Automated Burglary

Paraphrased from Forseti Svarog:

"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"


What he doesn't say is whether that's:

for sale OR on listed parcels OR publish to web... or if it's:

for sale AND on listed parcels AND publish to the web.

If they could add "AND the parcel is listed as a shop or business", that would satisfy me as a sufficiently stated intend to sell objects publicly that it would be reasonable to assume the owner is attempting to make their for sale items more visible.

Personally, I think if esc wants to be a "legitimate" search engine for secondlife, they should not present any data from parcels not marked "publish to web".

okay but why then do you want spam a lot of engines have changed to prevent search engine spam your starting with the mistakes they learned about why not make it opt in to start with

of course there is email marketing as another example. The internet started out with no opt-in rules or opt-out rules now its become illegal in many places to send email to someone without asking first (opt-in)

so you are basically repeating all the mistakes everyone made to start with I guess I dont understand why

firstly a lot of the community doesn't like it (me i dont care honestly but it picks up a lot of useless information along with the useful stuff)

secondly it serves no real purpose other then possibly a tool for theft.


Anyhow none of my stuff is listed at this point and i used the opt-in feature so its not working properly at all.


Search engines used to spider everything all the time. The result was a lot of unwanted stuff. Over time they started changing the rules. Now you can't bring up 20 pages leading to one entrance they learned from their mistakes. In this case it doesn't look like your using the present day examples.

ONce upon a time I used to get paid tons of money to build gateway pages and doorway pages. 20-30 per index page beacuse it was a way to get seen on the net at the time then that became spamming and you were no longer allowed to use all these pages to lead to one place. Then they required you to manually submit your site and not accept a lot of automated submissions.

All this is not being even thought about because at the present most engines are pretty much opt-in some are even double opt-in.

actually, the honest answer is that I'm writing on a Sunday afternoon while my 2 year old takes a short nap, so I didn't have much time to jot a response. You got some thoughts which I could write down quickly. There are some good questions there that I want to address in a formal way as the product becomes more formal.

And you are right, our system is an opt-out system. I'm not trying to equivocate around that, or blow smoke. But I still believe we are trying to do a responsible opt-out system.

If your product cannot get off the ground on it's own merit, why should I care? Making this system opt out, violates the first rule of civil society, "Do not iniate force against peaceful parties." Without my consent you use me as a BETA tester of your product. You cannot even claim implied consent since you are not Linden Labs.

The only honorable and moral thing to do is to scrap this system and make one that is totally opt in.

That is why Linden Lab provided us with a feature that allows us to set land for sale to a person and have it sell to them only whenever they get around to grabbing it. There was never any major need to do that for my bed in my skybox 600 meters above a island sim. The esc bot has now made it necessary. Hopefully Linden Lab can make the necessary changes to close this exploit.



Take some time and look at the roster of esc staff. Most have SL start dates of 2004. They were more than aware. And since they develop corporate sims - they know what 'set to zero for the customer' is and why it is necessary to do so. But I don not think I will find IBM's office building for free on the esc searchbot system anytime soon. Most esc staff probably safely opted-out.

This is a very good point Chris

Second Life isnt the "metaverse" yet. Its still a virtual world in the possesion of Linden Labs. So all comparisions to regular Internet crawlers, spiders, Opt-Out schemes on the regular internet need to be metered by this fact.

Linden Labs is also at fault here for allowing this to go on without telling us if its permissable or not.

One wonders what LL actually even knew about this imposition.

Oh, I dont wonder.

But that says something else.

No one needs "consent" to access publicly-accessible information from SL. LL has already set a precedent allowing the accumulation of SL service data in third-party websites (Name2Key database, anyone?). In fact, it seems as if their approach to it is one of encouragement, except where it specifically is used to violate the ToS.



Ultimately, LL *can* be the sole arbiter of how their service is used. However, given their liberal encouragement of technologies which enable new and innovative ways of presenting SL to the "masses", it is likely they are good with embracing these technologies as they come up. Also, the comparisons to "real" Internet search engines are not fundamentally flawed by this fact. The point is, if LL considers the info public and available for aggregation/use inside AND outside of SL, then the rationale for use of opt-out schemes is no less valid than for the greater Internet.



Fairly typical of them, actually. They are very happy to let people run with their ideas and creations, and only use ablative responses to serious issues (like with CopyBot, for example). By default, their attitude seems to be "it is permissible until we say it isn't or technically prevent it from happening".

Not necessarily the best way to run things, but there it is.

They were probably smart enough to close access to the sim until the requisite zero dollar purchases were completed, unlike the OP a few thousand pages back.

One wonders whether this was an imposition upon you, personally, in the first place.

They could have avoided most of the back and forth on this thread by stating their policy on collecting and displaying Avatar's object data on a third party website.

Actually this bungle was an imposition on everybody who cares about SL. ESC should withdraw it now, and either fix it or scrap it, before its corporate reputation is damaged even more.

One still wonders whether you, personally, were affected by this. Actually.

I didnt say flawed -
I said would need to be metered -
as in measured.

If Linden Labs had said - "We need to control how bots are introduced". Then thats how it would have been. A general statement Ive heard from non forums goers on this issue is it would have been prefectly fine for LL to do this, but they arent happy that some 3rd party has. (unscientific I know - but I know some "normal" people who dont read forums)

Simply put the arguement "this is the metaverse- it works like the internet" isnt true.

This is a virtual world - run by Linden Labs. The comparisions to the internet/metaverse are perhaps a goal. But they are not, as yet, reality.

Keep in mind we as residents agreed to a TOS with Linden Labs - Not Electric Sheep.

As far as they're concerned our opinion doesn't matter to them nor does it effect their reputation on those that matter to them which are the big corporations that pay their blood money, as long as the corporations are happy and still paying for ESC's services they couldn't give a damn about the rest of us which still leads me to wonder why they changed course and changed their search's behavior albeit ever so slightly.

Well Forsetti and Corey are aware of the issues surely with 0L sales and decided their beta could be improved a little to protect some sales without hurting their effort too much.

I mean even if I dont like the whole concept, I have to give them credit when they make an effort.

Ok I'll give them credit for that however I still find it suspicious since they have no reason to care what the community thinks nor have they shown any willingness to do so before this slight concession and acknowledgment and I do mean slight of the opinion and will of the community at large.

Well they started out in SL just like us - so I imagine some of it is just being Residents of Second Life and being willing to compromise in small ways that wont hurt their system.

I am sure however they fall in on the side of those who feel any data you can scan as a Resident is fair game to be autoscanned by a bot and listed on a 3rd party website.

Since its clear quite a few of the residents also beleive this (most of whom are technically inclined though some will say Im prejudiced for pointing it out)

They obviously don't care what we think about them, but it appears they do care about what Residents can do to them and their project. There are methods people can employ to deflect or negate their searchbot, or even to game it for Residents' benefit.

These include but are not restricted to: decoy cubes set out to spoof grifters, creating other "false positives" to cloud their search results, altering the names and descriptions of your items so no-one but you knows what they actually are, setting up prims "for-sale" that are actually adverts for the products one does sell, limiting their bot's range by banning the bot from any sim and petitioning sim owners to do the same. There are people doing some or all of these things as we speak (or rather type furiously). They care to the extent that we can undo their meretricious searchbot.

Small petty clarification: The Sell-To field (for parcels) long predates being able to search for available parcels by price. It wasn't added afterwards as a correction.

I agree that there needs to be a "Sell-To: group/person" feature for in-world items, and there has always been a need for that. Perhaps as a result of esc's search we'll finally get it.

And, as for whether the lindens noticed or "cared":

If esc's crawler hammered on secondlife, oh, like scripted land scanners of the past, then I have no doubt they'd be concerned, but that's not the case.

A crawler bot can likely wander about in secondlife and consume far LESS resources than a normal person trying to fly about on the same path. The bot doubtfully needs to ask for any more information than the normal client gets to 'see' what it needs to... and it doesn't need to download textures/animations/sounds as it goes.


So, if the crawler isn't tripping "heavy usage" alarms, and isn't showing data that isn't already visible by *everyone* in secondlife if they cared to look... I doubt linden lab sees a reason to intervene.

Though... I wouldn't be surprised if at some point they GOM this service.

Probably good points.

Claiming they would not notice though is silly - they know who ESC is.

Just put one and one together and got a possible answer:

1 -- ESC is obviously wedded to their searchbot approach that looks unworkable if what you want is a useful service for finding stuff legitimately for sale in SL

+

1 -- If there's anything most people can agree on here it is that SL needs such a service

=

2 -- As in 2 services. Maybe some enterprising SL'er could design and launch a WORKABLE third-party search site: Opt-in, searchable by item or item type not just by vendor or gamed keyword, space for merchants to enter their wares, ESPECIALLY vendor-based wares, plus their (genuine) prices, useful descriptions (prim counts, perms, etc., etc.) - and a landmark. Plus an easily-acquired sign for merchants and malls to post around SL to advertise the service when they join it. The merchants I am sure would be happy to do the posting work themselves once the spreadsheet was properly set up.

Not sure how the business model would work. Maybe a L$ fee for posting items above a certain price and/or number of items, so the really cheap stuff that draws eyeballs and the small-time or occasional seller gets on there too, and the merchants most able and willing - no, glad - to pay the freight to have such advertising would do so. Or maybe some other business model would work. True, it would grow slowly at first from being opt-in, but I think I would not want to stand in the way of the exponential growth rate once something like this does get going - just ask any merchant.

Let's be positive and creative here and put some thinking caps on. Some good could come of this thing yet!

LOL I dont - If there was one thing SL did well - Is the ability to SHOP

Maybe thees just some bad shoppers out there.