Landbots 101

No, coders can work around CAPTCHA where open source is involved.

Not if the CAPTCHA is generated and checked by the server.

Could also show a picture of some ducks flying around with some starlings, and ask how many ducks?

The client is totally insecure, but the server should be unpredictable.

what does open source have to do with it?
there are plenty of open source programs made specifically for digital security

anyways, i would think it possible to implement some sort of CAPTCHA authentication as a part of the land buying process, if that were the desire of LL to do so.

Although I've never seen the code for CAPTCHA, it's my understanding form those who have and LL themselves, that it can be worked around using a C# utility.

That would normally be unvailable to the average user or closed source. Much like a key generator for a game or application, in order to reject an incorrect response, it would have to know the correct one. A utility in open source could get the correct response and include it in the purchase details.

This is how hackers create key generators, by simply extracting it from the install program and compiling it into it's own .exe

I am inclined to agree, so long as it's server side or digitally encripted with a variable algorithm.

The desire to do so, is yet another can of worms

Is it possible to limit the ammount of resources the databse server allows a client to hog?

Meaning - If a normal avater uses X amount of databse resources while shopiing. If you limit the maxium to 5X, then all normal players are unaffected. While bots are slowed.

Alternatively, can it be tracked?

IF someone uses 20x the database resources of a normal user - they should be billed for it.

Yes Collete, it can be limited. Given the state of the current database resources, I think it might be inevitable and can be applied in a vast number of ways.

Cuurently, you can see an example for yourself. Bring up your search window, and select mainland land sales....hit the search button 6 times really quick. You will then be blocked from searching for 60 seconds.

Those numbers can be changed to any integer by LL, at any time.

The same can be applied to script queries and/or functions and attached prims.

Considering that landbots basically automate a giant chunk of land selling / buying - I dont see why the Lindens even bother to keep it as an in-world activity.

They can just have people buy and sell their land via the website, ala LindenX.

That way the bots / flippers / etc can do their "legal" thing - and they dont have to lag the rest of us in world.

Web pages require resources too. All of which comes off the total allowable bandwidth.

I remember back a few years when the lb_v2 bot was hovering our sims, LL tried putting public land on the web page. It seemed like a good idea at the time, by allowing everyone equal access to public land, however, several people made auto-refresh pages with audible alarms and hammered the homepage into the ground.

LL killed it soon after.

Interesting - yet they havent killed this system.

I know when we get over 35k residents the database is nearly useless. If a bot is 20 or 100 users (or more) as far as the database goes, then we could survie with more logged in if they were curtailed.

The only service I see the bots providing is allowing people to liquidate their land easily. Of course human controlled land barons did that already with less negatives.

Liken it to robbing 40 Peters to pay 3 Pauls. That's about the size of it.

About three or four dozen people were able to make a small living out of the land business, if they were diligent and ethical. Over the years, perhaps hundreds of small land barons worked their way into other more independant businesses such as rentals or estates.

It makes no sense whatsoever, that LL would scare away 40 people with establish business, merely to invite new bot businesses, to do exactly the same thing, perhaps worse.

I did it for nearly three years, only to be kicked to the curb while all the money now goes to 3 people. Thirty thousand US dollars to one person per month, stinks of corruption. They pass money to alts to get around LindeX tiers.

It's not fair, nor right.


One bot will ALWAYS dominate the others, so even with a hundred bots, one will prevail, while your resources are eaten alive.

The current terms of service contain the following:

The first paragraph essentially makes all bots a violation of the TOS. One could argue that the second paragraph legitimizes them, but that would depend upon the interpretation of "substantially similar function (or subset thereof)." Personally, I don't believe that argument holds water.

The last paragraph grants an exception for modified versions of the source viewer. Bots that were written prior to the release of the source code do not, presumably, fall under that exception and thus are still a violation of the TOS. That may be moot, however, since it shouldn't be too hard to combine the source code of a bot with the open source viewer, so that it would then come under that exception.

I can't say for certain whether any of these bots violate the prohibition against unreasonable or disproportionately large loads, but it seems highly likely. Thus they would be a violation of the TOS even if they fell under the open source exception.

Finally, it seems Linden doesn't even do quality control on their legalese. Any programmer worth his salt could explain to any lawyer worth his salt that "use and modify the source code" is so open ended as to be worthless, because virtually any software can be redone to appear as a modified version of the client.

They could easily fix this by adding a provision to this section saying something like: "No software may be used to contact this service in a way that provides an advantage in any transaction over what can be done by manual use of the official client, without the permission of Linden Labs. This includes automated searches to obtain information not easily obtained manually, and automated operations that allow the user to perform operations much faster than could be achieved manually."

Indeed they could.

They are reluctant to do so, being my impression.

I don't really have much exception to people developing their own apps for their own purposes, so long as it's not exploitive, resource intensive or imposes upon others.

Land bots fail on all three of those counts.

The term CAPTCHA is a trademarked acronym, owned by Carnegie-Mellon University, that stands for Completely Automated Public Turing Test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. It doesn't stand for any specific program or algorithm; they have several different examples on their web site. Others have created programs for similar purposes, and called them captcha programs, as well. (Don't ask me how CMU can claim a trademark on something that doesn't seem to be a product.)

So, there's no such thing as "the CAPTCHA", and hence you can't have seen the code, just the code for one or more particular programs that implement CAPTCHAs. New methods are being researched and developed all the time, and there's no requirement that any of them be open source.

There's also no reason to believe that you can't have a CAPTCHA that is essentially impossible to circumvent with automation. I encourage you to try out the examples at the CAPTCHA web site, http://www.captcha.net.

Daisy makes an important point that got buried.

For the average SLian, buying and selling their property is (are?) the biggest monetary transaction(s) they'll make here (just like in RL). Why is it such an incredibly quick process? Why isn't there a formal "closing"? If the two parties had to meet in a location in-world, would that help stop this bot-landrape?

The people most affected by this are noobs. They think they've entered a fantasy world, with nice people everywhere, talking creatures and magic at their fingertips. When they discover that there is plenty of organized crime in land sales and realize they've been screwed, I'm going to guess they get upset. Maybe they are part of that 90% who try SL and DON'T COME BACK?

If LL was concerned one iota about customer satisfaction, they would stop this slimy practice tomorrow.

The first thing I tell any new person, after "Hello" and "Welcome to SL" is "If you're thinking about buying land, talk to many, many people here. Real estate on the mainland is covered with noob corpses."

I guess some people use the "...Your Imagination." part of the SL themeline to mean "figure out new ways to screw other folks." (Without the use of pose balls.)

Real estate brokers in RL add value, helping make the property salable, helping with financing, scheduling important meetings, etc. They work hard to earn the commission. Land Barons here on the mainland rarely do anything but buy land, mark it up, make the land uglier with bad "for sale" signage, and then move on after they collect their money. With this new scheme, they do even less and make SL a worse place for the rest of us. Terrific.

This is my main beef. That land bots allow people to purchase and resell land quickly and automatically is of little concern, but I agree that it is a major problem that a small number of people are using an automated process to eat up bandwidth. Frankly this is much more concerning than campers, since the latter only affect a single sim, whereas the landbots create problems for the entire grid.

I'm not opposed to these landbots.

First, they do provide a service. When another month of high tier looms, many people try to mitigate their costs by selling land. Under the built-in system, they can either put it up for sale or "abandon" it, essentially giving it back to LL for free. Most people prefer to sell it. However, it's not always easy to get a "fair" price for your land when you have to sell it by a certain date. In the old days (and still today) many people would contact a land agent, someone who advertised that they buy land. They would have to choose between paying the tier, selling to a land agent below market, or hoping someone comes and pays their asking price before the cutoff date. If they chose to sell to a land agent at below market, they were always left wondering if some other land agent would have paid more. Bots fit into the "land agent paying below market," and there is a demand for that. Buying land now, even for below-market prices, is a service. Having competing bots (and non-bot land agents) simply keeps the market efficient, meaning land sellers who have to sell fast will get the highest below-market price possible (a bot buying at .1/m2 more than another bot establishes a new price "floor," and the land seller should be able to see that).

Second, how do you stop them? My experience from other environments, where bots are illegal, is that people still run bots. By not making bots illegal in SL, LL avoids looking ineffective and silly in this way.

Third, SL markets itself as an environment where people can make real money. I'm taken aback at the resistance of some to people who make their money buying and selling land, and to people who make their money scripting bots. Why should only object designers be acceptable businesspeople in SL? How come nobody runs down the people who take the same free prims available to us all, and trim and twist and texture them and mark them up so high? People begrudge land dealers their profits. Do they also begrudge scripters and builders and retailers theirs? Land agents sink a lot of money into their business; if they're willing to pay, and someone else is willing to buy, who are you or me to interfere?

What does it hurt anybody to have bots running around buying cheap land?

What is hurtful is taking advantage of people who don't understand the risks of selling land to "anyone" for cheap when they really intend it to go to someone in particular. But this is a separate issue from bots. Just as with non-bot land agents and end buyers, some bot owners will return the land when asked, and others won't.

As for throttling searches, I'm against it. It makes things inefficient. The other day I was looking to buy some land, land that the current search mechanisms can't filter for. I found I could scan a whole page of search results, hit "next," and do this again often enough and quick enough to invoke the throttle and be put on "time out" (I was scanning for terms like "waterfront" and "protected". I don't feel like bots lost their advantage with the throttles, but I do feel like I wasted some time.

You are being deliberately disingenuous here. It's like saying that artists just take a few dollars worth of paint and a cheap canvas and sell it on to the public for thousands. In the case of builders, designers, scripters, texture artists, greeters, heck, even escorts, they provide something that people want and are paid for their services. If you eliminated all the clothes makers tomorrow, people would miss them. Same with the scripters, the builders, the gunsmiths, what have you, all the people that contribute something to the world that is SL.

However, if you eliminated all the land speculators, no-one would miss them; in fact, everyone would give a big cheer. The idea that they provide a service by snaffling all the cheap land and thus making it easier to get rid of land quickly is pretty thin. Actually, the land dealers who DO provide a service are arguably those who buy entire sims (that most residents couldn't afford) and resell them in affordable parcels. But those who just speculate are parasites. They wouldn't be good for SL if they just speculated at a leisurely space. The fact that they do it by hammering the database with bots makes them actively bad. And those that swoop in to interrupt would-be private transcations are thieves.

I guess we'll just have to disagree on this. If all the land agents who buy and sell land for a profit were taken out of the game, I believe people trying to sell their land would take longer to find buyers and have to accept less for their land.

With land bots, prices are much higher than they used to be.

There seems to be more cries from buyers saying land prices are too high than sellers saying they can't sell. Newcomers are buyers aren't they? Land resellers are making it difficult for the land buyers. With more sims coming online isn't it a safe bet there are more buyers than sellers?
OK a seller might take a little longer to sell but newcomers will find it eventually ... won't they? and with the middle-bot cut out, the buyer should get a better deal, the seller may get a better deal and the database might get back to running how it was designed to.

The prices are at least partially due to LL putting most new hardware into trying to fill the huge surge in island sales late last year and the monsterous growth SL has seen lately. Can't blame all of the price increase on bots.

I'm not a fan of bots. I also don't buy the "but it helps people sell quick!" line - anybody who needs to sell land could sell it without the "help" of bots.

As I stated, I for one don't care about the "buying cheap land" aspect of things. What annoys me is that the functioning of landbots amounts to a denial-of-service attack. All of their repeated searches are eating up bandwidth and doing a number on the servers. It is simple enough to see how much trouble the system has handling my occasional (like, once a day) searches, so multiply those troubles into masses of searches being triggered over an over all day.

Obviously there will always be a lot of searches going on because there are so many people. The key is, resources are being spent on a multitude of rapid unnecessary searches triggered by land bots.

Judging by all the price tags and yellow land that shows up on my map in-world, the "safe" bet is that there are more sellers than buyers. Also, judging by how long it took me to sell a plot of land recently, anything that could have speeded up the process without lowering the price too much would have been welcomed. As it was, I sold my 8096m2 for $80 less than I paid...and paid extra tier a month longer than I wanted to. I'm not whining or complaining--I was not surprised by how things went, and don't think anybody owes me anything different--just pointing out the sort of situation that welcomes buyers. I chose to price my land about 2 L$/m2 above what the bots would pay, and eventually sold to an end-user.

Bots don't affect supply-and-demand overall at all. The spike in land values may be attributed to a lower supply of land (as LL fulfilled a spike in private sim orders) at the same time there was a higher demand (as LL hit its first 1M residents after what, 5 years of game life--then 2M and 3M in short order; actual premium-account holders who stay around to play are much fewer but in proportion). Land agents try to sell exactly as many square meters as they purchase, therefore matching any effect on supply with demand.

What land agents do do is stabilize prices around the "market price" set by supply and demand. You will notice that the lowest priced land (only briefly present as those plots get bought by land-flippers) and the highest priced (sitting there month after month) are not being tendered by land agents. Land agents all tend to sell for around the same price--the market price. They increase the demand for lower-than-market land, but not the supply of it, so lower-than-market land vanishes. And they continually refresh their supplies of market-priced land, lowering the demand for above-market land.

The way to cheap land is dumping 20-40 sims a day via land auctions, not banning bots.

I have noticed that there is another form of land exchange going on in response to this. I am one of those people who didn't think I would like SL and now have a tier that would have scared me silly just a few months ago...mostly bought from friends and neighbors without really thinking of being anything...just was right at the time to keep the neighborhood looking good and relationships intact. I made it a point to get to know my neighbors just because it made sense to me. People liked how I built and that there was community so offered to sell to me if they moved. At usually as I would find out later low prices. I wasn't paying attention to land prices much.

It probably doesn't make the SL headlines but I suspect this is happening elsewhere in SL too. Not everyone is here to make money or feel clever at other people's expense.

So people do have an alternative to sell privately to people they know and I imagine some land is selling that way as well and wouldn't be noticed.

In some ways, people who are focused on their bots and seeing SL as a way to make money are missing some really great intangible benefits in terms that result from being straightforward, generous and honest just like in RL. It is very clever to make and use a bot I suppose but being clever can get pretty lonely at the end of the day if that and money is all you have. Hopefully these people have also established other kinds of activities in SL too not based on seeing people as cash cows.