“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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This explains a lot. It didn’t make sense that the Lindens would be banning Wrong Hands for griefing some other sim when they were already mostly banned for being Woodbury. I’m surprised this article doesn’t mention the Digital Worlds connection, though.
Well done! Way to set the record straight. Its good to see honest, well researched and responsible accounts of current events.
@Uncle Martin
the digital worlds shenanigans appear to be secondary to Rubbles removal and the lockout of rancor. though kudos for seeing the relation, these things do tend to cascade a bit. Its a shared world so one event is forever linked to several others, much like in RL.
I was reading about this in the Herald, and you’d think Digital Worlds had a lily white reputation the way Pixeleen treats them. It’s sickening to watch. I’m glad I have a place to post comments about this stuff that isn’t moderated by people who are in on the whole thing themselves.
I would have wanted to see a more in depth story on the trashing of Digital Worlds and whether the Wrong Hands was really involved or not. I’d be surprised if they really were, beyond a single member doing something without the knowledge or participation of the others.
I’m just fascinated by all the back and forth all over the net on this subject, mainly involving Woodbury versus the world. It’s a massive, massive train wreck, and it’s more and more clear that it’s just a bunch of college kids with a dramatically overinflated sense of entitlement. And the JLU and the “wiki heist”, as Robble Rubble put it. The lengths that these people will go to to pump out disinformation on the subject is just amazing, it’s a kind of warfare all on its own. It’s pretty transparent if you take the time to read up on things and know who the players all are, and I did read a lot of the stolen wiki including the supposedly heinous parts where real life information was stored. And I can sum up my impression of it in a single word:
“Meh.”
This is what everybody’s so agitated about? Who cares if some cyberthug’s privacy was invaded, or if the JLU shared that information with Linden Lab? It gets them out of our collective hair, and while I think the whole costumed vigilante thing is just – I don’t know, it just gives me the creeps – I can’t see where taking these idiots off the grid is a bad thing for most people overall, you know?
Given that Only LL would have access to the login logs to know for sure we may not ever know who was really responsible there, here are the facts:
The person from DW was (most likely) phished
The money was sent to Prok, probably to incriminate Prok, who immediately returned it.
all of this occurred AFTER Robbles removal, so the likelihood of this being a Wrong Hands action is slim, more likely its just the AH Namedropping. But then what do you expect from a self confessed tabloid? actual journalism?
Ugh. Just ugh.
Why are some people so bent on burning everything to the ground, just because they can’t have it? Woodbury makes me sick to my stomach, everything they touch is blackened or stained or defiled.
Anti-social behavior is a very complex subject with many causes. The why isn’t so much important here as the results which are universally those with Voluntary Downs Syndrome (they CHOOSE to be dumbasses)get their comeuppance every time.
Editor: Someone claiming to be Robble Rubble attempted to post a comment – however, the email addressed used did not resolve to anything, so we were unable to verify the identity of the poster.
GreenLantern Excelsior posted this on the Herald a couple days ago:
http://dwellonit.taterunino.net/2010/09/30/linden-lab-entertaining-offers/
The only thing Woodbury has to do with this is that one of them tweeted the rumor and got it started. The whole thing is artificial, and that gets back to my point on them, which is that without that spotlight, they’d wither and die.
A better one is this:
http://www.techeye.net/internet/microsoft-to-buy-second-life
If you’re going to post, Margie, at least post something useful.
I thought I had, Tarheel. The Taturo Nino site usually features a very well informed, very well balanced viewpoint, showing both sides of the situation, unlike some other places I could have gone. You’re well known for picking fights with people and calling it discussion, so I’m going to let that one slide for now.
Woodbury is a real university though. You can’t make that go away just by ignoring it.
Woodbury is a real university , that is true, however the group removed from Second Life by Linden labs had made it clear they were acting as anything but a Virtual Campus. If the school administration has been aware of what was being done to their schools name (as I’m sure they eventually did find out when Lindens Labs legal stepped in) they would have been (and likely are) deeply hurt and saddened by what those miscreants were doing. Imagine Princeton or Yale having their names dragged through the mud as Woodbury University’s was. I’m sure any representative of those schools would be furious, not with Linden labs, but with these (Expletive deleted) Jokers.
Yes and no.
The real Woodbury had almost nothing to do with the SL version. The SL version was created because one student talked one professor into adding the SL experience to his communications class, and the one professor paid for it for two semesters. The classes were tiny, no more than eight students at most, which means that nearly all of the Woodbury University “students” in Second Life were not students at all.
After that the professor passed it to Tizzers to run. That’s how Tizzers got control of the MC Fizgig account. After that he was essentially unsupervised and did whatever he wanted. Every time he got banned, “MC Fizgig” made his new alt an estate manager again.
It took Linden Lab a while to figure out that the sims were no longer under control or supervision of the real life Woodbury, but eventually they did figure it out.
So, no, the in-world Woodbury did almost nothing that a real university would have done, and was never really under the control of the real university itself. Tizzers ran it almost from the very beginning, and it only existed at all because Tizzers lied his way into getting control of a sim.
Wait wait – Tizzers was fully backed by the University. Where are you getting your information?
That’s what he wanted everyone to think, but it was just the one class, with the one professor. Eventually they did convince the University to pay for another year, but it was a payment takeover. They never knew how their money was being spent until the end, and weren’t checking. Professor Clift kept that information from the school’s president too, because he knew that if he didn’t they’d have pulled the plug a lot sooner.
Just read the update.
It looks like both Linden Lab and the JLU just went on as though nothing had happened, and Woodbury/Wrong Hands got broken down into subatomic particles for trying it.
Good on you lot! You guys really are the heroes of the grid!
The wiki theft, in the end , only really hurt those that stole it, and their friends. The mistake was their assumption that we held our data for the same reasons they would. Nothing could be farther from the truth. When one gets into the hero biz (and heroes don’t really need capes and masks) one gets a lot of information and tips that A. we would never use directly on moral grounds, and B. We choose to hold onto in case something correlates later.
What they did, was in effect the same thing that would happen if a government database (usually compiled for the same reasons, especially for checking correlations in the event of an incident) were likewise compromised, all you’d do is reveal your own dirty little secrets.
This Group being able to hide from search, block all members, close enrollment and reappear indicates at least one group officer is still at large. The fact that all members are hidden also indicates they are backed into a corner. I echo the articles warning that anyone wearing a Wrong Hands tag should be treated cautiously and watched carefully. A correction will be issued on Episode 7 of Stark Reality.