Automated Burglary

54 page thread and still adding pages per day if you dont stop the forum is gonna fall into a big black hole

What is this? Sophistry? Lampoon? Parody? Sarcasm? Doubletalk?

From you?

Oh the hipocrisy.. it burns.

I couldn't care less if you believed me or not. If you are so effin' lame as to not know a joke when you see it, you're gonna die of a heart attack before you get out of high school.

At this point, I don't think there is anything else to say TO you, or ABOUT you. I think you've more than aptly demonstrated your whole reason for existence here.

Isn't there a bridge somewhere you need to be waylaying goats on or something?

Touched a nerve, did I? Where's Suzy?

Gordon Wendt starts singing end of the world by REM

...It's the end of the world as we know it, it's the end of the world as we know and I feel fine...

I can't imagine a more aptly named troll though...

"Har" - a sarcastic sound one makes instead of laughing at an attempted joke.

I could just see dad. "That's my son? Har!"

(I normally avoid making ad hominem attacks, but nothing else was getting through. )

I actually wouldn't mind at all working for a company like ESC. Hell, if I could sit on my ass, wearing nothing but boxers and a tee shirt, occasionally scratching myself in places I wouldn't scratch in public, for 10-12 hours a day, enjoy the hell out of it, and get paid for it...

Electric Sheep Company FTW

When you find out where applications need to be submitted for that gig, give me a jingle. I may not scratch but I do belch really well, if that counts for anything.

I have a few questions, Forseti.

1. I assume the idea of making this service an opt-in one is an idea which you will absolutely not consider, now, or ever. Is that correct?

If so, are you still convinced - even at this stage - that you couldn't find the bugs even now, if it became opt-in?

Or do you believe such a search would ultimately be relatively worthless, in general, if it were opt-in?

2. What are your plans - if any - to proactively let the residents know that their objects for sale are being catalogued and listed on this site?

3. After people opt out, is their data completely erased, or does it stay in the system in aggregate? (To use statistically, for instance.)

Is their information still scanned and recorded, though not published?

Or does opting out mean one's objects are not scanned and recorded at all?

4. There is an option to list all one's items everywhere, whether for sale or not.

I opted in to that, to see what would happen, but so far nothing happened. (And there is no pop-up to confirm that anything has happened when you choose that option at the inworld site.)

Is this information about all one's objects, for sale or not, gathered for everyone, and dumped? Or gathered for everyone, and just not published?

Or is it not gathered at all, at any stage, for anyone, if you don't opt in for it to be gathered?

5. To what end, if any, to you plan to put the information you have gathered, besides publishing it or portions of it on your search engine web site?

6. Will information (including any and all not published on the site) be collated and made available to your corporate clients for market purposes? Will you be selling this information?

coco

They are good questions, and knowing the answers would be very helpful.

Good Questions Coco

Im pretty sure I know a few of the answers

But I wont say any of my suspicions since that tends to annoy people.

They would probably have to scan ... at least enough to tell if the object they're looking at is on an opt-out list. From an efficiency/speed point of view, they probably scan&store, and then filter out the opt-out data.

But I'm just guessing.

Couple of Questions -

If they actually check opt out and opt in lists as they scan objects - wouldnt the bot get slower as more people opt in and opt out?

How can they know an object is Opt in or Opt Out without scanning it first? ESP?

The only efficient way to do it would be, as Rusty guessed, to scan everything, send it off to the back end (offworld) and check opt status there, discarding opt out objects and indexing opt in objects. Having the crawler do it in real time, querying the server on every object, would be considerably inefficient. As Rusty, I am just guessing. And no Har, I do not work for the Electric Sheep Company. I actually have to shower each morning, get dressed, get in my car and drive to work. It's just not fair :/

If the bot is tied to the databases, filtering on the fly could make sense.
The overhead of a single read to see if the name is opted out is lower than the overhead of writing to DB then later performing a scan and delete operation.
If it simply scans into a file, the filtering will most likely be after the scan, before DB input.

Either way, we know that opted out objects are not stored permanently by the length of time it takes to get them relisted. If they were already in the DB, the opting back in would show them almost instantly.

Which was all I was stating when you got annoyed with me about them collecting all the data and post processing it.

What you call back end.

Although I didnt "KNOW" thats how they did it - It seemed the only way they could do it that would let their lil Spybot (crawler wt/e) speed its merry way along the grid at top speed.

I do think they do delete the data they dont want to keep (opt outs, medium level not for sales) however - to make their search site run along smoothly.

That could change I think if someone wanted ALL the data - but from what Corey was saying fairly clearly they didnt really WANT all the data as far as she knew.

It felt to me like you were convinced they were retaining all the data, for future mining purposes. I still can't think of very many ways in which this data would be valuable to anyone. And for ESC, it would be an enormous expense in terms of storage cost, as it would effectively mirror a large portion of the asset store. In a cursory cost/benefit analysis, the cost would greatly outweigh any benefit.

Granted, I'm only thinking out loud. I really don't know what's happening over there in that virtual boardroom. I am confident, however, that privacy concerns will be taken seriously.

Cocoa, to address a few things (although experience has proven that you and I look at the world very differently):

Opt-in versus Opt-out. I touched on this in a blog post a little while ago, and I remain convinced that a middle ground is the best path -- that middle ground is an opt-out system with reasonable controls on what is displayed (in this case we would consider items for sale, land listed in Find > Places, things with Publish to Web checked, etc all reasonable), and a straightforward way to block the data collection process (i.e. ban Grid Shepherd from land, or opt out your objects).

A purely opt-in system cannot get off the ground and search would remain ineffective and an inhibitor on the advancement of the metaverse. This problem will only get worse the bigger all this gets. The successful Web search engines knew this and did not launch with an opt-in system for the Internet. Not that there aren't people who believe that the Web search engines should be entirely opt-in, but I am not one of them, since I find Google an absolutely invaluable resource to the Web and am personally quite glad they were able to launch and support that service.

Then there is the continued world/game versus 3D Internet/platform debate going on, as to how this is different from the Web. I think this is moving inexorably towards the 3D Internet/platform side, and just like people have private Intranets, we will see people creating their own walled garden communities/utopias. No one seriously thinks the metaverse is going to run out of a giant server farm run by a single company, do they?

As for the data, we aren't doing anything with the data right now, or monetizing the service. This is a prelimary technology we have put out there, and we are getting a lot of feedback that people are already finding it useful. Right now we list data on objects for sale and all-objects for those who have opted in (although I know you said you opted in and didn't see a change, which might either be a bug or that the db hasn't updated yet -- that process is not yet as efficient as it should be). I can see that data, and you can see that data. If we are going to go ahead with this as a fully supported technology and product, then I agree we need to be as transparent as possible. I'll be working on that over the next several months.

When thinking on the plus-side of the automatic opt-in system did someone realize that it is common practice to set items for $0 to transfer them and that this device could be used to swoop in and take these items not intended for sale?

(edit: reworded)

There's a huge difference between... set-for-zero for immediate transfers...
and set-for-zero and waiting days for the intended recipient to claim the item.

Transfering land with set-for-zero/sell-to-anyone is unsafe even for seconds,
because secondlife lists parcels for sale *instantly*.

The sheep search crawler would have pass by, notice and record, and a user
would have to submit a query that would find that set-for-zero object, teleport
find it, and buy it. If the intended recipient is going to claim the object moments
after it's made available, sheep search adds no threat.

If esc feels it's their responsibility to protect people that engage in this unsafe
practice, kudos to them.

I doubt they were aware (initially) that it was such a common practice.

News Flash, from ESC, according to Chosen Few on the other thread where we're talking about the impact of this issue (how to deal with it):

As a temporary stopgap, all items marked as 'sell original' will be excluded from the listing. That should pretty much eliminate the problem we've been discussing. Of course, there are certainly sell-original items that should be visible, so this isn't a perfect long term solution by any means, but hopefully it will prevent the kinds of 'accidents' we've been talking about here.

I think the parts of Coco's questions Forseti didnt directly address says as much as those he did.

I have a hard time keeping a straight face of this version of a "middle ground" between opt-in and opt-out.

If this search bots supposed purpose is to find stuff for sale the "Middle ground" is functionally nearly identical to the opt in.

In my opinion -
This would be the chart version Of comparing this middle ground to Opting in for the purpose of a search intended to index for sale items.

OPT IN
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"Forsetti's Middle"
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Opt Out


Of course this completly ignores the fact that Any system where something done without ASKING you for permission with information about you unless you ask them not to is

OPT OUT

No matter if thats 1 piece of information or 1000.

Mainly i was saying they take your data without asking. They would only keep it I think if they had a reason to.

How many sex gen beds I have for example - isnt all that useful information unless someone wants to know.

It doesnt stop it from being invasive though.

The Jira login system has been reported by a number of people as not working properly.

That the Linden Lab issue tracking doesn't work right somehow comes as a complete non-surprise to me.

Try loggin in to Jira first at http://jira.secondlife.com, then going to the issue you want to vote on, and you should see the vote option.

I just clicked on the link, didn't see a vote option, used the "if you were logged in " link, logged in, still didn't see a vote option, then, although already logged in, I went to http://jira.secondlife.com and clicked the login link at the top right. Then, I clicked the link the in the post above and voila, the vote option and other "logged in only" stuff appeared.

I then voted for it. I suspect that folks might find that making a comment in jira helps bring attention to the issues they want to support.