New Bot: The Estate Owners Fight Back!

Not going to agree with you on this one Yumi.

If someone's snooping around in my living room and buys some prim I have labelled anything- then im not responsible for it.



This isnt to say the Original posters Idea is necesarily the best approach - It would be better if they used a high ticket item that is created by someone they know who is willing to go allong with this.

But is it fraud? Who told these people this stuff was for sale? A spybot did.


I shouldnt even be SCANNED unless I opt in.

Period.

As to the protest plan, I think it is not a good one, for the reasons others have said.

I think what would be better would be a straightforward grassroots campaign: "Opt Out of Searchbot," or something like that.

coco

P.S. What I found out today explains why they didn't make it opt-in in the first place, and had no intentions of doing so.

Absolutely nothing fraudulent there and maybe if there was signage where the named prims were saying that "these are empty prims do not buy them" maybe people wont. I think its a shame that ESC decided to start the project as an opt out project as certainly to me since 1989 all opt out schemes that i have seen arrive on the internet have always been linked with spammers and other underhanded things.

Any company using the opt out method i dont trust, because if they as a company believed in their product and they believed that it is a good product/service then why not advertise it as an opt in service and let people use it because it is a good thing to use, unless of course they dont care about what they have done, we dont know for sure what ESC intend to do in the future with all the information they are gathering as at some stage it will be worth money to them in one way or another.

Why should i have to waste my time opting out of something that i didnt want to belong to in the first place? Imho i think ESC has made a very bad error of judgement as the idea of this search engine would have been good had they made it opt in rather than opt out, im suprised a company such as ESC who have been involved in the web and marketing for some time didnt know that opt out systems are bad for business, just like spam, unless there are other plans for this product in the future.

Im sure we will see much more of this sort of behaviour over the coming months as companies & people that LL seem to favour carry on regardless with riding rough shod over the populus here, but then thats just my personal opinion and i still wonder how many Lindens have interests in some of these companies

The truth sometimes is stranger than fiction

This kind of bot that clearly crooked and only want to profit from people's mistakes are not welcome and every thing should be done to fight them. The idea of fake prims is the best i saw in a long time. And is someone is dump enough to buy a object sitting in the middle of nowhere... well tuff luck.

Also my privatly owned sim is well.. private, so i can use what ever name i want on my prims.... there are my own private prims.. if someone if dum enought to use a shady website to try to steal valuable object from peoples who make mistake, they deserve it.

Now to find a way to screw those illegal land buy bots.....

Yes - and it lowered my opinion of them down even a few more notches.

Basically they are looking to track what we buy for corporate interests.

I see us protestors losing on this issue.

I guess at least Open Sourcing the servers will make gated commmunities easier.

If I'm working on a large build on my property, and am haphazardly using components from my inventory that may or may not have a sales tag enabled, I certainly would not want to come back the next day to find my build has been stripped bare of all its goodies, even if I was compensated. Its a pain in the ass that I should not have to deal with.

I'll decide when and where these items can be sold. This bot is tresspassing and falsely advertising by design.

Not bad Sys, you managed to get everything wrong on this one.

Because a bot is so much faster than a normal avatar they CAN do things that normal avatars cannot, otherwise they would not be used. In my Estate everyone who tps in is detected. Our sales reps go directly to them and enquire if they need help, or are just browsing. Our homes are protected by Security orbs, that ensure that an intruder is ejected within 10 seconds (adjustable). If I set objects for sale for a nominal sum in order for it to be passed to one of my managers who is taking over, in maybe 30 mins, I have bee able to do so, as many people in sl do, up till now. 10 secs is not long enough for a normal avatar to enter one of my properties, click on every object, find the ones for sale, then snap them up before being ejected. But a Bot can! And just what do you think the purpose of security orbs are anyway??

I also pointed out that the avatar dector did NOT pick up the visit of the bot that logged my things for sale. Some scripters suggested how that may have happened.

Bots are not ordinary avatars, they are extraordinary avatars, and using extraordinary language to describe them is not out of proportion, it is absolutely appropriate. My friends did not make mistakes. Taking precautions against things that have not been encountered or heard of before may come as second nature to you, but I am a mere mortal.

I also did not opt-in anyone without their consent. I did provide the creators who offered their help with the guarantee that they could withdraw their consent at any time (unlike Electric Sheep). Where did you dream up the information that anyone had been opted in?

Before you accuse anyone of hypocrisy you should check your facts. That is called due diligence.

Where did you learn this from? I'd like to read it myself if this information is posted somewhere.

No they didn't. Read my earlier post.

coco

Here it is again for those who missed it:

According to the link I put in the other thread,

Electric Sheep Company received $7,000,000 of funding to do things exactly like this, from investors such as CBS.

http://www.raphkoster.com/2007/02/2...ep-get-funding/

From Reuters:
-----

"We're helping (entertainment companies) bring their audiences into Second Life or other virtual worlds and then developing more entertainment experiences for that audience," Electric Sheep Chief Executive Sibley Verbeck said in a phone interview last week.

Verbeck, whose 45-employee company's headquarters is in Second Life, admitted that despite the media attention Second Life has attracted, it remains tough to learn for new users. . .

. . . Electric Sheep plans to use the financing to create software to make virtual worlds ready for mainstream consumption, he [Verbeck] said.

For corporate clients, Electric Sheep said it offers tools that help them track usage in the world, providing data that could be used by marketers.

http://www.reuters.com/article/televisionNews/idUSN2518789120070226?pageNumber=2

-----

So no, the service is not for us. It is for ESC's corporation clients.

coco

I'd like to point out that the search engine doesn't track any usage. It has no way of knowing what items were purchased after someone searches for them.

The "tracking usage" system that was quoted is in regards to tracking things like time and unique # of visitors to a company's project island - not unlike the visitor scanner lists that have been around for years, albeit on a more detailed and organized level, with extra data sets available.

Your postulation isn't correct - although you probably weren't aware of the other possibilities that the quote referred to.

Well I, as a content creator, stand behind Rock and all those with him who have come up with this brilliant plan to foul the validity of the search. It is very much akin to the posting of bad mp3 files the RIAA did on file sharing networks. Reguardless of whether there was still alternatives to net what u wanted, it DID discourage people from D'loading from less-than-trusted sources... and i think that is the point here... If you want the sale/product to be guaranteed valid, buy from the creators place of business and no where else. The only potential customers this could possibly hurt are those that are looking to NOT pay the creators stated price for said item. In fact, it hurts those who are looking (as in actively searching) for mistakes made in sale pricing to jump on them fast, and run with it. That behavior is devious and shady, and I'm really happy the mistake pouncers would get screwed. Teach them right for trying to take advantage of someone elses obvious mistake and rip them off. Seriously, if i had a line of quality prim products, I'd actually box some into a sealed room, and set them for sale at L$1, but Id autorez them as nomod temp-on-rez objects... take THAT! I'd do that same thing to the landbot if i could...

If you allow people in to your sim, by definition it is not private. A club or shop is not private, though you have the right to refuse admission. Privately owned and private are completely seperate things.
You also cannot steal items that have been set for sale. You tick that "for sale" box, you just agreed to sell that object to whoever might decide to buy it.

Final point, what exactly makes land bots illegal? You once again tick the box to set the land for sale, they buy it. Nothing anywhere makes it illegal, unless you are talking about the laws of your own head.

You need a Lesson on Data Mining.
Every Company in the whole world tries to use their Data for best Profit.
If they dont do that, they fail and go Bankrupt in the Long run.
This is normal, this is Capitalism.
Any Problems with that ? OK. Dont go Shopping. Never. Nowhere.

I never ticked any boxes, and I still had an item show up as 'for sale' on the site...I assume this is due to the way the creator originally set the perms. Regardless, it still would have allowed someone to tp into my bedroom, which bothers me far more than replacing a 50L object.

All right, Cory.

1. How about pointing out exactly why ESC made this search engine?

2. Does it or does it not track DATA for the use of the corporate clients?

And while you're here, answer the following questions, too:

3. When a person opts out, is their data wiped from the database in its entireity?

Or is the data still available in conglomerate mode? In other words, will the data not show that a particular avatar has a particular item for sale, but that number will still be included in the statistical data?

4. Your machine is capable of tracking and publishing every item an avatar owns, if we opt in to have it do such.

Is this information also gathered and presented to corporate clients in a conglomerate means? I.e., not identified by individual avatar, and not published anywhere, but presented as a statistic to your corporate clients?

coco

All of these answers are to the best of my knowledge:

1. Because the search engine within SL is highly flawed and has been for a long time. We're in a position to improve on that, and the improvement of search capabilities makes the platform a more productive one as a whole. We take the long view on virtual worlds and SL in particular, we do a lot of our work (although not all) in SL, and it is to our benefit that Second Life continues to expand, grow, and offer more and better features. LL knows that they can't do that all themselves, and they also know that the future of the platform depends on it not staying strictly within LL - hence the Open SL project and the Open Sim project.

2. No

3. I believe it is due to the fact that when you opt out, the removal is nearly immediate, but if you opt back in you will have to wait for the next indexing to be included again.

4. No. As the search engine isn't being offered as some sort of option or product to a client, and the end results such as total number of items indexed are highly subjective due to the opt out process, there's very little statistical information gathered that I could see would be of use to a corporation.

Im sure that as time progress's extra bits will be added to the bot as the corporate clients start asking for more information from within the game to use to spam us to death etc, as they said in the article ESC see Virtual worlds now as the internet was in 1993. If a company isnt rubbing its hands in glee at the potential for collecting all sorts of data from within the game as time progresses, i would be very suprised.

SL is a marketing company's wet dream especially with the growth we are experiencing here and the way LL cares not a jot about the way this information is gathered for them to use and sell as time goes on, and adding bits to a bot is no problem if they have got it in place already collecting data for them.

Just my opinion tho and im sure it will happen in time

I gotta ask - What if it is? If it doesn't identify you in any way, how does it harm you? Not speaking for Cory here, but for myself, I seriously doubt the information about objects for sale in world would be of much use to Corporation X. Information pertaining to what is actually being purchased might be. Information about how Corporation X's estate sims are being used by residents would be.

You have some weird ideas Sys. I never allowed anyone into my sim. No invitation was given, nor sought. You seem to think that anyone has the right to go anywhere they wish, wander around in people's homes, check out their furniture, pose balls, pictures on walls, even watch them in bed, and that it is up to the home owner to take all necessary measures to ensure that this cannot happen. Make their home like Fort Knox or permission is implied is the thrust of your argument! There are very little laws in SL, all we have is the hopelessly inadequate CS and TOS. What we do have, and what you sneer at, is morals, ethics, a sense of what is right and wrong. Landbots are wrong. Copybots are wrong. ShepherdBots are wrong.

ESC should have done things this way:

a) announced their service, and how it worked, and laid out its benefits
b) made it an opt-in service
c) made opting out again as easy as ticking a box
d) employed filters to ensure that obviously mistakenly priced items were not listed, until after a confirmation by the owner.
e) listed all the information and data that their bot was going to harvest, and what they intended to do with it, and what safeguards they proposed

I do have junk and miscellaneous stuff in my inventory that I would love to sell to those who wanted it, and this service could have done just that. But I somehow don't think that these aims quite fit with their business plan.

Inworld spam is against the TOS, and I haven't seen many reputable RL companies spam my inbox lately. The corporate clients in SL have to play by the same rules the rest of us do, and the ability to harvest Avatar keys has been around (including resident-published online databases of them) for at least the last two years. I personally have only encountered once instance where I was sent spam inworld due to (I strongly suspect) one of those avatar key databases.

There's virtually no information about the general statistics of SL use that LL doesn't already publish publically in their monthly metrics on the blog. Anything more specific is either parcel related, account related, or harvested from information made available through the very setup of the platform, and LL has policies in place against its misuse.

A guy creates a site that scans for prims.
Estate owners use up precious prims to make fake listings appear on the site.

What is needed is a barter and trade system implemented by LL that allows a split screen barter and trade window similar too, dare I even say it... Everquest. Or similar.

The problem here is the chicken and the egg!
Develop a system for users to be able to trade and not use a work around or "umbrella" every conceivable tool or solution to "groups" Take some team members out of developing the technology, and put them to use to start creating some Linden built CONTENT.

Make a way for people to trade, problem solved.
This is not about a site or opting out or opting in, this can be coded by anybody so don't harp on the site or the landowners. This could have just as easily been made covertly and the tool never even made available to the public, and still can.

For those of you interested in more information behind the decision making process of the search engine, and issues such as the incorrectly labeled items listed for sale which were not (this is something I personally experienced and helped track down the cause of - short story is a problem with the For Sale flag not being completely removed when the item was purchased):

http://blogs.electricsheepcompany.com/giff/?p=337

http://blogs.electricsheepcompany.com/christian/

The last link in particular explains the mechanics behind the bug and how it was subsequently removed from the system to the best of our ability; however I wouldn't be surprised if more appear, seeing as how we're dealing with a permission/sale system that has seen its share of bugs in the past 4 years.

Thanks for speaking up here, Cory.

Exactly. Thats how it is. No Privacy. If you have somthing to hide, hide it in your Inventory.
Raise the Ban Lines. Why not ?



You are wrong.

OK, Copybot is forbidden now, all other Bots are OK with LL.