Automated Burglary

Collette, kudos to you for fighting the case so gamely and articulately. I agree wholeheartedly with you that bots should be labelled as such in order to mark them as separate from 'real' avatars. Many games have Non-Player Characters which are clearly differentiated from characters operated by a real person. Same with bots.

Anyone arguing a case for 'rights for bots' is clearly arguing a bogus case. Is Second Life a virtual World for real players or bots? If SL is primarily for bots then the real players should decamp to another virtual world as soon as it comes online and leave Second Life as an empty 'Bot-Wars' husk.

Rusty, if you don't believe that individuals are entitled to any privacy in SL, then I'm sure you'll have no problems whatsoever with me or anyone else publishing all your RL personal details on forums and IRC channels all over the internet. After all privacy on the internet is merely a delusion, eh?

*shrug* We're simply calling it as we see it, and here's why:



YOU_DON'T_SPEAK_FOR_US. YOU_CAN_ONLY_SPEAK_FOR_YOURSELF. I don't WANT your "view" of "privacy" in SL for MYSELF. Unlike you, I DON'T speak for anyone else, and it IS YOUR "view". I see NO attempt to work towards a consensus (which I have pointed out already); in fact, I see NO attempt at even DEFINING what it is you are even asking for in terms of specifics beyond a handful of general statements and a plethora of snark in responses. I don't know how to be any plainer than that.



It is FAR from a Straw Man argument, because it is a FACT that YOU_CANNOT_SPEAK_FOR_EVERYONE.



Nanny States never start out with heavy enforcement. They start out with erosion of rights and freedoms, and then move on to things which require heavy enforcement once the obstacles preventing such are removed.



Your suggestion is far from clear; in fact, it is vapor. Show me the meat and potatoes. Show me that you care about really being inclusive and considerate of my desires and needs in helping to draft something that I CAN get behind. THEN I might just consider doing just that. YES, *you* have to do it, because *you* are the one proposing changes; I am fine with the status quo otherwise.



People already can refuse access to bots if they want. It's called a BAN LIST. No, I don't agree with a blanket flagging of ALL bots, especially since that is not possible, technically or through policy. Most especially I do not agree with it, simply because it is None Of Your Business how an account is used on the client end. If it breaks the rules, it doesn't matter if it is bot or human; it gets punished all the same.

You're not wanting a better solution, you're wanting a PERFECT solution. For *you*. *I* don't have a problem with the bots existing and doing their work, as long as they are following the ToS and not exploiting the system.



Because your suggestions are so general and so broad that it could potentially require significant (and, in some cases, infeasible) technical investment to make work like you seem to want.



No less insulting that you've been in response to many of our posts, I assure you. I am using your own words. I interpret them according to my experience with the language, and use of appropriate reference works (http://www.dictionary.com for example). If I seem to be misunderstanding you (or your tone), try using different words. I can't read minds; I just read words.



That's because you're not proposing an "equal rights amendment". You're proposing a "Colette's Rights Amendment", everyone else's take on it (most especially if someone disagrees with any of your precepts) be damned. There Is A Difference.

Well I think its clear now that while it was a good thread and a popular thread, its time to close it, since people have gotten so heated in pure angered arguement

Nice try, but let's keep things in context, OK?

The issue is creating a SL privacy space in SL, NOT breaking what is ALREADY illegal according to the ToS and revealing RL info.

No one here has argued that RL privacy needs more (or less) protection in SL.

Non-sequitur, -1.

Not at all. I have no more emotional investment in this argument than I have in anything else I do in SL.

I'm just curious to see if there is any hope for the rosy mist of light and reason to gain purchase anywhere.

But, yeah, failing that, close it. It's been nothing but a back-and-forth rehash for the last 40-50 pages, and I seriously doubt that will change.

The reason I havent defined those rights is becuase as I said in the begining of bringing it up I want the Lindens to decide on what

Residents are entitled to a reasonable level of privacy with regard to their Second Lives.

Should mean.

I never said I should decide it. I dont think they define it well enough. There obvious gaps between what many users expect and what they are granted.

I do think it should be more than it seems to be. How much more? It would depend on what the Lindens decided after looking at the whole issue.

I stated that in both threads.

The whole concept that I would define those rights was a concoction by someone that was not me.

Yes Ive been sarcastic in many of my posts - theres been dozens of attmepts to shut me up in this thread. Sometimes sarcasm is a better defense against agression than direct confrontation.

*sigh*

I wish I could express this better so that where I'm coming from wasn't so alien to you.

Code to PREVENT privacy violations would cripple secondlife.

Code to effectively PUNISH people that violate privacy is easier, but to punish people you have to first convince the lindens to update the tos and cs to make privacy violations a punishable crime.

THE CODE - determines what is and isn't possible. Some laws are made impossible by code. Obviously all illegal activities can't be prevented by code, which is why there are:

THE LAW (or 'terms of service') - these are "The Law" for us in this world. Part of The Rules express explicitly that some RL laws are also applicable. Violation of RL law can have RL consequences.

THE ETHICS (or 'community standards') - suggest what constitutes proper behavior, and while less binding and more open to interpretation than 'the law', they are, none the less, what we should conduct ourselves according to, and expect others to as well.

Respect for privacy can be added in at the LAW and ETHIC levels of secondlife, but
would be utterly useless without effective ENFORCEMENT... which requires:

1) An large elite class of people with special permissions to actively and responsively pass judgment on rule-breakers, (and likely an oversight committee to keep them from abusing their power) and

2) CODE that enforces the punishments doled out

Or, exaggerate somewhat: We would need a brigade of jackboots stomping about banning people from your utopian secondlife for standing suspiciously too close to your parcel. Lovely. Go buy a private sim and use your estate governance to enforce your utopia... I don't want to live there.

And... can we please leave copybot out of this argument? Violating the DMCA is punishable. Whether someone uses copybot OR NOT. "Easier" doesn't mean "more illegal".

That is what you have been angling for all along, isn't it Talarus? Distract, deflect, derail, misstate, flame, repeat and repeat the same exploded phony arguments and then call for the thread to be closed because of all the repetition - anything to get Strife to push that "locked" button. Feh.

Anything but acknowledge that we have a bungled bot that hurts people that was released without notice on SL by a company that not only doesn't care about but is contemptuous of those it exploits - judging by its apologists and its conspicuous refusal to grapple with these issues. Anything but acknowledge that the power to spy on or exploit your neighbor is not, not, not the RIGHT to do so. Anything but acknowledge that people own their SL stuff in the context created in-world by LL and LL owns every bit on its servers under RL law and NEITHER THE RESIDENTS INVOLVED NOR LL HAS ACTUALLY GIVEN ESC THE RIGHT TO USE OR SELL THAT DATA.

So, how much is ESC paying you to shill for them, Talarus?

That would be the first case in History Im aware of, of Jackbooted thugs stepping in to over-enforce the Rights of individuals.

I seriously dont see that happening reguardless of what comes out of this.


I never said to change any code -

Other than allowing people to ban Bot Accounts the same way they do Unverified accounts.



In this Electric Sheep example.

If the Community Standards had said "you cant post Users Items from non commercial parcels on a third Party website without consent of those residents"

Electric sheep being a responsible company would not have.

None of what happened in this thread would have happened.

Im not saying thats what the Community Standards needs to say, but it would have worked in this particular case.

Here is the BE ALL of it

My information about what I sell and where its sold is information that I allow Linden Labs server and who I wish to know about it.
It does NOT allow a 3rd party to scan my land and put any information that is MINE on its website.

There will be lawsuits about this, just wait and see

The permission bits that govern your content are technically the property of linden lab.

The bits that represent your content are the property of linden lab.

If esc doesn't violate DMCA in publishing listings which point people AT your represented content... then that lawsuit is going to have very little to no traction whatsoever.

Rusty, that was beautifully stated. I heartily agree and couldn't improve on your words! Gorgeous to read.

Just need to name Linden Lab and esc in lawsuit. A game player on another platform won when the company that owned the online game did not protect his virtual goods as they should have. Precedent set.

We locked up japanese americans, to protect our right to live lives free of being terrorized by possible sympathizers with our WWII enemies. U.S. citizens that have arab-american names or appearance have vanished off U.S. streets without due process or trial.

If that's not jackbooted state supported terrorism in the name of protecting people's rights, I don't know what is.

I don't want that or anything like it in RL or secondlife.




You should say that's what the community standards needs to say.

I would back you 100%. (edit: Sorry... responded too quickly... guilty of hopeful reading. I'd back it 100% if you included mention of 'publish to web' option being sufficient consent/permission)

But if you phrase it in terms of "regulate or forbid the use of bots or modified clients" I will argue endlessly. This is why I keep harping on the "dictate what actions are illegal, not who or what commits them." angle over and over.

I believe that esc wishes to be a legitimate service, and if this change were made to the Community Standards, they would have to voluntarily comply in order to remain in good standing with both linden lab and the community.

It won't stop everyone... and may not even slow down most people that ignore the illusion of privacy, effective enforcement is necessary to guarantee privacy.

But it would help in the larger cases such as this.

My frustration in the previous post was more directed at coco who seems to think I'm blinded by the code.

(*blush* -- Thanks Oryx! )

Please cite your source? I'm very interested.

Please stick to your coding and keep your minimally informed historical notes and politics off of these forums please.

Please cite YOUR source.......

Incidentally, the questions I've asked of ESC are answerable. It isn't brain surgery.

Either you can answer them, ESC, or we can conclude you don't think we're worth bothering to talk to.

coco

It was merely a counter-example to a claim attempting to discredit what I clearly stated was an exaggeration. The example was built upon one started by Colette in the first place.

But your request is noted, and since I was quick to condemn Har for his abusive and distortive use of the language I'll graciously concede and do my best to avoid using historic examples in future points.

Keep in mind, that unlike RL, secondlife has no recourse. If you are banned, basically you're screwed, you lose everything. Whether the banning was just, or trumped up by a group of people that just don't like you. The more laws that give people the right to demand that others get banned, the more likely people will be unjustly banned.

If that is a wrong conclusion... or if you feel it's okay for some people to be unjustly banned if it protects others from a violation of privacy that the tos/cs does not yet guarantee them... then say so. Don't merely dismiss me as ignorant... show me how I'm wrong.

For me, the point is that, like someone recently pointed out (I forget who, I think it was a page or so ago) is that you may scream "privacy" and "rights" all you want, but if you read the TOS,

EVERYTHING IN SL IS OWNED BY LINDEN LABS WITH THE EXCEPTION OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY.

Everything that you "own" is a collection of 1's and 0's on LL's computers. YOU do not own it. LL reserves the right to do whatever it wants to with those 1's and 0's, including deleting them without warning if it so sees fit. Your house, your furniture, your sex balls, all of it, every last prim, is owned by LL. NOT YOU. You can't sue LL for not regulating its own property. That would be like saying to the neighbor whose tree is providing you shade for your pleasure "you can't cut it down because I'M using it!" If ESC wants to send bots all over SL, it is actually sending some sort of query (I'm not a computer whiz) through the LL computers looking for specific 1's and 0's.

If you signed the TOS, you agreed to all this. If you don't like it, take it up with Linden Lab, not ESC.

Personal experience: The husband of a friend of my parents vanished, was detained for months, never charged, and finally released.

But personal experience isn't necessarily a proper citing so:

I'll offer: www.usdoj.gov/oig/special/0207/pdf/full_report.pdf

From October 26, 2001, to June 15, 2002, the period covered by this
report, the OIG received the following number and types of complaints:
Number of complaints received suggesting Patriot Act-related civil rights
or civil liberties connection: 458
Number of complaints within jurisdiction of the OIG: 87
Number of complaints outside the OIG’s jurisdiction
: 196
Number of “unrelated” complaints
: 175
Types of Complaints:
• Excessive force
• Illegal detention
• Detainee held without access to an attorney
• Detention under adverse conditions (e.g., cell light remains on
constantly, no access to reading material, only permitted out of cell
once a day for short period, toilet does not work properly)
Other allegations received by the OIG include verbal abuse by
correctional officers, discrimination by the INS, rude treatment by INS
inspectors, inmate not permitted to practice Muslim religion, and detainee not
permitted to observe Ramadan while in INS custody.

Good Job. Your personal experience aside, a substantial number of allegations yes. How many have been proven true? In todays PC rampant society, I tend to be dubious of a percentage of such claims. Abusues of power by authorities is intolerable, but have been ocurring for a long time, and hardly evoke the image of people being swept of the street in the dark of night.. but you did call me out on my call out.

If you get more than "we haven't decided yet" out of them I'll be pleasantly surprised.

That wasnt Jackbooted thugs over-enforcing the rights of the individuals. That was Jack-booted thugs enforcing the will of a paranoid Government.

In both cases. Individual Rights were Trampled on - not Enforced.

"Societies" rights were suposedly enforced. For our "protection".

I asked when have Jack-booted thugs Over-Enforced the Rights of individuals?

A better example would have been when Federal Marshals were used to escort children to school during the Civil rights Movement in the Segregated South.

But id argue they didnt Over-Enforce anyone's rights in that case they were protecting those rights.

In reality the rights are needed to protect people from other people from taking advantage of them, and from abuses of the Government.



As I said a coupls posts up - Its up to the Lindens to come up with Comunity Standards changes. They know what they are capable of doing and what they arent. And their lawyer has to approve of the wording it so they wont be liable for anything.

I will say only 3 (of 5) sentences refering to Privacy rights in a game based on Private Property Land Ownership simulation is a bit on the sad side.

It wont really stop the real nasty people out there but anyone legitimate will follow the CS like they do now. If we want a stronger community we need to start somewhere.

If they decide they Cant do anything more than they are doing - then they need to come clean so residents have some idea what they are up against.

I think most willl agree this searchbot blindsided nearly everyone.

And Im pretty sure Most people in Second Life still dont know about it.


Edit -

About the people you know thats unfortunate. I know a few Arab-Americans who have been held and questioned and one who cant return to the country becuase of these issues as well.

Cocoa, your passive aggressive, and often aggressive-aggressive, professional victim style makes it very difficult to want to engage with you at all.

I have always tried to act honorably in all my SL dealings and this is nothing new. Right now I'm up to my ears in work and while I do want to clarify these policies for everyone, right now I'm just trying to keep it simple and explain that there is nothing being done with the data right now, and we're just trying to figure out how to make search a little better for SL. LL is working on the same thing. I want very much to craft our privacy policy, clear it with the lawyers, and get it out there.

1. we do not want to do anything that burns the trust of the community. It is not who we are as people, and it is against our interests as a business.
2. we will be transparent about what we're doing with any data

We're not evil, rapacious, or any of that nonsense. Prokofy's view of what we're doing is totally off base, as usual. I fully expect there to be some people who think otherwise. Most people, however, have reacted quite positively to what we are doing, and see it as no different from the early days of AltaVista or Google: two different generations of search engine but both of whom spidered the Web, created an index based on their results, and provided a search mechanism on top of that index as a service for everyone to use.

That's all I'm adding to this thread. I want to get this right and communicate it all as clearly as possible, and it's something I will be working on over the next few weeks.