Grid scanners available!

Since it sounds fun, and obviously isn't against the TOS (The lindens have known about this for months, including the player responsible, and have apparently decided it's all good), I'll make grid scanners available on request. Let me know and I'll start building them today.

Just like Pete does, they will spawn roughly 100 or so objects, temp on rez and invis, with full land and avatar scanning ability, and send them out across the grid, in a 2d circular radius, at about 30 meters up.

Let's all do it and join in Pete's party! In fact, let's find his land, and have ALL our scanners sweep his areas! Hey it's not malicious. We're just interested in the publicly available info in that area, and have decided to use a mechanism that the Lindens deem legal and within the TOS.

If you're interested in how to do it, I'll teach you! Perpaps a public class held in Varney. If we turn on beacons, we can even observe an active pattern of usage by watching Pete's wondrous implementation. A live working example!

No foul right? No TOS violation, all public info, temp on rez and all so very minor to no sim impact.

I'm serious btw. I will build them and give them away for free. Why not? Consideration of other people's feelings? A wish to be civil and unintrusive?

Pfft. I can profit from this info, it's legal. All I have to do is not give a damn what anybody thinks. Thanks for the idea!

Cool, put me down for some. I'd love to be able to add to the mass freakout.

How about some self replicating pitchfork and torch givers that offer them to the peasants as they fly overhead?

I hope this forces a resolution!

I'll add a shiny particle trail to mine!

All in the interest of enhancing the SecondLife overhead sky, ofcourse.

Doing this will probably bring the grid down if they don't regulate themselves.

And I know Tocz to be a good guy and I'm sure he's not malicious.

I can make the torch giver.....now where can we get all the angry peasant mobs

Quite probably.

Put me down for a batch.

The scanners you're referring to are being looked at. What we see so far:
- they are temp rez objects that last up to a few seconds
- they appear to have little to no sim impact (this is being tested with help from SL residents)
- they don't appear to be monitoring devices

Land owners should be able to delete the generator objects over their land with the new tools in 1.6. We're testing whether there are height limits in the tools which would prevent the deletion of the generator object as well as the temp rez objects, and also testing further what the sim impact is of this type of scripted object.

As far as policy goes:

- People should not be able to place objects on your land that you don't want there. 1.6 will allow you to identify and remove unwanted objects.
- People shouldn't be able to use significant amounts of sim resources when they aren't land owners, which is why we're looking at the actual sim impact of these objects.
- People are not allowed to place objects that cause widespread sim crashes (Global Attack)
- Scanning for public land isn't, in itself, a terrible thing. It was a much bigger problem when land went automatically to public and scanners allowed someone to swoop in and purchase land that went public in error.

Beyond that we want to avoid sweeping rules about high altitude objects -- for example such rules could negatively affect people who are using scanners to help map SL, or even airplanes.

Sounds like an endorsement to me. As long as we follow Pete's well thought out model, we can all join in the fun.

Sim impact never mattered to me. I understand that these objects won't make much difference. Since that's the case, we should all be allowed to do it. Or is this some kind of first-come-first-serve resource usage, a-la, "well, when it was just Pete, it was ok. But now it's everybody, so we're rethinking the policy".

Your metric should be derived from the following; what if EVERY player on the grid did it? Because if you don't curtail it, you're going to see a great deal more of it. You are potentially advocating the scripted use of the ENTIRE grid by EVERY player. How will you manage that? Eyeball the sim impact of every single object moving across a piece of land? Tear up all those scripts and begin to micro manage? How do you KNOW that they are not monitors, and never will be, unless you are inspecting every single object that flies around in the air?

Or just say...DON"T SYSTEMATICALLY SCAN THE GRID (or anything you don't own) IN ANY WAY. THAT IS NOT THE INTENDED USE OF THE SCANNING CAPABILITY. Some player wants to fly around in an airplane all day, and scan, well I'm not sure what we can do about that. But this automated grid wide system, with invisible objects flying around everywhere, deliberately set up so that they are nearly impossible to get rid of without extraordinary measures, which is clearly intended to force players to participate? C'mon.

I mean, let's get 5k players to map the grid. Whee! Useful!

Also, why should residents map anything other than the property they are, one way or another, invested in? I wouldn't consider another player mapping my property to be helpful to me in any way at all, and since I'm being forced (operative: FORCED) to participate in this scheme, I should get some benefit. But...I have a map. I get to it with CTL M, or CTL SHIFT M. I do not want, or require, a player made grid-wide mechanism in any way. So from this two+ year old player's standpoint, this is a player-made mechanism that does nothing other than benefit that one player. Other than that, nobody benefits and it just pisses people off. Even the most minor sim impact is more than the player is entitled to.

I would liken this to banish scripts. Linden says "use our tools there is no need for player made land banishing". In fact, Linden frequently makes people turn off land banishers. Interesting, since they are specific to MY land, and don't force anything on anybody else at all, other than that they stay off of MY land. In fact, banishers do benefit me. Player-made maps do not. Hey I got nothing against it. Just don't force me, or my assets, to participate.

I find the practice intrusive and undesirable. And like anything that I find to be such, I want it stopped. It is spam, it is viral, it is invasive, it is rude, it is wrong.

However, let's be pragmatic. Maybe this is a good thing, I'll accept the fact it's legal and in fact recognized by Linden as potentially useful, and turn it to my advantage. Happy to be part of the solution! Chinatown, look out! I'm going to be aggressively mapping that area and counting my beans for...whatever reason, that's my business.

BTW thank you Merwan! Hey, I'm just "collecting some information". No need to worry about what I'm doing with it, cuz somebody said I'm ok and not malicious.

Robin, the problem is that objects like Pete's and Tcoz's avoid two rules of autoreturn on servers. They avoid the autoreturn on people's land because they are temorary on rez, and they avoid the autoreturn limitations placed on the common pool of temp-on-rez prims for each server by self-replicating themselves.

That's eccentially the boiled down problem here: "Using server resources without owning land and methods to avoid autoreturn on land you don't own.", and nothing to do with the ethics of land scanning or privacy or high altitude.

Robin, the scanners in questions completely avoid any possibility of returning them with normal ways, because even if i return them they will be back there in less than 10 seconds, and i have NO WAY to avoid it. Will i have to refresh my list every 10 seconds and manually return them everytime to have my land free of those?

Please let's be real. There is absolutely NO difference bewteen a data miner program that infects a computer and those scanners. They are purposedly designed to IMPOSE their presence even against the land owner's will. The only difference is that we don't have Mcafee and Ad-Aware here, so we have NO defence against them.
And this is grid wide.
If SERIOUS and RADICAL measures aren't taken against them and their owner everyone will feel entitled to use them and the grid will go to hell. Is this what LL wants?

Yes, Shiryu is correct, and that's the way to understand it.



Yes, end of story.

Now, for your next magical trick, try this: people who only own, say a 512 or a 2048, should not be able to lag an entire sim full of other land owners down to 37 FPS. That is what happens constantly. Objects you rez should stay on your own land, and that land should be billed above a certain level of CPU usage if it produces X number of active scripts bearing down on the server resources.

When the Lindens have this epiphany about server resources other than pixelated land on square meters, the light bulb will go off and they will realize they have to CHARGE people who use server resources, because it is a scarce resource (that the Lindens don't appear to make as widely available as they do pixelated land, which they charge handsomely for, and which also strains the servers, but in a different way than scripted objects).

Charge people for their use of scripted objects, on or off their land, in increasing increments as the scripted objects draw more from the server. When all these kids have to PAY FOR their scripted fun in monthly installments, we will see all this laggy crap reduce in a heartbeat.

The problem with this type of object is that you can spam the entire grid for 0 cost (well, the cost of rezzing one prim)


If PF had to purchase a parcel on every sim he's scanning in, then I think that is OK and we should let him do it.

Robin, as many have stated, these objects return if they are deleted. In order to get rid of all of them, a land owner would have to keep refreshing the land setting's menu every 15 seconds just to delete them and wait until the other ones make their rounds. I for one do not want to spend all my time in SL deleting these objects just to keep the land lagless.

Also, while one of these objects might not have a big impact on a sim, many of these with constant running scripts are more likely to do so. If these objects are allowed, it sets a precedent that this can be done, so many players will do it as well. If it reaches the point that many players are doing it, the sims will really see an impact and these objects will have to be dealt with anyway. So it boils down to either all of these kinds of objects get dealt with or they don't and end up bring sims to a halt.

they have a noticable sim impact.

and which sl residents are helping to test? (the pro or con people?)
what metrics are they using?

you do realize that using small amounts of resources in all sims uses as much server resources if not more as putting on lag monster in one sim? server resources that this person isn't paying for, but that other people are paying for.

but these objects are doing their work over privately held land.

ok, but what about negatively affecting the people who own the land?
note: most people don't mind vehicles coming by... they object to this continuous unauthorized use of their land.

these objects are coming from outside people's land... the problem isn't just getting rid of them, they move onto other people's land against the owner's will.

from what ll has said so far.

i think would it be okay for me to:

1) create a hundred of invisible temp on rez objects that each had their own unque destinations in mind every minute or so
2) that in order to get there, they would need to use llsetpos() continuously
3) and since they are temp on rez, there would either need to be generators all over the world, or they would need to spawn child objects
4) run these at high altitude

these scripts are about as minimal as they get.

and as long as they did this and nothing else, it would be okay.

so everyone is allowed to do it.

at least that is what ll seems to be saying.

Robin, I would like you to consider that the techniques used by these objects could be used maliciously. Their elusive and secretive nature is a dangerous precedent.

I don't see how Linden can afford to examine every object that every resident ever makes to see if it is harmful. Not everything outlawed by the TOS is always harmful. Some things are merely potentially harmful.

Linden must rely, to a great extent, on resident complaints as a way of detecting TOS violations. The techniques used by these objects are specifically designed to avoid detection. That makes it very hard for residents to help you police the world and minimize malicious behaviors.

You could outlaw objects that (a) are unmanned AND (b) are scripted AND (c) deliberately appear over or enter land that is not owned by the object owner AND (d) are designed to avoid detection.

Things like stray bullets, beach balls that roll off your land accidentally, airplanes etc. would not violate these rules. (What would?)

As another measure, you could define the term "satellite" as a flying or floating unmanned scripted object, whether high altitude or not, that travels systematically or widely replicates in sims without land owned by the object owner, and require that such things be announced (in a forum for this purpose, for example) with information as to their behavior and purpose, and define categories of legitimate behaviors for such things.

Buster

Very important concepts being discussed here.

I wonder what the implication of all this is on "benign artificial life" in SL. I've always wanted to see little flocks of birds in the skies of SL. Things like that...heck, I'd love to see them fly into my land's airspace. It would benefit everyone to have beautiful things like that in the world. As opposed to things that deliberately try to avoid being seen...

I remember seeing some schooling fish in the waterways of a citysim once. That was neat.

Problem is, SL infrastructure is not up to that right now. 20 or 25 avatars in one place, the whole things slows down to a crawl. So I agree that would be great fun, but I doubt it would be worth the processor power and bandwidth.

It might be fun to devote a sim or two to artificial life -- but I'd rather not have too much of it in any sim I'm trying to function in.

Buster

Send a few of these to me when they are ready Tcoz. I'll help you test them.

Can I have one too? I'll load an exploding cow into it as well - that should REALLY f*ck some sh*t up!

One mans exploding cow is another mans art...

Siggy.

I recall the owner of the scanners did that already, the artificial life thing, but a flock of ants, rather than birds, and they created an uproar then, too, after they took over a whole sim.

Ooooooooooh! Let's scorch the skies!