Warning! Self-replicating Land Scanner on many sims!

Has any conclusion been reached here on the topic of petes scanners?
I set out to read the lot, but when I got to page 25, and saw it went to 31, I gave up and jumped to the end.

I have seen many complaints by people unhappy about somebody doing something over or on "my land". This an error, like an attempt to control the public highway in front of your house. Because everybody and everything here can fly, everywhere above "land banning height" is, and should be, such public highway. Land ownership gives you control of only one thing above this height. Those prims which count against your prim allowance.

Any prims which do not count against you (like temp-on-rez, vehicles or birds passing through) are not your concern. Nor is there any right to visual privacy in the open, even morally.

So Petes scanners are not in any sense violating the rights of individual landowners. Any poster who bases her objection on such an argument is in the wrong.

Since LL has made an allowance for transitory objects visiting a sim, it is a question entirely for them to determine whether this is being abused. Just because your sim may normally get few such visitors, so that this calculated allowance is unused, and contributes to keeping the sim fps up, does not mean that the residents own this spare resource. The resources they have a right to are the sim resources MINUS LL's visitor allowance. If the visitors allowance suddenly gets taken up the sim performance will drop. But the residents don't lose anything they had a right to. They are simply losing an extra benefit which they had no right to count on. The visitors allowance.

Personally I find the whole topic of free travelling self-replicating objects to be one of the most fascinating and challenging aspects of SL script capability, and think it would be a huge loss to ban it. Used positively and responsibly I see it as being hugely significant and valuable in the future. One example would be pseodo-biological-life. I have plenty of prims, and if I found a beautiful plant had self-seeded on my land, or an insect colony appeared, with sufficiently rich and interesting behaviour, I might well decide to keep and observe.

In a few years time I would envisage that SL, or the succeeding Metaverse, may become rich in life-forms like this, and would be all the more fascinating and unexpected for it. They needn't be static even, they could evolve. I have such a thing in my own to-do list, and would not like this fascinating developmental avenue to be crushed by whingers who cannot even demonstrate that anything is being taken from them which they had the right to expect.

Because misunderstanding is so easy, let me reiterate my main point. If visiting objects drop your sim fps, they may simply be taking up resources originally assigned for their use, which you had been lucky enought to be borrowing up to this point, but which were not yours in the first place. fps drop is no evidence that anyone is stealing from you. Only the Lindens can know, because only they know what was allowed for "visiting prims and scripts" in their calculation.

So the higher space above your land is not yours at all unless your prim allocation is taken, and evidence of resource usage is no evidence of itself that residents are losing anything that is theirs.

So on what grounds are any of you complaining?

It is enough to point out this type of object to the Lindens, and leave it to them. If it escalates, and their visitor's allowances get routinely exceeded, then they will act. Only they can decide. Only they have the information.

Incidentally, I found 153 foreign objects (all the same owner) over my land the other day (autoreturn was off). I could see nothing, nor could the owner, whom I IM'd. I returned them, and she said nothing arrived. I have also had my own objects disappear from the same plot. We need the Lindens working solidly on bug fixes, not getting endlessly sidetracked by residents who think they could run the show better.

Forgive this newbie question, and I'm sorry if I'm dragging this post out but what are and what is the purpose exactly of these land scanners? And also, what is the reason that most members seem to be against them? Why should I be worried or concerned of them?

Wow, talk about necroposting *and* completely being unable to read through a thread!

It's relevant to a question I asked yesterday judging by what I've read so far, though, so thanks for that. I wouldn't have known this thread existed otherwise (certainly wouldn't have thought to search for "land scanner".

Bottom line is that these land scanners are unscalable. As SL grows, and more and more people want to mine data, sims will have more and more load until all of SL grinds to a halt.

I'm not interested in making a land scanner, but the idea of autonomous objects roaming the world for other purposes does interest me.

I also think it's too obvious to NOT be an inevitable development, when LL no longer controls the servers if nothing else, so we might as well come up with appropriate etiquette, self-imposed limitations, and things of that sort while the practice is relatively rare.

SL can't support an infinite number of these within a sim, but SL can't support an infinite number of anything within a sim, so I think the issue may be self-limiting. Somewhere there's probably an equilibrium point (though where it is changes over time as the variables change). The influx of new users pushes the point of excess toward "anything >0 objects", but the influx of new sims means that any given number of objects is less likely to concentrated in any one sim and overall improvements in the platform's performance means that any given number of objects is less of a strain than it used to be, both of which push the balance point higher, away from 0.

Edit: And I still haven't gotten far into the thread, but I skimmed backwards to see the most recent stuff, and it turns out that Ellie pretty much covered my general stance on these sorts of things.

Bargain, the reson we we conerned about a device that would fly around sims repeatedly, being invisible and self-replicating, is that whatever it's doing, it's meant to stayhiddedn. They verified it wasn't monitoring chat, but it WAS checkign for available land. If it was lallowed to persist it would have created an arms race among land barons and security scriptors.

Also, less... 'honet' people than our dear freind Pete might have use this clutter to release other, more malicious things to stalk or harrass people. We have some parts of TOS that are that are there for a reason.

Also, stuff like that creates additional overhead on the sim.

I did read this WHOLE post Hiro. Sorry if I don't catch on as quickly as you may. With the additional posts in response to my question, (thank you), I do have a much better idea now of the potential problems these things might cause.

Thanks again.

Interesting.

I have been thinking about and sketching out ideas for a bot that people could use to find their loose prims and lost items. They would float around a sim or a group of sims scanning for that player's stuff. I was going to operate them as a *service* rather than selling them or giving them away for this very reason... that having lots of people running these scripts would be laggy, where a service could be controlled and limited.

But if people are jumpy about unattended bots like this maybe I need to rethink my plans.

Just put in short die timers.

Actually, this forum thread could use one!


// this oughta do...

llSay(0,"Die, thread, die!";

llDie();

please tel me this space junk isn't still around, dragging the fps down with it.

Just out of coincidence I was cleaning up/organizing my landmarks the other day and I found the landmark to the location of origin of these thingies. Being bored I decided to go see if the motherships were still there and yes they were. However I stayed for a minute and didnt see them 'launch' any satalites (spelling?).

Yes, I was going to do that, and limit them in other ways, and give them cute names and appearances. "Luke Simwalker".

But, still, I don't want to piss anyone off.

LLabs finds itself with land scanners in a tough spot between negative and positive liberty. (google it.) They dont want to take away our freedom to make clever things that do clever things, to impose restrictions on our creativity, but at the same time, they dont want to allow others to impose restrictions on our other freedoms, like the freedom to own land without someones stuff going through it all the time. Furthermore, as I understand it, if I own a bit of land, I am free to decide to block access to either persons or items onto it for no greater reason than that on a whim I decide to. Land scanners again impose upon this freedom by a technicality - that temp on rez objects do not show up on land properties, and that objects cannot be banned by owner, eg none of you can say "ban all Apollo Korvins objects from parcel X"

It is also worth note I feel, that a great number of the cases where people have lost big on land deals, eg put in too low a price by mistake, or meant to sell to their friend cheap and had their land "zapped" within 10 seconds by a baron, involve a land scanner. The obvious reply that they should have not made that mistake, is as heartless and calice as it is unfortunatley correct. It a factual but not moral correctness, in the same way that if I see you walk down the street and drop your life savings which you were about to use to pay for your mothers lifesaving operation, I could say, well he dropped, it, I found it, tough luck.
Ok, it might not be quite like that, but again the point remains, there is a great number of cases where people lose quite large sums of money in RL because of land scanners, who are deliberatley taking advantage of people. I would call this nefarious and unwholesome behaviour, and generally views so far regarding this have expressed our societies distaste with the practice.

Were Secondlife a democratic institution, Llabs would have by now had to act on this. Overall, the consensus is that we do not want land scanners, it would seem. Most if not all of the people who speak in their favour, are using them. Most of the people who speak against the scanners, are not using them. But the point still remains, that the majority is against them. Thusly, were the majority to rule, the majority it is clear would opt to ban land scanners.

Secondlife however, isnt a democracy. There arent any elections, nor is LindenLabs bound to actually take what we say into consideration. Secondlife is a dictatorship. I am not using that term as an insult, its just what it is, they make the rules with no responsiblilty to us : they dictate to us "the way things are". Fact.

Luckily for us, it is a benevolent dictatorship. They do actually care about our happiness, and I believe, go to great lengths to get the right people on board at LLabs and spend a lot of time, and money, working hard, getting it right. We've seen with the prim taxes, amongst other things, that when they do something we dont like, and really hate, they roll it back. Thats pretty cool - they dont have to at all, but they choose to run their dictatorship as a democracy where they hold ultimate veto power. "Rolbacks" of decisions like this cost them time and money, and if they didnt care, they wouldnt bother.

So heres the crux of it - being that in general, LindenLabs is pretty good at listening to us, is there a group, run by a few who are *organised* and *collecting evidence* on land scanners and their effects, that is "open invite" so that all of us who are part of the 94,000 strong community of SL citizens can join and *express our collective discontent*? I think that while we all talk and talk about how much we dont like things, LindenLabs can only put it alongside the other things that people talk and talk about, all the other gripes. As soon as there is centralised leadership of a group collecting evidence on the effects of land scanners and with enough members to show that this is an across the board issue that we feel strongly about *as a community*, they will be more able to act, as ***currently their dilemma is about how to impose restrictions in a fair way on a community (the liberty issue) wheras if we have an organised majority showing clear intent, they can then remake that decision not on the basis of how to choose which liberty to take away, but instead will be able to act on what we as a community want put in place.***


Also, going off topic, I often wonder to myself, if the original few people who had the idea to create a world like secondlife, knew or even imagined at the start they would find themselves in charge of a land that had more citizens, a stronger economy and more land (admittedly virtual) than actual real countries, and that within a few short years they would find themselves facing political decisions that leaders have been wrangling with for centuries, if not milennia... lol..

Pretty cool, 'aint it???

Yes I agree, whats the big deal...why not just add the creator's name to the Second Hell Tourbus list and that makes it all ok.

From now on we can post...I nominate (insert name here) for a stop on Infonet's Second Hell Tourbus because (state facts here.)

Trashing another member under the guise of Infonet editorial free speech sounds like a plan to me to make sure we avoid a TOS/CS violation.

No. The only ability that scanners have is to return the parcel owners name.

They cannot zap people's land that they set for a low price to sell to a friend.

People do that by watching the land sales list in the Find Menu. They see a cheap parcel, they run to it and buy it.

Also, in fairness to many land dealers - if you inform them that the sale was to go to someone else, or that you simply marked it erroneously, most will give it back. Empahasis on most, because I know of a couple that won't. Those are the same folks who advertise landlocked or 100 percent submerged parcels as "OMG UNBELIEVABLE WATERFRONT CHEAP!!!", so I guess we shouldn't be surprised that those folks don't have the integrity to return mistakes.

Ok, Fair point duly accepted - I still think that the rest of what I said remains true and valid though, especially the part about organising a group, with people in charge who collect and submit evidence, to remove the burden from the lindens of deciding which liberty to inhibit, and instead allowing them to act on what the whole community wants.

With 94,000 people signed up to SL there is a strong opportunity for us to form a group with a single unified voice on issues we feel strongly about.

Perhaps I'm just an irrelevant idealist!

Dude, we can't get a consensus in any forum thread with more than 3 participants, so you have no hope in hell.

Besides which, like most things in SL, it'd merely come down to personal agendas and interests and not the 'common good', if there were such a thing. Which there isn't. There is just about nothing you could do in Second Life that everyone will agree is a 'good thing'.

Besides which, I don't want to be in a Metaverse Justice Watch type group that gets to decide what are issues 'we all' feel strongly about and I certainly don't want anyone speaking on my behalf. Mainly because I find those who are willing to step up to speak for us all are usually the very ones with the personal agendas who would step on everyone else to get what they want.

And without everyone being in the group, you're only ever going to be representing certain peoples interests. And we're already in a big assed group: we're all residents of Second Life. We already have a voice. But it will never, ever, ever be unified. I personally guarantee it

Well if you don't like these land spying robots then make a predator of them. Have it act like a virus attaching itself until many where found then it offs them all at the same time giving little hope of neighboring ones respawning the lot. The larger the amount attached or infected before kill the more effective but the slower the finish. One day the owner would wake up to no reports! He would redeploy but it would be hopelessly out classed and an evolutionary cycle would start as he built newer models that were in turn eaten. Moral of the story, stop whining and start doing something about it, it could be fun.

Yikes!! I hope there aren't any of these in my sim.

Uhhh....

Thread Necromancy is worse then real necromancy cuz you can't force the threads to kill people for you. So it's best to let them die.

Quite right.