Automated Burglary

If only that was believed by companies that continuously lobby for looser environmental policies.

Exactly... ie: politicians don't have to abide by the "Do Not Call" list that they put into law? Hmf!

I appreciate your viewpoint... and will meet you part way:

I can totally understand why some would feel esc's actions are "unforgivably rude." and the same for opportunists that use sheep search to grab items that have been left deliberately unsecured.

Ethically, I think esc's worst offense is this:

They took public "internal" content information ... and made it public "external" to secondlife. ie: Your bike might not be locked up in your back yard, but it's safe. If someone moves it to your front yard, it isn't.

To me, what esc has done could be compared to mom showing up with a book of baby photos to show all my co-workers. They're her pics... it's my face. The time and place is (to me) wildly and offensively inappropriate. My co-workers might get a big laugh out of it though and not see the problem with it, but its data about me/my-stuff in a place that I don't want it... without my control or approval.

I'd be rather annoyed too.

Every post from these apologizer shills makes themn and this misbegotten "company" look worse. Enough bad faith. We need to excise this cancer before it mestasizes more. How many more examples of arrogant exploitation and condescension because these people assume we are all stupid and they are smart, and therefore they are superior in a Darwinian sense do we need here?

Hey, I read up on Darwin too. Let's see who is superior in a Darwinian sense.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: Nature has made up her mind: That which does not defend itself will not be defended.

These exploiters had their inning. Let's have ours.

Har har har. Har de har.

Wow.

Tell me, what color is the sky in your world?

Fair enough. Consider yourself met halfway. And your point on the politicos is a good one as well. I take those things into account when choosing which crook is gonna waste my tax money. That's the moral of my story. i want to be able to decide for myself on as many things as possible. No matter how trivial they might seem.

Except it was working as designed, does not exploit anything, and has just as much right to access the grid as you do.



Wah! Someone is doing something I don't like and can't do anything about! My privacy aches!

They didn't impose anything on you. You likely had nothing for sale, nor were ever even affected at all by the bot.



Hard to write checks against an overdrawn account.

True blue here. What about yours?

When Google started up, it wasn't offered to anyone; it was imposed on every website on the internet, regardless if they wanted another search engine or not. They didn't tell anyone when they did their first crawls. It was buggy and often over-crawled some sites, sometimes getting hung repeatedly indexing the same page over and over again because of a recursive link.

If you own a website, you have no control over whether your site is indexed, nor what parts of the site are indexed, UNLESS you "opt out", either by learning how to set up a robots.txt file (which not all search engines respect), or you go to their site and request OPT-OUT removal of your content before the next crawl.

It wasn't arrogance on Google's part; that's just the way search engines work. Same thing applies to a search engine for things in SL.

The ESC folks set about following the internet search engine paradigm, and there is nothing wrong with that. The problem is, just as with Google, that there are some folks and some sites that don't want their content cached and indexed. Recently, I even had some sensitive logs crawled. I fixed the problem that caused GoogleBot to mistakenly crawl the site with the sensitive data, and requested it be removed from the index and the cache. Took a little while to get it removed, but it was, and everyone was happy.

Welcome to life in the 21st century. If you don't like it, cut your phone and net cables, and go back to being isolationist in a cabin in the mountains, or learn to deal with it on its own terms. It isn't just SL, or the Net, it is how the world is changing, and NOTHING is going to stop it, as government(s) are rapidly embracing it.

yes and then they changed how they work and you actualy have to submit a site so why on earth would a new search engine after seeing what the major engines went through repeat the same mistakes?

you just validated every post against that bot in this thread lol

More thoughts on: "internally public data" listed "externally" to secondlife.

The protective wall around secondlife is coming apart.

It started with open registration allowing anyone in. Now, things like Sheepsearch and copybot and their ilk are allowing everything out.

The capabilities that allow those "abuses" are necessary... not just for day-to-day usage of secondlife, but they are necessary for secondlife to evolve from mono-verse to true "meta"-verse.

That evolution could be the most brilliant thing ever... or it may be as bad for secondlife as the fall of the Berlin wall was (economically) for west Germany. Even in the best of outcomes, there will be victims of the changes.

I know of no world better suited to attempt the transition into a "meta"-verse than this, and it must be attempted if this world is going to survive once serious competition appears.

Comparing this failed, dishonestly presented serv\chbot to the fall f the Berlin Wall goes beyond effrontery. It approaches lunacy,

Look, people don't care about this doubletalk anymore. The victims will undertake to defend themselves. Get used to it. Game over.

I'm not sure whether to laugh or call the guys in the white suits. Excise all you want; no one is telling you to keep quiet. I understand your view; I just don't share it. I don't apologize for ESC or anyone else. They are big boys and girls and can defend themselves. I personally DO NOT CARE if ESC or their service continues to exist or not. I have no investment in it at all. I don't sell things in boxes marked for sale, I don't assist them in development, nor do I own or maintain any interest in them.

Everything I argue is from my own perspective in how I see things. People may want to damn me for my views; that's fine, I can live with it. I have strong beliefs in how things should be, and I don't mind sharing them when I feel they are pertinent. I expect no less from anyone else.



Well, for that to work a) you can not have reproduced yet, and b) you would have to be killed before you could. If you are referring to ideas, well, don't hold your breath. ESC and LL have no intention of radically altering their services over this. Tomorrow, the Grid Shepherd will still be indexing for sale items, LL will still be doing whatever it is LL does, and this thread will be over 60 pages if a mod doesn't step in to end it for us.

Life goes on.



I've never exploited anything in SL. I am a vehement anti-cheater, but I recognize and support rule mechanisms as designed in a world. In another game world I used to play in, people used to exploit Consigners to store crafting materials, but since Consigners charged a percentage fee per week, people would put masses of stuff up on them for 1 copper piece. People would find the materials on the Consigners and buy them for super-cheap. The people who (ab)used the Consigners this way were outraged. My response? You put stuff up for sale TO ANYONE at that price, and someone came alone and bought it. Stop using Consigners for something they weren't meant for, or build your own and limit access to yourself or your guild. IE, mitigate your risks, but don't call people thieves because they legally bought stuff you put up for public sale for a cheap price.

If anything, I am at least consistent in my views.

Obviously not of this earth then. 0000FF doesn't naturally occur in RL.

No you don't.

They crawl every site on the web whether you have submitted it or not.

I have NEVER submitted ANY site I have ever set up, and Google, Yahoo, MSN Search, Altavista, etc have hit EVERY one of them at one time or another.

Guess you need to go back and check your facts, there, bud.

I think you have hit on a large part of the problem, and why (along with the fact that LL no longer wants any part of us or our problems) this sort of problem will increase.

The system ONCE had built-in mechanics to prevent things like this.

They have now given the system to any coder who desires to mess with it, resulting in a new set of built-in mechanics and law - i.e., whatever the coder desires and can do, and however he wishes to change things to suit and profit himself.

Coders who take advantage of that should - at the very least - inform others when they are essentially changing the rules.

(I realize the new rule is, "Here it is, coders, do with it as you please," but in practical terms, that amounts to building a new client, and changing the rules from what was formerly possible to what most people didn't know could be made possible, and then not telling them, for one's own profit.)

In any case, I was reading an interesting article about bots turning on people (I'll include the link if I find it again) this morning, and reminded of Asimov's first rule of robotry: That a robot shall not cause harm to people, as another poster just got done bringing up.

Setting aside the fact that in this case there are no bots with any sort of free will, and the fact that everything this bot does is actually ESC causing it to be done, I, too, would posit a couple of ethical rules for bot runners of the future:

1. First, cause no harm.

2. If harm is caused, make retribution.

3. To prevent harm being caused, don't grab the advantage of surprise out of self-interest of your own financial benefit. Foster fairness by first making diligent effort to let people know what is going to happen to them.

Now of course, one would think that people creating a bot - particularly the ESC one that presumably exists to serve us (which I don't buy for a minute) - would just naturally proceed with these ethical principles, but obviously, they are not.

ESC didn't, and neither do people with land-bots. I realize they tell themselves it's only "business," but that's the sort of "business" that eventually deprives them of good will, reputation, and customers. (We are not ESC's customers, but without us, ESC's customers will ultimately not be interested in SL. If the idea is to make a killing and then get out before it collapses, then yes, people with bots are definitely on the right track.)

One does indeed get tired of living in a completely lawless place, where whoever can fiddle with the mechanics of a car gets to change the traffic rules and grab some advantage for themselves. Where the one who comes up with a doohickey to sniff out locks on bank vaults is the one who gets the cash.

Naturally people get tired of being trod on, resent being ripped off, object to having their privacy violated, and take issue with being considered insignificant and unworthy of consideration, or expected to give up their self-interest in the interest of some other group of people and their new rip-off machine.

Any company that proceeds as ESC has in this matter has shown itself not up to the task of being a community leader of any kind, much less the least bit interested in providing a community service.

coco

P.S. Here's the link about the robotics story: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=451016&in_page_id=1770

Hilarious!

coco

blah blah blah... Go on. Defend thyself.

This game is far from over. I have gotten used to it.

You make yourself a victim by persisting in your unrealistic view of the world.

But defend yourself if you can... I think your biggest foe right now is yourself.

I picture Strife with his finger on the Close Thread button..

But he just can't help it.. it's like slowing down to look at a multi car pileup as you pass by..

Cars. A very apt example of a technology offered by a company that should have the "do no harm" ethos.

Cell phones are great... but used while driving is known to increases risk of harm. Is that the fault of the cell phone maker?


We live in the future. Decades ago, didn't the visionaries claim flying cars would be commonplace by now?

Why don't we have our flying cars? Because we'd have to live underground to be safe! And the "linden lab" that controls RL air-space isn't interested in approving open-source access to their space.

Very true. I am all for it. But because it is a place we choose to come to, and we support financially, a little more consideration for us, the residents should come into play. I've only been here a short while, but a lot of people here are the ones who have put SL in the place it is. We don't have control over a lot of things in RL. But if it is truly, our world, our imagination, do we have any influence. or is that just another empty sales pitch. I may be a naive idealist, admittedly. Second Life is my first venture into any virtual-online game, I'v never even used chat rooms before. I didn't read any of those over hyped articles before jumping in. Maybe I bought into the idea a little too much.
If we are going to go by Real Life rules here, let me know. I will become the jaded, suspiscious, cynic I really am.

Hi Brenda, me again...

Yours is an idealism I truly share. And I'd bet a few months worth of RL salary that it's also one that Philip Rosedale shares. The reality is that although Second Life is purely his dream come true, he needed financial backing to make it happen. That comes from the corporate world.. venture capitalists.. folks who invest in an idea, with the expectation that at some point, that investment will be returned in spades. It has always been inevitable that Second Life would quickly develop real world commercial appeal, and that the scope of the "metaverse" would widen so-as to accomodate corporate interest in the platform.

It's only been very recent that revenues at Linden Lab have begun to rise from red ink to black, and I doubt at this point that it's anything significant, as far as the investors are concerned. Our collective contribution as residents most likely pales in comparison to the likes of Mitch Kapor, when you consider what the over all P&L and balance sheets probably look like.

I imagine that 2007 is going to be a roller coaster of year for Second Life, and the community. Some, perhaps many, will leave in disgust. Others, many, will stick around.

There's light at the end of this tunnel, of that I am convinced. I am also convinced that there is room for everyone. Nike, Cisco, IBM, Microsoft, Toyota, and you, and me.. "Your World, Your Imagination" still thrives, and will continue to do so.

I predict a big boom in Gated communities.

I wouldn't invest very heavily in such things.