OMG youve got to see this!!!!

Hey Felix what protection do items that are set for zero that were intending to be only bought between friends or clients that may have mistakenly missed it showing up in the system? Or if someone selling textures through UIID they never set to sale or some how has circumvented the UIID system to steal textures to resell as there own?
Yeah settining up the UIID images was difficult for me at first. I had major problems with other venders but I found Meta Mart really easy once I understood it.
The creator is really nice person. I suggested they put up display of products the owner is selling like regular vendor to owner and she added it.
Sadly I haven't really had time to put in many products nor have I sold much.
Last time I talked the owner r it seem like only 800 people in entire SL were using it and the few friends I talked about didn't seem very excited by the HUD.
The image looks quite nice of your HUD though even though I am bit nervous about some bot just buying whatever is for sell regardless if it was intended to be sold to general public.

Ah, I know several of those names. They show up frequently on my warned away list for my security system. Now I know why they seem so interested in my property, lol. As for products listed, I don't sell anything.

They just know how to sit on property banned Lines......

got slbrowser today and tried it. Was shocked when I found a listing for a plant stand that invited people to tp into my livingroom. The plant stand as I bought it is marked for sale -- sell copy. It is also no modify -- which means that I can't even untick the "for sale" indicator. I kinda thought slbrowser was a good idea, as the built in search engine in SL is beyond a joke -- but I didn't expect the contents of my living room to be indexed! Should i stay tuned next week to see the contents of my kitchen cupboards showing up? If so, I'd better check the expiry date on my soup tins now -- don't want to be publicly embarrassed... :}

Cool, not that I will use your list for anything, good to see an open policy like this for those that want to know.
Sounds like a cool search system, at least it won't go down as often as SL search.

Now I know why Computer Allen ignored me and Innova won't go out with me

It seems there is a new set of bots that this person is using. beware he added a whole new group.

Not, no new set -- they're still the same bots, plus one more (10 is a round number : Smark Slade.

Since this thread has been revived, I take this opportunity to publicly announce the SL Robot Control Protocol, something we (SLBrowser) designed to avoid the problem reported above, but that can be used by other bot writers -- that is, bot writers who value people's information privacy.

This protocol has been inspired by robots.txt, the Robot Exclusion Standard (see http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/norobots.html and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots.txt), which is a protocol used between Web servers and Web bots to specify which pages should not be collected. (For those of you old enough to remember, the same issues of privacy were raised several years ago with the proliferation of web bots.)

The SL Robot Control Protocol works through a script placed in some object on the parcel whose owner wishes to be excluded from the information collection process. When they arrive at the sims, the bots are notified by those objects that those parcels and/or the objects in them should be left out of the information collection.

Like robots.txt, this SL bot control protocol is merely advisory. We will honor it, and hope other bot writers will do the same.

We ask residents who don't want their parcels/objects listed by accident (by ours or others' bots) to please get one of those objects in SLBrowser Headquarters in Neptune/9/233/27 -- look for a pink ball near the bots' pictures, it's free to copy and the script is open source.

I thought this thread was dead.

Who brought it back to life?

I am seeing a new names appearing.

They're 10, for now, the ones I listed.

Names and numbers are not that important. Just like a person-driven avatar can stand outside a parcel and see the information inside, so can program-driven avatars (bots). Therefore, banning bots from parcels doesn't do much in terms of privacy, it's a false sense of protection. Only banning them from the sims will keep them out. It's important that SL residents know that.

That's why we are now doing what I describe above. Starting next week, our bots will listen to those Robot Control objects, and those parcels will be left out of our data collection.

Good...............!

This is idiotic. We have to either hunt down bot names and fill up our ban lists for this stuff or have to use stupid objects that shout away the bots (and supposedly have to put it on every single parcel if my land is parceled up)? Does _any_ of you coders _ever_ think before implementing? I guess I will start a new policy: I ban every coder who doesn't use opt-in for this kind of stuff from all my land. The owners of the bots. Komuso friday night gig? Forget it - not for you. Show and tell? No, you are not welcome. That would be on level with your arrogance regarding residents data.

It would even be worth to finally use banlink - and fill in all the names that crop up in the context of non-opt-in bots in SL in there. The world is _not_ your data, just because you can cough up two and a half stupid program. The next kid who wants to be "the google of SL" will come along and run another set of bots and then the next - just as all those hundred of idiotic and superfluous spider bots on the web. All just mindlessly collecting worthless data.

Yes, worthless, none of the "search engines" provide any real use, because there are no useful metadata connected with objects in SL like the linking in websites. You are based on data that's below the level we had on the web at the start of search engines - and your results are even worth less.

Object listing in SL is best done with opt-in _because_ that way you can get metadata from the object owner. Just running around and collecting objects and even object contents is just highly intrusive and dumb.

And regarding the "spiders are proven": the web was a rather passive medium at the time the first bots hit it, the load of bots on passive HTML pages is quite low (and even that kicked a few servers off the net when altavista came along for the first time). It drastically changed when dynamic content was more widespread - bots automatically triggering CGIs, object deletes (not just one wiki got wiped out with the first bot who happily clicked the "delete this page" links). SL is very similar: we don't have much passive data, most of it is active and bot intrusion _is_ a problem. And all that for worthless results.

And yes, that's the same with the ESC search bot. Their search is worthless. OnRez on the other hand works, because owners of objects who want to sell will put in the needed data to make something that is searchable in a useful way. It's completely idiotic to run around and collect all objects of all the grid, just because there might be something out there for sale that is not listd in a shopping site - because most probably those objects are exactly _not_ meant for sale and are just set to sale out of technical reasons or due to user error.

The "problem reported above" can be fixed simply by working around the bug in your bots .

There's also no reason to unnecessarily burden sims with "bot shooing" scripts when there's already a built-in alternative: if a parcel isn't set to show in places you consider it off-limits until explicit permission is given to datamine it.

Come again?

Kitty: we would definitely consider doing what you say if Linden Lab wouldn't be charging a fee for people to check that flag on. That fee is, well, basically a symbolic gesture for stating that search is a paid service in LL-world (imagine if search was a paid service on the Web! -- we wouldn't be able to find any educational and not-for profit information). Because of that fee, we can't really tell if the flag is off because people want privacy or because people just don't care to pay another fee to LL. Plus, that simple flag is not that expressive in terms of what should and should not be collected.

Barney: I respect your feeling. It's a bit discouraging, but it's not the kind of reaction that is going to deter technically-curious people from experimenting with the possibilities brought up by the idea of an Open virtual world platform, which is where SL seems to be heading. Granted, a 3D virtual world is quite different from the web. And the Web is 15 years-old, so a lot of these issues are completely figured out there. We're just in the beginning here -- the SL client was made Open Source only 8 months ago. We have to catch up; we've corrected some of our initial mistakes, and I'm pretty sure we still don't have the final solution.

It seems to me, though, that many residents are simply hiding their heads in the sand wrt the issue of openness. Many (most?) residents would prefer that SL would be a closed, proprietary virtual world, just like WoW and others. That would certainly avoid all of this (for one, I wouldn't be here). But LL released the client, and that allows all sorts of programmers, with good and bad intentions, to write their own clients and bots.

So flaming bot writers will achieve two things: (1) general ignorance about what bots are and their capabilities (for example, the general belief that banning bots from parcels will prevent information collection on those parcels -- a misconception); and (2) bot writers will go underground -- they already are, as far as I can tell, except for us who have been totally open about it (does anybody believe that ESC has stopped running their bots just because they have been badly flamed? and where are all the residents who write the bots that we know are out there?)

So the conversation should switch from questioning the existence of bots to discussing how to co-habitate with them in general. But maybe that's not a discussion for having here in this forum.

WRT our search service: we're doing this because it's technically rewarding and because there is a chance that it will be quite useful, much more useful than the built-in search; especially under the scenario of an Open virtual worlds system -- a scenario where different virtual worlds, speaking the same protocol, are hosted by many organizations, and not just LL. We are not a company and we're not making any money with SLBrowser yet, and probably won't, at least until some of these privacy issues are a bit more clear, which we hope will be soon.

I used you browser when this thread first appeared. The info it provided was wildly out of date and generally worthless.

If I have a sale and you bot scans me that day and then I end the sale it is ME that looks bad to customers assuming that I have any kind of control of my "listing" on your service. How would a buisness owner get something like this fixed? Do you plan to CHARGE to have your bots visit a location at certian intervals? How about ad banners? If so, how will it be different than the existing ad system and if not, will you add a disclaimer evertime the browser is openined by the user which states that the info provided is done so without the knowledge or consent of the vendors and may be weeks or months old?

yes, i found that too.

Except for the listing inviting people into my livingroom to inspect a plant stand.

Diva, what about that? Don't you think something's wrong somewhere when you are providing tp's into people's private living rooms? Yes, I know technical limitations, la la la, but still... bottom line.. you provide a tp for any tom, dick or harry to use to zip into my livingroom.

I'm a bit more sanguine and calm about these things than most people, I suspect -- but as more and more people discover people suddenly appearing in their bathrooms having followed coordinates provided by you, well... I think you are going to see some hystrionics and fireworks start happening.

Which is too bad. Because I actually do think the service you provide is needed, and I do wish you luck in it.

I *just* don't want it to be crawling through my home and listing my tins of beans in it.

Good questions! I wish we were already in business, so I could address this much better. We're not in business, we only have a technology at this point, so let me speculate about business issues.

The basic indexing and search service would always be free. The potential business plan here is in all similar to Google's. I don't think I need to explain how Google works.

WRT timeliness of the information: we have been crawling SL every other week, and we're now going to do it on a weekly basis. So the information may be one-week old. I doubt that you will be upset when you have visitors to your store who have come based on information that's one week old, at most - heck that happens in RL too!

The lag is to be expected. Web search engines like Google used to have a lag of about 2 weeks up until recently. Not sure if Google entered in special deals with specific web sites to index them more often, maybe. With a lot of R&D and modern web technology, they're now being almost instantaneous across the border. If SLBrowser is as successful as Google, you can expect to see that immediacy in the future (ah!

If/when we carry ads, the advertisers will have total control over them. So if you have a sale for a limited time, you probably don't want to run that ad when the sale is over.

There's a listing for Duke's Mart Prefabs in there right now. The place hasn't existed for six weeks now.

I just checked, and we are both wrong by the exact same amount of time
The last crawl of that sim was July 23 -- so 4 weeks ago. And Duke's Mart Prefabs was there at that time.

We'll try to do a better job at clarifying how old the information is, probably by stating that on our web site. We already do, but I realize that it's not that clear.

We're just finishing a crawl as I speak -- the new index will be up later today. From now on, unless there are disruptions, the crawls will be done weekly.

Any reponse to the privacy issue? About you poking into people's houses uninvited? Have you any idea what the reaction is going to be when this story breaks? It will be bigger than copybot.

Please don't make assumptions about what level of deception I will happily settle for in order to sell a product or put words in my mouth in order to sell yours. The fact remians that your product will send people to vendor's shops with inaccurate, out of date information and leave vendors in the position of having to answer the questions that result. You make it look like vendors provide bad service/false advertising if you do not make clear that your browser provides old information taken without consent to your users each and every time they use your product.

BUT, thank you for admitting that it is your ultimate goal to make this a service that people PAY to be listed in (in the form of ads).

Whoa. You almost make it sound bad that they will ask people to PAY. I am in your PrimPincher store right now, Nimue, and judging by the price tags everywhere it appears that you don't think the concept of getting people to PAY is a bad one......

In fact, I'd be thrilled if they only listed paid things -- I would just not pay them to rifle through my house. I would though pay them to rifle through my stores.

The privacy issue was the reason of yesterday's post, once I saw that this thread had been revived. We worry about that; if we didn't, we would be quiet and would go underground like other bot writers. Most importantly for our search service, we want to have good data on our search index; bad data is a nuisance. Listing someone's lesbian bed that happens to be accidentally marked for sale is not something will do in the future, and we are working to remove that data from our collection.

We have, at least, a good proposal for this issue, the Robots Control Protocol I described -- this solution is *general*, not just for our bots but ALL bots, assuming they are compliant, and some are/will be.

SLBrowser has not been a secret, we simply haven't done any marketing or advertisement, because we're not a business. People have found out about it, we have been having an average of 2,000 queries / day in the last couple of weeks. There have been posts about it in a few news and blogs, including SLNN and SecondLifeInsider. The comments lead me to believe that residents are finally willing to talk about these issues in a rational manner. But maybe I'm completely wrong.

I don't think it is bad at all that they ask people to pay. I prefer that they charge for this service as then it is opt in. I think it is good that they admit that rather than talking up this service as a free alternative to search when they intend to use it as part of a buisness for which they take info from all of us.

I pay for ads & I list with SLEX and gladly share a commision with a service that helps me get product information out to potential customers, but in both of these cases I have some amount of control over what information is put out there.