Illegal Land Scanners At 600 Meters

I think Weedy was answering my question. I was thinking this practice was automated and requested confirmation of that.

I have seen land scanners come and go. The older ones by someone (small chance I remember his name) are no longer on the grid, but they used 20 parallel scanning scripts which gobbled up alot of sim performance.

Then there was the notorious lb_v2 satellites which is no longer in operation. Those were a self replicating bot which rezzed over land not owned by the creator. Thats the crux of my post today.

Otherwise, building a 16m sq micro empire is an expensive and time consuming task. There are quite a few land scanners out there, but they are spread around the grid. A few here, a few there. The person in my complaint has the lions share of the scanners, and has acquired land surrepticiously by placing scanners over land he does not own.

As Suzanne asks, what is illegal about this? Illegal is a strong word to throw out, when perhaps "I don't care for it" might have been more accurate?

What am I not understanding that makes this illegal?

Its an exploit.

LL will probably take the position that land owners need to use Autoreturn and I'm not sure what else. Probably not much else. Sad thing is, it opens the door for everyone and anyone to litter the skies with these things, not to mention pileups and pissing matches when land comes abandoned.

Oh, so there's nothing at all illegal about this, it's a case of an 'exploit' in which landowners need to be responsible for the items on their property? What a totally misleading and inflammatory title to this thead.

On second thought, perhaps. The underlying issue is still there however.

I believe it's still a person's right to determine what is on their land. If things are automated to be placed there then how much time am I supposed to spend checking land and returning items, especially from the same person? When you see the same name reoccurring and the inability to know who all is dealing in land, you tend to wonder what type of item they are intent on placing there. I prefer to decide who uses the allotment of server space I pay for. Sim performance is effected by the number and type of scripted objects. There are enough contributors to this with the people who own land and I'm not wanting to have it added to by people wanting one sort of information or another. At least not without asking permission to use the resources.

I don't think land scanners are illegal. But they sure as hell create an uneven playing field.

Check this out:

About 6 months ago, a resident bought a parcel next to mine, left a bunch of crap on it, and was subsequently permanantly banned. I've been hoping for a while to at the very least get the parcel cleared, and in the best case - have it go up for auction so I could bid on it.

Last week, I was on the phone with support, trying to get that parcel cleared of junk that was owned by the banned player. The Linden on the phone was extremely helpful. I explained the situation, and once he did some checking, he cleared the parcel of all objects.

Since I was already on the phone, I figured I'd push my luck a little, and asked the Linden if he could also revert the property to Governor Linden so that it would eventually come up for auction. The Linden agreed, and released the parcel to public from the original owner, and then switched over to Governor Linden to aquire the parcel.

Here's where it gets bizarre:

While I was on the phone, I could hear the Linden verbaly gasp. Then I heard him comment to himself "Hmm... *edited* just purchased the property".

The Linden then proceeded to tell me, "Well, I tried to send the parcel over to the Governor, but *edited* somehow got it first." Keep in mind, this was in less than 10 seconds.

The support Linden then told me, "Well - *edited* is a fair guy - you can just deal with him.", as if this whole thing was no big deal at all. I had to put up a *HUGE* protest on the phone, and make a big stink about it before the support Linden finally paid back *edited* for the property, and sent the property over to the Governor.

Not sure if you're following my explanation here - but it sure seems like Land Scanners give folks the ability to catch land that goes public in a matter of seconds. If land goes temporarily public before it goes to Governor Linden, this is *plenty* of time for someone with a land scanner to pick it up.

IMHO, I think its a tad unfair. There should be no public land: it should all go to auction. I'm not a land baron, but just in trying to pick up an adjacent parcel at auction, it seems like the odds are stacked against me.

We're in complete agreement that it's an annoyance and that it's rude. My only point was that it is NOT 'illegal'. This matters to me because if the thread hadn't have said "illegal" in the title, I wouldn't have bothered to read it.

It's an exploit because the reason for the height limit is to allow an airspace for flying planes and such not to conduct your business without paying for the server space to do so. This is a legitimate use for owning 16 sm parcels. Another alternative would be to obtain permission and even pay for using the sims resources. It's cheaper to do business this way. In terms of legality, LL has interceded to have them removed. So it's a grey area.

Just a question:

What is the logic behind Public land? Why wouldn't it make sense for all land to go to the Governor when its released, regardless of size?

Is there a situation where it makes sense to have public land? I'm confused.

Well managing land requires manpower. Claiming the land, cleaning it up, placing it for auction etc are all time consuming issues. LL is in the business of collecting fees for land tiers. Making the land public eliminates administrative details and the tier remains at peak, not tied up in LL's hands.

Hrmph... that makes perfect sense, actually. I hadn't thought about it that way

Wow, this *edited* character sure sounds FIC! The irony!

Absolutely not. The FIC fought damn hard to rid the land scanners last time:

/108/39/38280/1.html

I'm investigating now. If this is true, someone will have hell to pay.

FIC in the sense that the Lindens have no problem with how he operates.

This is just hair splitting. So what if it isn't technically illegal? It's a giant loophole in the TOS (one of many). I mean are you actually defending the act itself?

How is it okay to stick a scripted object on someone elses land without permission that does nothing but degrade the sim performance and allow said idiot to rip you off on land deals and possibly grief you and your neighbors in the process?

And don't spout that shit aobut how peple should check the objects list themselves and know what to do if they find these things because a lot of people have to play the game for long time before they are even aware of these kinds of things.

I know when I was a newbie, the sim I lived in was always slow as molasses even though there was hardly anything or anyone there. It turned out that one of my "good neighbors" ...
(and his friend who is now a mentor! ),

had all kinds of (badly) scripted objects and scanner hanging over other peoples property which was likely the cause of the problem.
The Lindens refused to do anything about it period.

The average citizen has no protection against this stuff, it's really up to LL to do something with the tools or with the rules to stop crap like this happening.

The three sims I posted got a visit this morning from the alt in question. It's not hard however to find the same thing going on over several of the new sims. I spoke to him briefly. The TOS says I can't post logs, but take a look at :

*edited*

Don't be too sure about that.

Last time, Lindens got pissed, but they are bound by their rules. If scanners don't, in and of themselves, affect the FPS of a sim, LL is in a real grey area.

However, last time we made the case that the nature of the scanners' stealth, inability to be excluded from your land or returned (since temp-on-rez), and the sheer arrogance of the person behind it was a real problem. We also argued it from a Kantian perspective - that if this wasn't stopped, data miners would come in eventually and grind the entire grid to a halt.

The solution was showing released land from an RSS feed. Why this person may have not used that is just plain retarded, but who knows.

...

Another thought is that LL has asserted that improved object restrictions was being developed and is a priority. I think LL may be holding on, hoping to wait it out and ultimately fix this with a technological solution.

I'm not finding any scanners yet.

Can people please post locations? And please do abuse report if they are hovering over land that does not belong to them. We stopped this once, we set a precedence, we'll stop it again.

If these land scanners burden a sim, that impairs my ability as an SL person to enjoy the service provided by LL. That's against TOS. =P

He is out there pulling them down as we speak, I am going to look at a few of the known locations atm.

Hence the grey area and the nervousness of some and the quick removal of the scanners as we speak.

Hardly, it's placing items on a land owner's property knowing full-well that they do not want it there. People in a shop who rez a shop-item to try it right away might be placing it when the owner would prefer them not to, but they don't know better.
However this land scanning is essentially a griefer attack, because they know full well that at least one person doesn't want excess objects being placed on their land, yet they set these things off replicating themselves without any concern for this fact.

Weedy tracked 'em, I photo'd them.
http://www.sluniverse.com/pics/ViewAlbum.aspx?id=357