Ginko - Part II

<Anshe Chung>
And yes, I hope ghost of my dead uncle hunt you all down.
</Anshe Chung>

I'm going to go and wash up.

It's several orders of magnitude more exciting than this bunch of arse.

Don't suppose you want to do my washing up too whilst you're at it?

Gotta love these SL feuds. More exciting than half the dross I come across in game, whether it's a crap mall, laggy club, or camping chairs.

Bout time we had another incarnation of *.ingo isnt it?

Lewis

I happen to find arse several orders of magnitude more interesting than washing up.



See? Exciting!

Dirty little egg, you!

BLingo! It's like Tringo but the pieces all bling different colors and intensities and you have to match the blinging jewels. Extra bonuses are awarded for every measured fps you drop the host's client with your own bling.

I have a visitor counter, but I don't use it to spam people.

Yes. And apparently nor do Ginko, unless I missed that bit?

Anyone who thinks that many scripted objects are doing only what you see them doing is sorely mistaken

My stuff does what it says it does.

I always supported the idea of banking in SL, so it was an easy decision to let my visitors have access to a Ginko ATM on my land.

But not anymore.

First they installed a lottery in the ATMs, without informing land owners that they were using the ATMs to let people gamble with them. And from my conversation with Nicholas, it was pretty clear that they had no plans of letting the land owners get any part of the profits from their FREE gambling machine placements. A gambling operation that won't share the profit with the land owners that spend time and money to get people there is pretty slick, i must admit.

That was red flag #1 for me. I decided to let them stay, looking back I really don't see why. Maybe because I like Nicholas, and have known him since he was pretty new? I really don't know.

And now this. Using the sim resources I pay for to collect information for their own personal gain. Without informing me, or offering a cent back for the information they collect on MY land.

That was red flag #2. What more secrets do you have up your sleeve?

Luckily, i have the option of returning them from my land. Which I have done now.

And just to put in here too, that Avatar that could be idling way over there, just doing nothing for the past few hours, could be doing the exact same thing, only they could be logging chat, logging the hidden channels, and planning to use it all for other means. And, same thing with that little cube over there that is hidden under a walkway, which a group land officer has not returned yet because everyone has been too busy.

Yes, it might have been wrong for Ginko to put this in the ATM without letting people know, but what can we do now but just sit back and let the person who made this post bash us, and try to find every way that she can to ruin us.

Now you don't have to take my word for anything, I just recently came to work for Ginko not too long ago. I have come to trust them, and love all of the cool people I work with. This data is not being used in any bad way. The fact that this person that went around trying to undermine our trust in game, had access to these maps, is because he must have found out about it from the people that did ask what kind of scripts the ATM's used in them before having them on the land. We never tried to hide the fact that the ATM had a scanner in it, we just did not have up-front disclosure, like we do now, and Hino already apologized for that. And all I can offer is my word, as a person with sugh high personal integrity, which you can ask almost every person in game that I met, that I have this, that the information we collected is not for any bad means, and only Hino himself, and two others that work for Ginko have access to this database of information. Granted the maps where public at one point, may still be… but it is just a map, that information cannot be used to hurt anyone on behalf of Ginko using these maps as you don't have access to name, or keys, all you can see... are dots, green dots, and yellow dots.

As it is, this poster has already broken the forum guidelines yet again with this post, since she gives our name in the forums subject, but I am not calling for this thread to be locked, I just thought she would learn rules like the rest of us have.

But yes, if you have any questions, or want to understand things better than Hino already explained, feel free to talk to him in game when he is around, he enjoys talking to people about the ATM's and how they work.

It would be very interesting to see a map generated from all the sims' data stitched into one big ubermap.

-Ghoti (likes maps)

Ok here's my problem with this since I never made it clear in my first post.

Yes I know people have scanners to watch traffic flow. I know this, everyone knows this. I was planning to install one myself to watch how many people visit my place and nothing more. Problem being with Ginko is that these are scanners on land they don't own and its GRID wide unlike your local club or casino where it exists on land the business owner owns.

Because its grid wide Ginko effectively tracks where you go accross the grid regardless if they know where in the sim you are or not. They still know what sims you visit. Now seeing how they are planning a commerce website like SLBoutique and SLExchange this makes for valuable marketing data. How you ask? Simple, doesn't take much to send an employee out to a sim to see whats there. Hell some sims its not even necessary like Furnation, The Forest, Gibson, Lusk, Midnight City, etc. Sims with a theme make it easier for their marketing department. This simple data allows them to custom tailor ads and products on their shopping site to appeal to you. Sound familar? Yes, in the real world we call this Spyware.

Hino, I know this may have not been your original intent for your code to be used in this way but do you actually think someone in your company won't relize the potential your code has and exploit it with or without your knowing for better marketing? I bet you L$100 that Nicholas had this thought cross his mind.

PS: Remember, spyware doesn't track what you do in a website only wich sites you goto much like what your ATMs are doing right now and thus why its a big issue.

As Hino said, it takes the Avatar name once, not across the sims if I read his post right. As well, I belive that Hino was the only one that had the access to the code of his machine, and as I said, only three people really have access to this data. I myself do not, just because I do not need to know such things, and nor have I asked to have access, even though I do work Tech support for GF.

And yes, a quote from Hino,

Not everyone who reads a thread is either for or against you. Whining about being picked on comes off as less than professional. Questions about one's business practices are part of the territory and are bettered answered minus the pout. At least one of your customers in this thread, apparently previously on your side, has decided to withdraw their monies from your fund based on this issue.

Well said. Presentation is a factor when trying to determine someone's credibility.

No? Surely not...

That's nice. But (a) you can't prove it short of opening the scripts up for public scrutiny, and (b) that doesn't change the fact that there are many products out there that do far more than they appear to be doing.

You know what people are like - if they can get away with it, they will. Like selling freebies. Or exploiting permissions bugs. Or stealing code. Or gaming the dwell system. Or taking advantage of someone's land sale setting mistake. Or fucking over a group member. Or putting scanners and data gatherers in benign objects.

And with this issue, if it is an issue, like most of the ones above, there are no rules about doing it, or if there are, there are no real consequences to breaking them.

The only real rule that may be partially relavent is that you can't plant a 'listening device', but that is so sketchy as to be unenforceable unless ALL it does is listens and transmits public conversation.

I had a vending device that transmitted the public chat of a person who spoke into the vendor after pressing a particular button, because it was recording a message that would later be delivered to an object. And because it proved too difficult for the average punter to remember to use a channel number despite explicit instructions

Thats a public listening device. With a purpose. And a limitation dictated by what I needed it to do. But then you only have my word for it that that's all it did! And I didn't have to tell you that much. The fact is, unless it's something you can measure and detect you just don't know what the hell that scripted object is doing.

I seriously doubt you can apply the listening device argument to scanning a region and recording avatar positions. So all you're left with is moral and ethical arguments. Which range from 'well a vendor doesn't need to do this! it's wrong!' to 'so what? there's probably another 10 scanners within range doing the same sort of thing!'

I don't see the problem. From a couple of perspectives. Firstly, key harvesting is not against the ToS. It's been clarified by the Lindens before. A Key database is a logical way to facilitate a gifting service, as has been mentioned here in the thread. So a valid reason to scan. You might not agree, but thats just your opinion versus theirs.

Should they tell you they're doing it on your land? Why? There are no rules or limitations (yet!) on what a scripted object can be doing on someone elses land nor what the creator has to disclose to the landowner about it. You might not agree, but that's just your opinion versus theirs again. I assure you, there are plenty of vendors out there that scan. It helps the owners determine traffic in a region versus their own sales there. A useful metric, imho.

Secondly, isn't it also reasonable to consider that an ATM might have (hell, SHOULD HAVE!) a security log? IRL, they often have a camera that records what's going on in the vicinity of the machine. Well, ya can't do that in SL. But even better, you can take a'DNA fingerprint' with a simple scan. You can know exactly who was where and when. When and if something untoward happens, you can pick it up and nail down the scenario almost instantly. Like CCTV. Which we all star on daily!

If I was building a banking ATM, I'd sure as hell have a scanner in it. Wouldn't you like to know that if someone manages to exploit the bank they have something in place to help track it down?

I ono. Like I say, I don't see the problem.

Hmm. So...

1. They're getting the keys of nearby AV's so they have a list of AV keys for when they open up their own web-store... Good for them. "Key Harvesting" controvercies are so last-year, anyways...

2. They're logging the location of AV's in the area. Maybe I'm naieve or missing something, but... what's so dangerous about this? So they see that there is a high-traffic area? I guess this is a little more grey of an area... But seriously, I don't see how this could be used for anything other than what Hino said... See that everyone is hanging out on the opposite side of the sim, perhaps it's wise to move the ATM to the other side of the sim where everyone hangs out...

What's unethical or immoral about this?
If I can fly into a sim or take a snapshot periodically and get the same info, if the traffic/dwell and info like that is basically already in the public domain??

Ok I've looked through the code and this is what I see.

Its a scanner wich gathers keys, names, and time stamps. It does so every 500 seconds (little more then 8 minutes) and sends this data every 48 hours or whenever the memory fills up wichever comes first via email. So far everything Hino says it does. Good. However...

Maybe I'm just too new to LSL to see it, but I don't see anything in the code that checks for duplicate keys. Maybe its somewhere else in the ATM code or maybe its in the back end. If so then he can't give it to us for the obvious security reasons. Problem being without seeing this code all we have is his word wich is pretty shakey right now. So for all we know it could only get an agent key once, but is that once and nothing more? Once per day? Per 2 days? Per Sim? Without seeing the code we cannot know this and thus why everyone is paranoid.

Yes, that is all that we do have is our words, and trust, and during a meeting with a very important SL person, whom I was granted the great pleasure of sitting in the meeting with them, he understood that we have this trust, and that Ginko works on trust. Yes, it is a valid concern to bring up to us, as many others already have in game, we have been dealing with this matter for a while in game now. But seeing when it is brought up by this topic starter, I just keep thinking back to when she vowed to destroy Ginko in any way that she can.

Just a few statements, in similar concept as Kris and Logan above:

1. Harvesting of AV UUID's is a legal practice explicitly approved by LL's - There are MANY practicle uses for a list of AV UUID's which add value added services to a organization's customer base. Yes, they can be used to spam however one can't assume that everyone is going to utilize it to this end. People can hack with computers on the internet - does this mean everyone on the internet is there to hack?
   
2. Showing a snapshot of AV movement is provided already in the client - This is public information, as mentioned before. I have my real doubts that Ginko, or any other organization with similar technology, is using it to track individuals but rather look at the movement patterns of AV's in the whole. This is done constantly in RW business via cameras, sales reciept auditing, "membership clubs", credit card statements, etc. I goal is more targeted marketing to what the consumers want to increase revenue. If anything, this is demonstrating that some organizations are taking SL as a serious business prospect. Heck, there is talk of trash companies starting to scan for RFID tags in people's garbage since it would be valueable marketing data.
   
3. The effect of a once every 5 minute sensor sweep is undetectable - This would not be creating lag. While quickly repeating sensors indeed can knock a sim's speed down, 5 minutes is exceedingly conservative and respectful of sim resources.
   

I have to say this, to take this to heart.. you have to know Hino, he is not whining about anything, you might have to go back and read 500+ posts about what this is all coming down too. That, and Hino is a fun guy.. we are here to have fun.. that is what SL is for, to get away and have fun. He adds to that fun by joking around, it all comes down to times when he says that his lazy hurts, and he needs to take some time off or working on things. Hino is one of the best, if not the best, scripters out there, he does so many things every day, I do not blame him for being lazy from time to time on certian projects. The important things that need to be done, you can count on Hino for those to be done, that is why he is around, and why he has such a great knowledege os LSL, and uses that knowledge for the good things, and not to harm anyone, I know a few of people have asked him, jokingly of course, to make a harmful script, and he won't.

I am sorry if you cannot see Hino as a stuffy guy in a suit, and that is not what he is, or tries to be, he is a fun guy, that is a great person to know, and a good friend that I am honored to have.

Wow...

Ok, first off. I will say this, I have no problem with Ginko acquiring my UUID, oooh-lala. No big deal. I only start to worry if they start using things to.. I dunno, scan channels for secret conversations or whatnot.

As for Anshe... I mean no disrespect, and please don't take any from what I'm about to say; From my observation it seems that Ginko is doing things within the TOS of LL. I can also understand the need for sensor sweeps considering a LOT of other objects do that too. Many of which are more malicious in intent. I think that perhaps you may have been a little rash in jumping to a conclusion that Ginko has evil intents or purposes with the information acquired. There is no legitimate proof that Ginko has done anything wrong. Until you can prove that the company has been using their information in a malicious manner, it may be best to withhold the accusations until hardcore proof has been acquired.

And... finally, FOR GOD'S SAKE! CHILL!!! SL is, theoretically, supposed to be a place for FUN. Do you honestly think that people would pay real money for virtual land and items if they didn't get SOME entertainment value out of it?

The cliche phrase "Can't we all just get along?" kinda applies here.

great big brother is watching.

Just for the record, SLBoutique.com ATMs do occasional sweeps for avatars as well. We only collect name/key pairs - no locations, nothing else. I repeat, we ONLY collect avatar name/key pairs. We also share them freely. People can IM me to opt out (Hi Tcoz!) and they won't be able to receive gifts from SLBoutique or be shared on any of our lists (much like Ulrika's). A total of 2 people have opted out, and to this date, despite the claims that it would DEFINITELY happen, no one has been spammed.

Our code also stores as much information as possible in memory. We store a list of the most recently collected avatar data, and only add an avatar to the string to be sent via email when a avatar not stored in the list cache is encountered. When the string becomes large enough, an email is sent. If the scripts gets low on memory, the email is sent and the list and string variables are cleared to free up memory.

I still think its about time SL provided us with llName2Key() and llKey2Name() globally, regardless of whether the avatar is in the same sim or not.

We also offer a version of the ATM without the scanner code.

Regards,

-Flip