Linden's landbot protection, what will it be?

Robin Linden suggests a new feature will be added to make it more difficult to buy land using landbots.

What do you suppose this protection scheme will involve?

As no information has been provided yet, we're all just guessing of course. I was thinking of something along the lines of a turing number.

I assume it will be a CAPTCHA, they already use them on the sign up page for new accounts.

CAPTCHAs are those little images containing skewed and distorted text on a background containing noise that are supposedly difficult for automated systems to read the text out of, hence preventing automated activity of some type.

I say supposedly because a lot of them have flaws. In the case of the CAPTCHAs used by Linden Lab, the main flaw from my point of view is that I can't read them as a human either!

Thats the same thing that I was gonna suggest. I see it being much like rapid shares (Think it rapid share) sorting of free accounts. If you go to download something you have to wait 45 seconds and then key-in a three letter code.

The thing is, will this bring with it anymore grid lag then we have already been getting. It gets to points when simple building is impossible.

I have trouble with them myself - I often find it quite possible to interpret at least one camouflaged character in more than one way.

Captcha solving systems already exist, and apparently work well enough that human moderators are still needed to delete posts and ban users from forums that use them to limit registration access.

One method of defeating captcha is for the bot program to post the captcha image on a free porn site as a challenge to access some porn.

The bot programs can call the person running them when they need help, can't they?

In theory, yes they could - but then your speed advantage has disappeared and a real human would have got the plot. Or a better bot

Same with putting the captcha on a porn site, for example. That's fine if you want to automatically register a bunch of accounts on a site, because there's no time pressure - you can just keep the account until you need it to post spam, then throw it away.

However, obviously in the case of land buying at cheap plots, bots were brought in not to relieve the drudgery of registering accounts but to establish a speed advantage over humans.

Hmm, or a camping chair, maybe...

Hmm, pay folks to help the bots solve captchas - the bot could could upload the captcha image and send it to members of a "solve the captcha for lindens" group inworld, pay the first one with a working answer a linden or two.

Now the Landbot protection scheme may involve something like checking some field in the client program or such. Can the servers tell whether they are connecting to an official Linden made viewer or to a third party viewer?

What if such a check were in the official client, but conveniently left out of the source code that's available?
Surely such an ommission is legal.

It would make anyone with an open source client have a tad harder time buying land (maybe "if check fails, send captcha" serverside), but it would seriously hamper a bot and bot programer.

On the other hand they only said they'd look into it. Not that they'd actually implement it. Meanwhile I did think of hiring hordes of newbs to solve captchas for me since they seem happy to work for pennies per hour. I'd simply pay a bonus to the first person to get the captcha right and ignore people who accidentally or deliberately got it wrong.

I dunno, after all of LL's words about escalating wars against decompilers I'm kinda sad that they'd try to go down this road. Either outlaw bots or allow bots, this sort of half assed measure seems like a waste of everyone's time. Meanwhile I already have solutions to protections they didn't even implement yet.

Of course, I'm kinda biased so perhaps my opinion should be taken with a pinch of salt.

Don't forget, it's useless to get the correct solution in this situation if it's going to be slower than just clicking on search, teleporting manually and solving the captcha yourself.

That was my first thought, they've stressed so many times that they don't want to get into an arms race with developers, and now they're insinuating that that's exactly what they're going to do.

The obvious solution would be to restrict repeat queries from the same client (including other clients on that IP address) to once per 60 seconds or something equally unacceptably slow to justify a bot. Yes, I know land moves fast, but I don't think it moves *that* fast.

Personally, I have nothing against bots, *provided taht they are being directly used to enhance the interactive in-world experience of everyone in the world*. Unfortunately, I have seen no reports of any such bots yet.

I suggested that a couple days ago but now think it's not the best solution - it would just encourage people to create an army of alt-bots to distribute the searching to the point that, taken together, they're still hitting the database at whatever rate they want. I guess they could filter on IP or even subnet but there's ways around that and it turns to a arms race which LL has said they don't want to get in to.

I suspect that LL will do CAPTCHA or some other random gate that requires a brain behind it to get through.

I think the protection scheme will go like this, linden labs will have 2 light bulbs in a room being filmed by a web cam and switching on and off in intervals of x seconds where x is between 1 second and say 30 seconds. These light bulbs are in front of a web cam that films both at once and when someone pulls up the buy land window they will get a still shot of the light bulbs in which they have to be able to tell which one is on and which one is off. Since X is an ever changing variable though one that LL can predict either through keeping track of the changes or via making it predictable in a way that they know it can work as a pseudo random captcha alternative.

...

Well, I have a bot that enhances *some* people's in-world experience, but falls far short of ehancing *everyone's* in-world experience....

I have used libsecondlife code to create a bot capable of halfway decent melee combat for the samurai combat community (Combat: Samurai Island) that I participate in regularly. It's fun, and people seem to really like to see if they can beat him Feel free to IM me in-world for a demonstration if you like.

I know others in the same community developing bots for various roleplay and community reasons.

I certainly hope that whatever measure the Lindens come up with to stop automated land-buying bots doesn't harm the ability of developers to create bots that really are harmless and fun.

Not really. A bot that uses human or any means of evading a protection scheme that doesn't require the operator's attention doesn't have to be faster or as fast as the operator in order to save the operator time and trouble. Also bots, unlike humans, can work 24/7. Also, defeating the protection scheme isn't the only thing the bot does; the bot can also teleport to the parcel and make the purchase, and the bot can make make decisions on whether to buy based on average land prices, average prices for the particular sim, etc. without the operator having to be involved.

Oh yes, the bot can do a lot of the other work in buying, selling and setting up land for sale. But I honestly don't think people would actually have an issue with that, it is the rapid finding and buying of land that has a lot of peoples noses out of joint, simply because it has always been the fastest people to the plot who managed to snaffle all the cheap plots.

You put a time-limit on the CAPTCHA image, when you click buy a little pop-up window appears with the newly created image and a field to enter it and underneath is the text "You have 30 seconds to enter the code", if you fail to do so then it is replaced with a new one, or closes or whatever and you have to start again to do it.
If a bot can screenshot, upload and get a human response for the image within the 30 seconds then I'd be mildly impressed.

There is of course however the issue of bots being used to find the plots then re-direct them to a human operator, thus then can run a bot in the background and use it to jump in quick, while removing the need to do the checking themselves, which is just as bad IMO.

The bot clients will likely not be making screenshots ; they'd get the test image sent as as a file just like the regular secondlife.exe client would for displaying to a human.

I've read reports that various sorts of cheatbot networks are already being used succesfully to game the system in some online games, with human operators getting paid to monitor multiple bots and intervene when needed.

What systems other than captcha and search throttling are there for reducing the advantage bots have over humans?

Forcing of negligible time delays in certain aspects.
Such as:
Force teleports to occure at a delay of 2 seconds, regardless of data being sent to the client. An ordinary user won't notice, most teleports take over 2 seconds as it is.

Force a 1/2 to 1 second delay in sending search data. Most users won't notice as the delay is so small.

Force a delay into responce speed, i.e. if buttons/dialogs are clicked through too quickly, slow down their interpretation serverside. Delays of 1/2 second would not effect a normal user due to the user's complete inability to respond that quickly.


Other thouht:
What if land sales worked a little differently?
If there are two or more people on the land being sold, allow all parties to place, essentially a bid for the land. Give people on the land 1 minute to attempt to buy.
If more than one person places a bid at the same time, inform, get new bid. If someone attempts to bid after there are any bids, display the new price. If it's too high they can cancel.
Sell the land to the winner, obviously.

This would be similar to normal land auctions, but takes place quickly merely because there are two or more people who are currently present and both want the land.

Bidbot.

When abuse staff get saddled
With newbies who have tattled
On bidbots that have battled
and the land sale system gets addled,
it's a saddled addled tattled landbot bidbot battle.

or the extinguishing race of the flesh made landbots could simply accept the fact that simple and repetitive tasks are better done by programs.

Perhaps, but there's only so much use to one.