New Bot: The Estate Owners Fight Back!

Here's the timeline as I see it:

April 10th - sheepsearch is announced http://blogs.electricsheepcompany.com/giff/?p=337
April 10th - obvious bugs and privacy concerns acknowledged http://blogs.electricsheepcompany.com/christian/?p=149
April 10th - Grid Shepherd banned from Dreamland for Convenant breach http://www.secondlifeherald.com/slh/2007/04/sheep_warned_af.html
April 12th - pros and cons discussed with ESC members on a podcast at http://www.reznation.com/?p=106
April 15th - improvement are added to the site, none of which address any concerns raised in the previous days http://blogs.electricsheepcompany.com/christian/?p=151

It seems most of the concerns and problems have been evident from the very first day which is now almost two weeks ago, more than enough time for them to publically address any concerns, even if it happens on their own blog or through a press release.

The bottom line keeps getting lost.

1) There is a robot that wanders the countryside invisibly scanning for items marked for sale. It can scan your property from outside your banlines from the other end of the sim. If its marked for sale, its fair game.

2) We often purchase items that still have the for sale button lit once you get it home, and dont know it till its pointed out by somebody else. My sofa had a for sale sign on it for two weeks before I noticed it and unclicked it.

3) Sometimes we sell items to our friends for zero dollars, as an easy way to transfer items. A practise done since the dawn of SL.

4) The robot does not distinguish between items such as these and items intentionally set for sale to the general public. It simply lists the item and the items location so a shopper can go pick it up.

5) A shopper with this information can teleport to your property, or to the property next door, camera over to your place, and purchase your item. Banlines, orbs, or a strict admit list will not be able to stop them.

6) This service is mandatory, the robot WILL come to your house, or your neighbors house and scan YOUR place from there. Right through your locked door and banlines. Unless you go to the Electric sheep property and ask to be removed from this service, known as OPTING OUT, you are required to participate. This is known as the OPT IN default. You have been automatically included in the robot scanning option. They did not ask your permission.

Question: Unless a person has been notified of the existance of a roving cataloging robot, how does a person know this is happening? And if they do not know its happening, how can they change their personal habits and stop transfering items for zero dollars to friends? If they dont know about this service that they have been forced to participate in, how do they know they have to run around the house and make sure no objects they own still have a price tag on it?
Answer: THEY CANT!!!

So the countless people who play SL but dont read message boards are in the dark.
The robot roams, the shoppers fill their pockets, and the guy who never heard of this thing wonders where his sofa went.

This service should have been available upon request.
Meaning, you CHOOSE for yourself whether to let a robot catalogue your items for sale or not. If it sounded good to you, you would go to Electric sheep and OPT IN.
Many would enjoy this service. But the guy whos only crime is being uninformed, should not get his sofa sold to an unauthorised buyer.

You could put a texture on the prim telling the person not to buy it and possibly explaining the evils of bots. The bot could never read the texture.

Or you could put the prim behind a wall where a person cannot actually buy it.

That's a very narrow and fairly innacurate view of social engineering, yes social engineering can be used for that purpose and most famous accounts are of just that but it's not it's exclusive use.

Has everyone with owned or rented property and who places prims on it filed ARs and used any other legitimate ways of reporting TOS and CS violations? Trespassing, spying, generalized invasion of privacy Residents might reasonably expect in SL, and enabling unwanted takings of people's property come to mind as appropriate charges.

Close students of the TOS and CS please feel free to list further appropriate charges here.

Have you e-mailed, called the 800 number(s) and otherwise made sure LL understands the gravity of what is being done here, and requested Electric Sheep Company and its avatars be banned from SL for deliberate, repeated and gross violations?

Go for it.

Honesly I wish it would do some good but doubt it will since LL won't act against one of the major (may have been the first I'm not sure) to bring some huge corporations into second life.

There is no offense being committed here worthy of an AR. There is no invasion of privacy with respect to the CS. The Community Standards section on "Disclosure", which is where you get your "invasion of privacy residents might reasonably expect" from, deal with two issues:

1) Disclosure of First Life Information about a resident, without their consent, which has not already been disclosed by them in their profile

2) Monitoring, recording, or distribution of chat or instant message logs, without their consent.

There is no such thing as "trespassing" in Second Life.

This search crawler is not "spying"

When you set an item for sale, expect that somebody might just come along and purchase it. The function was designed and implemented so that one resident may sell an item to another. It was not designed to "safely" transfer an item from one resident to another. Using the function in that way has inherent risk, which you, the transferrer, take, when setting up the transfer.

Sure there is.


Yes it is.



Those things just arent againt the TOS/CS, this doesnt mean they do not exist.

The entire disclosure statement, like the rest of the CS, is written in a way that allows Linden Labs to avoid enforcing anything if they need or wish to.

Its also vague enough they can enforce things you wouldn't think were violations - If they need or wish to.

We have no choice now but follow that edict. We have a bot that sneaks into your house and writes down what you got.

Whether the founding fathers meant for us to interpret the 'sell function' to be safe or not is a moot point. The fact of the matter is, before this bot started listing items for sale on a website, it was natural to assume that your items were reasonably safe in a LOCKED HOUSE. We no longer have this naive belief because we are aware this thing exists now. But to those who have never heard of this SheepBot, they will continue to believe they are reasonably safe, and will go home and find items missing.

Before anybody decides to say, " But anybody can cam around and buy your stuff even if the bot doesnt list it" This is true, but that would be a sneaky insideous snake of a person who is intentionally looking through your banlines from next door, just in case you missed taking the price tag off something. They would also have to mouse-over everything you own to do so. Time consuming and not worth the effort for those types. But a bot sends a hundred, honest, legitimate buyers to your house. And one or two unscrupulous types.
THE BETA IS FLAWED. DEFAULT SHOULD BE OPT OUT!

LL and the huge corporations are my point. Help them understand the character of what ESC is doing. Sure as hell ESC won't tell them how the Residents are receiving this. The Residents will have to. (And by the way, I thought Community Standards were supposed to reflect the wants, needs and social expectations of the Residents.)

Hhhmmm - the huge corporations. You know, Gordon, you have a point there. Maybe folks ought to communicate more with our new giant neighbors here in SL. Hhhmm...now THAT is something worth thinking about. I wonder how much they even know of how badly designed and ill-received this "service" from ESC is. The ESC blog talks about how *cough* well-received *cough cough* it is aside from a "few" "privacy concerns."

Good thought there, Gordon.

Yet it is the one espoused on that site, is it not?
Also notice that I said "through" social engineering. I wasn't providing the definition


.

Point well taken even without such implications it's probably not proper to be pushing a t-shirt using a sig so I'll probably change it once I find something good to put there, btw interesting quote yourself I've never heard of this Soho guy, I'll have to google him.

Even for for-sale objects on parcels which are listed as commercial?

For those of you who criticized my statement about ESC not caring about the community by saying that before they joined ESC many of these people did some great work I would agree but apparently they have fallen to the dark side of the grid.

I may be missing the obvious, but... How can you determine programmatically that a parcel is commercial or residential? Is there a way to do so?


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Go to any parcel of land and do About Land in the World menu. Under the Options tab, next to the Show in Search>Places setting, there is a classification for the parcel. Regardless of if you advertise in Search>Places, the parcel owner can set classification to whatever they want.

Since you can check this setting, a bot can check this setting.

That's interesting. I don't think it ever occurred to me to check something like that, so I wasn't aware of it. To me, if there's a store there it's commercial, no need to check zoning

That's something they really ought to consider as a modification to the bot, I should think. Really doesn't sound like a technical challenge, either.

Thanks.


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This is another example of tools that LL should give us, allow you to make a public distinction on whether your land (on a per parcel basis unless on a private region in which case it would be handled like other similar controls) and to give the tools needed to effectively put such distinctions to work in terms of restrictions and such.

I've lost my patience with this thing. It looks like ESC has no intention of discussing an opt-in version or in any way listening to anyone's privacy or other concerns whatsoever except insofar as people report bugs. I have done that, and tried to be helpful.

I believe ESC is going to do what it wants to do, and what we think is irrelevant. As far as I can tell, ESC has the full blessings of LL to do whatever they want. Apparently neither ESC nor LL cares about our privacy, much less whether people are sent by direct TP into other people's private homes (as I was, because an item a customer bought from me was showing up as for sale in his home, though you couldn't buy it).

Neither ESC nor LL cares if people lose their items they never meant to sell due to this. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't remember any apology from ESC about this, or any offers to pay back people's losses due to their wretched deployment of a bugged product. They could, you know - they have $7,000,000 real U.S. dollars to do it.

ESC didn't bother to tell anyone about this, using the excuse that it couldn't be done - and they aren't telling people about it EVEN NOW, when people are losing the items they paid good money for.

Now, it seems to me that a company that is purporting to set up and spread the word about real-life corporations in SL must actually be pretty pathetic at that job, since they claim that they couldn't possibly get the word out about an upcoming FREE search engine! Of course they could. Anybody could. The silence was and continues to be a deliberate choice.

ESC is going to do what it wants. Someone asked how they could have the gall, well, I'll tell you how: Because they are Electric Sheep Company. They pwn SL, and they ARE above our petty concerns. WAY WAY WAY above. We scarcely register on their lofty radar. Moreover, LL loves them. They will do what they want, because they can, and they know it.

I believe ESC will continue to stonewall us on this, and consider us unenlightened beings in the way of their conquering of the metaverse. I'm sick of the doubletalk. I personally absolutely do not buy this idea that this search is primarily for us. If it were, they would obviously make it opt-in.

They received $7,000,000 funding by corporations such as CBS. They work for those corporations, and they are here to market SL - AND US - to those corporations. They have a broader picture than just SL, and expect to service these corporations for years to come in any and all virtual worlds - this is just one of the first of them. If anyone thinks ESC is not collecting our data to use it in proprietary ways to benefit their corporate clients, then I have a bridge in Brooklyn I'd like to sell you.

There comes a point in time where I get tired of being ignored, however polite I may be, and recognize it as the supreme arrogance it really is. I've been asking why not make it opt-in since they began it - especially now, now that they have already had the test run with all of us - and have received nothing that makes any sense whatsoever. I'd rather they simply said the truth, which I believe is: "No, because we don't want to and we don't have to."

Consequently, I opted out of this search engine tonight, and want nothing to further do with something that purposely and defiantly hurts other residents as well as insouciantly invades their privacy.

I urge everyone else to opt out as well (at least they have made that easier), and tell your friends to opt out also. (Or put those fake prims in, like the OP advised - that's starting to look just fine to me now.)

Should the ESC ever decide to speak to us directly about these matters - and I mean someone who actually decides these things, i.e., Forsetti - then I might change my mind.

I hope I have lost my patience too soon here. I hope they will come home from their important business trips and actually talk to the residents on the LL forums - and I do mean DISCUSS these issues, and answer these questions, here, with everyone. But I personally am done begging for an audience.

I hope they will make their search opt-in, and stop riding roughshod over the residents while pretending that they know what is best for us. But after days and pages of threads here, and two weeks prior to them, I've lost my patience.

I hate to withdraw from something that looked good and could be good for my business, and maybe some day it will be good for us. But meanwhile, it's not good for my business or my reputation to be associated with something that shows no respect for the residents.

Without respect for the SL residents, there will BE no more SL residents. That might not matter to ESC, who are looking to other horizons, but it does to me.

coco

I am sorry Coco, I must disagree with you on just one point. Inaction does not equal a blessing on LL's part. ESC is also a private company, they can do as they please, meaning they don't need anyone's blessing before making something that people don't like. Not that you may have any pull, but if people want them to listen, they need to get them where it hurts.

All about you, is it, big guy?

Well Torely does make a positive comment on one of the cited blogs threads from the last page.

Still that doesnt make it Linden Labs "official" veiw of the service.

Have they ever had an "official view" on anything? Even on copybot they didn't have really a view on it they just essentially repeated what the TOS already said.

They never asked me to list my office name on their site..and it is copyrighted..so I can take them to court for that right? I never asked them to scan my shit. So if there happens to be 100 prims named "electric goat company sucks ass" for sale for 1$ on my private sim that they never asked to be on,and they all end up listed on their site I never asked to be on..yay for me!

Make it 0L

so it will show up on the 0L search.

Just a tip