The Phantom Zone

Current version 0.5.15.beta and is considered release candidate 1 (RC1).

Features being added:
notification to admins of ejections as they happen
age kicking overrides based on local passes
and a visitor logging feature.

Key features:

Complete control of the system by the land owner.
Locally override bans issued on a global-network level.
Allow/disallow bans from other network users on your network.
Allow/disallow bans you issue being shared with other networks.
Eject by avatar age, for any age limit you select (this feature must be set up on a per-node basis, and is not networked).
Easy to use with no complicated set-up – no tricky megaprims placement, Phantom Zone doesn’t use them!
Phantom Zone has always, and will always be free to use!

What is the Phantom Zone?

The Phantom Zone is designed to help residents manage, share, and enforce bans on parcels. The system is provided and maintained by the League of Heroes, also known as the Justice League Unlimited (JLU) group within Second Life.

How Does the Phantom Zone Work?

The Phantom Zone is collection of ban networks controlled by residents. Any resident can own any amount of networks, for use in different contexts (e.g. personal vs. business). Ultimate control of a network goes to the network’s owner, and he or she can also have administrators to help them maintain their ban lists.

Phantom Zone Mechanics

Residents operate their own personal banning networks, with nodes on each parcel they wish to protect. Phantom Zone nodes belonging to a single network may be placed anywhere on the grid, regardless of physical location. Your Phantom Zone installation will use no megaprims, requires only a single master node placement per parcel, and is optimized to create the lowest possible lag. Even external web traffic from your region is optimized, as the nodes share information with one another before calling the server for more data – even if nodes in your region have different owners, or belong to different networks.

The Phantom Zone uses flying probes called ‘prisms’ to patrol your land. These are temporary objects that efficiently roam your parcel, detecting and report any avatars that may need to be teleported to their home location and/or added to the parcel ban list. The entire volume of airspace over your parcel is patrolled, all the way up to the 4096m altitude limit. The prisms have been engineered to produce almost no lag and are extremely efficient.

Ban Lists

Ban list data is stored in an off-world database. Lists can be accessed easily from any network on the Second Life grid. Lists contain avatar names of residents, their ban status, who applied or removed the ban, the reason for the change in status, and the date each change was made. The Phantom Zone uses the concept of a ”global” or “system-wide” ban list.

Any network operator can elect to share their bans with the rest of the Phantom Zone community. When this is done, bans they place also result in temporary bans on the global ban list. This global ban will last for a time determined by how many other networks have that resident banned. This prevents troublemakers from just going somewhere else and causing a problem. After a certain number of networks have banned a resident, the global ban becomes permanent until some of the bans are removed.

Note that Global Ban List Subscription is Optional

If you don’t wish to have global bans on your network, you have two options:

1. You may choose for your network not to use global bans at all (turn “trusting” off); only bans you add directly to your own network will take effect.
2. You may issue a “pass” for the banned resident. The resident will not be banned from your network unless the pass is removed, but other global bans will still work on your network.

While the League does monitor abuse and can issue global passes, a global pass does not override your local bans if you have banned a certain individual.

Getting Your Own Network

To get a new network, whether you already use the Phantom Zone system or wish to start using it, please contact one of the following for assistance:

Kalel Venkman
Maverick Grunfeld
Emiley Tomsen

Currently, Phantom Zone nodes and networks will be only given to those with land of quarter sim size or larger to protect, with occasional exceptions made on a case by case basis. This is to prevent abuse of the Phantom Zone system, as people may try to use the ban features to harass other residents. One of the above listed representatives will have to make a visual inspection of your land to verify your intent to use the system properly.

Important Note – The Phantom Zone is a free service, and not an attempt to make money on the misfortune of others: if anyone offers to sell you either a Phantom Zone node or attempts to charge you for access, they are committing fraud and should be reported immediately to the one of the above people.

Phantom Zone (PZ) F.A.Q

Q: Is Phantom Zone just a clone of RedZone like some people have told me?

A: Not at all, Phantom Zone and RedZone are completely different systems owned and managed by separate people. The Phantom Zone was built from the ground up by the League of Heroes / Justice League Unlimited to be replace the highly regarded SLBanLink networked banning and security system. The Phantom Zone does not do client or alt detection. and at no time in its history has the League ever created or developed technology capable of doing this.

Q: I’m concerned about my privacy, does the Phantom Zone collect any personal information about me or those who visit my land, like geo-locating me in the real world?

A: Absolutely not. Like the Justice League’s own Brainiac system, the Phantom Zone does not collect any form of personal information at any level – just avatar names and keys. Phantom Zone installations scan all avatars in its range and check avatar keys and names against its database to make sure those people are allowed on your property, but that is the absolute extent of any information the system might collect. Avatar names and keys are public information, and the Phantom Zone has no way of tying your avatar name to your real life information or locating you in the real world. So, no, no real names, no credit cards or email, no IP addresses, nothing even remotely approaching that.

In fact, the Phantom Zone database does not even contain a field for IP addresses. IP addresses are not a reliable means of identifying alternate accounts, and are a potential violation of privacy if combined with enough other information, so we saved ourselves the trouble.

Q. Is there any risk of hackers breaking into the Phantom Zone database and discovering people’s email addresses or passwords?

A: No; while there is no such thing as a completely secure system, the Phantom Zone design takes this fact into account – the system as designed relies entirely on Second Life itself to authenticate system users, and so does not need to records special login names, passwords, email or IP addresses. The most a hacker would get would be who had an account, who they had banned and why, information they could get by just talking directly to the estate manager or landowner(s) who banned them. The Phantom Zone database contains no other information, and doesn’t need to in order to do what it is designed to do – provide a neighborhood watch-style shared banning list security system, for free, as a gift to the citizens of Second Life.

Also missing is the usual web interface these sorts of systems usually feature. There is no web interface to inject SQL into, so the methods by which previous networked banning systems have been hacked are unlikely to work on the Phantom Zone. Interaction with the Phantom Zone system is done exclusively through Second Life via chat commands.

While it’s certainly possible to expose the Phantom Zone database if one were sufficiently determined, the rewards for doing so would be very small and would not compromise the operation of the system itself, since no particular secrets would be revealed should it happen.