Automated Burglary

I'm sure in RL the airlines would like nothing better than to return to the pre internet days when fare structures were opaque and they could much more easily extract large sums of money from their customers.

I imagine they curse the advent of Travelocity, Kayak, Farecast et al on a daily basis.

Fact is these fare comparison engines/bots (yes they are bots) have benefited the average consumer tremendously.

The ESC tool has the potential to do the same for SL provided they are sensitive to the comments/needs raised in this thread. Your objection to the existance ESC search engine seems to me to be rather illogical and based on general notions of "greed". I hope you will come to revise that view in time.

And your evidence for this assertion is where?



Most likely


Nonsense. I teleported directly to the location, from the website, and clicked a sign, all in the span of about a minute. I opted IN.


This speaks volumes about your own personal character, and ends any further attempt on my part to have a reasonable debate or discussion with you here. What an absolutely pathetic and nasty thing to say.


Chicken Little strikes again.

If unrestricted Bot usage is going to be allowed Ala the 3d Web scenario, where your land is not comprable to RL land at all ..

Then were going to need more tools from LL.

All bots will need to be registered as such - becuase we will need some way to restrict them. Banning individual bots will be useless as they multiply with the growth of second life.

SO basically:

-All bots will need to be Flagged as bots
-Parcel and estate owners need the ability to ban all bots.
-The ban will include disbaling the bots camera when it reaches a no access parcel.
-The bot will not be able to buy, scan, click on, any object or avatar on a parcel it cant access.

Hi RobbyRacoon,

The explanation of how all this came about is in the very first post in this thread. I quote:

"I then asked her to check her account details. Then the truth was revealed. All the items had been 'bought' by not one, but by various people. This is despite the fact that the new sim had not been advertised, and had not even appeared in the sl map yet!

Each 'buyer' was contacted, and fortunately some were kind enough to respond (others have not), and in most cases the items were sold back to me at L$0 (but not all were sold back, and some insisted on a 'profit'!

They had all found these items on the new Electric Sheep search engine."

I think if several purchasers all claimed the same, that they had discovered my 'bargains' on the Electric Sheep website, then I consider that to be good evidence.

What further proof are you seeking?

Hmmm, you were in the know. How many don't? Not really a Failsafe situation I fear.

Agreed. But considering we can't do the last two even with a known and explicitly banned griefer, it's unlikely LL will come close to offering such protections.

I personally think that is overly restrictive and unnecessary, but it's an interesting thought.

Of course it assumes the presence of a governing body, and if Second Life does indeed become the 3D web where Linden Labs is not the sole source of servers and does not retain iron control over everything that occurs, it is highly unlikely that you will ever see that come to pass.

Thinking forward, it is inevitable that we will see more bots, many many more. And it is inevitable that they will perform any of a number of tasks that they do not currently perform, some good, some perhaps not.

I might personally choose to register my bots with the BBB (Better Bot Bureau), as they have no nefarious purpose, but then you get into issues about the accountability and credibility of the governing body. And that is a whole 'nuther can of worms.

There is no good and fast solution. Not now, not in the near future.



.

Thats how the system works - please stop trying to "win" the argument and think about what you type. The system works by scanning peoples objects. The evidence is their entire site.



My wanting a system based on an invasion of privacy to fail makes me unreasonable. LOL. Whatever.

Hehe. Good response. I had read the original post back when the thread first started and had not referred to it since, since I thought I remembered what it said.

Thank you for posting that again


.

My comments are based on an unrestricted existance of scanbots, spybots, crawlers, dataminers on the grid.

If such a case exists we need more protections than we have now.

Right now its one bot.

At one point there was only one Land Bot.

At one point there were only Real People camping also.



What happens when its 5000 crawlers?


Edit -

If a bot has to have an account - and it does. Then its not the "3d web" yet. Linden Labs is still in oversight (as loose an oversight as it is.)

I see this going two ways.

- People either given the ability to keep the bots out of where they play house
- Or a LOT of people moving to gated communities with restricted access.

Yes. Because they don't think their reputation IS on the line. They are above reputations with the hoi-poloi. What we think is provincial, and silly. They think that if it can be done it's fine to do it. They have a big backing for that here on SL, too. I think most people who code actually think that way.

The problem is, you shouldn't involve the entire population in your experiment, and you shouldn't say to anyone who has been adversely affected, "Well, the kinks haven't been worked out yet," and, "It will eventually be okay."

That's another problem with SL (and with LL). Individuals, and individual harm, don't matter much, as the end is always considered to justify the means.

As a result, we hurtle always headlong into some FUTURE that is supposed to be just and fair, but it is never considered necessary that the PRESENT be just and fair. And the future never arrives.

Anyone's losses are just considered necessary collateral damage incurred for the greater good of other individuals, whose rights and goals always trump what happens to anyone along the way.

This is backwards of how it should be. Only by assuring the rights and just treatment of the individual can society flourish. What we have here is a dictatorship of the technology, with little concern for individual rights and welfare. That's why the future never arrives, and can never arrive.

coco

well said coco

I want hair, blonde-brunette-ish, in a short-ish style, with some non-intrusive flexi strands. Can they tell me where to find that? No. And they never will be able to, so compared to shopping in-world or even compared to SLex which is at least categorized and has pictures and a way to buy there, on the site; a bland, one-level unsorted list of *text* results really isn't useful in any way.

As far as I know the only way ESC is involved in SL is taking corporate money in exchange for some build. They're not a brand or store that matters within SL so whatever reputation they have with resident is meaningless. We're not where they get their money, and that is ultimately the only drive they have.
If ESC is involved with the community in any positive way that doesn't involve cashing in, I'd really like to know what it is.

SL is a tool to those who seek to make a profit, it's a sense of escapism/entertainment to everyone else. You'll never be able to make both those work together, but considering how the entertainment dollars outweigh the corporate dollars by orders of magnitude, it should be clear whose concerns should matter the most.

I've had a scanner running on a sim I know it does check for two days and no sighting. So either it's quite stealthy and evading normal sensors (the sim has a 64m² landing point, all the rest of the sim is not generally accessible - doesn't stop it from scanning any of it - so it's not a matter of not knowing where it'll show), or it's been shut down for the moment.

You make a good point, that if bots are going to be allowed (as spiders are on the WWW), then we are going to need more tools from LL.

I have created a feature suggestion on JIRA to implement the sort of features web servers and sites use to tell robots (typically from sites such as Google) not to index the server or web page. You can vote for it at https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/MISC-131.

The thing with robots.txt is that it is a voluntary code. Robots do not have to respond to it. You also have to know that the bots are out there and how to setup the text file.

ESC has a voluntary code (they agree to not scan your stuff if you opt out) for which you need to know that the bot is there and how to stop it (by opting out).
I don't see that suggestion as being much different.

If all bots were marked as bots on the other hand, then we would be able to have a useful system of bot blocking. Those who wanted bots on their land (such as fighting bots) would still be able to do it, and those who didn't want bots on their land would be able to block them.
I think though, that to make it anywhere near useful, LL would have to implement blocks on banned avs/bots so that they cannot interact with objects inside the banlines. To me, this should have been implemented as part of the ban system anyway, and it's an oversight that it isn't.

Not that a system of identifying bots that the owners wish to remain unidentified will be easy to build.

Yep. LL won't go for putting resources into trying to doing this - they've said a number of times that they're not interested in arms races..

I would vote for a suggestion that adds a voluntary "I am a bot" bit to the login protocol and parcel-support for denying access to bots. Not nearly a 100% solution but would make me a bit happier.

You're right. But I think their scanner is the first of many, many more to come. Outfits such as ESC that respect residents' decisions to opt-out will be hard-pressed to explain why their scanners ignore the feature (however it makes it in) for estate and parcel owners to disallow all scanners in general or their scanner in particular.

For bots that don't care about residents' wishes not to be scanned, we're talking about a whole different kind of warfare.

That it's the first is an assumption. This sorta thing has been possible for a while now..

Not to mention people dont know about Electric sheep in world and didnt know this was being done.

When I explained to the estate owner (i help manage) why i was banning Grid Sheppard she and her freind were very surprized someone was even allowed to do this.

I think the average SL resident has no idea about these automated systems that are being developed.

I've been reading a lot about this lately, about the strictly meritocratic thinking of techies, and why this accounts for things like the dotcom crash.

I don't demonize the product or the creator. Capitalism is based upon the presumption of acting in self-interest. The creator of the product isn't required to care about the product's use or consequences on others. The creator is required to abide by laws of the jurisdiction. In this case, Linden Labs has the jurisdiction. It has no laws preventing the use of this product, nor is it likely to care about the product's use.

What this does show is the result of Linden Labs' live-and-let-die attitude. Linden Labs has no concern for setting the standards as to what one should expect when going from First Life to Second Life, making it a money trap for anyone participating who is not skilled at examining the Second Life source code. If Linden Labs wants to create that kind of predatory atmosphere, that's just fine and dandy, but what it is should be advertised before one signs up for it.

Taking advantage of someone else's ignorance and weakness is generally considered unethical and immoral in real life. In Second Life, Linden Labs completely approves of this behavior. It's actually hard to blame the creator of the bot and its users, since they are just doing the kind of thing that Linden Labs encourages them to do every day.

Ultimately, this thread provides an example of why Second Life is not going to meet any aspirations of becoming a virtual marketplace. As these stories are made known, people will stop trusting Second Life with their money. And that is a shame, really.

More to the point, there's no good way for the average SL resident to find out.

Of interest:

http://www.raphkoster.com/2007/02/26/the-sheep-get-funding/

"The Sheep Get Funding"

Read on down for discussion of search.

coco

You mean this?

I'd say the dotcom crash was down to fools with too much money looking to jump on a bandwagon that they understood nothing about. Investors should always ask "where will my money come from?", not "what is the latest thing we can jump on?". Even applying meritocratic thinking, dotcom investments had not proven themselves to have merit or achievement in obtaining good returns.

The sad thing is, I can see a replay with all this "web 2.0" nonsense. Some of us have been applying this technology for a while, just using plugins rather than the browser itself.
A change in the delivery system and the name will not create automatic profits.

Anyway, back on topic (slightly), I think a lot of techies are driven more by curiosity. I often try things just to see if I can do it, with no other reasoning behind it than curiosity. A lot of people I know work in a similar way.

The strategy of blame-the-victim-for-the-mugging is going to be counterproductive here. Virtually everyone in SL is at risk from this thing and they are not going to buy it.

The strategy of challenging the OP to "prove" his loss came about through use of the ESC search won't work either. The (reluctantly admitted) problems unearthed in this thread exist and are a general danger whether that was the cause of his or any other particular loss or not. (And this stratagem was exploded anyway as I was writing this by the OP.)

This "service" was introduced with little general notice, allows "swoopers" to exploit a common practice among builders and others long used as a workaround of a deficiency in SL design, allows "swoopers" also to exploit the unwary who may not think to even look at the "for sale" line in an object they place in their own SL homes with no intention whatever of selling it, includes everyone in it without their permission, and makes it cumbersome to opt out even if one is so fortunate as to find out one is in it and can get out and goes looking for the opt-out location. This search method also often makes it easy for griefers and in-world stalkers to locate many potential victims' properties for harrassment or land-griefing. To top it off, it not only fails to distinguish between residences and business places, it is evidently unable to identify the for-sale contents of vendor devices and so misses probably a very large majority of the genuinely for-sale items in SL.

It hardly seems credible that ESC, a very sizable operation in SL terms that does substantial work for LL and large corporate customers, could have been unaware of these issues. In any case, these (and other) issues were raised in the Searchbots thread in the Resident-Run Websites forum a week ago or more and have obviously not been corrected (I recommend catching up with that thread). The defense presented earlier in this thread by one of the principals of ESC that one can protect oneself by excluding the searchbot from one's parcel has been shown to be spurious - it demonstrably can camera-view from far outside one's banlines. It hardly seems credible either that the principal would be unaware of this capability when he offered this defense, and if he was, seems to betray a startling lack of knowledge about his own operation. Perhaps he has another explanation.

I submit that the strategy of portraying ESC as a poor, unknowing, innocent victim of "demonizing" will be counterproductive as well. ESC can reasonably be expected to show at least as much responsibility as it or its apologists demand of the victims of its ill-conceived project and it and they have already loudly asserted that ignorance is no defense. More responsibility is called for from ESC, IMO, since they obviously knew about their project and the victims obviously didn't. And ESC has not so far exhibited any such responsibility.

Instead, ESC has, through the extraordinarily inept implementation we have seen revealed in this thread, managed to poison the reputation of what could potentially have been a quite useful service if done right. Perhaps fatally, for who will trust something from ESC after this? Or any other searchbot service? I originally thought such a search service would be a good thing. No longer. Not one anything like this.

ESC needs to clean up its act. It may not care about individual SL residents, but how long will its corporate customers or associates want to continue dealing with a partner that conducts itself in so careless and cavalier a fashion? SONY, in particular, has its in-world site located on Sheep Island.

To get a search service that works will require significant changes to the search mechanism by someone, if not ESC then whoever takes up the task next, and also changes in SL design that can only be made by Linden Labs. Such changes have been proposed here by many people who obviously want SL to improve as much as I do. Such changes are obviously urgently needed and should be made forthwith.

And meanwhile, us SL residents are going to have to look about for ways of protecting ourselves and dealing with threats such as this, and the malbots to come. More posts on that subject would be welcome.