Saturday, August 8, 2009

Spammers are disseminating a new illegal SL client under Gwyneth Llewelyn's name

Hi! If this is the first time you’re visiting my blog, you’re probably looking me up because you received a spam notecard announcing a new SL client, “Neil Life”, which allegedly has a lot of illegal features — among these:

reenabled control alt shit t like cool viewer to get texture uuids plus mine also grabs sculpt ids. But Please respect permissions.

Modified the copybot patch but still please respect permissions.

You should be thrice warned. First, the spammers are using notecards (apparently translated in several languages; I got one in Portuguese) that bear my name as owner. They very likely got one notecard from me with full perms (there are so many around…), changed all the text, and send them to others from objects called “Gwyneth Llewelyn”. That’s as far as I’ve been able to track down; from there on, stopping the “chain letter” effect of people circulating those notecards is very hard. So far, I haven’t been able to find someone proficient enough with Second Life that managed to figure out the location of the spamming object, so that it can be reported to Linden Lab, deleted, and the owner of it permabanned for violating the Linden Lab Terms of Service for Second Life (impersonating another user; spamming/chain letter; distributing a tool that violates the Terms of Services regarding illegally modifying other users’ content without their permission).

Secondly, this notecard will point you to a link on 2shared.com, where you can download a RAR file which contains a Windows-compiled version on this so-called “Neil Life” SL client (mentioned on 2share.com as “Client with copy and permission change functions.”), with the full source code. 2shared.com got an abuse report from me, but, at the time of writing this post, they haven’t deleted the RAR file yet (they seem to host these files completely anonymously and probably ignore all abuse reports). So people are still downloading it (8 downloads since my last visit there). Do not download this file (specially if you have a Windows computer). Even if it shows free of virus, anyone who creates an illegal SL client really doesn’t stop at that. It might, just like the infamous vLife, simply steal your password — you’ll never notice it until one day you log in with another client and see your L$ have disappeared (and if you’re a content creator, it’s highly likely they will steal your content too, if they caught your password). I have not audited their code, since I don’t have enough experience to do that.

And thirdly, more important for me, I have absolutely nothing to do with either “Neil Life” or anyone currently spamming other users with notecards bearing my name. Most of these notecards are quite old, possibly even from 2004 or 2005, from a time where nobody thought of spamming other users with fake identities. I’m just a victim too.

Continue reading at the link below:
Spammers are disseminating a new illegal SL client under my name

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