The CryoLife Papers – Exporting and Pirating Avatars
Second Life piracy made simple
by Junius
CryoLife is a copybot client that can be used to steal copies of in-world Second Life content. CryoLife does not steal scripts, animations or gestures – the piracy potential is limited to prims, textures and clothing. These papers are a description of Cryolife use and detection, countermeasures that work, and anti-CryoLife approaches that amount to little more than wishful thinking.
Before you jump into the comments to call me names, know that I am writing these papers to strengthen the economy, not to hurt it. Every time a copybot program is mentioned in public I see posts asking those of us who understand the reality of piracy in virtual worlds to censor ourselves. While I understand that reaction, it is time to move past irrational fear and superstition. Silence is hurting the content creators and shop owners who keep Second Life going.
I am writing these papers because I can no longer willfully ignore the con artists who take advantage of hard working content creators by selling anti-copybot products that do not protect anything. A small industry has sprung up that is fueled on hysterical fear and ignorance of copybot and this has to stop. The veil of secrecy surrounding these programs must be lifted immediately. Business owners and content creators have been lied to for too long.
I’m sorry, but your content can not be safe from being copied and distributed. It is nonsense to blame Linden Labs for this. Blaming them is like blaming Comcast for letting you get Viagra spam.
This saddens me greatly. Read more, learn, and prevent content theft @ The Herald.
thank you for the warning, I was copybotted on Friday night, also found content belonging to another designer I recognised but she’s to up herself to listen to me. Oh well her problem
thanks again, it needs to be out there, not hushed hushed,
I guess if you see someone using the Crylife viewer, TP as fast as you can.
how do you know what viewer someone is using?
There is an SL viewer named Greenlife Emerald Viewer, it ‘shields’ you against Cryolife (what your avatar is wearing, not prims in your shop/land/sim). It also has a radar what tells you which viewer residents around you are using (simwide).
Cryolife users get immediately banned by us in all our sims.
I hope EVERYONE starts to use the Greenlife Emerald Viewer and reports all you see using Cryolife for using Copybot (still against the ToS!)
I heard with emerald you even get free (temp) uploads.
I need to download it.
Cryo is not a copybot client it’s a real client with copybot features.
Yes, Emerald can show you that someone is using it unless of course they change the image in their clothing protection or just turn off agentclothing .. then sorry but emerald can’t after that. Emerald identifies other clients by the UUID of the agent clothing image.
Also even in emerald the prims you are wearing are not protected, only the textures on your avatar such as cloths, skin, eyes. Cryo can copy the prims no matter what.
And just because someone is using cryo does not mean they will copybot. It has other features in it that are great for building that neither the regular client nor emerald have.
LL will not ban a person simply for using cryo until they use it to do something illegal. Unless you see someone copybotting with it or wearing things they have copybotted then you can’t really AR them for copybotting. It’s not the client thats bad it’s what the person chooses to do with it.
Oh and cryo cannot steal animations / gestures but what it can do is turn them full permissions along with cloths, skins, gestures, sounds everything but prims and scripts basically. They will retain the origional creators name as well, they will just be full permissions then but only if the person with cryo has them in their inventory.
There are other clients such as Vlife that can do this as well.
They don’t have the original creator’s name, they have the name of the copycat as creator, i found a house filled with my furniture and not my name as creator.
If you see someone using Cryolife, do report them, ask your friends to report them, the support team can check in the database and their inventory what are legal or illegal copies.
Reporting someone takes 1 minute, if we all work together we can get rid of a bunch of thiefs!
Leyla you misread what I said … yes the prim items do not keep the creator name as they are downloaded as an xml and then reuploaded into SL and recreated with that avatars name, but people with cryo can turn anything in their inventory other then scripts or prims to full permission using notecards as the notecards in Cryo have special editing features that normal clients do not.
Example .. say I am on cryo and I go buy a Curio skin. No mod no Trans. Put those into a notecard in cryo .. save the note then copy them back out of the note into the inv and poof full perms and Gala is still the creator. As I said cryo is not the only one and as for aring every perosn using cryo .. yes the support team can check but usually unless you have some reason then don’t. It’s kinda like calling the police and saying hey these people own a knife …. it’s possible maybe they killed someone with it because a knife is sharp and they own it.
I just caught someone trying to use the Cryo client expressly for copying items on my sim.
–One day old account,
–using the CryoLife client (thank you Emerald) and
–pointing at a build and not responding to the request to stop.
Yeah, I pretty much think that was a dead ringer. Name and shame? Domoniq Aries. But what’s the use of even posting the name as I am sure it’s a throw away account.
So yes, be warned, grab yourself a copy of Emerald’s viewer.
candy..there’s no OTHER use for cryo than stealing stuff.
and bad news: this domoniq person is a ghetto idiot who doesn’t know how to mask her tag. if the person is a BIT smart, you won’t see what client they’re using.
YOUSHOULDKNOW, YOUSHOULDKNOW that lindens DO ban cryo users JUST for being on cryo. it doesn’t have ‘wonderful building features’ unexistent in emerald or snowglobe, and, anyways, what having ‘wonderful building features’ when you’re just a ripper?
YES, cryolife is merelly intended to steal stuff.
youshouldknow is right about agentclothing and texture shield, tho.
the only interesting NOT STEALING ORIENTED feature in cryo was free texture uploads, wich has been patched by linden labs.
How do you folks feel about the banning of cryolife users from sims?
My friend has always told me that a group of american kids she hangs around with, I say american because it is normally the brazilians, is into botting. I believed her but had no proof. The other day she sent me a screenshot of one of these individuals from the emerald viewers “radar” feature.. and sure enough, this person was on cryolife. I dont take this lightly, and when the word got out people began banning this individual from their shop- My quesiton is.. what happens when they stop using the client or opt not to use it.. do they still deserve a ban?
Any views on this?
@ blehbleh- really? I will have to pass on the screen shot mentioned above to LL then.
YOUSHOULDKNOW, YOUSHOULDKNOW that lindens DO ban cryo users JUST for being on cryo. it doesn’t have ‘wonderful building features’ unexistent in emerald or snowglobe,
No they do not, they will investigate the person and if illegal activity is found in the logs then they will ban them but no they cannot ban someone for not having done anything wrong.
And yes as someone that has used ALL those clients it does have features that help with building that the others do not. It also does not have the slow rendering problems that emerald and other views have, like leaving many people as little poofy clouds for extended times, of course everyone just blames that on SL.
Just because you are certain if you had it you would use it solely for stealing everything doesn’t mean thats the only use it has for others.