How to Prevent And Deal With Doxing

 
By Angel Fencer

What is Doxing

Doxing is the unwanted sharing of personal identifying information(PII). It’s an illegal practice some people do. It its mostly with malicious intent.

The info includes but is not limited to:

Pictures of you in real life
Address
Passwords
Real life name
Date of birth

Motives of people who dox

Most people dox cause they disagree with the user. But sometimes there is an discriminatory motive behind it.

In my case, I am transgender and the doxers where trying to get me to end my life cause they disliked. I protected another trans person in a Discord VC.

I been Doxed HELP me

If your doxed please do the following:

1. Remove all personal information from Google refer to this article: https://support.google.com/websearch/troubleshooter/3111061?hl=en

2. Private your Facebook and remove your real life information from any social media you can (or delete/privatize it).

3. Do not be afraid to take legal action Doxing is a criminal offense and you have all the rights to call the police and file legal lawsuits over this.

4. Do not give anything to the doxers. They likely WILL send your info regardless of you sending money and may ask a ransom. This is a scam, just report it to the police.

5. If your passwords are in the dox please change your password on all sites and use Lastpass,Dashlane or another password generator and only use a master password for them.

6. Avoid interaction with the doxers, they are dangerous as they have your information. AVOID contact.

7. Report the content to the platform it happened on.

8. Warn your neighbors and potentially move out of your house if your address in the leak

9. (Optional) Change your legal name

10. Change your phone number(if leaked)

    And remember you can contact me in SL or on Discord I am out to help people as much as I can you are not alone in this stay determined and strong don't let the doxers win.  

My own story of being doxed

So I've been doxed first by people of a certain anarchy server in Minecraft. Then later it was made worsen by transphobic users on Skeppy (A Minecraft trolling/prank channel’s Discord/Minecraft Server: Invadedlands) cause they hated I defended another trans person in the VC.

It all started when I was young I made a Minecraft account using my real name before I changed it a few times until my current one. Since Mojang and Namemc keeps history, they easily found my name then found my Facebook and got a picture of when I was 13, and my passwords by hacking my deceased Father’s Google account. It's despicable how they also doxed my Dad, my not so nice half brother and even drawn over the picture of my father after I dragged them into a Group chat on Discord with an friend who defended me. He later stated, "Do me a favor and not introduce me to these people there horrible and I want nothing to do with these insane freaks." I couldn't agree more about how delusional they are.

For security I won't include the logs as they include real-life info of me and my family. They've been spreading it on my old (now defunct) Discord server (I revived my old one and that one is still alive and active) after which I closed the server for good.

The amount of transphobic slurs in the chat and the fact they wanted me to end my life makes me worried they did this to other people who might not been so lucky as me.

These people did this on a platform known as Discord. While the platform is amazing, the fact they can make unlimited accounts using VPNs and such is terrifying, especially with the threats. Anyway they still are trying to get to me while I nearly forgot they existed as it was in 2017-2020 and I moved on from those clowns. I just wonder why they keep doing this to me while I just want to be left alone. They are really showing signs of psychopathy there. I just hope they get arrested before anyone gets hurt 'cause of them.

Still thinking of how he said "Its never safe with me around, better sleep with the pillow on the face tonight." I of course did not nor did I respond to them.

And a note to the doxers if they read this: Please stay FAR AWAY from me and my family! We won't hesitate to get you guys in a pickle if it's required for our safety. Also get a life besides harassing people online. Oh and see that network cable? Pull it out of your router before you get yourself in jail.

Angel Fencer

 

Genus Project Wins DMCA Suit, Reopens Today

By Bixyl Shuftan

Good news for fans of Genus Project. They've won the DMCA suit against them, and will be opening today, Friday September 4. The suit, the second filed against them, was made on July 4, just hours after the store reopened following winning the first.

On the Genus Discord channel, owner Anna Ivanova would explain how the case was made.

"The person who did this thought out his plan very well. ... So what happened exactly? This person, I am sure, is ... an experienced Second Life user. Basically, he copybotted my mesh from the game. And then, having some editing skills, he used Photoshop CS6 to create the ad ... on April 5, 2020 (shortly before filing a fake copyright complaint against me), and uploaded this product to be sold on a third-party site.

"He called himself by my name and said that he had been developing mesh for a very famous game studio for 13 years. ... The ad was ready ... Then they came up with a fake address, fake phone number, fake lawyer from NY, cuz it's not even in the database. They came up with a text about the alleged studio itself, that they have been doing business for 13 years, and a list of claims they have against us. In the end, they ask (us) to remove all Genus content from ALL of the inventories, so that even a trace of mine will not remain in ... SL - no store, no products - nothing."

Unfortunately, while finding out how the culprit pulled off the forgery took only a short time, getting the DMCA shutdown resolved would take time, and help from lawyers, "The most disappointing thing to me in this whole situation is that I and my 5 lawyers were ignored for several months. Nobody wanted to answer me, all my letters were unanswered - no feedback at all. My lawyers received only references to the old letters and a copy of this complaint. And of  course, nobody answered us from those fake addresses and phone numbers. After months of silence,we were finally able to achieve the result. A very famous and strong American lawyer took up the case, for which I am immensely grateful to him. I have received return-on-sale approval for all my items and there is no longer any DMCA against GENUS Project. All charges were dropped. All copyrights for my work are registered. All complaints and DMCA that are sent to me from now on will be invalidated. LL is notified of the registration of rights and trademarks."

Anna would state, "The thought I was a thief caused depression in me ... But I'm not used to giving up. ... I was treated unfairly, and realizing how easy it is to frame the real author of works, it's just insane." Her advice to serious content creators in Second Life, "I ... shout out to everyone who engages in creativity and creates something, you should register the copyright for each of your work(s), so that no one can ever, ever, do the same to you."

She would have a message to the person whom filed the DMCA takedowns, "I assure YOU I will not give up trying to find YOU. ...  And to YOU, I say this. If you hate me and my brand so much, then don't be a coward and tell me about it personally. If you want to compete with me, then learn how to work like me and do it honestly and professionally. Otherwise, you are a nobody for me, not a rival, not an enemy. Just an empty spot - nothing. I am not afraid of weak people. ... The responsibility that you have taken upon yourself is so huge, you could end up in jail."

Her final message was to her customers and other supporters, "I love you all and I am proud that we are ALL a big family. Me, you, everyone who loves Genus. I will reopen the store tomorrow. Until then, let's celebrate this beautiful day."

On Discord, there were numerous well-wishes from fans, "Yay!!!! Welcome back! We've missed you!" "I am so glad that Genus Project is back in action!! This is a happy day." "i am so glad you back and all sorted and i hope you catch whoever is doing this cause i may be being paraniod but i got a feeling they gone after **** too seems strange they are down now i think this is some major lame troll." "I want to personally say, Anna, I am so terribly sorry for (what felt like an eternity to both you and us) the countless months of undeserved stress that you've endured.  I am happy to know you can breath a sigh of relief, even if a little.  As you already know, your supporters, have been in your corner the entire time; having faith you'd persevere.  We are proud of you for, NOT GIVING UP, though...it wasn't easy.  It proves just how good and STRONG you are!  ONLY POSITIVE LIGHT from this point on, Anna.  YOU ARE A TRUELY A SHINING STAR!"

And so after being down for months, Genus Project is back in business, to stay this time. For them, what looks like the end of a long nightmare. For others wanting to be serious content creators in Second Life, a cautionary tale about what can go wrong.

Hat Tip: Ryan Schultz

Bixyl Shuftan

Second Life Store Hit With Two DMCA Shutdowns, Second Hours After Reopening

By Bixyl Shuftan

Since Bento mesh came out, there have been a number of products based on it. Among them are the avatar heads by the Project Bento store, which blogger Ryan Schultz describes as "highly successful." Unfortunately in April, they were hit with a DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) takedown order.


Recently, we have received a DMCA complaint against us for the first time from another Second Life creator. According to the rules,we need to delete our content before the end of the proceedings. Our lawyer is currently filing a counter-DMCA complaint. It has all our files created for second Life, and we hope the situation will be resolved soon. 

The author of the complaint is unknown, but when we receive the response from Linden Lab, we will send the case to court. 

We ask you to treat this with understanding, these are forced actions that we must take to ensure the security of our intellectual property. Please note that content will not be removed from your inventory, it will only be removed from the Genusproject Resident inventory. During the closing of the store, we will stay in tough in social networks (discord and Facebook) as well as in the world group. Thank you for your attention and understanding. 


So for a time, the store was closed until the issue was resolved. According to Ryan Schultz's article, there were some angry accusations by fans of Genus that one of their competitors was behind the takedown. But several brands stepped forward to deny the claims, and Genus themselves while thanking their fans for their support strongly urged them not to spread rumors. It never was revealed whom filed the DMCA takedown order.


First, I would like to thank everyone for supporting Genus and taking the time to help each other and form a solid community in this group. Second,Genus is temporarily closed until the DMCA claim is reconciled and Third.Sadly i need to make this clear. All will be banned from group & sim if you disrespect Genus Project  or  speak negatively about another creator or mention their products  that do not support Genus Project Brand. In a world where you can be anything. Be Kind.  Be Safe - #Be Strong.


Finally on July 4, the store reopened. But only a few hours passed before Genus was hit with yet again another DMCA takedown order. The staff would announce the news on the Linden forums, and their Discord channel.


While we had hoped the DMCA business was behind us, we have received another notice from Linden Labs that we must remove our inventory and our store.  As we have not been given info regarding who initiated this the first time, we are left to assume it is the same person and that it is someone with no actual claim.

We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused anyone - your patience, support, and loyalty to our brand is not something we take for granted.  It is unfair to ask you to stand by us and stand with us as we fight this, but nothing about this situation has been fair.  Please understand that we cannot provide details we don't know and we ask that you keep rumors and accusations down while we work with our lawyers and with Linden Labs to prevent this from happening again.

And if whomever has filed this is reading?  Please understand that filing these claims does more than hurt us as creators - it prevents us from giving customers the support they deserve.  It stops us from releasing updates and letting customers get redeliveries.  That is who you are hurting the most.


As Schultz would put it, "It would now appear that The Genus Project is now going to be involved in a long and costly court battle before they can sell their products again. A major player has effectively been knocked out of the Bento mesh head market for the foreseeable future, and perhaps permanently. This is going to affect not just the team at The Genus Project, but it is also going to impact all the content creators who created skins and cosmetics for this brand of mesh heads."

As before, it is unknown who filed the takedown order, or why.

Sources: Genus Discord, Ryan Shultz, Linden forums  

Bixyl Shuftan

SLife and Times: Viewer Issues

"Is it just me, or is there something wrong with Second Life?" That's been a question I've been asking myself this week. One of the places I go to regularly, there's not usually any problem and I can cam around and chat to my hearts content. But twice this week, things began to slow down and freeze up to the point the screen would turn black. A few times I had to close the viewer and restart. The crowd wasn't that particularly big, about a dozen people. I managed to get around it by focusing on just myself, or some corner of the place. But that wasn't much fun.

This was the buggiest time I've had since November when a "Unscheduled Maintenance" at the time caused people to be knocked off the grid. But checking the Grid Status Report, while there were some rolling restarts at the time, there wasn't anything out of the ordinary mentioned.

Chatting with friends, a few have been telling me they've been having troubles as well. One wondered if it was Linden Lab's moving things to "cloud" servers. Another wondered if it was someone's avatar, or the avatars of a few people, that was so resource-intensive, it slowed everyone else down, an issue I touched on last month.

Does the machine need replaced? It is a few years old. But friends of mine have been able to get by on machines much older. Plus I don't have a lot of money to spend. And I recall a friend of mine once got a new computer, and her performance on Second Life actually got worse.

In any event, the issue went away after a while. Hopefully it was just a fluke and the problem, whatever it was, won't show up again. At least not for a while. Glitches and bugs have always been a part of Second Life. So we learn to put up with them when they're small and occasional. It's when things get out of the ordinary when we notice.

Bixyl Shuftan

The Meeroo Mess

In May, we took a look at the new hit breedable pet on the Second Life Grid: The Meeroos. Being more interactive, having more personality, and slower reproducing than previous breedables, it looked like the company behind them had a sure hit. Nothing it seemed could go wrong.

Unfortunately, trouble did come. The Meeroos blog stated that “since the beginning of July,” someone “had been committing a series of exploits with the Meeroos.” Then a counterfeit store was built in the Twas sim, which began selling fake food. It was traced to two day-old accounts whose names were variants of “Meeroos Resident, the asset manager of the Meeroos’ company staff. Besides depriving the company of Lindens, the phony food contained unknown scripts with unpredictable effects that could be fatal to the virtual critters.

Linden Labs soon stepped in to ban the griefers. Unfortunately, they blocked the wrong account. They blocked Meeroos Resident from the Grid, as well as shutting down the Twas Sim. The result was the company unable to sell food, and pet Meeroos going hungry. New world Notes described Meeroo owners as tweeting Linden Lab’s Rodvik Linden, pleading him to let them feed their pets.

Fortunately, unlike some other breedables, Meeroos do not starve to death. Instead they’re described as running away in search of food, able to be recalled by a “whistle of return.” So there apparently was no danger of pets being lost through lack of food. And eventually, the Meeroos Resident account was released, as was the Twas sim.


It's been quite a weekend here, for all of us at Malevay Studios and our wonderful community around Meeroos. We know this has been a challenging time that has been both frustrating and often discouraging, but I am pleased that we have weathered this storm and have arrived on the other side. Linden Lab and Malevay Studios have been working together to remove fraudulent content from the grid in order to restore confidence to Meeroo Parents. As always, you are our number one priority, and with Linden Lab we have taken the required steps to reduce the threats that have been plaguing us.


Second Life Newser contacted the Meeroo owners Grey interviewed, but they had since given up on raising pets. Dropping by the store in the Roo sim, residents were dropping by to get food and other goods. In once corner was a big pile of grain, as if to advertise there was now plenty of food. One lady told me she was getting her first Meeroo. Others, however, told me of troubles, “... all of mine and the stumps vanished and still are missing, I had 24. So now I have to buy a new stump and food. Gone, vanished. I’m so angry because I just bought a snowpaw. Now I have nothing and lost my $400 and Meeroo people have not found them yet! Now I’ve just ordered berries and again not delivered. This is the 4th time this week I did not get delivery as well.” He was filing reports to the Meeroo website at support. Apparently, this resident was still having some problems.

A few days after the Meeroo troubles, another virtual pet company, Petables, announced plans to eventually close it’s operation in the Second Life Grid. While their turtles will still be running for now, “At a future date when the turtles are no longer paying for their server costs and the tier for the store in Shark, we will give a week or two warning, and then shut them down completely.”

Petables went on to explain the reason for this was an exploit left unresolved, “There is an issue on Linden Lab's end that was reported in 2006 that Linden Lab has never addressed. This issue allows people to steal whatever they want from vendors, and there is nothing that we can do to stop it. ... We have done everything short of go to the Linden Lab office building and refuse to leave until they at least talk about this problem, and have been ignored or dismissed every single time. For us to see something that we have poured thousands of hours into treated like that by the platform provider is probably the most de-motivating thing that I have ever experienced.” They explained one person in particular had stolen “thousands of US dollars worth of product from us,” and could no longer deal with Linden Lab’s refusal to solve the problem.

Second Life’s most popular pet remains on the grid, but another has given up due to the same kind of trouble that apparently the danger of will be around indefinitely.

Sources: New World Notes, Meeroos Blog, Petable's Blog,

Bixyl Shuftan

Bronyville In Trouble

I have learned that Bronyville and its accompanying sim Derpy has been taken offline, hit harder than the repeated griefings by bored troublemakers in the past. I hadn't logged in for most of the day, being elsewhere and otherwise indisposed, but then I started to see the notices flow in... "calm down, please"... "we'll get this straightened up..." "attempts to rebuild and salvage are in the works..."

I spoke with three or four people, and at this stage in time many people are not talking. Many of the people "with power" (or whom I assume have power) are just as confused as to what went on and is going on as I am. I spoke with one concerned citizen of Bronyville who had this to say:

[20:50] [Concerned Bronyville Citizen]: not the slightest, some coup between admins
[20:50] [Concerned Bronyville Citizen]: I suspect we aren't getting it back though
[20:51] [Concerned Bronyville Citizen]: Curly got hacked, twinkie and rembrandt got banned for supposedly being the hackers
[20:51] Xymbers Slade: Got hacked, again?
[20:51] [Concerned Bronyville Citizen]: then the bronies group went ape****, accusing Curly or getting them banned falsely so that he could control everything
[20:51] [Concerned Bronyville Citizen]: no, not again, the last time he was hacked was what set off these events
[20:51] [Concerned Bronyville Citizen]: so depending on who you believe
[20:52] [Concerned Bronyville Citizen]: maybe [Sim Owner] is powerhungry and got the other admin ponies banned
[20:52] [Concerned Bronyville Citizen]: or maybe its a big misunderstanding
[20:52] Xymbers Slade: Banned from the sim, or Second Life?
[20:52] [Concerned Bronyville Citizen]: nobody knows what actually happened and is just speculating at this point
[20:52] [Concerned Bronyville Citizen]: banned from Second Life, which is why the sims are gone
[20:53] [Concerned Bronyville Citizen]: I barely know any of them so im not gonna make any judgements
[20:53] [Concerned Bronyville Citizen]: but the place has been a giant dramafest from the start
[20:54] Xymbers Slade: As are most things spawned by 4chan, though... /co/ board or not.
[20:54] [Concerned Bronyville Citizen]: one conspiracy theory is that a chan hacker got into all the admin's accounts
[20:55] [Concerned Bronyville Citizen]: and maybe used [Sim Admin]'s computer as a proxy to hack curly
[20:55] [Concerned Bronyville Citizen]: to get them all turning on each other and fifing off all these bans and ****.
[20:56] Xymbers Slade: Mind if I save this log? I write for a SL blog, and this kind of story will require more than one "eyewitness" opinion.
[20:56] [Concerned Bronyville Citizen]: I'm far from an eyewitness, I'm just repeating the heresay that ive heard
[20:56] Xymbers Slade: I'll list it as hearsay then if I write an article on it.
[20:57] [Concerned Bronyville Citizen]: nobody that actually knows what is going on has spoken about it, except maybe [Sim Owner] who had a meeting to tell their side of the story earlier today

Speaking with one of the "Brony Royal Guard" (if titles can be believed):

[21:20] [Brony Royal Guard]: The canned response is:
[21:21] [Brony Royal Guard]: The Bronyville and Derpy sims are offline while Lindens investigate [Sim owner]'s account trouble. The sims may go back online, but we will probably need to find a new owner/sponsor. The worst case scenario is that the sims will go back online for a short period of time (a week?) for people to pick up their items before going offline permanently.

A few minutes before walking away from what appeared to be a little group meeting held on another sim nearby to discuss the untidy turn of events, a notice went out that essentially said "Attempts are being made to salvage Bronyville and Derpy (if it can be done everyone will get a voice on if we should save it or lose it; Funding attepts are being made as well; Once stages 1 and 2 are done everyone will get to choose who they want to lead the sim and who they want as admins."

By "Funding" I am assuming a new sim, which makes me think Bronyville, at least in its current incarnation, is not going to come back. That last bit has me worried. "Choose who they want to lead the sim"? It makes me wonder what kind of drama and politics were being played with behind the scenes.

Now, I had a small plot on Bronyville which I just renewed. If the sim goes down for the count, there goes a few thousand $L down the drain. I had nothing truly "of value" on the plot so I will lose nothing if it disappears from the Grid, but it was a nice home away from home. Others spent hours or weeks or months on the build, getting it just right. I can't imagine how they must be feeling right now.

The moment I know anything more, I'll report it here on the SL Newser.

Xymbers Slade