Warning! Self-replicating Land Scanner on many sims!

You can scan practically everything. I have a script call scan-foo that allows me to scan. In game, search for "Script-Foo."

Off-topic: Hey, can one link from these forums to in-game locations? I thought somebody once said that was possible.

Is this seriously all you people have to do? You might want to step back and realize that you are enacting the time honored practice of witch hunting. And you are about to step over the TOS line of harassment.

If you are going to burn this witch, you may also want to tie to the stake a large majority of this fine upstanding community (many of whom have posted here). There are snooping, scanning, lagging scripts hidden in many everday objects. You think all those scripted freebies given out are innocent? Wake up. Just because it isn't flying around at high altitudes, doesn't mean it can't scan and send IMs or emails. Something as simple as a scripted pair of sunglasses could be gathering name/key pairs, performing mobile public land scanning or even doing conversation logging. All this data can easily be IMed or emailed back to the original author.

I'd wager that this Lag Witch Hunters Cult has used more sim CPU cycles with script-foo scans than the original offending objects have. Let the Lindens do the policing. Put down your scripted, particle spewing, lag inducing torches and go enjoy SL.

PS: Lindens, please don't put any more performance tools into the LWHC's hands. See how dangerous they are now? Imagine how many witches would be burnt if they could analyze individual object resource usage.

hehehehehe

Thank you, i am quite proud of it. In the meanwhile you are enacting the time DIShonored practice of being an attorney of the devil. And attorneys of the devil are MUCH more damaging and pesky than a witch hunter can ever be. Defending clear cut griefers is not exactly a good thing, you know?



All those items are used on one's OWN land, and when they are not they are fully detectable and returnable without effort. This is an IMMENSE difference. Exactly the same difference between a virus and a an utility program.

And here crumbles the card castle of the naive attoney of the devil. Retry, you might be more lucky.


Pathetic...

Ahhh, the sweet smell of people too afraid to say something, so they resort to alts.

Gotta love it.

The difference, Mr. Alt, this isn't about lag, per say. It's about issues that have a lot more serious ramifications than the next target for the lag-hunters.

Second of all, attachments are controlable. If a script in it you don't trust, you can delete the script or the attachment. And if it turns out that someone is monitoring conversations with scripted attachments, thats a bannable offense.

We can't do anything about these things. It is one person forcing their goals on us.

Next time, be man (or woman... hell, lets dispense with gender. Decent.) enough to talk to me main-account to main-account, and maybe I'll give you more credit than a random forum troll.

Considering that there are several of these in every sim and new ones show up every 15 to 45 secs and that they have probably been up there for months eating up resources, I would venture to say that you couldnt be more wrong. What about the places where 20+ of these things show every 45 secs? I dont care if his script is simply giving short life span cubes a tour of the grid, its still not good. Constant (24/7) resource usuage of every mainland sim by 1 person is not a good thing reguardless of intention or even amount of resources being consumed. This isnt a witch hunt. His objects ARE pretty much everywhere and ARE using up resources.

"Witchhunting" is not a valid analogy. Witches are mythical.

Folks aren't seeking retribution for imagined wrongs. They're angry about actual objects over their land. Sneaky, intentionally stealthed, scripted, resource-using objects.

Stepping over the TOS line is not advisable. Instead let's work together and get Linden to change the TOS so that secret, sneaky, unmanned, stealthy scripted traveling objects are not allowed, regardless of their purpose or the good nature of their creator.

The rules shouldn't depend on whether the creator is a "good guy" or not. This behavior needs to be outlawed.

Buster

Thank you Robin for your prompt reply to this question:

/invalid_link.html


She indicated, it is reasonable to IM an owner of stray objects. Although she recommended that we wait until the release of 1.6 before using scripted objects to send IM's. So long as only one message is sent per object rezzed, it is not spamming.

As I understand it, version 1.6 will allow landowners to delete and/or auto-return specific objects. The problem with this in relation to these scanners is that you'll have to be constantly checking your land settings menu to track these little buggers every time they rez over your land, and given how they keep reappearing, you'll be spending all your time on your land doing this just so you can enjoy playing with less lag than usual.

I have also known Pete for a long time, and while I considered him to be a nice guy, I am really disappointed in his behavior. After a long search for objects like these in Gualala a few months ago (thanks to Crystalshard for helping me out a lot), we found these scanners flying around on my neighbor's land. My neighbor didn't know that these objects were on her land, given that the land belongs to her group. After sending an IM to my neighbor about the scanner, she sent an IM to Pete about removing them from her land. I guess I'll have to do another scan to see if these scanners where removed or if they are still there causing lag, which might explain the unstable increase and decrease of sim performance even when I'm the only one there (and I don't wear hoochie hair or bling). So, while I can deal with these on my plot of land in Gualala, I have to sit idly by if they stepped over to her land (hoping she logs in and deletes them while they are flying over her land), meanwhile suffering through the lag. I am a hermit who is constantly creating on my land and rarely leave to explore, so my plot of land is where I am enjoying my Second Life and it's frustrating to be living in a sim, trying to enjoy SL, while there are scanners constantly causing lag.

Well, Pete's friends have posted and defended his character. I'm kind of glad they did so, because it adds perspective to this whole matter. It adds the perspective that nice people can do stupid, irresponsible things; that good people can make big errors of judgement. That is what I believe this case is. Just because Pete is skimming along the top of the TOS doesn't mean it's not extremely rude, the whole brother-in-the-backseat-of-a-long-trip "I'm not touching you" to his sister scenario. As I've said, I've escalated this with Linden Lab and requested that they consider re-evaluating rules about this kind of script.

His character was never really in question, but for a couple of angry posters. I think the call to "immediately ban" Pete was the most severe thing suggested, and only by one or two posters; we're not looking to see Pete banned, we're looking to see Pete's satellites banned. This is far from the "crucifying" that Pete's friends suggest. And as I stated to the Linden representative on the phone yesterday, I was very happy that this is one of the only threads I've ever seen to hit 10 pages that has been almost entirely civil.

We are upset about something that Pete is doing. People are legitimately concerned about land ownership rights. If Pete stops doing it, problem solved, and people forget about this in 3 days, and then laugh about it when they remember it a few months down the road.

fwiw

20 simultaneous invocations ofllrezobject() and llsetpos()/llsetrot() can cause a small but noticable drop in time dilation for a sim that is around 4k fps.

the relation between lag having these little objects flying around is like the relationship between a circuit breaking and leaving a light on. it can be the small thing that causes the circuit to trip and lag to manifest.

fwiw

pete fat's been doing this for months. and he's been asked to modify his behavior more than once.

however, i don't know that these things do. only that he's had things flying around for ages.

this isn't a mere error in judgment.

This is no error in judgement. These actions are deliberate and have been going on for months. The Lindens are aware and have done virtually nothing, obviously.

The player I deliberately didn't mention before was indeed Pete Fats. So these activities HAVE been reported before (not just placing them but having them over somebody else's land), Linden has been aware of the abuses, in fact it was quite a while ago, and it seems instead of being disciplined, Fats has just taken it to the next level.

I am EXTREMELY disappointed. I have known Pete a long time and it just seems he has decided to treat SL as his personal mechansim rather than an environment in which people have rights and value privacy. Discontinuing all this activity immediately is the only way I can see to rectify public opinion.

BTW....the objects were, and for all I know are, set up to monitor the Tringo hall/build whatever. I got asked, in my Mentor capacity one night, to show up and help clear them out. So, insofar as timeline, this has been going on since a while before Tringo.

But, as I said before, Linden said that the guy doing it (Pete) was a "a good guy and isn't doing anything malicious". How, may I ask, did Linden know what Pete was doing, and that it was all right? It just didn't seem that they were a) surprised or b) prepared to do something about it.

And I'm sorry but I can't agree with DO NOTHING WAIT FOR LINDEN. I'm not a lamb and have rights, this player is abusing them, and I'm going to defend my assets from these intrusions.

I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt. If you have info otherwise as such, you're welcome to post it.

That's not a good solution. In fact, that's a solution that isn't fair to Pete.

If we all forget about it in 3 days, then somebody else will start doing it in 6 days.

That isn't right. We don't want to say "Pete shouldn't do this". We want to say "Nobody should do this."

Buster

Also, regarding public info, what the Lindens say is just not so: all AV info is not public.

Say I'm on my land, in a building. I have banned a player from my parcels, put them on mute, and so on. I do NOT want this player to know that I'm standing in that building on my land; I've taken precautions against alt zoom (which has a distance limit and so on). I want them to have no information about me at all. If they see me around or whatever, fine. But on my land, in my builds, I want zero information about me or my assets, many of which this player will never see because they are banned, being broadcast to this player.

This player now just throws out a scanner, and gets all that info.

Is that what the player is doing? Who knows, probably not. But the fact is, not all information is public and these kinds of attacks get around that. It's a bit of hair splitting but it appears to be the case.

This is as bad as any listener cookie that gets thrown on your computer. There is a reason that you can clear them out or prevent them from being set, and why there is enormous industry around preventing any info about you or your PC from being collected, no matter how harmless or general it may seem.

There was a /huge/ thread about this around... uh... 3-4 months ago, I think. This is not the first time.

I wanted to respond to your post seperately, Timeless, because it was reasonable well thought out.

That's the point. We want to spoil these kind of clandestine, global satellites. As I said with the categorical imperitive - if a lot of people did this, it will grind SL to a halt. When SL grows big and corporations come in to data mine, it won't take all too long before the Lindens will have to ban this anyway, and/or put a technological stop to it.

If anyone is spoiling anything, though, it's Pete. Scripters in SL act responsibly so that there isn't a call to ban useful stuff that can be potentially dangerous. I would hate to see radical changes to Temp-on-rez, for instance, because of this.


Ignorance? No, it's smart. People should look at these with a keen eye, because time and time again people are setting up listeners and other malicious scripts.

Now, if Pete was really interested in having a legit satellite network, he could have:
- Not made them invisible
- Not made them tiny
- Not made them move around so quickly as to avoid detection
- Have a poll in the forums for peoples' opinions first and explain the usefulness
- Have these give, on touch, a notecard explaining what the satellites are and what they do
- Have an exclude list
- Not have them temporary on rez so people can return them if they don't want it over their land


First, this isn't a good analogy, since radio waves don't eat up RL clock cycles.

Secondly, you bring up a good point because radio is highly regulated, unlike these satellites. As an employee of a major cellular telephone carrier, I know very well how regulated airwaves are. So you are really making an analogy that would agree with our demand that these satellites be not clandestine and hard to detect, etc.

Thirdly, this is not real life. It's a subset of real life. We can choose to exclude things from real life that we don't want here. Like spam. Like grief. Like scripts that are a global dredge on the system.


We are running this world by taking a stand here. This is a perfect example of what Linden Lab wants us to do. We are standing up for our landowner rights and making it clear that we will not tolerate this.

Thank you, Timeless, for illustrating our points so well.

I wonder if this is why almost any sim on the grid experiences minute fluctuations in time dilation even when the sim seems "quiet" (No avatars, nothing visibily happening otherwise). Almost any sims will have a fluctuating time dilation anywhere from .9 to 1, I've noticed, fluctuating several times a minute sometimes.

You're right, Buster. Thank you, good insight.

This topic has been looming on the horizon for months. I suppose it was just a matter of time before we had to deal with it. Like other major issues in SL, like ratings system or spam or whatnot, it's just something we have to work through.

And this isn't the first time this has been a major SL issue, as mentioned earlier in this thread.

Just another day in paradise.

Thank you Hiro for posting this,
I agree, It is Rude.. I did not ask for this things to be brought onto my land. I do not want them there and they just keep showing up..

Conicidentally, check out the Satellite Exhibition running this weekend (right now) in Hogadon (at the airport). These satellites conform with most of Hiro's satellite certification rules (lol). Interestingly, the griefer satellite makers declined to exhibit.


The point was more about a limited resource and how limited resources get managed.


Yeah. It's more like I'm promoting full disclosure. If you don't disclose you either didn't know you had to, or you are hiding something.


True, but the system is our new autocracy. Careful about the rules we make today - they will be hard coded tomorrow.

As a satellite maker myself, I want to be free to make cruising un-manned vehicles (for the sheer science of the scripting ie. techie fun). I don't want one single bad egg spoiling that fun for me.

And before you all go off on a tangent, no I don't make griefer sats. I am one of the most sim-friendly scripters in SL.

Point taken.


Merwan has a good quote on his profile, "Commerce is about Trust."

How can any such trust be established with a stealth satellite network?