The Answer is "NO"

Yes, it's not so much "leverage" as it is a "last straw" to an ongoing problem.

We suspended trading, today when we were obstructed by the concierge for persuing this matter as an official complaint.

Our policy was clearly displayed in our group profile, and any inquiries to us, would have involved the policy being displayed for them. I changed it today, because for the time being, we want some peace from the torch mobs until this can be resolved.

For your information, this is what our charter read until today.

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Global Data Networking since 2004.

Our land is not for sale UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, but we are willing to trade for equal sized parcels within the same sim.

We do not collect personal or avatar information.

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I wish I could Love, but our operation is marginal at best, and lately operating at a loss.

We hold our cards very close to our chest, not to be cagey or surreptitious, but not to give our competiton privity to anything. Besides that, the many ad cutters along the way who claimed to be legitamate, would have adopted our program as a "front" for their agenda.

Non-disclosure weeded most of them out, but a few clever ones remain and I am not in the mood to tip them off.

Well you going to look back on today as the golden times. Within 2 years all of the tiny parcels (16s and 32s) will have disappeared from the mainland, if the owner has under 512m on same sim. Theyre all going to get moved like you're finding out now. The next move going to be micro-parcels swapped with a Linden-owned parcel of same size next to any other land you/we may have on same sim. And to other sim if you/we dont own other land in the sim. Is my guess anyways.

I will respond to this post, because I am aware of some of our dealings with DancesWithRobots.

We have traded land in the past. and will likely do so again.

DWR has every right to this opinion, while we do not necessarily agree with it, we do not find it objectionable either. DWR has sent us notecards too, but rather than insist on anything, choses to be respectful and polite. As such, DWR has been flagged on our system as having the first option to purchase the land, in the event we ever abandon the group. We have hundreds of other similar requests by other residents, and are continually updating that list because we often outlive them.

Although we often run into snags and we catch alot flak from residents, LL upholds our rights to our network. Jack has made numerous indications, there are legitmate uses for micro parcels and I presume, much of that is based on our grid presence.

We want nothing more than to be neighborly. We are not Lindens and we are not perfect.

The current land freeze is not a permanent suspension of our comittment to the community. but an interim measure which is necessary until LL gets it's act together and quits feeding us to the dogs.

Like many other things lately, the economic situation has caused us to cut back, but the lack of clear policy has increased our workload and multiplied the attacks on us.

Why is everyone missing the point that Jack IM'd me, I mentioned this situation and he said it wasn't right and should be fixed. I was advised to request the swap which I did (see earlier post when put in the transaction numbers). I was then told by LL to AR it which I did. I followed their guidelines for dealing with "doughnut holes", the very thing they discussed on these forums and made a policy about. The fact that a guy wants to continue making a a shady secretive business out of something that LL and the residents have stated is a problem that blights mainland is really his issue, personally I think they do it for attention, gives people a reason to contact them.

Dave and Weedy do not MAKE donut holes. They buy small plots, but usually on the edge of a property.

There is no blight to having an empty, non-banlined, unobtrusive plot other than the megalomania of the neighbor.

I don't like data mining and the high secrecy is a little unnerving but if LL cannot prove that Dave and Weedy actually cut that donut hole, then Dave and Weedy are not in violation of the landcutting policy. It is not a violation to own a small plot, but it is now a violation to cut one. And that plot was cut long before the policy was set.

And if Dave and Weedy aren't griefing their neighbors, the neighbors should just let well enough alone.

I doubt very much Jack IM'd you out of the blue, without some of your bullshit attached.

You manipulated the situation based on false ARs. By your own admission, stipulated using terraform to invoke this.

To this day, you remain unrepentent for harassing and threatening Weedy, openly distributing notecards, making defamatory statements in public, manipulating exploiting terraform to wrongly accuse us and who knows what you say and do behind our backs.

Then you have the audacity to come into the forums and crow about what a wonderful anti-16 zealot you are and how getting Lindens to take our land at your behest is reprehensible.

Again, thats right.

We have a very strict policy to 1- Never cut an otherwise decent plot to create a node in our network. 2- Never buy land from extortionists, despite availablity to the sim 3- We develop a price cap, which is normally around 2x the average market value. We have made some exceptions in unique sims, ie full-terra etc. and 4- To respond promptly to requests to trades.

That's just not enough for the anti-everything zealots, though.

ffs I said this earlier, I told you the whole series of events, I said something snarky in concierge, to my surprise Jack IM'd me. I explained how silly it was that a sim be ruined by one plot and he said the doughnut thing was something they were very eager to resolve. Then they resolved it, bawwww all you like but they had a long dialogue with residents regarding those who use small plots commercially (you are selling this data right?). The fact that you've been a blight since 2004 doesn't mean your immune to the changes effected by the voices of those who care about making mainland a better place, a belief that LL certainly hold too as we saw when they stepped up their involvement as an active estate manager.

Taking our land without notification at your behest of lies, is unaccpetable.

Nobody else enjoys that privilege and neither should you.

Linden Lab has no business intervening in disputes between residents and they had no business taking land away from us without notice.

You were muted because you are a griefer, and LL is going to have to answer for it eventually. I have taken this one right to the top.

To reiterate other's questions on the topic of what exactly do you do, well, if all you do is collect a very narrow scope of sim data, then that leaves the llGetParcel*() functions and llGetRegion*() functions in a script, unless I am missing something else. I imagine the llGetParcelDetails() with its wealth of flags is what you use the most, and, with that data collected from multiple parcels in multiple sims, sure it's narrow, but it definitely is in no way lacking lots of BIG FAT & WIDE detailed data that could be used for good or bad purposes. I kind of remember somewhere hearing that you do have clients.

llGetRegion*() functions such as llGetRegionFlags() provide less valuable dynamic information as mainland sims are almost always set the same and remain static. You wouldn't need monitoring scripts in 2000 or whatever mainland sims for that.

I doubt you are collecting much performance data because really, besides getting Time Dilation and FPS, there isn't much other functions in LSL to get any other info. I write scripts that monitor sim performance as a sub function and I know...

What do you do with this data? Are you White Hat or Black Hat or just data miners selling info to whoever will pay for it?

Yes, it all sounds innocent, but if you are collecting, say every parcel coordinate by sim and vector that allows creation of objects and scripts by anyone, hmmmmmm, who would love to have that info? If a griefer group had that info, they could bring down most of the mainland.

Or, since llGetParcelInfo() function has no built-in time delay, a script could hammer every parcel in the sim to find when parcels go up for sale and notify a client Landbot to snag the land up priced below market value before a Landbot using Search could, since Search->Land is throttled.

Lots of uses, but I don't think LL has any use for your data because they already have that data.

You have to admit that when you say we don't do this and we don't use that and we only do this and we are not going to tell you exactly what it is, people are going to be a little suspicious.

Sign me,

Just Curious

Suspicion is one thing, proof is yet another.

For your information, we have never sold data to anyone, ever. We have "leased" our network access before, to cover tier costs, but those times are few and far between. One client was an educational institution, who were students examining performance data for research purposes.

You can paint this any way you like, but our primary intent of non disclosure is for our own protection from competition and letting extortionists privy to us.

Can you imagine Umnik and ROBO, and Luke and the rest of that ilk placing identical scripts on his land and claim legitimacy? Some how I think you can, and we are not willing to give them an inch, so they can take a mile.

It's the very reason why we are still live on the grid, and the exploiters are gone.

Hmm last time i saw Weedy talking to you Ewan you called her a four letter word begining with c in group chat. I doubt that she has seen or read a messages of yours since. Do you really think its unreasonable of her to want to avoid reading your messages since?
You must remember that It was what a month ago and you distributed note cards of a conversation of a conversation that you had had with her. Did she abuse report you as she said she would.
i never really understood why you wanted to distribute that notecard. not only was it a breach of Tos but it failed to support your argument and the swearing in it presented you in a poor light.

"Not going to happen"? Read again what I said. *You* can't stop other people doing the same things to you as has already been done, and the precedent makes it more likely that such actions would be successful. You have publicised the success of such actions and seem to be alienating most people more with every post, including the Lindens, almost certainly - and they are all powerful unless you think that you can successfully take this to external litigation, which the numbers here don't support.

Pep (this is a public relations disaster for *you* primarily)

It's not reasonable to expect us to live by the spirit AND letter of the law, especially when we are and always have been within the rules, yet advocating and ignoring false ARs against us doesn't show you in the brightest light either.

This is a very real issue, and as such I have every right to make it known.

That's your problem in this thread, Ewan. You haven't told the whole series of events, and you're looking very bad. The notecard and transactions evidence that you posted, in an attempt to make yourself look like the good guy, was from 3 days ago, but this has been going on longer than that. Like all of the onlookers here, I don't know what happened and when, but you've lost this one. Your evidence looks like the only bit of the whole thing that could make you look good, but you presented it as evidence that you behaved perfectly well during it. It had the opposite effect and made you look like the bad guy.

Having read the whole thread, that's the way it looks to me.

It's *not* law; it's Linden whim; you have *no* rights, merely privileges which they allow you.

I advocate nothing; I merely observe, so your insulting comment rebounds upon you, and reinforces my belief that you are not helping your cause by expressing your indignation so unconvincingly in Residents Answers.

Pep (IBTL by the way)

PS I have no opinion about the rights and wrongs of your case or your nemesis's behaviour; I am simply saying that I don't think that you are presenting your case well, nor is this the right place to do so.

Wrong, the Lindens are not as omnipotent as you think they are.

Perhaps you should read Bragg v Linden Lab, you might learn some very important points of law.

Linden Lab is not at liberty to breech their contract with residents who are acting in good faith for no reason. NO VIOLATIONS occured here on our part, yet I have proven on multiple points, that Ewan is the one in violation.

That's ok though huh?

Wow enough drama to last for a day or so

Anyway, who is the asshat and who is not, isn't that important. What actually happened, that is important. No one had taken land, something I have read several times in this thread. Land was NOT taken, land was swapped. From somewhere inside an existing parcel towards the edge of the parcel. Something we all would think is only fair. Hooray for LL, as this is a mere example of enforcing an policy, and we all know they are not too good at that in general

What I really do not understand, is the refuse of any disclosure about what happens on these 16 m2 parcels. With as main reason, that the competition could get the same idea. Come on, we just got informed that the business is at a loss. Some competition that would be, copying a business scheme that is loosing money

Anyway, isn't it time to leave this behind you Dave? The only thing that happened, is that the swap of micro-parcels that your group advocates, was not done by you but by LL. No land was stolen, only swapped. Saved your group some work as well.
No matter how much of an asshat Ewan might have been, leave it behind you. No harm has been done except to your pride.

Yikes, it's drama central all up in here. Also, if there were actual moderators I would say IBTL.

Anyway, it's this kind of nonsense that drove my own little microparcel thingy out of business.

There are two key problems.

People can be vindictive selfish assholes who think they are somehow entitled to whatever they wish. We had 1200 16sqm parcels and woud receive maybe 1 or 2 requests for swaps per week. Pretty much they all went smoothly but every couple of months one would turn into a screaming match like this one. Its really draining to have to deal with this BS constantly. Of course from Ewan's perspective that's the point. He just needs to wear down the other side. In a sense "the terrorists already won" when I disbanded Universal Network partly due to this kind of thing.

The other problem is Linden Lab, they're all very lovely and everything but the staff are just people and they make mistakes or bad judgment calls. The thing is the people like Ewan only need to win once to get their way whereas the people like Dave need to win every single time an attack is mounted. There have been several occasions where LL employees have taken my land and just given it to some random guy. Guy Linden set one of my parcels for sale to Anyone for L$1/sqm once for example. Occasionally someone bullies Concierge Support into returning a parcel they sold for less than they would have liked. It's very frustrating but you just have to accept it will happen from time to time while doing your best to prevent it.

All in all, it's clear that Weedy and Dave can be extremely disagreeable and difficult to work with but just because they're assholes doesn't mean Linden Lab should let griefers like Ewan push them around and steal their land.

On the other hand, although LL's behaviour here is awful and must surely have been a great shock to Dave/Weedy in the end they did just swap the parcel out with another somewhere else so it's not like anyone actually lost anything.

We never did anything wrong. Yet land was taken from us without notification, for the wrong reasons.

LL asked us to suspend our operation until they get back to us. Which was supposed to be one week. Several weeks have past and we have once a week asked the concierge for the meeting, as the weeks go by, the excuses get weaker. First she was sick, then she was transferred to another department, then she's busy in a meeting, then no reply at all.

There will never be a proper policy or a meeting of the minds, if the don't minds never meet. We can't expand, we can't sell. Our only choice is wait for LL to stop sitting on their hands, and do what they represented they would do in a timely manner, while our survival hangs in the balance.

As soon as you get away from the Linden's Law it is a question of cost-benefit, *not* of subtle points of commercial law - and it strikes me that you would have to dig deep into your pockets and reveal considerably more about your operations than you seem inclined to - or can afford to, from your last post - in order to score a minor point of principle.

Pep (I fought the law and, surprisingly enough, I won)

Sure, if this was an isolated incident. But it's not.

I don't blame you one bit for abandoning the Universal Network. Fortunately for you, you have other businesses and can absorb the loss. We don't have that luxury. We spent alot of time and money building our network and are unwilling to abandon it, even though it is not currently viable. Athough we currently use the land for a very narrow purpose, it's not to say we won't employ more innovative ideas in the future.

Somehow, I doubt Guy will do this again, but it doesn't correct what he did earlier.

Much like a year ago when a careless Linden took our land and the concierge accused us of "ostentatious advertising", we could not allow that to stand and had to bring this to the attention of the powers that be.

If we did something wrong, we accept our licks, but when we are treated like we have treated lately, something is very very wrong at Linden Lab.

At last! Some insight!

Pep (Much good it will do you now)