land scanners part the fourth

Land scanners are now moot: /120/9f/38891/1.html

The sentiment appears to be that they are legal. I am now confident in my ability to build and distribute these objects, and in the fact that there will be no repercussions no matter how many objects are spawned, and no matter how much data they are collecting. And I will. Always nice to try and do something new and interesting.

The bottom line: for the time being, creating lightweight, grid-wide viruses(call them what you will) is legal in SL.

Thanks for the clarification.

Heheh.

There are a zillion other things to scan other than public land.

I think this wasn't meant to stop PF but rather to shut up the forum residents.

It won't work.

have you seen the code?

there is other data worth collecting.

Reporting public land on the web site does remove the need for constant scanning for public land inside SL. People collecting information on avatars and avatar traffic will still need a constant scanning presence however.

Since this issue has been clarified, I'm hoping to use roaming drones to continue my mapping of the terrain in SL. I don't think I'd scan any sim more than once every week, so the impact would be enormously less than the LBv2 objects. Of course, I'd be happy if the Lindens just published heightmaps for the sims (like showing public land on the web site) so I wouldn't have to do all that work

Im happy with this response. They are aware and thinking about measure a users global CPU resources. They are looking into providing easier access to grid information. This last one was my main concern. Give everyone the same opportunity and access to public land information. And finally I understand his points on land tool height limitations and free flow of air traffic. I do though urge for better land tools (anti-push options, etc) even if there are still limitations on their height.

Even at the height these objects are at though, landowners have the ability to return
objects. These lb v2 do everything they can though to circumvent the right of return
since as soon as you return one, another takes its place at most 30 seconds later.
So should we really not be able to return objects at this height? This is far different
than something like a plane passing over as explained below.




It sounds to me as if carrier pigion v5.3 would go straight from point to point passing
over sims as it goes. This is very different that the scanner in question. It goes to specific
points over many peoples lands including my own and stays. Yes, it derezes, only to be
replaced by another one in the same spot seconds later. If this hypothetical pigeon were
delivering one message every 30-45 seconds 24/7 to my land, I would want it gone as well.



Well, for me atleast, part of it is that i can build that high, and it does count against my
prim limit. But also that I do seem to have control at that height in that I can return
objects at that height back to thier owners. Which I can actually to with these scanners.
Only to have it replaced by another in the same spot. Each individual one may not be
static so to say, but since a constant stream of them are send to my land, one being
replaced by the next as soon as its gone, the end result is exactly the same as a static
object being put on my land, always there, that I did not give permission to be there
and have no way of keeping gone for good. Again, this is different than anything that
just passes over every once in a while.




Although for me atleast, the resource consumpsion isnt really the biggest issue, atleast
if its an person with hoochie hair or a jetpack on, and you dont want it there, you can
ask them either to remove the attachment or leave, and if worse comes to worse, ban
the person from your land. The point is, these things are not always there, with no way
for you to get rid of them.


Ive probably repeated myself, but this is the issue that I have. These are not planes
passing over, or anything else passing over. These lb v2 are a persistant presence
that is imposing itself 24/7 over land that I am paying for, even as rent. I have been
given tools to what I want to have persist over this virtual land, but these objects are
purposefully getting around those tools. This specifically is an abuse of the technology,
not a use of it.

Well said. Some people want absolute ownership of their virtual land, but limits make sense.


The word "mismatch" makes it sound like a mistake or oversight. It sounds more like this is intentional, and you should use the word "difference". There is a difference between the rights landowners have etc. It sounds like you mean, "That's a feature". I have absolutely NO problem with that. I want to see carrier pigeons, that would be great. I want a bot that can buzz over to a tringo game, IM me with the avatar count, and then commit suicide, so that I can decide whether to go there or not. (55 players? Ferget it, lag city.)


BRAVO!


NOW there you missed the point. Their virus behavior is the problem, not least becuase of the precedent. Nice guys can make viruses, but I can't? Viruses that do one thing are OK, but viruses that do something else are not OK? That smacks of capricious enforcement, and I don't like that.


GREAT! No, wait, is that an excuse to DO ABSOLUTELY NOTHING?

if pete (or any other scanner) wanted to collect data in a RESPONSABLE manner, i would have no problem. Look to another thread by Ice Brodie, where she kindly asks if people would like to be included in her mapping project... describes what the process will ential, what results come out of it, and within hours got volunteers from HUNDREDS of sims eager to be part of the project.

/130/b5/38726/1.html

*THAT* is a proper way to handle a 'sl wide' grid resource project. not this one minute scanner BS. The only reason to make this network as persistant, malicious, and hidden, as it is, is snatching out public land before other people get it.

If he wants to do territory maps, or political maps, or land statistics, PLEASE do, we would LOVE to see this information, and set it to update DAILY, not EVERY MINUTE. Asking people for permission would be a huge step too.. look at how many people are *HAPPY* to help ice with a very similar (in data, NOT methodology) project just because she was open, and friendly about it.

Theres a good lesson there, for both Pete, and for LL

I've learned something.... it's easier to get forgiveness then permission.

Primitives eat up memory, bandwidth, and CPU. In order to prevent the server from drowning in a sea of primitives we imposed a number limit and eventually tied primitive counts to land area.

Scripts also eat up memory, bandwidth, and CPU. So they compete for the same resources as primitives however script excecution resources have not (yet) been tied to land area.

Note that LL has not yet tied "server resources" in general to land ownership... only (persistant) primitive count. It seems that there is a misconception that "server resources" have been tied to land ownership, but that is not the case. This misconception may have been propagated by statements made by LL, I don't know, I'd have to review town halls and forum posts to dig up the evidence but the fact of the matter is that at the moment only persistant prim count is allocated by land ownership -- resources such as script execution and bandwidth are currently a single common pool.

The resource that _really_ matters is "server resources" so we're looking into how we can more correctly distribute and reserve these resources for the landowners.

-------

Now to change directions just a little bit...

Regarding whether someone is allowed to repeatedly put a scripted object at 400 meters over your land. At the moment the "no outside scripts" limit is restricted to 20 meters. This means that in general land owners don't have control over the scripts that run in the sky. That is the current state of affairs; whether and how it should be changed is one of the points that should be debated.

-------



Yes, that is the current state of affairs. As long as they do not violate the TOS or Community Standards then lightweight drones are allowed. "Lightweight" is key here since drones that actually put a noticable local load on a server will be subject to censorship. In other words: just as piles of dynamic, linked, hollow torii are within the possibility space of SL but may require censorship if they are dragging a simulator to its knees -- armies of self-replicating drones are also within the possibility space of SL but may require censorship by LL if they are dragging a simulator to its knees. The "lb v2" scanners have not crossed that threshold for several months*.

When server resources are more correctly tied to land ownership, and if landowners' control over their skys is changed then the possibility space of SL will have been trimmed to contain a slightly smaller volume with a smaller number of tragic possibilities.

--------

* For those considering creating their own drone armies I recommend you speak with someone with some previous experience so you can avoid the design pitfalls that crash simulators.

You seem to have missed the point that he used the term "viruses". And a virus (any kind of virus) is a violation of the TOS by itself (again, article 5.1, paragraph v).
Everyone knows that are ways to scan land for legitimate resons without falling into the definition of "virus". LBv2 DOES fall into the definition of virus and should be treated as such.




I fail to understand what do you mean with "lightweight". Anton, the sim i own land in, gained 100 full fps in the 18 hours LBv2 has been shut down, and lost them again when it has been brought upo again. With the same exact avatar and time conditions (meaning at the same time of the day and with no one else than me in the sim, and my hair is only 5 prims, mind you). Many others have reported similar or even bigger fps differences during that period of time. Statistically LBv2 DOES pose a significant server load.
Are you telling me that constantly taking away averagely 100 fps from every sim in the grid 24/7 for my own selfish purposes is ok? Careful about what you answer, because it would just take 3/4 people doing this to bring most old sims of the grid under 100 fps.
Honestly Andrew, LBv2, according to the data that has been gathered is not lightweight at all expecially if you consider the fact that it works just for the selfish purposes of a single resident.

I script vehicles, and haul ass for several hours to make my scripts as sim friendly as possible and make my cars the least disturbance as possible for the sims they visit, and then comes some selfish virus programmes and makes my efforts (and the ones of many other considerate scripters) useless. Then i ask myself and i ask YOU, WHY should i care?

LL should encourage considerate scripting, instead of endorsing selfish sharks that spread viruses and hog resources in an unproportioned way.
No Andrew. Sorry but in my eyes this is definately not the way to go.

more data:

it doesn't seem to reset temp on rez, but being in a function seems to extend the lifetime of a temp on rez object indefinitely.
correction: crossing sim boundaries does seem to extend the life of a temp on rez object


sample script:

fMove(key pkAV)
{
    string sRegionName;
    vector vPos;
    vector vOffset;
    integer iDieOff;
    
    vOffset = <10.0, 0.0, 0.0>;
    
    iDieOff = 0;
    
    while (iDieOff < 100)
    {
        sRegionName = llGetRegionName();
        vPos = llGetPos();

        llInstantMessage(pkAV, 
            "in: " + sRegionName +
            " at: " + (string) vPos +
            " gen: " + (string) iDieOff +
            " age: " + (string) ((integer) llGetWallclock() % 1000)
        );
        
        llSetPos(vPos + vOffset);
        iDieOff++;
        
    }
    
    iDieOff = 0;
    
    while (iDieOff < 10)
    {
        llInstantMessage(pkAV, 
            "in: " + sRegionName +
            " gen: " + (string) iDieOff +
            " age: " + (string) ((integer) llGetWallclock() % 1000)
        );

        iDieOff++;        
    }
    
    llInstantMessage(pkAV, "dying now");
    llDie();
}



default
{
    touch(integer piCount)
    {
        fMove(llGetOwner());
    }
}

Interpreting sim FPS is a black art, and I'm a wizard. 100 Hz may or may not be significant. I'll see if I can reproduce your 100 Hz in Anton, although I'm curious what your background FPS is so I can properly interpret my own results.

"Lightweight" is subject to interpretation at the moment since we don't have a clear definition of it. I'll examine the "lb v2" in Anton and make a judgment.




Please state your definition of a "virus". I prefer the phrase "self replicating drones" since that seems to be more correct to me since its replication is, as far as I can tell, constrained rather than being unbounded. It is a recursive solution to a problem -- recursion is a valid algorithm for many tasks. The word "virus" has negative connotations these days, however since the "lb v2" is currently a valid point in SL's possibility space the connotations that go along with the word might not apply. -- even if the word "virus" fits its behavior that does not necessarily make it evil.

Andrew,
I was wondering if you could speak to the impact the LB v2 drones have on the asset server(s), and if the volume of rezzing/derezzing that takes place due to them is considered lightweight? There have been several estimated numbers given as to how many of these things are created in a given amount of time. I personally have watched for them in Holt, and at one point had registered well over 100 unique keys for these objects in about a 20 - 30 minute period of time. While the impact on a sim by sim basis may be minimal by whatever standards you are using to gauge these things, I am left wondering what affect it's having on the asset system, which in turn directly affects every SL resident, land owner or not.

Best Regards,
McW

Black Art....Wizard.....they'll be building up the woodpile in town square and roasting you soon

Objects marked as "temporary on rez" do not make assets when they are deleted, so the deletion events are not a load on the asset system.

As for rezzing, the rezzed asset is cached locally on each server that needs it so that also does not load the asset system.

However, constant creation/deletion of objects does expand our logs, which get automatically purged after some period of days, but it does make the logs hard to decipher sometimes when there are many objects such as an army of "lb v2"'s coming into the simulator.

Instantiating the object and inserting its representation into the physics engine is relatively expensive, more so for hollow objects. Linking things together is also expensive which is why I bring up hoochie hair because linking several hundreds of curls just once probably eats the CPU budget of lb scanners for a minute or more.

Part of my job is to prioritize what needs work. There are reasons why right now hoochie hair is high on my list and cracking down on global drones is not. Creating and linking hoochie hair doesn't have to be so expensive... I'm working on (er... soon will be getting back to) optimizing this in 1.7 and maybe backporting to 1.6.x. Someone else is already working on the next generation of the scripting engine which will be much, Much faster than the current one and will make the current lb scanner load even less of load on the system.

I read Andrew's latest post very carefully, and I think that I, for one, am prepared to accept the Linden position as stated for now. If I were Linden, I would do something different, but I'm not Linden.

Everybody hates lag. Linden knows this, who could miss THAT point. It is actually in Linden's own self interest to protect the entire grid from lag, because lag drives users away. I think that you can usually count on businesses doing what is in their own best interest. So, even though I have a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach that maybe "Linden doesn't care about ME", I have confidence that Linden DOES care about Linden. Since my interest corresponds with theirs in this case, I think that by protecting their own interests they will be protecting mine. Never mind why.

So therefore I am not worried about spybot lag. (I stopped calling them lagbots days ago anyway.)

I am also thrilled to see public land for sale appearing on the web. I accept Andrew's statement that they are looking into providing better information about the grid, and I take this as a huge step in the right direction. If this pans out, then the "unfairness" aspect of it goes away as it relates to land barons using tools like this.

Hearing a lucid explanation of Linden's plans for more fairly allocating server resources is very reassuring, and I take it at face value that these are "plans". Plans take time to unfold. I can be patient if I have confidence that things are worth the wait.

Andrew also invites debate about what the land tools ought to be, and I think he's sincere about that. Great, let's discuss that.

I am also reading in this post that anybody CAN make a satellite network. To do this, you don't have to be "FIC" (if you don't know, don't ask). You only have to do it in a way that doesn't burden the grid, crash sims, or create lag. They are willing to do the work to monitor and investigate things like this. I predict trouble, but I have faith that Linden will react (because it is in their own interest to do so) so the future disruptions will be limited. I would rather the disruptions be prevented, but at least I will be able to say I told you so later. Maybe I will get some satisfaction out of that.

I think an explanation to land buyers that says, in simple terms, "what you are buying" would help so that users don't feel violated by things like this. It would only take two or three sentences. “Land” is a three dimensional space extending from X meters below ground to Y meters above ground”, and “Land Tools” affect this space a certain way, and the space above this space in a different way. (Or have I missed something? Does it already say this somewhere?) If people were told up front, they would say, “hey, lookie at that thing up there above my hexahedron”. (Well, ok maybe they would word it differently.)

When the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, there were frantic calls to "shoot it down". (I'm not THAT old, I read that in a book.) But we all accept that things fly over our houses every day. This is because we understand them.

So while I am not joining the other team, I am going to limit myself to debating what the rules should be in the future. I accept that things like lb v2 are allowed, and I accept that this particular one is not laggy. I expect Linden to come through on their promise to (a) monitor these things and change the policy when problems arise, (b) provide better grid information so that spybots are not needed for that purpose.

I’m not happy, but I am accepting.

Buster

The norm in anton is around 450-550 fps with LBv2 active. 550 when i am the only one around. When the LBv2 were deactivated the norm was 650+
I hope this is what you meant with background fps



A virus isn't evil in itself even while talking about normal computer viruses, the mcafee listing is full of low threat viruses that can be considered not "evil" but they are still viruses and intrusive in the system and as such unwanted, and their spreading is still a very very very serious issue.

A virus is not only self replicating. recursion can be a valid algorithm for many tasks, but when it's paired with other issues it quickly goes down the slope of being damaging and unwanted.

A virus is a self replicating being that sneakily inserts itself in a system using a certain amount (high or low, it does not actually matters) of system resources, and hides itself into the system most hidden parts (in this case high into the sky) to avoid detection as much as possible and is specifically designed to avoid possible countermeasures (autoreturn) and as such to force it's presence even against the system's user will. In addition to this if the system is not completely cleaned all at once (you don't eliminate the spawning points in this case) the virus will remain resident in the system and will begin spreading again and automatically return to the same conditions prior to the failed cleaning in little time.
As you can see recursion is not the only issue here, it's a broader number of issues all combined into a single virus that make it absolutely unwanted, and all those issues are present on LBv2.
I agree that there are legitimate uses of land scanning drones, bt they do NOT need to have all those caractheristics and are much more "friendly" towards the system's user's needs and will (return/"uninstall" button anyone?). This is exactly the same difference between an utility program and a virus. An utility program (or script, in the case of LSL) does NOT need and it's not supposed to force it's presence over the system user's will.
The "evilness" of LBv2 shouldn't even be a point of discussion here, a virus doesn't need to be evil to be a virus, nor to be damaging of the system user's rights.
In any case LBv2 can be fully considered a virus, and i think any virus prevention expert could confirm this, so it fits into article 5.1 - V of the terms of service, thus i ask LL to enforce their own TOS and to protect paying customers from such a threat.
There is absolutely no reason not to do it, the fact that the virus is written in LSL should be ininfluential.

Honestly Andrew, as much as i LOVE the endless possibilities of LSL and i fully enjoy using them, i think considerate scripters and the other residents shouldn't be allowed to be held hostage by a few unconsiderate, irresponsible and plain rude scripters. Their efforts to be as server friendly as possible shouldn't be made useless by the greed and/or interests of a single unconsiderate one.
Do you really need to wait until every half decent scripter (it doesn0't take much knowledge) has his little army of LBv2 bogging the grid to an halt before outlawing them?
The more you wait, the more you let the problem expand the more painful will be the "cure".

Even if you don't want to admit guilt, with freedom comes responsibility, and the creator of LBv2 has been horribly irresponsible. I think this should be the leading point.

A virus does not have to be evil to be illegal. lb v2 is a virus by behavior. Dangerous precedent. Dangerous.

Indeed.

Andrew, while I appreciate the concerns of LL in dealing with "hoochie hair", many have already stated that there is quite a difference between objects of that nature (e.g. hoochie hair, bling jewelry, vehicles, planes) and these objects in question. An avatar wearing hoochie hair can exit the sim and the resources that were being used will be returned, while the lb v2 objects are constantly rezzing in a sim, so they are using the resources constantly.

If LL decides to start allocating resources to land ownership when it comes to scripts, does that mean that the lb v2 objects will be using up our resources if they are over our land? How about the resources that are allocated to be used by passing vehicles and planes? If they lb v2 uses up their resources, does that mean that nobody will have any resources left to fly a plane or drive a vehicle?

Also, if these lb v2 objects are given the ok by LL, then that means that other players can do it as well as long as their intent is not malicious. So this means that if someone is given a similar script to the one used for these lb v2 objects, then anyone can place them into a seagull-liked object and have them spread throughout the grid and even if they use up people's resources and cause lag, there would be no violations and they are ok.

Just curious as to what would be the point in which actions are taken, since I understand the human nature of avoiding a situation and only dealing with it once it has gotten out of control.

Because people have asked the perpetrator to stop, some graciously, some not, and he hasn't. Nor is he likely to given the "green light" given by Andrew in this thread.

The "lb v2" scanners have some non-zero cost amortized over the entire grid. They provide some unknown benefit to the creator with the cost externalized among all the other users of SL. There is simply no incentive for the creator to "play nice". And appeals to his ethics or morals have been summarily ignored.

I understand that prim hair attachments are believed to cause a higher load on the system and Andrew is "properly" attacking the larger percieved problem first. I still don't understand the logic of "this gives benefit to one, costs to all, and we have yet to define an overarching policy that makes these 'wrong' and aircraft 'right' so we will do nothing at present". But it is their grid, their rules, and "lb v2" is likely here to stay.

It would be really nice to know what these scanners are doing, as they could well be reporting - for example - where I hold land. It is not clear that they are merely scanning for land for sale. But again, we get the cost and neither benefit nor knowledge.

So Pete Fats' scanners are allowed, legal, permitted. Congratulations, Pete. Regardless of the "legality" it is pretty damn impolite, but that ain't against the law in SL or RL.