Today, Zee Linden talked a bit about the Risk API. If you spend much time on secondlife.com, you'll have seen it appear in the sidebar more than once. You might have poked at it to find out what it was all about. Basically it's a system for monitoring account activity, conditions and funds transfers that indicates fraud. Why should you care? After all, you don't commit fraud.

Because Zee Linden says that griefers are using the Risk API as a form of techno-social judo to have the accounts of innocent people mass-suspended. In fact, it's even better than goo attacks. Zee's initial message is "Be smart, don't get scammed", but by the end, there's obviously no way to prevent it, since your consent is not required.

Risk API griefing involves: Getting a large sum of money by fraudulent means (for example, through a stolen credit card), giving it to people, waiting for the system to identify the fraud, then sitting back and laughing your ass off as your account and hundreds or thousands of others are suspended by the system pending investigation. Once the money's moving, even relatively small sums could potentially cause issues, as we read it.

We're not just talking about a few minutes, or even an hour of goo attack here. We're talking about possible days of interruptions. Over at FurNation, there was wholesale disruption for weeks -- the griefer apparently counted on the Risk API to grief the community.

Zee Linden says to avoid using L$ for large sums, as it cannot be trusted. "If a resident wants to donate to your group, please ask them to do it in US dollars rather than Linden Dollars."

Umm. Generally a griefer isn't going to ask. They can give the money and you can't refuse, messing you up without consent. Depending on how it's done (eg paid to the group, then distributed) you may not even notice. Most people who do many transactions in a day have money transfer notifications turned off. In the case of FurNation, they asked, but actually, they didn't even need to. Just paying the money to a group owned object would pretty much have clinched the whole thing.