People keep asking me this question, so the answer is: yes!
There are some ripping tools around, some will exploit the client side of the connections, some will exploit the data stream itself (proxies) and some rely on bugs (or vulnerabilities) on the server side.
Some of these tools are detectable (that's good), and some are not (uh oh, that's bad).
OK ... let me rephrase this: Some of these tools are detectable (that's bad), and some are not (yay, that's good). Does it sound better for you now?
The fact is that, whatever you viewer needs to draw: be it Avatars, Objects, Particle Systems, Animations ... anything that you will see or hear through the network ... must be transferred to you from the servers, and thus can be decoded, saved and duplicated.
You can even duplicate the topology of a land you like, and use that on your own land, if you have one, so you don't have to teleport around to climb that mountain, or sit under that tree.
So in theory, anything you see can be yours, for no charge (and that is what scares the hell out of some content builders).
What is not going to be yours? the scripts inside those objects. For example: you can duplicate someones jewel with a bling script on it, or someones glasses with auto-shading behavior, but you will end up only with a copy of the objects, the bling and the auto-shading behavior will be gone, as the scripts will not be copied.
In fact, the particle system of an object (the bling, for example) can be extracted and reverse-engineered into a LSL script, but if you see someone using a cloth, weapon, or any other thing that would have a script on it, it is unlikely (unless someone can prove me wrong) that you will be able to rip out a copy of that script. However, if you have a script on your inventory that's "no modify", there's a chance that exploring some bug you would be able to full-perm that one, but I'm still to see someone post a way to do it.
So copypots do exist, in different sizes and shapes, and no prim is safe in the virtual world (now you can go outside and scream in terror).
The only thing is that, by using a copybot (without being careful), you can get banned from SecondLife, and have your avatar account disabled by LL, believe me, it happened to me, and with around L$7000 on my avatar account (what's that worth? 20 bucks? lol).
One nice measure against copybotting skins I saw lately comes from some viewers that do "Cloth Protection".
It basically blends all the layers together onto the baked textures, so if you want to steal that specific skin, you must take all the clothes (wearables, not prims) with it, then you will always have to be wearing the same stuff ... which renders that skin useless.
So if you cherish that skin you got yourself for L$0 on a freebies store, and is exactly the same as the one that sells for L$500 on another store, just use the "Cloth Protection" thing and you will be fine.
i really love your blog and your stuff you make.
ReplyDeleteI just want to know if your proxy could fake my account UUID so i could never get banned? Will it also randomly spoof all my hardware like PB DownForce Hardware spoofer does?
Thanks for the great proxy by the way does it spoof ip?
I just cant find info on what features you have in your progrwams.
April
xoxxooxox
No, an UUID can't be faked.
ReplyDeleteWhat you can do, if you want to do "fancy" stuff in SL, is create a few alts and use them.
Of course you need to create this alt with a different email address than the one from you main avatar.
Then try to make those alts as "casual" as possible, so they wont attract any attention.
Then you use these alts to do whatever "fancy" stuff you want, and if you lose one, that won't matter.
If you need to transfer something from your alts to your main, try first saving it to your hard disk, using MyProxy for example, and the re-import that with your main. This will not leave any tracks of communication between your alts and your main.
Also, if you need to rez something, find an empty land (no people) to do it. Any land with return time of at least 5 minutes is good enough.
Never go to sandboxes. Sandboxes are a big NO NO if you want to rez stuff.
Also, never go to public places to try out your recently copied wearables. Again, empty land is your friend ... just don't use the same empty land all the time, and move away from there in case someone shows up to talk to you.
This proxy winn not fake MAC, ID or IP. You can use it with NeilLife, for example, to avoid detection, but just follow these basic rules (and try to come up yourself with some new ones) and there's a good chance you won't be banned anymore.