“Wrong Hands” Gets Backhand

As previously reported on SCIFI.radio, Linden Lab has diligently removing accounts belonging to members of the outlawed Second Life group “Woodbury University” and its subgroups. The deletions have been coming in response to reports by the Justice League/League of Heroes, together with those from a cluster of intercooperative peacekeeper groups in Second Life.

On September 13, 2010, Robble Rubble, leader of “The Wrong Hands”, a subset of the Woodbury University group, logged out for the last time. His account disappeared from search at approximately 9:35PM that Monday evening. JimK Korpov, founder and sole owner and officer of the Wrong Hands group lost his account on September 18 at around 9:45PM Second Life time, leaving the group headless and useless for any practical purposes.

The borders of Rancor closed within mere hours of Rubble’s loss of his account, in an apparent reaction to the event. Many had assumed Rubble to be untouchable because he had survived so long after the initial wave of Woodbury deletions.

Rubble’s final curtain call came as the result of an attempt to deceive the Justice League and the **Police Department**, a well known public service and support group in Second Life,  into attacking a rival griefer group squatting on the untended University of Bradford region.  He had made use of an alt in the deception, reasoning that after masterminding the theft of a portion of the Justice League’s BrainiacWiki in January of this year that he would be unlikely to receive help if he approached the League directly.

When the Woodbury University group was initially banned on April 20, 2010, its lands were seized by Linden Lab. Discarding any pretense of legitimacy, the group resorted to a continuously rotating stream of ban evasion alts in order to sustain their presence on the Second Life grid. Relying on tips from concerned citizens, Linden Lab monitored activity on Rancor, a region once controlled by Codizzo Hax. The sim was once home to the Nicholas Mafia, a group with friendly relations with Woodbury University.

The Woodbury University group has the dubious distinction of being subjected to the largest mass ban and land seizure in the history of Second Life,  at approximately three dozen individuals and their alts.  A reliable source has been able to confirm that Rubble was never a student at the real life institution by the same name.

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Story Update: October 17, 2010

While JamesK Korpov and Robble Rubble were both deleted from the grid, the group “The Wrong Hands” itself remained.  Though lacking any owners, members still existed with the power to invite  other members, as their membership count was observed by the League to grow from 28 to 32.  Seeing that the group was obviously still active, the League made a request of Linden Lab to remove the Wrong Hands group from Second Life on October 7, 2010.  A detailed investigation by Linden Lab took place.  By October 17, ten days later, the group had been forcefully disbanded, tying up the last loose end in the Wrong Hands saga.  It is not known how many of the group’s members lost their accounts in the process.

The illegal copy of the BrainiacWiki materials stolen in January of this year and hosted at http://jlu.sl4.me has also been taken down.  The web site belonged to Wrong Hands member Tux Winkler, who redistributed copies of the materials from that site in violation of international copyright law. While the domain itself still works, the entire site it points to no longer exists, displaying only the hosting service’s default page.  The lack of a redirect to a new server  clearly demonstrates that the shutdown of the site was involuntary.

Story Update: October 21, 2010

RETRACTION:  Though the timing aligned well between the filing of reports with Linden Lab and the apparent disappearance of the Wrong Hands group, it has been discovered that the group is merely hidden from search.  Detailed examination of the profiles of existing members show that the group is, in fact, still active, with vague threats being issued to various residents by some of its members. Not only did the Wrong Hides go deep into hiding, they also cleaned house, possibly  to reduce the number of potential targets for Linden action, shrinking their count from a high of 32 members to their current compliment of 8.

What does the Wrong Hands have in store for the Grid?  Considering that their original act of espionage was one of revenge for the destruction of the Woodbury University regions and related accounts, and that the result was the banning and destruction of all their own long-held public identities on the grid with no affect on the League, their losses are mounting.  Citizens are warned that contact with known members of the Wrong Hands can be hazardous, as they appear to choose additional targets more or less at random.  Citizens with information about the Wrong Hands are encouraged to contact the Linden administrators of Second Life, as since most of them are now banned permanently from ever accessing the grid again, they are in possible violation of United States federal law.

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SCIFI Radio Staff

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