Warning! Self-replicating Land Scanner on many sims!

I dont. I dunno if I will, either. I'll leave this up to you. Thanks.

How do we jam it? Are you saying they are using shouts/listens?
If anyone can come up with a way to jam it, I'm willing to try. He's using the land that I pay thousands of USD for yearly to make money, so I don't have any issues with some sabotage. Heck, its my land! There is currently no way to get rid of these parasitic objects, so giving him truckloads of false reports of available public land would be cool!

speaking on slippery slopes, this statement invalidates your entire post as far as ll is concerned. it is their firm opinion that anything which prompts you to explore the world is a good thing.

you know what would be neat? we need for the land ban feature to ban avs to a given height, but also ban their objects at any height. i know i know feature suggestion...

I find an even better parallelism with data miner programs that sneakily introduce theirself in your comp, causing a lot of problems.
In any case those land scanner cause an objective damage to land owners that don't have any toold to counter them. Not only the owner had an extremely shady and irresponsible behavioir. But since he seems to be known as a "brilliant scripter" he knew what he was doing. So he is knowingly causing a damage to others to pursuit his own goals. Isn't this the definition of griefing?

The configuration of this kind of items seem to be designed to avoid detection and the possibility of an abuse report. I had to hunt them for more than an hour to finally grab one and abuse report the guy. So i wonder if he's actually been abuse reported before, and how many times. Anyway it's been a hour well used.



Actually i don't see why people should have any istant tool to detect public land. If you wanna find things explore. I really doubt public land has been implemented to feed the occasional land baron.



Simplest way to jam the source = ban the owner

I just finished reading this thread, and haven't looked anywhere else yet, but have there been ANY response at all from the Lindens on this matter?

Nope, but I just flew up to 400m above my land with a scan-foo and on each sensor sweep (10 seconds?) one to three "lb 2.0"s would appear. First of all, I'm pissed at Pete Fats that my land isn't getting swarmed with the version 3.0 scanners because I like to consider myself on the technological cutting edge and feel slighted.

I'm currently writing a dectector to find as much detail on these bugggers as I can. I can't figure out if it should send e-mail to [email]support@secondlife.com[/email]. If you don't hear back from me, you'll know that spamming the game with detectors is OK, but reporting them is not.

3 seconds.



Please do. Though, saying "scan info #" might also work if the object will still be in sensor range.

Not likely. All you need to do is a basic encryption, or some time based encryption, and there's no way to make it go haywire. That's IF you find the source, which a Linden could not do with me looking with him.


Nope, they don't show up on radar, since they are on temporary on rez. That's why they're so hard to track down.


Excellent analogy.

Is this the precedence that Linden Lab wants to set? What if some company wants to come into SL and do this on a widescale basis, data mining, collecting tons of object info, etc? This precedence of letting this go leaves the door wide open to corporate exploitation.

Friend of mine IM'd me an interesting thought:

What happens when 1.6 comes out, people will all see crap like this on their land, and all suddenly wake up and go WTF?


...



Oh, I am not looking forward to being a Live Helper trying to explain this one to 10,000 players.

Another thing is that it doesnt look like Mr. Fats or his alts picks up the land himself.
It looks to me like that is done by someone else. I released some public land in another sim, just to see, and it didnt take long until a 'respected' member of the community picked it up. And I've seen him pick up more public land earlier, quickly. But since i have no clear evidence, i won't name him in public.

A nice revenge could be to set up a big network of llTeleportAgentHome scripts in a lot of the sims affected, with a nasty IM attached. If the leechers get a hard time moving around in SL, they may change their mind.

I'm sure many of the land owners wouldn't mind if we show them the bastards flying around at 400m, trying to leech resources off of their land investment. This must of course also teleport the buyer home, not only the script owner/creator. It shouldn't be a problem with TOS either, since we are free to teleport home anyone we want from our land.

Let me make this clear:

I think revenge is a very bad thing. Be the better person and let Linden Lab investigate. They are very busy with GDC and 1.6, so give them a day or two.

well any self replicating objects in SL that can (and do) run on other people's land/sims could (and should) be considered viral in nature, and thus *do* violate the SL terms of service and should be validly abuse reported to the lindens. It would be most constructive to be able to do so directly from the object, but little buggers like these are notoriously difficult to capture and click on.

I will say if i am able to catch this (or any of the other self replicating objects whizzing about up there (and there are a number of them) i will begin to abuse report them as violating that specific rule of TOS

As some have said here, v1.6 object tools should allow better inventory of what is on parcels, and perhaps some suprises I imagine

If you can even FIND the buggers (Turn on Object Beacons) it's doable... these stay in place for a good five seconds or so.

Remember, there are legitimate ways to look for public land other than using scanners. Simply set your draw distance high, fly up high with some sort of flight assistance (like a jetpack or other device), turn on "View Land Owners", then fly around looking for public land. It's quite easy and possible to find public land, which goes to show the public land scanner scripts don't give the owners/creators all of the public land in SL.

So I built the scanner and have confirmed that they are owned by agent 3e43422a-fb6b-4a38-9756-d6ffaa8635c7 which I have not yet resolved to an owner's name.

I set the scanner radius to ensure that I was only sensing objects that were within the boundaries of my land (insofar as my land can be construed to extend to 400m). They aren't moving, but by the time I try to camera to that spot or send a particle tracer, it has gone.

The attached log shows about two minutes with of scanning at 20 second intervals. The fields are:

1. object key
   
2. object name
   
3. owner key
   
4. position
   
5. velocity
   

Time to go resolve the key to a player as llKey2Name() only works if the agent is currently in the sim.

These can and will be hit by my active script scanners if set to max range and hovering up in the 400-600m area, they are only there for a few moments though... but the scanner does include a pointer particle laser that could be used to help focus where to look for them.. if people want one, just im me in world (it works best when worn as an attachment)

Scan-foo: Information about 'lb v3':
Scan-foo: Object key: 8cdb45a7-0c39-a5e4-763b-4f0f5477f645
Scan-foo: Located at: <168.68648, 65.47591, 21.79288>
Scan-foo: Angle: <0.00000, 1.57080, 0.00000>
Scan-foo: Rotation: <0.00000, 0.70711, 0.00000, 0.70711>
Scan-foo: Velocity: <0.00000, 0.00000, 0.00000>
Scan-foo: Owner: Pete Fats ( 3e43422a-fb6b-4a38-9756-d6ffaa8635c7 )

thanks for a cool tool, CS.

Maybe some thoughtful player could draft a "fair use of airspace" rule for LL to consider adding to the CS / TOS - one that takes care of this problem as well as addresses the old "blocking the telehub" problem?

Very good idea

whats really called for is simply more powerful land permission tools... if someone does not want to allow self-replicating bots 500m above their land, they have every right to simply deny/bounce/autoreturn them.

honestly what people should do is given the known name... create a dedicated scanner scanner, that every time one of those objects is detected, sends a notecard/im/whatever to the person in question, informing them of your decision to 'opt out' of giving them permission to use your land for these purposes... a few hundred thousand ims/notecards/emails later, this person may decide to change their coding practices to be more resident friendly

land option: ban player also bans player's objects.

but this is still a worm.

This doesn't mean that the owner of such little but griefing viral things shouldn't be troughly hunted down and punished.

i'll toss out the basic pseudo code

timer()
{
Call a scan for actives of person X
}

scan success:
{
if (the object's x/y falls on your land)
{
give inventory a notecard and/or IM them with a prepared statement regarding your desire to opt out of having your land be used as part of this system/network
}
}

I will create an object of this type and offer it as public domain when i get home from work tonight, assuming no one else beats me to it

There is a publicly visible group called Fats and Clones that has five officers and no members. The officers are:

1. Pete Fats
   
2. Pete Fate
   
3. Pete Few
   
4. Pete Foo
   
5. Schwanson Schlegel
   

This is public information. Pete Few has only given out 3 rates, all negative and has no other rates at all despite having been "born" a year ago (also public information). Coincidentally, I have three negative rates against me, but can't say who gave them to me because that would violate the ToS.

My earlier speculation that Pete Fats was providing a service for another might have some validity. If I was a land barron, I'd be annoyed.

- Your intrepid, investigative, not-banned-yet, reporter