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June 13, 2005
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Virtual Reality Weapons
reBang Weblog brings a nasty little weapon for Second Life to our attention that will likely crash the client of those it has targeted (Recipe for a Metaverse: One Part Virtual Weapons). There is even a nice little catalog-like advertisement for it.
Simply rez one of these objects and set the target’s name using “/500 target name". If that target comes into the same sim and with in 96m of the DBomber, the DBomber will send them over 15000 blue dialog boxes, along with 15000 notecards. It screws the client, and it doesnt stop when the avatar logs out, it will continue to pump notecards to their account even whilst logged out, if they come with in 96m of the DBomber, they WILL get 15000 notecards, and many Dialogs(the dialogs dont conintue after the avatar logs out, the notecards do though :) :) ).
I've certainly had my testing login severely impaired by DBomber whilst testing, and seen quite a few complete lock ups.
One admires the cleverness, but hopes that this sort of thing doesn't ultimately destroy the space.
UPDATE 2155PT: In the
comments, James Grimmelmann points out that this weapon likely violates the terms of service.
posted by Ernest Miller |
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Ernest Miller pursues research and writing on cyberlaw, intellectual property, and First Amendment issues. Mr. Miller attended the U.S. Naval Academy before attending Yale Law School, where he was president and co-founder of the Law and Technology Society, and founded the technology law and policy news site LawMeme. He is a fellow of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School.
Ernest Miller's blog postings can also be found @
1. csven on June 13, 2005 08:53 PM writes...
"crash the server of those it has targeted"
technically, that should be "client" which is the Second Life application running on a user's computer. the server is where the virtual world is hosted - in this case it's at Linden Labs' SF facility i imagine.
Permalink to Comment2. Ernest Miller on June 13, 2005 09:06 PM writes...
Yep, you're right. My bad. Corrected.
Permalink to Comment3. James Grimmelmann on June 13, 2005 09:29 PM writes...
reBang writes: "And it does this without violating the Terms of Service by being . . . well . . . pretty creative."
I'm not so sure about that. 5.1(iv) of the Terms of Service requires that users not ". . . upload, post, e-mail or otherwise transmit Content as determined by Linden at its sole discretion that is harmful, threatening, abusive, [or] harassing . . . .."
5.1(v) adds ". . . that contains any viruses, Trojan horses, worms, time bombs, cancelbots or other computer programming routines that are intended to damage, detrimentally interfere with, surreptitiously intercept or expropriate any system, data or personal information . . . ."
5.1(viii) adds ". . . interfere with or disrupt the Service or servers or networks connected to the Service, or disobey any requirements, procedures, policies or regulations of networks connected to the Service . . . ."
And, finally, 5.1(x) includes " . . . harass another user."
All of these could be interpreted to forbid the use of the DBomber, and (iv) and (v) would seem to reach creating such objects, as well.
Permalink to Comment4. csven on June 14, 2005 06:40 AM writes...
my mistake. that should have been:
"And it does this without - according to the creator - violating the Terms of Service by being . . . well . . . pretty creative."
as soon as my site's back online, i'll edit it appropriately. however, the bigger issue and the real point of the entry is that as this kind of interface develops there will likely be new forms of irritants developing with it. i suspect there will be an entirely new kind of thrill motivating the people who would write these kinds of applications. in some ways we may see a kind of mash-up: the browser meets the first-person shooter. i've no doubt that there are capable coders who've not bothered to write a trojan (for whatever reason), who would be gleeful at an opportunity to create virtual entities that do nothing more than harass, insult, degrade, verbally abuse, flash their virtual privates, aso. personally i'd be irritated by a virtual paparazzi that did nothing more than follow me - a 3D representation of spyware.
going from lines of code to 3D visuals will, i believe, have a profound effect on cyberspace not just because of the technology but because of how we react to that technology.
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