A couple of days ago, I learned that a copybot viewer was using Greenlife Emerald’s code as its base and knowing that it’s open source and easily downloadable anyone with the right tools and skills can download it, tweak it and compile it as their own viewer. I am not a coder so I wouldn’t know anything about tweaking and compiling source codes but it brought up a question that can only be answered by Greenlife Emerald. My question was, “will viewers compiled based on Greenlife Emerald’s code show as Emerald in their built-in radar?” and, unfortunately, the answer was yes.
Is it really Emerald or a viewer disguised as Emerald?
[2009/09/03 21:44] Source: (Saved Fri Sep 04 12:41:02 2009) it will unless they change that
I also learned that ThugLife, another copybot viewer, also shows as Emerald in Greenlife Emerald’s built-in radar.
[2009/09/04 0:46] Source: (Saved Fri Sep 04 13:40:03 2009) yeah, you just gota understand that the detection is not always accurate. in fact, thuglife users all apear as emerald as well. which is kinda why i really dont like the detection feature.. but other emerald devs do, and if its optional, meh.
Now, this just shows that we cannot fully trust Greenlife Emerald’s built-in viewer detection because what we might be seeing as Emerald might not be Emerald after all. There is a chance that what you and I are seeing as Emerald is really one of those copybot viewers disguised as Emerald and with the growing popularity of Greenlife Emerald, it would be safe to assume that more copybot viewers will be using Greenlife Emerald to disguise themselves.
Many residents have learned to trust Greenlife Emerald and if more bad viewers use Greenlife Emerald’s ID or tag (or whatever it is they use) to disguise themselves then there is a possibility that it could lash back to the real Greenlife Emerald badly. I, myself, also use Greenlife Emerald (together with Snowglobe, Meerkat and Cool SL Viewer) and I particularly like the viewer detection feature. Have even used it to Abuse Report a couple of CryoLife viewer users.
I think for now, Greenlife Emerald should remove their built-in viewer detection feature. Yes, it is a pretty nice feature but right now bad viewer developers are abusing it and will continue to abuse it to hide their own viewers by disguising them as Emerald.
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Tags: copybot, cryolife, emerald, greenlife, greenlife emerald, thuglife, viewer in disguise
just about any other opensource client can be faked in a similar manner, and probably any other client that can be detected, can be faked, they just have to figure out how they get detected and mimic the behavior/characteristics
There is really no point to removing the feature, this is nothing new, tags have always been possible to spoof quite easily without even touching any code.
There’s also the fact that it’s pointless to remove the detection code because Emerald allows the user to render it impossible for anyone to tell which viewer they’re using. (Called stealth mode)
Removing the detection would just mean everyone appears to be using a linden viewer, which is no solution because in most cases, the detection is accurate.