Avatar of the Year 2008 – 3rd Place: n3x15 and d3adl3yc0d3c
by Alphaville Herald on 10/01/09 at 7:21 pm
by Pixeleen Mistral, National Affairs desk
Last night, while trying to convince Hamlet Au of New World Notes that things would really go much better for him if he would simply stop running away and dance with me – I don’t bite – the one-man Linden infomercial production company totally ruined the mood when he voiced a concern that SL Herald press representation could signal the presence of griefers — and what terrible self-replicating particle shit hammer might rain down on the laggy RMB City dance party that Hamlet has been nice enough to teleport me to?
Hamlet generally avoids covering the meta-games Second Life residents invent to put some excitement into their gameplay, so perhaps he is unfamiliar with the two avatars to whom the Herald is awarding the prestigious 3rd place award for avatar of the year in 2008: n3x15 and d3adl3yc0d3c. This is a shame. The Herald’s Avatar of the Year award is never presented lightly, and recognizes those that have had the biggest impact on “your world, your imagination” — for better or worse.
Previous griefers players with a unique approach to gameplay who have recieved the avatar of the year award include Prokofy Neva, Tizzers Foxchase, and Plastic Duck — demonstrating that a vigorously pursued vision for the metaverse can have a real impact.
d3adl3yc0d3c qualified for his award with a series of cleverlyconstructed distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on the SecondLife infrastructure and asset server in 2008. By creating selfreplicating scripted objects that quietly spread across a large numberof sims, and by then remotely triggering the object scripts, d3adl3yc0d3c wasable to bring the Second Life asset server to it’s knees repeatedly andseemingly at will, using Second Life’s grid to mount mass attacks onthe SL asset server. Does this also suggest that the SL grid may begenerally useful for DDoS attacks against external targets?
After this game lost its appeal, d3adl3yc0d3c branched out into mass e-mail spamming from in-world self-replicating objects, taking advantage of scripted objects' ability to send e-mail to external sites. Mr. c0d3c eventually attacked an SLEXchange forum regular that he felt was anti-American. Unfortunately, after a few days, his target used a Gmail filter to automatically redirect the spam to the e-mail accounts of the Herald staff. But the Herald staff took 5 minutes to become experts on Gmail spam filters, and this skill has proved to be useful in the hall of mirrors that is teh interwebs.
Eventually d3adl3yc0d3c moved beyond the griefing game and to pursue studies of the philosophical implication of self-identical avatars along with a professional writing career. Before getting out of the griefing game, d3adl3yc0d3c demonstrated a number of new uses for anonymous access to unlimited free scripting and the Second Life infrastructure, and was helpful enough to offer existence proofs to Linden Lab about the drawbacks to user-created content and unlimited free accounts.
n3x15 is jointly awarded the 3rd place avatar of the year award for his work in keeping the notorious Patriotic Nigras griefing group running after PN founder Mootykips tired of the game. Community organizers are a vital part of our virtual world, and n3x15 seems to intuitively understand this.
Beyond suporting the PN during a period when the leadership was in constant turmoil, n3x15 also had a crucial role in maintaining the shooped life griefer-friendly SL client. With this client, n3x15 enabled legions of throwaway accounts to visit Second Life, fill sims with goatse images, get banned, and return on another account within minutes – providing both abuse-report-expert anti-griefer groups such as the Justice League Unlimited and the Linden Lab G-team a reason to exist.
Beyond his software and organizational abilities, n3x15 also worked part time as an open source software license advocate, and demanded that d3adl3yc0d3c publish his griefing improvements to the SL client to comply with the terms of the GPL license. This commitment to the cause of free software and what appears to have been a competitive race to see who could be the biggest and baddest in the griefing community appears to have served both of this year's 3rd place award recipients well – and spurred them on to greater achievements.
In time, n3x15 also tired of the griefing game, and has recently turned his attention to anti-griefing tools and the OpenSim software. While both d3adl3yc0d3c and n3x15 have changed their focus, it seems likely they have inspired a new generation of griefers, if the repeated log-in lock-outs due to “in-world issues” have anything to do with scritped user-created content and anonymous accounts.
This Just In...
Jan 10th, 2009
DDoS attacks have been perpetrated by codec time and again, using simple llhttprequest scripts combined by self replication so it is possible to attack external sites. Codec attacked the SLX site every night for about a week straight almost a year ago.
BTW, the reason that codec’s methods for attacking the asset servers works was because every time an object is autoreturned the asset server creates an asset. Codec managed to design a new weapon that used self-replication on STEROIDS. Combined with looped dataserver requests and llhttprequests targeting SLX back in April, this also flooded sim queues to the point that teleportation was nearly impossible during an attack and LL administrators were unable to logout griefers in affected sims since the sims were not receiving “kicks” from the admins.
Codec also was rumored to have developed malware utilizing a “decentralized protocol for communications.” Article here:
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/915865/the_latest_trends_in_malicious_software.html?cat=15
These are just a few of many things that he did that impacted second life. While slightly less lame than N3X15, these accomplishments really aren’t anything to be proud of.
SLH is a has-been
Jan 11th, 2009
You do realize that outside of this blog, no one has heard of these nitwits.
yiffy for russians
Jan 11th, 2009
I like the way Prokofy’s name is up there along with 2 of the most famous griefers ever. Damn, isn’t it cool the way things work out like that?
Nexis and Codec, you 2 have to do something big now that you have this promotion to the 3rd most important avatars of 2008. Go out with a bang. Take out the JLU and Nicolas Mafia both in one afternoon with a Proky and a Linden tied behind your back, that kind of thing, you know.
Congratulations you both, now go cause trouble.
deadlycodec
Jan 11th, 2009
Wow! This came as a surprise, considering your recent “fair and balanced” coverage of my “being kicked out of the PN.”
I do appreciate the award, however.
It should be noted that a certain LL engineer and long time friend has adamantly denied that my attempts at attacks on the asset servers had any effect whatsoever. I’m still not sure if he was only saying what he was supposed to say. As noted, I had a knack for being able to announce attacks ahead of time with very consistent results.
Though my rapid rise in the ranks of the PN was first prompted by a grid attack that I announced ahead of time on the PN forums (see where Prokofy blogged the results at http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2007/07/second-life-gri.html), DDoS attacks were certainly not the highlight of my career as a griefer. They aren’t particularly complicated. Linden Lab has arguably provided the perfect DDoS platform, free of legal consequences for the attacker. No one needs more than a few thousand servers to wreak havoc on a website.
Who to thank…hrm..
I’d like to thank the Second Life Herald, for more than a year of continued press coverage. Without the press, Griefing is almost useless by itself. Well, at least it doesn’t compare to the drama that press coverage causes. Yay drama!
I’d like to thank our flawed legal system that has protected me from prosecution.
I’d also like to apologize to the residents of Second Life. I’m sorry that I haven’t been around to grief you lately. I’ve been such an awful griefer. I’ll try and do better in 2009 but no promises.
Seriously though, coming from SLH this actually means alot. I didn’t expect to be credited for anything I did after our falling out and whatnot.
Oh and the studies on self identical avatars, while interesting and at times rather frustrating, were largely immaterial in the end. They only mattered to me because I lost a friend….
Anyways, I’m out. Peace.
Baron Cuttlesmith von Blogharder, Esqu, MD
Jan 11th, 2009
Prokofy Neva is one of the biggest SL trolls ever. That she is unaware she is even trolling, and makes a fool out of herself whilst doing so, is besides the point. Her notorious wall-of-text posts are ample bait to draw in those foolish, who then find themselves wasting many long hours in absolutely pointless flame wars.
I consider Intlibber a lesser Prokofy; it’s very obvious that he’s actually attempting to troll much of the time (probably based on some moronic being-loud-and-stupid-is-good-for-business-tactic), and he tries way too hard and only causes a minor ruckus.
As for the mentioned leetspeak-emblazoned duo of failure, they are but minor script kiddies who know how to fool around with a bit of code, no more. They are the best and the brightest of /b/- which is to say that they are notable only by their mediocrity and fail. Currently, n3x15 spends his days trying to hang out with Waterhead trolls, and begging Lindens (and even Intlibber’s nonexistent “connections”) to not ban him.
My personal choice for third place Avatar of the Year is no less than Pixeleen Mistral. Throughout the year she has excelled in causing drama and trollbait by exhibiting the shittiest fucks to ever sit on a pose ball. Congratulations, you have shown that the worst grief is done with the pen and not a prim.
LOL Core
Jan 11th, 2009
Deja Vu? Is that you?
I nominate Ratcloner101 Stoop for griefer of 2008. You really should cover this guy. He’s a real treat, trust me.
Anonymous
Jan 11th, 2009
Information tiem.
We hate /b/. It is full of furfags and endless copypasta. Meager attempts to save it have all failed. “The best of /b/” doesn’t mean a damned thing because /b/ is an image board anyway, it was never intended for raid organization. The places that actually do have an interest in organizing raids will often actually willingly use some kinds of DoS attacks. The things that deadlycodec does, on the other hand, are not explicitly illegal. Maybe you would consider quasi-legal malicious software childish and worthy of demerit, but it causes a annoyance and failure of a system that is hardly worth mention except that it’s fairly easy to exploit. None of us griefer-type will be winning any awards for cleverness, and this award seems more like an insult due to SLH’s somewhat condescending attitude.
So yeah, no awards, no recognition. Just your pissed-off banter, plz. We’ll know it was us.
Elenora Beattie
Jan 11th, 2009
You know what: I do agree with the reasons to pick those two as important figures. But please have a look back at your blog feed. There is nearly ONLY news about griefing. You give those disturbances much too much platform.
El.
Baron Cuttlesmith von Blogharder, Esqu, MD
Jan 12th, 2009
Elenora: You must be new to SL; let me explain the basic workings of this furry sex game.
SL is fed off of three things: creativity, drama, and sex. All three are of course not mutually exclusive. Creativity is indulged in by only a few. Sex is the focus of many more assorted fucks. But drama, that lovely drama, is enjoyed by all, whether they admit it or not. Nomatter if it be scandal, grief, “trolling,” or flamewars, drama makes up the bulk of non-sexual energy put into Second Life. Alliances are made, friendships found, enemies scorned, and discussion urged all by the gnashing of teeth and the tears of many failures. With the absence of any _real_ gaming mechanism SL it itself a social game. That’s why the Herald- which is little more than an interactive tabloid- is one of the only remaining “news sources” in SL that has any considerable readership.
Instead of denying your humanly love for drama, embrace it.
Yo Ho
Jan 12th, 2009
You mean after you went creepy and stalkerish, Codec? Fuck you. You don’t deserve any sort of reward, not even “Best Turd in the Bowl”.
deadlycodec
Jan 12th, 2009
Awww, is dat sum butthurt? I bet I know who you are….
Locked Out Again
Jan 18th, 2009
Great, once again I can’t log in and probably due to some denial of service attack on linden labs. How cool. That has really enhanced my whole experience of the game. And the mass email spammings – oh what fun. I haven’t laughed so much since my computer got fucked up by a virus and I had to wipe the whole the whole thing. I would really like to meet these people and give them a warm hug. You obviously know them, so how about rendering up some street addresses or phone numbers?
J.C. Denton
Jan 18th, 2009
what a shame
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