Prevent automated land buying!

No it doesn't:

What you have created is NOT a viewer, you aren't using it to view the grid yourself, what you have created is a BOT which does not require human input at all. It is therefore essentially the same as copybot tools which take content that is "freely available" due to the way SL sends data, and creates copies of them unfairly.
You have created an exploitative bot that goes well beyond what can be reasonably defined as a 'viewer'.

The TOS don't state that the the software has to actually view anything. It says you can create software that provides access to the servers for the same function as the viewer, or a subset of that. Clearly, searching for land, teleporting and buying land all fall within functions provided by the viewer and therefore Elanthius's bot by definition implements a subset of the features provided by the viewer.

Copybot didn't infringe upon the TOS per se, using it to commit copyright theft did. There's obviously no way that this is a copyright infringement issue, so mentioning Copybot is a strawman.

Yes, the key phrase there is "any subset thereof"

But, let me ask Haravikk, what exactly is your definitiion of the viewer?

As I pointed out in an earlier post, mundane modifications to subsets of the viewer's functions that help with real estate purchase would definitely be acceptable, and would still fit the definition of a viewer (either yours of LL's). Yet, apparently, at some point along the way, the combination of mundane modifications become objectionable to you. Where and Why?

You said, "...what you have created is a BOT which does not require human input at all."

Is it a bot, and not a viewer, because he doesn't need to be staring at the screen for it to work? So, if he made it so that he had to sit there and press a "Go" button, while it performed everything else it does in an automated way, would that draw the software back into your definition of "viewer"?

My point is, there is no clear line where the viewer is suddenly a bot. The viewer LL provides already has many tools that help you automate certain mundane tasks, and more such tools are added with every official update. A "bot" simply automates a certain amount of tasks, beyond some critical threshold, when suddenly Haravikk and the OP start to scream their heads of at the heinous crime. I want to know, what is this threshold? Or is it really a grey area? If its a grey area, then let's define it as much as possible.

I think you will see that without a black-and-white definition of "bot," there is nothing LL could add to its TOS or GPL that could prevent "bots," whatever they may be, without halting progress on the project in general.

Just my 0.02...

For starters, this guy and his bot is not buying up all of the land, nor is he preventing the average player from buying land. It makes no difference to me, as an average player, whether I buy land from him or some other land baron/swooper/speculator. What has made a difference is that I recently bought land from him cheaper than I could have 2 weeks ago. So as far as this consumer is concerned I am grateful prices are going down. Now prices could have gone down because of the flood of new land, I have no idea. But really, it strikes me as a bit disingenious that "land barons" would be upset over this. I have never been able to buy land from anyone other than someone else who swooped in before me and snatched it all up for a quick sale. "Land barons" being upset that they just might have to buy land from a middleman just like everyone else is not exactly something that gets my panties all in a wad

Secondly, by using this bot and buying up lots of land, this guy is putting his own capital at risk. It is not like he is getting some sort of free ride. If he can buy more land faster and sell it for a lower profit margin than other land speculators, the winner ends up being me, the average player who just wants to buy a piece of land to call home. Can you say Wal Mart?

Thirdly, as far as I can tell, he is doing nothing immoral or illegal, unless he is using multiple accounts to bend rules. I have no idea if he is or not.

Here comes the BUT.

Linden labs opening up the client is one thing, but allowing ANY untested, unpredictable client to actually attach to the grid is incredibly and insanely stupid in my opinion. For all I know every single crash of the grid over the last few weeks could have been caused by this user testing his modified client during development of it. Considering the fact that a poorly modified client connecting to the grid can render the entire grid unusuable by 10's of thousands of paying customers, allowing them to connect without limits is severely irresponsible. In my opinion Linden should require all developers to register themselves and test their client in a monitored development sandbox before allowing the code to connect to the actual grid. There should be a reasonable effort made by Linden Labs to audit the code and its effects before allowing it loose on their servers... If the code is "approved", some sort of signature should allow it to connect to the grid. Unsigned clients should not be allowed to...

To reiterate, I've been pretty careful with my bot and think it's use of resources is probably much lower than a normal avatar. Nonetheless, I have similar concerns and someone is definitely going to have to come up with solutions to this problem. I think my suggestion would instead be for LL to develop a way to monitor each player's load on the server either in retrospect by examining logs or live. Then users who are found to be overloading the DB or doing absurd things with physics can be asked to refrain or throttled or banned as appropriate. This would have repurcussions against greifers as well as badly coded bots. An auto throttler wouldn't be such a bad idea either. Heavy DB users could have the priority of their requests reduced for example. Something similar to the way llHTTPRequest() is throttled might be appropriate.

Just a couple of thoughts after my last post....

People with large amounts of land (speculators/barons) are not exactly powerless to compete with a bot. All they have to do is lower the price of their own land below what the competitor is selling for. That is what competition and free markets is all about

Depending on how intelligent the modified client is (and its author), the semi-unscrupulous could create honeypots that gum up the automated buying... Take plots of land, divvy them up into 1M strips that no human resident would buy, and price it just below average to let the bot start buying it up. For extra added pleasure only allow it to be bought by the bot owner. Of course, they would have to be alternating strips to prevent the bot from buying them and joining them back...

About half a dozen individuals who may remain unnamed have been doing all the things you described and more. My favourite was when they would set land at a very low price then raise it quickly hoping I'd pay the higher price. They even had the gall to ask for their land back after slipping and letting it sell at the lower price.

Their latest trick is to follow my bots around and harass the previous owner of land into claiming he sold it in error so they can buy it in a private transaction for slightly more.

A robots.txt for the grid, in effect.

The problem with what you suggest, however, is that the expense in CPU usage of the monitoring itself would probably defeat the purpose of the monitoring

LL should impose limits on the client, just like throttling on certain LSL functions. Not allowing access to the production grid to unauthenticated clients is the only realistic way I can see that they can protect the grid from DoS attacks, whether they be intentional or accidental.

Has it crossed your mind that you might be able to make more money by auctioning the modified code than by using it? Of course, if I am not mistaken, at that point you would have to release the changes since you would be distributing it...

I'm reserving that option for when my bot is about 3rd or 4th best in the game.

Only bots derived from the Open Source Second Life viewer need to have their code released with the binary, under the terms of the GPL.

libsecondlife AFAICT has a BSD-style license, which confers no obligation upon the distributor to provide the source code. Microsoft famously used BSD-licensed networking code in Windows and at no point were obliged to show anybody any source.

So it depends on how a given bot is implemented.

No, you are quite right. They don't have to, but it's a line I can draw in the sand that I am able to say "anything on that side" and "anything on this side" and "well, maybe it's still not quite right, but it's a start."



I completely understand.
I think however, that he has done his test for buying cheap land.
If he were going to move on to the stage of making better search and buy tools he'd only need to run the bot for a few days, see how well it did.
Then he'd abstract the bot part out, removing the automated controls and building buttons that the user would click to do each of those parts (automated "find me cheap land and alert me," "goto and buy this plot," etc.)

What it looks like to me is that he plans on building a bot that is "good enough" (only 3rd or 4th best in the world) and then redistribute it as a bot.



He is. Each bot has it's own account.

You may not like what Elanthius is doing, but I wouldn't call it immoral. He's exploiting an ability that SL provides for him to make money.

Now, I don't see his bot as providing any worthwhile service to the community; on the contrary all it does is drive prices up slightly (IMHO, higher than they would be without it). And probably not significantly if it's true that we're talking about a small fraction of land available for sale.

The first question here is whether it should be allowed or not, and not whether he's evil or the antichrist. If it's made illegal (somehow) then no doubt he'll either stop voluntarily or be forced to stop.

The second question would be HOW; precisely what should be against TOS: too frequent server queries, or land sales without human interaction, or what? While that's a technical argument, it does have implications, and many folks who would agree on a "yes" to the first question would vote "no" to any number of potential options for the second question.

Frankly, I suspect it does not provide any value and therefore there's no point in allowing someone to profit by it. However, I could be wrong there. Elanthius might be able to make the claim such as, by buying many lots of land and presenting the available choices in an easily browsed format, he's providing a valuable service. Or he might even be able to show that his buying/selling habits make the market more liquid somehow. Programmed trading is allowed (with limitations) in the stock market -- why shouldn't it be allowed for land in SL? (Rhetorical question -- I still think it does more harm than good, but I'm interested in why it should be different from the RL stock market.)

And finally, I'm not saying that anything that allows profit without providing some value should be illegal. It's just one consideration among many, and an important contrary consideration is the liberty to buy and sell in any way you want. That consideration has to be taken carefully as well.

It's up for us to choose whether we want it or not, and up to LL to choose whether to listen to us or not. Unfortunately, there's no way to vote "no" in the feature requests, so LL won't know how many people considered the subject and specifically do NOT want it.

Where I come from, we call these people "scabs". This a group of people who take the jobs from others solely for the purpose of financial gain. That is immoral as it gets.

The hacks from W-Hat have gotten their way. LL fell for it hook, line and sinker.

We have only seen the tip of the iceberg.

More bots is not the solution, it's only the beginning of the end.

It is the end. The end of your sort of land dealing. You were taking advantage of a market inefficiency, and bots make the market more efficient by providing a ready buyer.

He's created a way to have a standing limit buy order for land, just like any commodity exchange. If you want the same opportunity, either hire someone to develop a similar bot for you, or encourage Linden Lab to build in land limit buy orders, so that you can place them that way.

Flaming a land agent is just silly, you should concider what benefits land agents make, if you find a good and trusted one, you can always rely on them to find you the perfect peice of land, so YOU dont have to spend all day doing itand if you dont like it, DO IT YOURSELF

Ethanthius, you made alot enemies of people that where your friends. your trying to put your competition out of business or atleast significantly reduce their ability to make money. The key to Second Life is friends, and your circle of friends has become alot smaller, your time is limited indeed, friend.

Can we say, if you dont like it do it yourself?, Yes, Ethanthius you let the genie out of the bottle and now it can't be put back in, but heres a warning to all you non land agents out there that are getting a chunkle out of this, you think your going to find land easier when 10 of these bots are running around? 20? 100?

Now Ethanthius, you mentioned you only had two bots working, maybe but how many of these land bots did you give Skye? as far as I can see there is atleast 5 working Dont admit something to only admit half truths.

Im not complaining about you running the bots, thats your edge ok so be it. But you need to be able to accept the negative that comes with it. the deed wasn't in good intentions, and that is the cross you bare, and those around you that you harmed will not soon forget

You mean, by introducing actual competition he has disrupted your business model, therefore he is evil incarnate? I am curious about how much price fixing has gone on between "land barons" and how much they have "cooperated" to keep prices up.

He's created a way to have a "limit buy" order by hammering the server with requests.

What we need is a Linden comment on this, pity there's no Linden Answers forum any more.

Recent Linden blog entry:


See http://blog.secondlife.com/2007/01/30/new-continent-coming-to-second-life-mainland/ for the full entry.

Oh rly?

So one person contolling the low end of the market is good for business and SL?

I don't think so.

There is no "collusion" between land barons, only competition which drives pricing and economics.

I'm sure you are quite pleased that hackers now control the land market, tell me....what's the difference and why is one person's monopoly better?

There's no monopoly here. This is just another kind of competition between real estate moguls. There's nothing preventing others from using the same tactics -- yes, a barrier to entry but not an insurmountable one.

I've said I don't think I like it and would like to see a way to limit or exclude it. But we need to stick to the real issues.

You could even look at the upside. Let's say you find yourself owning a 512M plot between a noise factory, a stink warehouse, and a griefer hangout. Nobody in their right mind would buy this property after seeing it. Yet you have a good chance of getting near the marginal rate from the bot.

Is that enough of a benefit to warrant this kind of thing? I don't know.

You call the use of automated bots "actual competition"? How about everyone having to search the land for themselves, which is what was happening before the landbot... I can not understand how you consider that "Actual Competition". And when did I say evil incarnate? and did i say it was hurting my business model? Seems you have a passion for inventing your own literature to read

Now i have also noticed that the land search is not updating itself, a sold peice of property might stay on the land search list for 15 - 20 minutes, Im sure this has everything to do with the increased load on the database trying to fill 5-10 bots search request every 2 seconds, that is if you can beleive they are set to every two seconds

There is no competition between moguls when it comes to bots. The long and the short of is, the faster bot will control the market. All the other bots will do, is further pressure the search database....for nothing.

I fail to see that as being a good thing.

That was exactly my point. What is the difference if a limited number of land barons buy it up first and sell it to me when I need some land, or someone running a bot? The difference is bot owner is selling at a lower markup. So I (the customer/consumer) spend less on land. If he can buy more faster, he can markup less and sell at a higher volume, therefore driving prices down. While this obviously does not benefit land barons, it does benefit "normal" residents who are not in it for the quick buck...

So sorry, I'm not buying all of the whining and complaining

Lower markup? What makes you so sure? Truth is you have no such knowledge.

I won't argue your real agenda, which is anti-land baron at any cost. In case you hadn't noticed, land barons have been around since day one and SL has flourished. I see no evidence that a monopoly will be better for SLin lieu of the traditional land baron, in fact quite the opposite is the case.

I'd rather LL buy all the land and re-issue as first land or resell it, as opposed to a hacker with a monopoly running the low end market.

That would be better for SL than your idea (which is not a solution but an attack, anyway)