Searchbot!

Well my stuff was there before I knew there was a there and that seems to make an opt out option a mute point. I do feel it is a violation of privacy to have your stuff scanned and published on someone's website without your even knowing its being scanned. It had a fountain in my courtyard listed for sale that is not intentionally for sale. I did not realize it was for sale. I would have been darn mad if someone had actually wanted it and bought it. And I do wonder if it is responsible for some of the issues we have been having as of late with the asset servers and the missing or inaccessible inventory items that some have been experiencing. At best it is an unnecessary and unwanted drain on system resources. Further, any hope that I have heard expressed that it will benefit store owners is a joke because it is horribly inaccurate as has been expressed here in previous posts. I don't like it.
JMHO for what it is worth. I guess we all have them.

Web Tab!

It doesn't work in the web tab. ...

I'm guessing you're into this "open source" stuff yourself, which is why you support it.

Such services should only EVER be "opt in". The authors cannot assume that everyone is happy to be included unless they are told otherwise. That is not just a breach of privacy as per the CS, it's also extremely arrogant of them to think that "they know best" and that their ideas can be unleashed upon the grid without anyone actually not being happy about it.

So far, every "bot" that has been made under the open source has been detrimental - land scanners, copybot, now this thing. The majority of us did not support the open source announcement, and most of us still don't support open source. If you're talking about a game and a cheat code, that's one thing, but when people are investing tens of thousands of dollars in SL, it has to be tighter than a duck's butt. Open source removes that tightness.

Broccoli

I doubt any bots use the open source viewer code to operate. They all use libsecondlife which is a result of the natural weakness in trying to operate in a digital environment in which everything can be seen and copied an infinite number of times for free. Libsecondlife has been around for years regardless of open sourceness.

I'm not exactly sure how publishing data about public items standing on public land is a violation of privacy but I'm pretty sure you know my opinion as well as I know yours so I won't go into it too much.

Can't wait till there's 10,000 of these on the loose scanning the grid every hour
Can it find Land too? A poor mans Landbot to keep setting loose on the grid repeatedl?.

Hey maybe someone can use the searchbot to make Landbot/Copybot Hunter/Killers, Live Help is gone and AR's are useless so time to start pigeon hunting. What's a bot going to do if you keep pushing/orbiting/killing it anyway ?

i must say this is awesome! i did a search for my name and it found my freebies ppl are selling.
good job
-LW
ps. there is no privacy on the internet silly,
Ray Tracer: You blokes look uptight. You should try logging off, it relieves tension.

Indeed... although until the open source announcement, it was totally, unequivocably and unquestionably a violation of the terms of service.

Why it was allowed to exist, instead of mass bannings and legal action against the culprits, Linden Lab decided to turn a blind eye instead. There has been much speculation on why, but nobody really knows.

Broccoli

I disagree, and I would think you'd already know that. Your language is a little strong here. Why not add an IMO at the end for safe measure?

If only LL would make the mozilla browser work a bit better, this would be a great thing to run in the mozilla browser.

No need as far as I can tell. Reverse engineering or derivative products was clearly spelt out as being in violation of the ToS at the time. I don't see any "margin for confusion".

Broccoli

I must say: I am really angry about this whole thing!

I'd like to see three things happen:

1. The immediate shutdown of this piece of technology,
2. architectural changes in SL to make such things impossible in the future and
3. an official statement of Lindenlabs how they think about this issue!

I'm going with Broccoli Curry here: such a service should ALWAYS be OPT-IN, not OPT-OUT. This whole thing is a real big breach of everyones privacy in SL! When someone has not heared the news and does not know about the searchbot, well, he's never going to ban it on his parcels to avoid his stuff being listed at all.

I mean, come on, everyone of us has stuff in his home/whereever, he does not liked listed in public at all. When I maintain a webpage, I know there's going to be some spidering about, heck, I want it even to happen normally, and if not, then there's robots.txt, I can keep parts of it closed and so on.

But here? Why should everyone in the world know, for example, if I've got kinky sex toys in my apartment - or not? That's for me only to know, the people I invite, perhaps, and that's it!

This searchbot is just an implication of a bigger problem, though; we don't know if it hasn't happened before or not, so basically SL is unsafe in that kind of matter.

This means: to avoid such search bots in future as whole the underlying architecture of SL should be changed - hopefully - in a way to render such efforts useless in the future!

I'm not so optimistic as the rest of you; come on, be serious! This whole thing can backfire on you later in a very bad, bad way, without you even seeing it coming at all until it is to late! This is about your privacy, a good you should really nurture and treasure!

And, of course, all you oh-so shopping lovers, don't be so blue-eyed and in love with it! They're claming that they're only listing items with the sale flag, I trust them on that. Well... but do you really know if someone (this must not be ECS, this can be everybody) is not going to make far more bigger databases in the future with all objects in it, making files about you, selling information distilled and refined out of this data to companies interested in you, advertising business, whatever?

If this has not already happened - this is the beginning of such technology. There goes your data. SL has lots - once again - some of its innocence. Be afraid, be very afraid...

Not to mention absolutely everyone else in the whole game who cares to move their camera inside your house and click on everything in there.

Well.. let's look at an analogy that shows invasion of privacy by degrees...

* In Real Life, someone peers over your back fence. They have magic binoculars that can peer through walls and around corners. They leave with their memories.

* They come back the next day, video the whole experience, and put it up on YouTube without asking your permission.

Which version is ok with you? The First? First and Second? Neither?

Getting back to the sheepish search, it has no way to determine business versus residential. It is exposing items on a persons parcel that may not even belong to them, but which may inadvertantly be for sale (and do not construe that as some sort of public service) It is good tech, but the deployment leaves a lot to be desired. I am the user; dont make decisions for me that I am forced to undo. It sets a bad precedent.

One wonders how many of the folks that are in love with this deployment are avid pgp/gpg users with everything locked up tight in their emails, drives, etc.

I tested the search engine this morning and discovered a friend had a "for sale" item in his house. I figured it was the "bug" of this engine and wanted to see if I could actually buy it from his home. It TPed me directly into his living room right on the item. I wasn't able to buy it, but I now know where he lives. He doesn't give out landmarks to his home. He has that right to privacy. That is why many people live in skyboxes.

So now, if you type in an AV's name and they accidentally have a "sell" box checked on an object in their home, you can TP right there.

Greifer's delight!

The ONLY good thing about it is you can find out who is selling Freebies. I know of a few Starax items for sale that are actually freebies...

Argument by analogy is the weakest of all arguments. You might as well just open by saying Hitler did it. Fact is you put some stuff in a publically accessible place and then the public came along and accessed it. There's no need to act all surprised and insulted. Maybe you were under the mistaken impression that the inside of your SL house was private. This is an unfortunate misconception that many hold.

I just found some of my freebies for sale. Time to bop some heads.

Invasion of privacy.... ummm hello.... this is secondlife there is NO SUCH THING as privacy, it's been gone out the window for ages now and any illusion of it you might have is just that an illusion. Just like locking your front door, or putting up a skybox both of which make you think you have privacy, but down on the ground is a guy with his draw distance set to 512, and camera pointed right at you. Get use to it. Bots are here to stay, they have always been here, before people even knew they existed and the world itself is just adapting to having bots that are publicly known about and it's going to get worse in the long wrong, bots for events, bots for shopping, bots for advertising.... they call this the future of the web, well guess what, the web grew thanks to bots.

That is not true at all, at all. Only the more infamous bots are detrimental (and even that is not unequivocal), there are in fact bots made using libsl that are in no way detrimental to anyone in Second Life.

You seem to be very fond of strong "absolute" statements that are not always in fact correct The Lindens acknowledged that libsl (*itself*, if not all possible uses of it) was acceptable before open sourcing the client as well.

.

So today it shows Nothing of mine for Sale.
This is now up to date ?

It does not include my Mainland shoppe at all. Hmm am I happy or sad ?

Now, with search bots, if you piss in their Wheaties, they will delete you or poison the database with false responses or change the data in some way to give false impressions, (ie) changing prices or descriptions.

Landbots already proved in spades, they are crooks and smug asshats motivated by greed. Now we can expect much of the same from searchbots.


Not suprising though. It will certainly be abused and LL will remain silent.

Me included. My main shop doesn't show, even though I pay for it.

Just another example of corruption IMHO. Bad enought they take work away from me, now they want to kill my radio business and finish me off.

Searchbots are a kludgey method of acquiring this info. LL should give us the permission fields needed for fine grained web visibilty, make permitted data available on the web, provide an API, and give us the mozilla browser so we can use the sites that develop as a result right in the SL viewer.

From LL's standpoint:

should != would
take > give

Doing things in a roundabout way is the norm down there in SF. Afterall, ratings changes are the highest priority.... right up there with voice. Bugs, what bugs? Oh.. right, they need to create more bugs.

Umm... Wow. That is more negativity than I would expect even from you on this issue. Is there any *logical* reason to expect that Electric Sheep Company is going to "poison the database" just because they don't like you? I find that extremely difficult to believe.

Not necessarily. It is possible though.

Objects inadvertantly set for sale default to 10L. Wonder how long it will take to see people's houses, or no copy items items get bought up, by accident?