporting around and I came across a huge stash of bots hidden underground on a private island. I think I still have some screenshots in-world, but that’s another example of how independent bots are cropping up all over. While we can make historical references to CopyBot every time the subject of non-player-characters in Second Life is brought up, there is no real link between CopyBot and any bots that are currently inhabiting the grid. Unless someone has written CopyBot 2.0 and I just didn’t hear about it.

   “But he is all part of the “enabling environment” where there is never any responsibility because everybody in the group can always say it’s a group, and you can’t have guilt by association in a group, eh?”

   By the same logic you can say that Second Life is an “enabling environment” for laundering money, harboring deviant/illegal sexual behavior, and copyright infringement of all sorts. libsecondlife is a tool that imposes personal responsibility.
4. 

   Prokofy Neva
   

   Jan 4th, 2007
   

   Wow, Eddy, that’s quite the post. Is it just youthful exhuberance or sheer tekkie hubris that makes you fail to see that you aren’t correcting anything I’ve written, but merely confirming it?

   More than anything about Second Life, I marvel at the way young people have grown up lying through their teeth, without any conscious awareness that they are utterly wrapped up in prevarications. The moral compass has definitely gone astray.

   Once again, you dodge the question of who made CopyBot. But why? There’s nothing inherently evil in CopyBot, eh? It’s just a program. It’s only those who make “unauthorized use” of it that to worry, and that wouldn’t be you, now, would it?

   Whoever made Copybot — now gosh, I wonder who THAT could be — was working in a program that reverse engineers Second Life because they say that information wants to be free. They say SL needs to be open sourced. So…why would they be anonymous when it came to putting their John Hancock on a script or a program to execute actions in SL? Open source is so open that whoops, we forgot who coded that so oops, we can’t go back and ask them stuff or comment stuff? That doesn’t sound like the tekkie wiki that I know in Second Life where people are always copying and sharing scripts and acknowledging others — oh, and also terribly concerned that scripts retain their copyright and inability to be copied, if nothing else does.

   Back when you gave the interview to Hamlet, you said you were working on these copying-bots-that-weren’t-copybot for “a client” — and it turned out it wasn’t mannekins for a store or something, but evidently this rock concert. So how was it that you could tell Hamlet something around Nov. 6, and then today tell us you only started work on it a few days before the event? And of course, we know that MultipleInstancesBot was already out there and being tested by the sheep on their island (unless, of course, they were testing Campbots, which is of course unlikely).

   The notion that you never, in your life, had any communications with W-Hat is utterly preposterous. There were some 20 of them in your group, libsecondlife. The group constantly chatted among themselves. You’re saying you remained utterly blind and incommunicado as people like Gene Replacement came in the group, grabbed stuff, made megaprims, griefed sims, and got booted from Second Life? Huh?

   I’m going to be honest and say that you probably aren’t in a position to make a statement like that. I have never seen the code for MultipleInstancesBot, but I wrote my own for the concert and I can say that the code necessary to write something like that shares nothing in common with CopyBot which only logged in a single avatar and was all based on object recognition and rezzing code. I would be very comfortable saying this is an incorrect assumption.

   I simply find this utterly unconvincing, and I’m sure others will, too. Here we have 3 things that all look alike, all logging in hunched-over avatars all with identical outfits. And we’re supposed to believe that they are um fraternal triplets with different parents, separated at birth, or a sport?

   That’s ridiculous. Of course they’re all related because they all do the same actions, it’s just that this or that line of code may be differentiated to distinguish between “go sit on that campchair and suck out the camping dollars” and “go sit on that guitar and pretend you are playing it” or something. Please. You don’t have to be a coder to recognize the similarities; only an ardently, heavily-dosed prevaricist could be saying that these things are unrelated, that they never saw or imagined the code, that it’s all just like beautiful flowers just springing up randomly in nature without any coordination.

   This, from somebody who showed the most grave cynicism in the chat channels and used an alt to sell CopyBot.

   Libsecondlife is *itself* wild, not making things that enable others to “come into the wild”. It’s irresponsible, anonymous, and provocative by its nature to start with, not suddenly and mysteriously coming upon this behaviour in others.

   There is no real link between CopyBot and any bots that are currently inhabiting the grid. Unless someone has written CopyBot 2.0 and I just didn’t hear about it.

   Baloney. Bots are bots. They all bot. They are copied. Some are programmed to go on copying other things; others are programmed to suck casinos dry. But they are all from the same happy family. As all happy families are alike; it is only unhappy families that are different.

   I simply cannot take your word for anything. I don’t believe this is the arcane field that you claim. It doesn’t take some special arcane mastery of the ages to realize that this kind of statement is merely some literalism about some facet of the thing, without grasping — or being willing to concede — the higher relational issues among the different manifestations of bot: “I can say that the code necessary to write something like that shares nothing in common with CopyBot which only logged in a single avatar and was all based on object recognition and rezzing code.”

   Single or double or 50 avatars — who cares? It still *copies*. They all copy lol. Look at the first video with Hamlet, and watch that copying! Are we now to believe that the Hamlet video was MultipleInstancesBot and not CopyBot? Is there some deliberate confusing of the imagery here? Based on object recognition? Well that seems likely something one can easily add on to a fundamental bot that is alike across all models — ditto rezzing code. All bots copy. Only one is CopyBot. Others are CopyBot plus, etc.

   Whatever the true technical issues here, I simply don’t have the confidence or trust in you to be straightforward, sincere, and in good faith in describing them. You’ve constantly danced around your own role in this, and covered up the role of the other guy, while all the while telling us there’s nothing “wrong” with CopyBot, so that your motivation for the cover-up is mysterious.
5. 

   Eddy Stryker
   

   Jan 4th, 2007
   

   Ok Prokofy you have gone past trying to put something together to just making really stupid comments.

   “Once again, you dodge the question of who made CopyBot.”

   I said I know who made it, you don’t have a clue, and I’m not telling. Ok I take it back, I’ll give you a hint, his name is Lance. You’ve never met him before or spoken with him I’m pretty sure. Please feel free to keep making wild assumptions about who the original author is, it’s humorous.

   “Whoever made Copybot — now gosh, I wonder who THAT could be — was working in a program that reverse engineers Second Life because they say that information wants to be free. They say SL needs to be open sourced.”

   Lance has never made any statement at all to anyone regarding CopyBot, so I don’t know what you’re talking about there.

   “Back when you gave the interview to Hamlet, you said you were working on these copying-bots-that-weren’t-copybot for “a client” — and it turned out it wasn’t mannekins for a store or something, but evidently this rock concert.”

   You’re making the assumption that it would be impossible for me to work on more than one thing at the same time over the course of several months. Mannequin project is still on the workbench, the concert already happened and yes everything I said is absolutely true.

   “The notion that you never, in your life, had any communications with W-Hat is utterly preposterous. There were some 20 of them in your group, libsecondlife. The group constantly chatted among themselves. You’re saying you remained utterly blind and incommunicado as people like Gene Replacement came in the group, grabbed stuff, made megaprims, griefed sims, and got booted from Second Life? Huh?”

   The group constantly chatted among themselves? I think there have been about 10 lines of communication between the in-world libsecondlife group total, and I never read it. The W-Hat members have their own IRC channel and I haven’t them chat in our channel at all. Also we’ve fragmented off developer chat from the main #libsl channel and I don’t go in #libsl any more (too much non-developer traffic). My statement still stands as true that I’ve never been in contact with anyone from W-Hat until just recently.

   “I simply find this utterly unconvincing, and I’m sure others will, too. Here we have 3 things that all look alike, all logging in hunched-over avatars all with identical outfits. And we’re supposed to believe that they are um fraternal triplets with different parents, separated at birth, or a sport?”

   Keep making yourself look like an out of touch fool. It takes about 10 lines of code to make a bot come in-world (that’s the beauty of libsecondlife) and what you do from there is up to each coder. That’s why CopyBot and whatever ESC happens to be using at the time likely don’t share any code other than the 10 or so lines needed to login. The entire rest of your post is based on you proclaiming how everyone else’s code works that you’ve never looked at.
6. 

   Artemis Fate
   

   Jan 4th, 2007
   

   “The group constantly chatted among themselves? I think there have been about 10 lines of communication between the in-world libsecondlife group total, and I never read it. The W-Hat members have their own IRC channel and I haven’t them chat in our channel at all. Also we’ve fragmented off developer chat from the main #libsl channel and I don’t go in #libsl any more (too much non-developer traffic). My statement still stands as true that I’ve never been in contact with anyone from W-Hat until just recently.”

   Prokofy just can’t have something to spatteringly denounce without all the groups he hates somehow involved, thus pretty much no matter what, W-hat, ESC (or other such dev companies), libsl, fic, and (now) corporations find their way into all of his conspiracy theories.

   I wouldn’t bother trying to prove him wrong, these aren’t some facts or ideas he believes in, this is more of a worldview fueled by his paranoid fantasies and growing insanity. Logic, reason, and facts need not apply.
7. 

   Lorelei Patel
   

   Jan 4th, 2007
   

   These are all very interesting theories. But where does the part about black oil and the human-alien hybrids and the Cigarette Smoking Man fit in?
8. 

   urizenus
   

   Jan 4th, 2007
   

   You know if people would come up with the virtual bigfoot screenshots like I asked we wouldn’t have to run these Sheep stories all the time. But in the interim we work with what we have, and basically what we have is the inherently evil iconography of the sheep or lamb, which is a cult horror film waiting to happen: “The Attack of the Killer Lambs!” But would I prefer virtual Elvis sitings? Don’ you know it!

   By the way, when I read these stories by Prok I can’t get the scene from “Oh Lucky Man” out of my head — you know, where he finds the “person” who has had his head grafted onto a sheeps body?
9. 

   Prokofy Neva
   

   Jan 4th, 2007
   

   I don’t proclaim anything about code, as I am not a programmer, but I don’t claim that this is such a secret and arcane field that no one can ever understand anything about it, or that nobody ever gets to ask questions about it. It takes no special coding genius to see the resemblances among all the bots and realize they are related; it takes no special expertise to see that you are double-talking and doing a fast patter here to try to cover up things.

   If it only takes 10 lines of code, great! But before those 10 lines of code, they were likely related. The Lindens can log on 3 million accounts now and make sure they don’t lag anything and you’ll be able to help them tell the media about reaching 3 million now.

   It’s humorous to think that I’m somehow “putting things together” when you do in fact keep dodging the request to name the names of your software developers in your open-sourced reverse-engineering program. In fact, are all these items in fact open-source? This was at issue before, I recall, when there were claims that they were, but you had to go through gate-keepers. I don’t need to judge about the code — but other interested members of the public interested to assess the Copybot legends could be invited to take a look — there are likely people with greater expertise — and better reputations — than you.

   If you know who made Copybot, but have to remain coy and secretive about, it definitely suggests you fear something or have something to hide. I don’t need to make “wild assumptions,” but it stands to reason from everything we’ve seen that you had a good deal more to do with this than you’re willing to let on.

   It’s immaterial whether you find my logical and reasonable questions somehow indication of my tinfoil hat status. You’ve only raised more suspicions than you’ve quelled. The effort of you and your boosters like Artemis to use the old word-salad, literalist, self-justifying approach is transparent and pathetic.

   So let’s get this straight. You’re leading a group that has 20 people come into it and remain in it for months, using your programs to grief others — god-mode, mega-prim, copybot — and you just have no idea how that happened — these people were all permabanned for crashing the grid and for terrible griefing, all wearing their “libsecondlife” titles — and you just remained completely out of the loop. Oh-kay.
10. 

    Just a thought
    

    Jan 4th, 2007
    

    The ONLY information capable of proving Prok’s theories – IP addresses, account information, that sort of thing – is information NO ONE with the exception of Linden Lab, the Federal Government, and the account holders can possess legally.

    all other lines drawn are speculation – there is no argument that can be made to say this is not so for the reason stated above.

    IF Prok or anyone else is in possession of this information they are guilty of hacking the system – or otherwise having someone else do such.

    Of course I fully expect Prok and her pets to attempt to denounce this little hole in her assertions ….. Unfortunately you can’t. Not without revealing other activities that are not within your power to do and NOT get yourselves in hot water (any form of tracking at all that is done by agencies outside the federal government or a sanctioned police action is in violation of privacy. In fact, it is stalking).
11. 

    Bedevere Octagon
    

    Jan 4th, 2007
    

    Well first lets leave W-hat out of conspiracies and secondly it could be a “safari.” W-hat indeed!
12. 

    Bedevere Octagon
    

    Jan 4th, 2007
    

    *pops his monocle*
13. 

    Prokofy Neva
    

    Jan 4th, 2007
    

    I don’t need any special IP or other information to draw the obvious conclusions here which aren’t conspiracies, but as plain as the nose on your face. Nor do I seek to gain some unauthorized access to an IP or would I even know how to do it. I don’t need to. Use logic and conceptual thinking to see how this story falls apart. A group claiming to be open source can’t tell you who has written their open-source program or even answer a straight question as to whether all the programs are really available to the public and open-sourced. An open group with 20 members in it claims they can’t tell what these 20 members later permabanned were up to.

    Just a thought’s assertions are just conspiracy-mongering themselves.
14. 

    Just a thought
    

    Jan 4th, 2007
    

    No Prok, they’re simple facts – end of file there.

    I’m not talking at all about any group or open-source project …. which incidentally means they allow the source code out. They don’t have to tell you diddly about who’s running what.

    I am talking about your THEORY as to who is behind ANYTHING related to Bots, Griefer Attacks, et al. You cannot prove at all who did what without the information I mentioned in the prior comment – Logs and personal data can be edited and are thus not sufficient proof. Nor are your personal experiences as everyone has a different story to tell.

    Please get your responses straight before attempting to write one to me – thanks.
15. 

    Bedevere Octagon
    

    Jan 4th, 2007
    

    Artimis sez: “Prokofy just can’t have something to spatteringly denounce without all the groups he hates somehow involved, thus pretty much no matter what, W-hat, ESC (or other such dev companies), libsl, fic, and (now) corporations find their way into all of his conspiracy theories.”

    Well first Prokofy is a female…RL Pics are not conclusive or anything, but she doesn’t like W-hat, ESC and Co. because we call her on her BS and such. Although she now accuses these groups of everything from virtual terrorism to virtual rape.

    She is seeing witches behind every water barrel.

    Meanwhile we should all enjoy Porkofy like we all enjoyed that odd old lady who lived near us and did the kookiest stuff when we were kids. Sure she spouts some insane, half baked crap but she is fun to watch. Just sit back and enjoy the fun!
16. 

    Eddy Stryker
    

    Jan 4th, 2007
    

    “A group claiming to be open source can’t tell you who has written their open-source program or even answer a straight question as to whether all the programs are really available to the public and open-sourced.”

    Go back and read my last comment, I was giving you good hints! Again, I could tell you who wrote it but since incessantly try to figure it out it’s funny not to. If I came out and just told you the answer would be really dry and boring and you would have one less reason to talk about libsecondlife. And no all of the programs ever written with libsecondlife are not open source, I tried explaining a long time ago on your blog that we’re under a very liberal license that means you aren’t under any open source requirements when writing software that uses libsl. So people are writing commercial code with it, private applications, etc. The library is completely free and will remain that way, but the library by itself doesn’t do anything.
17. 

    Jesse Malthus
    

    Jan 4th, 2007
    

    Prokofy, for your reference, here is the text straight out of LICENSE.txt:

    “Copyright (c) 2006, Second Life Reverse Engineering Team
    All rights reserved.

    - Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
    modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:

    - Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this
    list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
    - Neither the name of the Second Life Reverse Engineering Team nor the names
    of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from
    this software without specific prior written permission.

    THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS “AS IS”
    AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE
    IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE
    ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT OWNER OR CONTRIBUTORS BE
    LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR
    CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF
    SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS
    INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN
    CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE)
    ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE
    POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.”
18. 

    Prokofy Neva
    

    Jan 4th, 2007
    

    See, its comments like that Eddy Stryker/John Hurliman that I hope the Internet indelibly keeps to be served up to your future employers and loan officers as representational of your character. This sort of coy word-salad stuff is noted, and noted as part of that whole gleeful-malicious manipulative approach you take to other people in the world you live in.

    Jesse, anybody can cobble up any TOS they like. I’m not certain what you’ve cobbled up is even good open-source practices. Sounds to me like you want open-source to mean “I get to do WTF I want, and even not open source code and keep it for commercial gain in an project trying to gain its cred from being open sourc” etc. etc.

    All part of the word-salad, Red Queen approach you boys take.

    As for documentation, I suppose the appearance of a libsecondlife reverse engineer on the scene running the Campbots doesn’t count for anything, oh well, it must be an optical illusion.
19. 

    Prokofy Neva
    

    Jan 5th, 2007
    

    Btw, I find it touching to consider how dedicated ESC employees individually dress each and every separately logged-on bot in their own personal, individual non-copyable sheep outfit. I bet they have little footed jammies, too.
20. 

    Eddy Stryker
    

    Jan 5th, 2007
    

    “I’m not certain what you’ve cobbled up is even good open-source practices. Sounds to me like you want open-source to mean “I get to do WTF I want, and even not open source code and keep it for commercial gain in an project trying to gain its cred from being open sourc” etc. etc.”

    Yes, such a horrible license the BSD is. That’s why there are a dozen operating systems based off it that are also the backbone of Apple’s OS.

    Prokofy, did you give up guessing already? You are so close!
21. 

    Prokofy Neva
    

    Jan 5th, 2007
    

    Apple’s OS is not made up of anonymous people, nor do the Apple makers/users/adapters use it to grief people. That’s why this practice doesn’t suck when they do it : )

    Um, I don’t play guessing games. I suggest this fellow put his name on his work so that um, the Motherland May Know Its Heroes.
22. 

    Mako Mabellon
    

    Jan 5th, 2007
    

    Btw, I find it touching to consider how dedicated ESC employees individually dress each and every separately logged-on bot in their own personal, individual non-copyable sheep outfit. I bet they have little footed jammies, too.

    Only legal way to do it. (Probably now the easiest method, too, at least for relatively small numbers of bots – the code to restore the previous appearance on login is reasonably well-tested and takes just two lines of code in the application to activate. Appearance cloning, OTOH, would be more complicated.)

    Fortunately, I think you generally only have to do it once per bot (well, until the baked textures break or are deleted, anyway).
23. 

    Jesse Malthus
    

    Jan 5th, 2007
    

    Prokofy: Different licenses for different purposes. Companies tend to be less likely to use a library if it means having to divulge their code.
    In fact, some people call the BSD license more free than the GPL since it has less restrictions on what you can do with the licensed code.
    Also, open source is a development methodology whereas Free Software is a movement. libsecondlife doesn’t subscribe to the latter.
24. 

    Cocoanut Koala
    

    Jan 5th, 2007
    

    Three questions for Jesse and others in LibSL:

    1. Do these bots count in the general number of people on line?

    2. Do these bots take up resources as a normal AV would?

    3. Does LibSL pay an additional $10 for every bot they create?

    coco
25. 

    Oh Really...
    

    Jan 5th, 2007
    

    Prok displays a complete lack of understanding about what a library is in computer science terms, open source libraries and open source in general. You can add that to the list I guess…

    We can only hope our heros at the Justice League can save us from the onslaught of reusable blocks of code designed to be used by programmers in assembling their own programs. What were computer scientists thinking of when they began this dark road with things like APIs, shared objects, etc? The horrors!
26. 

    Jesse Malthus
    

    Jan 6th, 2007
    

    1. Yes
    2. Not as much on both server and client side (and it’s got even more fine-grained bandwidth tools)
    3. That’s up to each members own conscience. We don’t have any “libsl account pool” or anything of the sort (although we might if we get buy a last name. How does Tekkiwiki sound?”
27. 

    Prokofy Neva
    

    Jan 8th, 2007
    

    Here’s the way they’ll be doing it with the new open-source deal:

    It’s a GNU license and you have to make what you do available to the public.

    So I wonder how that squares with the libsecondlife practice of taking things reverse-engineered, but not posting them openly, nor publicizing their names on the items, and using them for private, commercial use — and griefing, of course.

    Will you now be forced to cease that practice?
28. 

    SuezanneC Baskerville
    

    Nov 29th, 2007
    

    Copybot:

    Nevah forget. NEVAH.

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