Saturday, December 11, 2010

Aventity - Chimera uses zf redzone which violates your privacy

Normally when I find stolen content from content creators that's been copybotted or perm exploited in some way or another I file abuse reports against the thief, today I filed an Abuse report against the content creator, why else? when they went whining about it to get other people into filing an abuse report against the thief they revealed they were doing something just as bad as the thief, using zf redzone to spy on their customers, their content got stolen by the thief they mentioned all the same, so zf redzone sure didn't do a lot to protect them did it?

anyhow I don't have much L's coming in that I don't put into uploading textures and what not on my own content I work on on an alternate account, when I see something I like I make a shopping list and when I have a lot extra to spare I usually go ahead and Buy a few things from that shopping list, today I took about 5000L off the list without buying any of it and decided that Ill spend my money where it counts on other content creators that are treating their customers right like Luskwood, with that said your probably wondering who it is that had the zf redzone security orb, it was Chimera Avatar parts and accessories, which is owned by Mephitis Jezebel who also runs Aventity avatars, and partnered to Chef Soderstrom whom brought the redzone security orb to my attention, he sent out a notice which had a notecard attached, I viewed the notecard hoping to find out if any of the content I had created has been copybotted or not only to be disappointed in finding the notecard had a blurry attached useless texture and that they had been using zf redzone to supposedly protect their content, normally in this case, of receiving notice someones stealing content I would support them and file an AR on their behalf to help draw the Lindens attention to the issue regarding the notice I saw, but this, finding out they use redzone I'm just going to ignore it, and ignore filing the AR next time I see someone handing out their content(by all means I wont accept stolen content period but normally when I encounter stolen content I file AR's in supporting the creator and notify them of it, wont be doing them this favor any longer.

Anyhow your probably wondering about how this caught my attention I got a group notice from one of the groups im in "avatar makers guild" which had notecards attached from chef soderstrom and go as follows:





Notice:"Tis the season for avatar theft:
Dawnstar Attis, a new alt of crystalie Jigsaw/Carami who was previously banned by LL for proven content theft + harassment, is handing out a notecard named "Merry Christmas," which contains permission-hacked avatars made by AVentity, Curious, Mutation Industries, and more. They are doing this out of spite (they've already viciously attacked me and others in IMs) and won't stop, even claiming that their bad rep is all a lie, despite numerous witnesses and logs proving otherwise. Please keep an eye out.

Notecard:"To ALL Creators/Artists"
Hello, there is a person going around under a series of alts that is passing out notecards similar to the following containing permission hacked avatars which possibly contain some of your avatars. They have currently been banned under two names that i know of (crystalie Jigsaw and crystalie Carami)


This person is idiodic enough to continue making alts with the same profile information along with passing ownership of certain groups to the new alts they make to avoid bans. I have attached a photograph of the older characters that are now banned for more evidence.

[]Snapshot of Older Names
[]Snapshot of Notecard with Items
[]Merry Christmas


The notecard has had the items removed, however a snapshot shows the notecard with the links to the items. (This is to prevent this notecard from being passed maliciously)

Please pass this notecard along to fellow avatar creators/associates so that this is more well known. This user has also been banned under the zfRedzone system multiple times along with being banned from almost all furnation sims and popular furry clubs.

I have also taken a snapshot with a tripcode typed in the description so that if this notecard is altered maliciously it will be a safeguard.

---------------------------------------------------------------
Abuse Report that I submitted, feel free to use this
---------------------------------------------------------------
Reason : Fraud -> Chain letters
Description: Ban Evasion (3rd) Sending notecards with perm. hacked items


This person is an alt of Crystalie Carami and crystalie jigsaw (Both of these users banned for passing out permission based avatars along with items before) Included in the screenshot is the image of the inventory item properties along with the notecard itself, which reads.

Dear girls
now is the christmas over us so i want to give u all a christmas gift
so here are they (links to hacked avatars)
MERRY CHRISTMAS FROM YOUR Dawnstar Attis

You can look at the profile of dawnstar attis and find that it is the exact same as crystalie jigsaw along with crystalie carami, they are also head of the same groups

----------------------------------------------------------------


Thanks for your time,
Chef






viewing Mephitis Jezebels Profile and visiting her store I found a zf redzone security orb using Imprudences Area Object Search feature right atop her store for Chimera avatar parts and accessories, where she attempted to obscure the orb by putting a small Box around it.

Thursday, December 2, 2010

zf redzone can disrupt secondlife service for residents of the UAE

Seems redzone can and will discriminate against countries with filtered internet service like the UAE



Just the other night I got contacted by a Secondlife user from the United Arab Emirates, this user told me that they had been banned and given the boot from several different regions indiscriminately by the zf redzone security orb oftentimes as a result they would speak to the land owner of the land and most the time the land owner would ask them to appeal but one actually went looking into it for them and found that this person according to redzones so called 120% accurate alt detections that this person had a terrifyingly huge slew of alts, none of these accounts it had linked to this individual belonged to them, as a result of the inaccuracy the land owner removed their redzone security orb so this person may enter the land but however, as another result they started researching redzone and found my blog and personally IMed me in secondlife to ask me about it and find out why it had associated so many accounts as alternate accounts belonging to them, really I hadn't a clue how it could do that, but some inquiry back and forth between me and this individual and a little research on their country lead to the answer.

One of my inquiries with this person, was about Proxy servers, as I have encountered a number of secondlife users who have said I'm safe, I'm using Tor, as Tor may seem to have many Proxy servers in service, really compared to the number of SL users using it it is conceivable that some Tor users may be routed through the same IP and thus show false positives of being alternate accounts of each other, while this user wasn't a Tor user, the inquiry about Proxies had led me to discover that their internet service was proxied after further inquiry, and a little bit of brief Googling I learned a lot more about internet service in the UAE.

Turns out most internet service in the UAE comes down to a single provider known EIM(Emirates Internet and Multimedia), however the service through EIM is censored through a set of Proxy servers, and if you don't configure it which most people don't you are routed through a common proxy by default, the typical use of a proxy server is to filter outbound personally identifying information and mask IP addresses by resending your traffic each way, however countries such as the UAE use it as a point to centrally administer internet traffic requests to websites outside the country so that your search can be filtered, EIM's purpose for Proxying all traffic within the UAE according to my research is to filter out and to block users from viewing porn on the internet.

The side effect of proxying service for the purpose of moderating and censoring a users internet activity in such a way though somewhat effective does have a a side effect, it results in a very small pool of IP addresses for a countries residents and also results in many subscribers to the internet service over there to share IP's within that common pool(multiple secondlife accounts using the same proxy thus appearing to have the same IP), the result being one of these many many many users going through that proxy may have used a viewer that was either a copybot viewer, or falsely detected as such, the end result is that zf Redzone has listed this user as having many alternate accounts which don't actually belong to them and belong to many other users of EIM, which are banned by Redzone as well, while I can't say it's banned the whole country its conceivable with the way IPs are pooled and proxied under EIM that many groups of users from the UAE are probably clumped into groups where hundreds of people are considered alts of each other, and when one of those people in one of these groupings gets detected as a copybot whether it be false or not its safe to say the rest of the group gets banned as such.