Read The Lifecycle of Software Objects for Free Online Page B

cracking many of Data Earth's access-control mechanisms, and in recent days people have been seeing rare and expensive items from their game inventories being handed out like flyers on a downtown street corner. Ana hasn't been to a game continent in Data Earth since the problem began.
    In the playground, Jax and Marco have decided to play a new game. They both get down on all fours and begin crawling around. Jax waves to get her attention, and she walks her avatar over to him. "Ana," he says, "you know ants talk each other?" They've been watching nature videos on the television.
    "Yes, I've heard that," she says. "You know we know what they saying?"
    "You do?"
    "We talk ant language. Like this: imp fimp deemul weetul."
    Marco replies, "Beedul jeedul lomp womp."
    "And what does that mean?"
    "Not tell you. Only we know."
    "We and ants," adds Marco.
    And then Jax and Marco both laugh, mo mo mo, and Ana smiles. The digients run off to play something else, and she goes back to browsing the forums.
    FROM: Helen Costas
Do you think we need to worry about our digients being copied?
    FROM: Stuart Gust
Who would bother? If there were a big demand for digients, Blue Gamma wouldn't have gone out of business. Remember what happened with the shelters? You literally couldn't give a digient away. And it's not as if they've gotten any more popular since then.
    In the playground, Jax exclaims, "I win!" He's been playing some vaguely defined game with Marco. He rocks side to side in triumph.
    "Okay," says Marco, "your turn." He sorts through the toys around him until he finds a kazoo and then hands it to Jax.
    Jax puts one end of the kazoo in his mouth. He gets on his knees and uses the kazoo to rhythmically poke at Marco's midsection, around where his navel would be if he had one.
    Ana asks, "Jax, what are you doing?"
    Jax takes the kazoo from his mouth. "Make Marco blowjob."
    "What? Where did you see a blowjob?"
    "On TV yesterday."
    She looks at the television; right now it's showing a child's cartoon. The television is supposed to draw its content from a children's video repository; someone is probably inserting adult material using the IFF hack. She decides not to make a big deal of it to the digients. "Okay," she says, and Jax and Marco resume their mime. She posts a note about the video tampering to the forums, and continues reading.
    A few minutes later, Ana hears an unfamiliar chittering sound, and sees that Jax has gone to watch television; all of the digients are watching it. She moves her avatar so she can see what's drawn their attention.
    On the virtual television, a person wearing a clown avatar is holding down a digient wearing a puppy avatar, and hitting the digient's legs repeatedly with a hammer. The digient's legs can't break because its avatar wasn't designed to account for that, and it probably can't scream for similar reasons, but the digient must be in agony, and the chittering sounds are the only way it can express that.
    Ana turns the virtual television off.
    "What happen?" asks Jax, and several of the other digients repeat the question, but she doesn't answer. Instead she opens a window on her physical screen to read the description accompanying the video that was playing. It's not an animation, but a recording of a griefer using the IFF hack to disable the pain circuit-breakers on a digient's body. Even worse, the digient isn't an anonymous new instantiation, but someone's beloved pet, illicitly copied using the IFF hack. The digient's name is Nyyti, and Ana realizes that he's a classmate in Jax's reading lessons.
    Whoever copied Nyyti could have a copy of Jax, too. Or he could be making a copy of Jax right now. Given Data Earth's distributed architecture, Jax is vulnerable if the griefer is anywhere on the same continent as the playground.
    Jax is still asking about what they saw on the television. Ana opens a window listing all the Data Earth processes running under her account, finds the one that represents Jax, and