Automated Burglary

{Sigh} Lord, deliver us from paraphrasers, for surely they shall spin.

I believe the CS should reflect a consensus among the Residents, not the commercial self-interest of one third-party entity, particularly not one so obviously disdainful and exploitive toward Residents. LL will take care of the TOS.

ESC will have to speak for itself about its motives, but since you want my opinion, I do not think that ESC "deliberately misinterpreted." My opinion is that it ignored CS and the residents entirely.

And I think ESC's actions and the arguments of its agents in these forums speak for themselves. Residents can readily make up their own minds about the nature of ESC.

Finally, there are things LL can do to help, but in large part it is the Residents who are going to have to take action and deal with such problems themselves. And as for "vilifying" anyone, if the shoe fits, wear it.

I'll be polite and just wish you "good luck" and go back to lurking until Cocoanut gets some more answers out of esc.

Well to take their defense I do not feel like i have to ask permission either to make data mining.

It would be nice to see a "sell object to" feature just like there is for land. (even being able to restrict the purchasing to a given group) It would solve a lot of these issues. Administrating a business can sometimes bring up complex issues for ownership, permissions etc. There's only so much you can do by making someone your estate manager and giving them manipulation rights.

I for one have seen objects I had carefully set out, positioned, and set up for someone just to suddenly watch it poof and vanish as some scan bot zipped in and took it in the few moments I set it for sale to them to take ownership. They were AFK for a bit and I was distracted, it did not take very long.

Please add this at jira.secondlife.com, if someone hasn't already, as it would be very useful.

Hi, Kyrah, welcome to the thread. Actually, your observation about whether you "have to ask permission" is not so much a defense of ESC as a partial explanation of why there is a problem in the first place. A problem, by the way, that reaches far beyond ESC and its malignant little searchbot.

If a would-be data miner did "have to ask permission" there would be no problem here. Any problems would be strictly between the miner and the people who gave permission.

In the present case ESC released a searchbot in-world essentially scanning avery Resident-made object in it and collecting those where the "for-sale" box was checked. ESC then posted these with landmarks set right in front of each object on a website separate from SL and LL, claiming it was a search service for in-world buyers. ESC did all this not only without asking anyone's "permission" but also WITHOUT NOTIFYING THE OWNERS OF THE OBJECTS. As a result, owners found themselves relieved of valuable objects from inside their homes and properties for nominal or zero prices by unscrupulous people when the owners were innocently unaware that the for-sale box was checked, or were builders using a workaround that had been safe common practice for years and had suddenly and without warning made them vulnerable. ESC's response to complaints about this effect was profound contempt and condescension - and for quite some time not the slightest inclination to fix or remove this bot. (And by the way, the bot cannot read the contents of vendor devices, so misses maybe 90% of the objects legitimately for sale in SL; it is almost useless for its stated function.) Whether by accident or design, the result was not merely data-mining, but predatory data-mining, and from the moment ESC knew about this effect, consciously predatory. It is evident that from their point of view, The Electric Sheep Company are the meatpackers, and we Residents are their sheep. One ESC officer has been quoted in a publication as speculating about "life-logging," meaning basically tracking every move an avatar makes as well as every object it owns or disposes of. I will leave it to your imagination what other harmful (to Residents) uses spybots could be put to by exploitive or malicious people. I have thought about it, and some of the possibilities would have a deeply chilling effect on interest in SL by individuals and businesses alike. Some of the possibilities are just plain chilling.

For us, the questions now are, what can or should LL do about the problem ESC's actions have exposed, and what can or should the Community Standards be to deal with the possibly predatory use of spybots, and what can or should Residents do to deal with what many see an unwarranted and harmful intrusion into their SL lives and sense of privacy, and what can or should "privacy" consist of in SL, and how can such privacy be guarded?

For LL, there are other questions, such as, should they be allowing outside entities to be making such dubious use of data on LL servers which LL, after all, legally owns, and which might someday actually have monetary value to marketers and others? And, at what point might LL lose the legal right to control their own data through failing to take action to assert and protect control?

As you see, Kyrah, there is a lot here for intelligent people to work on; a lot of questions about SL that need intelligent answers. I hope you will help work toward those answers.

Back on topic: The topic isn't as complicated as some are making it.

For every post with a complaint about someone exploiting the game by bypassing the GUI, there are multiple responses in defense of the exploits.

Bypassing the GUI just means using an external process to interact with the client. It's called cheating and no explanation is going to be good enough to justify it.

If the LL policy on cheating allows exploits, then I suggest finding some other "game" to play or wait until PunkBuster is adopted for Second Life.

Nice interpretation! And if linden lab didn't embrace open sourcing the client, or had a policy against anything but their approved clients connecting to the grid... I'd definitely see searchbot/landbot/copybot use as 'cheating'.

Open sourcing the client makes rules enforced by the client software entirely optional ... as long as the altnerate client software doesn't cause problems for the server software or violate the published rules & regs laid out by linden lab.

My worry, is when the server side gets open sourced... that means many of the rules that sims enforce will become optional too. That will result in quite a degree of panic in hindsight, I'm certain.

Think I stopped in here 900 posts ago. Without reading the 600 previous posts Im assuming the sheepbot is still running under its original parameters. Logging locations so opportunists can fly in and scoff items inadvertently left for sale. If this be the case, and they have not swapped the thing over to an OPT OUT default, SCREW THEM!! If they dont think anyone cares they should take note of a thread thats over 1100 posts long! For every additional person whos lost an item unintended since the masses started complaining about this thing, they should be raked over the coals for their irresponsibility. They may have designed this thing with good intent, but once the monster started eating villagers stuff and the populace started freaking out, THEY SHOULDA PULLED ITS PLUG AND FIXED THE ISSUE!!!! And if LL has let this ongoing mess continue, they are just as guilty of gross negligence. Dont do product testing on my account, without my authorisation, if it can result in damages. I do NOT appreciate being an unpaid guinea pig for some third party software developer. Wheres a list of everything Electric sheep has vested interests in? Id like to OPT OUT of supporting anything they do.

There have been recent reports that the data on the searchbot's website have gotten quite stale, so maybe it is in drydock for now. As far as I know, nothing has been announced, however.

It could be they are waiitng on Forsetti's development of statements they are going to make to SL residents and publishing them.

Since ESC is now building a Star Trek Sim for CBS allegedly, change Drydock to Spacedock.

Ahh forget all that, just phaser/laser/taser the Spybot.

Thanks for the info, I look forward to seeing it. I still think of ESC as one of us and really want this to work out well for everyone. At the same time, I still feel it all should have been voluntary, and it would be a better tool if it is voluntary.

In Second Life, peeping tom reports YOU.

This is about to become truer than we can imagine.

Yep, remember, the sheepbot - or sheepspybot, to be more accurate - was written to scan every Resident-made object rezzed in-world. ESC only chose to publish those where the for-sale box was checked, inadvertently or otherwise.

If you rezz anything in-world for any length of time that you would not want your worst RL enemy to find out about by paying a price to ESC, relabel it, relabel other things for camouflage, and set out decoys.

I'm going to lock this because the thread is too long. Feel free to restart the thread and link to posts contain within. All I ask is that the thread have a name that better describes the situation (and that the rules are observed).