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How Are Griefers Able to Spam Everyone On a Sim?


Prokofy Neva
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Sorry, no.

Friend requests were not the only way to generate a contact/calling card though the means for getting them did vary. Others are quite correct that you can take an existing card and alter it to point to someone else - among other methods. 

What is utterly incorrect is the notion that their generation was wholly tied to Friend Requests: You could request Friendship or simply send a calling card to someone. 

Yes, sending a Friend Request would automatically generate the cards for both parties if accepted and remove them should either terminate the friendship ... It was a trivial matter to go into your Trash and pull the card back out though. 

Even the software calls them Calling Cards and differentiates between those generated by an accepted Friend Request and those simply sent to you by another user. 

There was never a thing known as a Friendship Card - just Calling Cards with added data stating they are tied to an accepted Friend Request. 

Further, as others have pointed out already, one does not require a Calling Card to initiate an IM with a group of users. 

ETA: As of 2012 the function for giving out a Calling Card still existed and was marked as "Give Card" in the context menu that pops up when secondary clicking an avatar. It may or may not have since been removed. 

Edited by Solar Legion
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I admit I haven't read most of the inane rambling in this thread but as someone who uses bots a lot let me clarify things.

1. Plenty of legitimate use for bots, group invites and in my case two way group chat between discord and SL. Caspertech does something similar with slack.

2. All of the bot software doesn't really care about scripted agent status or not. The onus is on you to enable it and technically LL doesn't REQUIRE it, but if your bot *****s up or you're using it to game traffic you're gonna have a bad time. That said it's a good idea to use scripted agent status and corrade enables it for you by default. I am not sure if JVA or such does as such.

3. Bots can do a lot of things, even more than your client can. I love using corrade to export our sims ban lists so I can import them into excel files. Mind you, non estate manager accounts cannot do this. 

4. Yes bots are used to join and spam groups en masse. This is why Project ECHELON exists, it sits in high traffic groups and sees if there's messages that meet the bad messages example and automatically bans them from other groups so they can't spam to other groups. Research indicates that the group spam relied on people whining about getting spam in the same convo, bots would then crawl the profiles of people who talked in chat to find more open groups. Sadly, conference spam cannot be stopped in the same way.  

5. Corrade does not have to have a group configured to use it. It only needs a single group to act as an authenticated user. Basically group name/key + password is the same as username + password for LSL scripts communicating with it. You can designate targets with most commands. Of course some people can use it for bad, but these things have been happening with or without corrade. 

Even if you were to ban bots outright you would still have people who don't care about the rules doing it anyways. Unless you want to make the LL client closed source and completely change the existing protocol so they can't reverse engineer it as well like ye olde days, you will never be able to properly stop this. A good stop gap solution would be to rate limit the amount of conferences a person can open based on the amount of people in them.

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1 hour ago, Ghost Menjou said:

4. Yes bots are used to join and spam groups en masse. This is why Project ECHELON exists, it sits in high traffic groups and sees if there's messages that meet the bad messages example and automatically bans them from other groups so they can't spam to other groups. Research indicates that the group spam relied on people whining about getting spam in the same convo, bots would then crawl the profiles of people who talked in chat to find more open groups. Sadly, conference spam cannot be stopped in the same way. 

Where can I find out more about Project ECHELON? I can't find anything on Google.

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4 minutes ago, Whirly Fizzle said:

Where can I find out more about Project ECHELON? I can't find anything on Google.

It's something I made and use for the several groups we(me and several other people) manage since I was tired of having 6 groups of us pop open with spam and people complaining about it.. 

I was gonna clean it up and release it but the group spam has died down almost completely(they have switched to conferences) and I had/have higher priorities. 

Edited by Ghost Menjou
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4 minutes ago, Ghost Menjou said:

It's something I made and use for the several groups we(me and several other people) manage since I was tired of having 6 groups of us pop open with spam and people complaining about it.. 

I was gonna clean it up and release it but the group spam has died down almost completely(they have switched to conferences) and I had/have higher priorities. 

Ahh thanks.

If the group spam picks up again, that's something I'd definitely be interested in using.

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On 2/25/2018 at 6:04 PM, Prokofy Neva said:

No, Luna, technology is good or bad because the engineers *weld in their ideologies*.

Sure, there are different ideologies. I've written a blot on this for 18 years? Hello? There are technolibertarians and technocommunists. While I realize that it may be hard for you to believe, as most of your responses to me are hostile despite my frequent purchases of your products I have studied this an enormous amount, written tons, and possibly might know not even just as much as you, but more, and certainly have been more critical than you are prepared to be.

Anything  that anybody creates has an ideology welded in, and it's up to us to set the laws regarding it after we see the results. In many cases, the technology is not even created without some consultation with the larger world. So I can't see technology as bad from the getgo.

I don't recall ever being hostile to you. I have disagreed with some of your ideas, but that is not hostility.

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9 hours ago, Ghost Menjou said:

I admit I haven't read most of the inane rambling in this thread but as someone who uses bots a lot let me clarify things.

1. Plenty of legitimate use for bots, group invites and in my case two way group chat between discord and SL. Caspertech does something similar with slack.

2. All of the bot software doesn't really care about scripted agent status or not. The onus is on you to enable it and technically LL doesn't REQUIRE it, but if your bot *****s up or you're using it to game traffic you're gonna have a bad time. That said it's a good idea to use scripted agent status and corrade enables it for you by default. I am not sure if JVA or such does as such.

3. Bots can do a lot of things, even more than your client can. I love using corrade to export our sims ban lists so I can import them into excel files. Mind you, non estate manager accounts cannot do this. 

4. Yes bots are used to join and spam groups en masse. This is why Project ECHELON exists, it sits in high traffic groups and sees if there's messages that meet the bad messages example and automatically bans them from other groups so they can't spam to other groups. Research indicates that the group spam relied on people whining about getting spam in the same convo, bots would then crawl the profiles of people who talked in chat to find more open groups. Sadly, conference spam cannot be stopped in the same way.  

5. Corrade does not have to have a group configured to use it. It only needs a single group to act as an authenticated user. Basically group name/key + password is the same as username + password for LSL scripts communicating with it. You can designate targets with most commands. Of course some people can use it for bad, but these things have been happening with or without corrade. 

Even if you were to ban bots outright you would still have people who don't care about the rules doing it anyways. Unless you want to make the LL client closed source and completely change the existing protocol so they can't reverse engineer it as well like ye olde days, you will never be able to properly stop this. A good stop gap solution would be to rate limit the amount of conferences a person can open based on the amount of people in them.

And with all that, once again you didn't create the valid and good use case of when your bot would need to come on a sim, slurp up all the names of the people there, and send them messages that most of them won't want, and will be viewed as spam. The end.

Exporting ban lists is in my view, for the birds. Inevitably these lists are polluted with people who don't belong on them, which were put there for mistaken and especially political reasons. For example, one major creator of a ban system that I believe is no longer allowed in SL put me in that ban list just because he didn't like my blog criticizing his overwhelming powers and abuses in collecting IP addresses. Then it replicates with everybody's "private stash ban list". Another major creator with a monopolist status put me in his product's ban list as an "example" that most purchasers then didn't remove. The potential for massive abuse of such exported list is big. That's why I won't accept them on Twitter, either, or export them.

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18 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

No, because Friendship cards DO require consent, you have to say "yes" when the order comes in to you.

That someone can maliciously copy your name into a copyable template doesn't suddenly make something called "calling cards" that are "not" an exploit.

They are an exploit.

You are wrong, and havew been wrong in EVERY SINGLE POST you have made in this thread...

There are no "friendship cards" there are only "contact cards/calling cards" and while adding a friend with their consent gives you a card, it is NOT the only legitimate way to aquire them, one can simply choose "add contac t" which is NOT a friendship request and requires no consent.

No consent, no 'editing' no cut n paste, just use a damn option in a menu in your viewer. Not an exploit, just a feature YOU despise, can't figure out how to use, and refuse to accept the existence of.

Your obsession with calling cards, and the INSANE idea that somehow having one without friending somebody with their consent, is an exploit and that an army ofgriefers exist who all pretend to be bots, and spend all day editing your uuid into other peoples calling careds so they can conference call people you don't know and tell them what a buffoon you are, is ALMOST as ludicrous as your comparing having a calling card to the use of nuclear weapons.

23 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

You don't do that with AR-15s or atomic bombs I bet Klytyna, endlessly say that they are technically correct and therefore no one should ever challenge their use.

A better analogy, if we must go nuclear, would be you claiming griefers build nukes out of whale cheese, and me telling you that you are technically illiterate to a degree bordering on the certifiably insane.

And for the record, *I* wouldn't say an AR15 is 'technically correct', its a crappy gun designed by an idiot, and the basis for other crappy guns, it's one and only 'saving grace' is that it's dirt cheap to mass produce, which is what made it's derivatives popular with Defence Departments around the world.

23 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

This "it's right just because you can do it" ethics-free coder-verse is really the worst -- it's what makes the Code Cave unfit for human civilization in general.

Oddly, many non communists around the world think exactly the same of the brand of anarcho-capitalism you advocate, and with FAR better justification...

23 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

Again, if what you claim is true, that there's "all these people" who use the Firestorm griefer-originated viewer, why do literally hundreds of people constantly spam me with angry blasts about getting one or two spams from a spam griefer? If what you say is true, they'd turn off the conference instantly, block it, it would cease to exist, and would never repeat.

So now you are denying the figures on which viewers are the most popular and most used? Even LL know FS is more popular that the official SL Inferiority Viewer, that's why they are so cooperative and chummy with the FS devs...

As for why people don't use a feature in their viewers...

For EXACTLY the same reason you don't know how to use 'calling cards'...

Bloody minded ignorance and a refusal to make ANY effort to learn how to use their viewer.

You're calling 'calling cards' an exploit when they are not. You're demanding their use for making conference calls to everyone on a sim be banned, when in fact they are almost never used at all, and conference calls to everyone on a sim do NOT require the use of calling cards at all, just the use of crtl+leftclick in the people panel, on the list of people nearby, a standard feature of all viewers, no exploits or calling cards or properties edits needed, just a case of...

LEARNING HOW YOUR VIEWER WORKS BECAUSE IT'S NOT... NOT... NOT VIEWER ONE ANYMORE.

Noobs don't know how to use their viewers properly, because they are, well... Noobs. They have a legitimate excuse, they can and do learn with time.

You don't know how to use your viewer because you are PERMANOOB, you've been a NOOB for more than 12 years, and by now it's pretty much incurable.


 


 

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11 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

And with all that, once again you didn't create the valid and good use case of when your bot would need to come on a sim, slurp up all the names of the people there, and send them messages that most of them won't want, and will be viewed as spam. The end.

Just because that string of events used in that way may not be a "valid and good use case" doesn't mean the individual actions are bad. A bot can be used to teleport between regions logging performance, visitors, repeat visitors, tracking where your visitors are going so you can improve the experience. It can retrieve the names of visitors so you can see who your returning and regular visitors are. It can send messages to people eg. upcoming event information to people who have requested it, notifying multiple staff when a visitor requests help allowing a faster response time, allowing multiple staff to send messages from a single support account without accessing SecondLife or sharing login information. These are just some of the potential "valid and good use cases" for these features. Just because some people chose to use them for bad, doesn't make bots bad.

But then, I don't expect much from someone who clearly has no clue.

On 2/22/2018 at 7:40 PM, Prokofy Neva said:

Bots can't join groups on their own.

 

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18 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

And with all that, once again you didn't create the valid and good use case of when your bot would need to come on a sim, slurp up all the names of the people there, and send them messages that most of them won't want, and will be viewed as spam. The end.

Exporting ban lists is in my view, for the birds. Inevitably these lists are polluted with people who don't belong on them, which were put there for mistaken and especially political reasons. For example, one major creator of a ban system that I believe is no longer allowed in SL put me in that ban list just because he didn't like my blog criticizing his overwhelming powers and abuses in collecting IP addresses. Then it replicates with everybody's "private stash ban list". Another major creator with a monopolist status put me in his product's ban list as an "example" that most purchasers then didn't remove. The potential for massive abuse of such exported list is big. That's why I won't accept them on Twitter, either, or export them.

Exporting ban lists is actually part of the cleaning and review process! We automatically parse non-existing accounts(like banned accounts) or ancient ones. Then we generally have an open discussion about the bans on there. Sadly our non-EM moderators can't see the list without it being exported. However, we value the input of our entire team and that's why it's important to check.

Quote

And with all that, once again you didn't create the valid and good use case of when your bot would need to come on a sim, slurp up all the names of the people there, and send them messages that most of them won't want, and will be viewed as spam. The end.

As a whole that is indeed spam. However individual actions can make sense.

We don't use the bots for this, but we have automatic checking for blacklisted VICE weapon creators. This works by scanning everyone's attachments that enter the region and shoots them a message if the creator is no bueno.

Sending messages with bots in certain cases is a valid use case. Like for verifying forum links and what not or two way communications. 

Just because 2% of the users abuse a piece of software doesn't put the blame on the software. You can use psexec for a lot of legitimate uses, but you can also use it as a malicious actor to move laterally easier. 

Every email isn't bad by default just because you get spam etc.

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@Ghost Menjou thanks for that information, but you are proving my point -- your "good use" involves scanning, which some people may disagree with but let's leave that aside, and involve sending messages *only* to those who are "no bueno". Sending only SOME messages isn't spamming everyone on the sim. Not everyone will have that undesirable/illegal weapons system. So it's not a case.

I'm asking for a good use case of spamming everyone on the sim and I don't see one.

So you're diverging from the point here by trying to validate "the sending of messages by bots to some people". But that's not the issue. It's "the sending of messages by bots to everyone on a sim or in a group" that is the exploit of friendship cards which are indeed friendship cards, even if termed "calling cards" in inventory as their original intended appearance and application in SL was through consent from a friendship offer, and their casual copying and exploitation in various advertising or griefing exploits are a problem, a bug, not a feature.

You're also having trouble condemning spam, by going off on the tangent "but email isn't bad because it is used to spam" . Naturally as a bot user you want to exonerate bots and say "but bots are good." Once again, the topic under discussion here is "bots sending messages to everyone on a sim or in a group". Do you or do you not condemn that behavior and if so, what is your solution to stop it?

I could note as an aside, given your invocation of an exigency for bots to have certain messages, that there is one super-annoying RP group out there that forces you to join it if you want to enter all the parcels on that particular interesting RP sim. Understood, that's normal. You pay a fee, and so then you're reluctant to leave that group -- what if you want to go back and enjoy that exploration again on that sim? But eventually you are forced to leave it because the owners use it for their bots to constantly communicate the types of things you mention. 

So strange automatic voices constantly pipe up every hour, and are echoed by other strange automatic voices saying things back, that I think amount to "I'm here and I'm running" or "yes, the sim is up and running" -- but naturally none of us "norms" feel the need to know this and it's a constant spam. So...why is it there? I think it's there because the owners of the sim have it set to a group and *that land group* has to be the group these bots communicate in. Why they need to communicate there, and can't on some scripted hidden channel that doesn't show up in chat is beyond me. PS why they need to keep spouting these things at all is a mystery. Maybe machines need to tell each other these things; why have humans bothered by them? Nerds who wrangle bots don't think of this, but I think there should be a certain botiquette, and believe me, it will be enforced some day on the wider Internet as it is even now on Twitter regarding Russian troll bots because no one is required to become a machine, think like a machine, be driven into machine behavior or become victims of vicious machines just because "the Internet runs on them" or some other exigency. Any more than they are required to answer phones endlessly ringing with spam calls -- they can be put on a national do-not-call registry; any more than they can expect cars to drive into their living rooms; there are traffic rules. Why bots shouldn't be regulated like phones or cars is beyond me. Of course they should. All machines have historically been regulated because they can be harmful to humans. Why are bots special? They're not. The Internet is not a magical unicorn place. It's just a big phone hooked up to a lot of trucks. Did you get your Amazon today? Did you tip your poor doorman who had to lift all those packages?

I also have to chuckle to myself about all these status messages in that RP group when so many bots fall on infohubs and clutter up sims where I have tutorials and such. Why do they do that? Why can't they go home? Why can't they be *set* home? Why, if their "set home sim" is down can they just stay offline instead of being dumped at an infohub FOR DAYS ON END -- it's not like they have the autonomous power to pick themselves up and say "Oh, I should go back to my home sim" -- if they did, they wouldn't be slumped at infohubs for days on end. Again, this is a botiquette issue. The owners of them shouldn't leave them like stray dogs all over.

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@Ghost Mejou Re:

Exporting ban lists is actually part of the cleaning and review process! We automatically parse non-existing accounts(like banned accounts) or ancient ones. Then we generally have an open discussion about the bans on there. Sadly our non-EM moderators can't see the list without it being exported. However, we value the input of our entire team and that's why it's important to check.

Once again, I oppose the export of ban lists precisely because they are copy-pasted without thought and without clean-up and without awareness. If you have an "open discussion" that's great, but I don't get to be in it to explain to you that I am a blogger, not a griefer or copybotter. Did you take me off? I don't want or need to be in every open discussion. But that's just why exports are insidious, they can't be corrected for problems like this, and the problems then only mount. Valuing the input of your team is great management-speak, but we can't be all on your team and inputting. Some furry that once took out a gun at the Shelter is banned for life. He comes to my rentals and lives happily ever after, only taking his gun out on war sims zoned for this. Why should he be endlessly put in ban lists? There is no court of arbitration for ban lists. So I oppose them. Each owner should make his own up organically of actual cases of griefing. As for copybotting, one can find lists here and there of which ones to include but there, too, there isn't any due process. The abuse reporting system in SL is mainly used to settle scores with enemies by invoking technicalities to make the Lindens pounce on enemies. Given that reality I'm skeptical of any cutting and pasting.

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12 minutes ago, Prokofy Neva said:

@Ghost Menjou thanks for that information, but you are proving my point -- your "good use" involves scanning, which some people may disagree with but let's leave that aside, and involve sending messages *only* to those who are "no bueno". Sending only SOME messages isn't spamming everyone on the sim. Not everyone will have that undesirable/illegal weapons system. So it's not a case.

I'm asking for a good use case of spamming everyone on the sim and I don't see one.

So you're diverging from the point here by trying to validate "the sending of messages by bots to some people". But that's not the issue. It's "the sending of messages by bots to everyone on a sim or in a group" that is the exploit of friendship cards which are indeed friendship cards, even if termed "calling cards" in inventory as their original intended appearance and application in SL was through consent from a friendship offer, and their casual copying and exploitation in various advertising or griefing exploits are a problem, a bug, not a feature.

You're also having trouble condemning spam, by going off on the tangent "but email isn't bad because it is used to spam" . Naturally as a bot user you want to exonerate bots and say "but bots are good." Once again, the topic under discussion here is "bots sending messages to everyone on a sim or in a group". Do you or do you not condemn that behavior and if so, what is your solution to stop it?

 

I only made it through the first bit of the inane rambling.

Of course I am not saying that spamming random people is good. I never said otherwise. Spam is by definition malicious.

Also scanning is done through llGetAgentList or the old llSensor stuff. Either way, that's part of LSL in general. 

Anyways, there's no solution to the spam issue. I guess you could limit how many IMs a person can send in X time on LL's server side. Rate limiting conference calls are a good one too.

Nothing bot developers can do really since most of this stuff is open source and I have a feeling this spam bot stuff is written from the ground up by a malicious actor. Especially the whole profile crawling and conference spam. 

I would suggest filing a Jira and you're more than welcome at the next scripting/sim user group meeting to discuss it with actual lindens!

Also RE ban exports:

Ban exports don't get shared between sims, they're just used to review people that've been added to the list and to remove people. They're never used to ADD to the ban list.

I can ban across all participating regions and parcels though if I wanted to, but that's completely LSL based and thus not related to bots.

 

Edited by Ghost Menjou
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9 hours ago, Hintswen Guardian said:

Just because that string of events used in that way may not be a "valid and good use case" doesn't mean the individual actions are bad. A bot can be used to teleport between regions logging performance, visitors, repeat visitors, tracking where your visitors are going so you can improve the experience. It can retrieve the names of visitors so you can see who your returning and regular visitors are. It can send messages to people eg. upcoming event information to people who have requested it, notifying multiple staff when a visitor requests help allowing a faster response time, allowing multiple staff to send messages from a single support account without accessing SecondLife or sharing login information. These are just some of the potential "valid and good use cases" for these features. Just because some people chose to use them for bad, doesn't make bots bad.

But then, I don't expect much from someone who clearly has no clue.

 

1) You're also trying to chunk up the issue and try to separate out various functions of bots THAT DO NOT INVOLVE SPAMMING and trying to derail and distract the discussion at hand.

DO YOU OR DO YOU NOT SUPPORT BOTS THAT IM EVERYONE ON A SIM AND SPAM THEM WITH A MESSAGE THAT NO ONE HAS CONSENTED TO RECEIVE, YES OR NO

It seems to me you botters want to save out this ability of mass spamming because "you never know" if you might need it. Perhaps you imagine your bots valiantly spamming out a message about a RL end of the world? But you know, I think we'll manage without you? What you really seem to be doing with this parsing, edge-casing of singleton issues, etc. is to say "we reserve the right to do WTF we want with our bots". And the answer is, no, comrades, you don't get to do that. And please say yes or no, do you support spamming? So we can understand that in fact you bless spamming or not.

BTW many of the things you think are glorious and wonderful about bots are also accomplished by simple prims with old fashioned scripts even of 14 years ago like "visitor log". You don't need to take up an avatar slot on a Mainland sim with these laggers to accomplish this task.

There are also other systems beside bots that have multiple message systems to reach staff.

As for the bot being able to join a group, I continue to subject that to testing because the issue here isn't somehow being "stupid about what the technical abilities of bots are" which at the end of the say largely don't matter to non-bot wranglers like me.

The issue is "is this griefer harassing me really a bot, can bots do that, and since that's annoying, how can we stop it?"

I realize these nuances fly right over the heads of some, and they're rather indulge in their raucous ridicule, snarking, "liking" blah blah.

But again, a bot does not have the intelligence to look for themed groups. Do tell me how a bot finds rental groups. Not every rental group that is open for membership has the word "rent" or "rental" in it. It could be called "Sunnybrook Meadows". So unless the bot is scanning every group in its entirety and only joining open ones -- a function one can concede it might be able to do, as much as a load on the servers that might be, how can it pick out open, large groups for maximum effect with its racist spam message to have maximum shock and anger value? I suggest that takes human malice, not bot action.

The bot might also pick out pro-Trump or anti-Trump or some other political group. How does it do that? Only human intelligence could pick out the *theme* of a group that might not be in its name.

As the bot what the name of the airport is in Toronto, and you'll see its problem.

 

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2 minutes ago, Ghost Menjou said:

I only made it through the first bit of the inane rambling.

Of course I am not saying that spamming random people is good. I never said otherwise. Spam is by definition malicious.

Also scanning is done through llGetAgentList or the old llSensor stuff. Either way, that's part of LSL in general. 

Anyways, there's no solution to the spam issue. I guess you could limit how many IMs a person can send in X time on LL's server side. Rate limiting conference calls are a good one too.

Nothing bot developers can do really since most of this stuff is open source and I have a feeling this spam bot stuff is written from the ground up by a malicious actor. Especially the whole profile crawling and conference spam. 

I would suggest filing a Jira and you're more than welcome at the next scripting/sim user group meeting to discuss it with actual lindens!

Also RE ban exports:

Ban exports don't get shared between sims, they're just used to review people that've been added to the list and to remove people. They're never used to ADD to the ban list.

I can ban across all participating regions and parcels though if I wanted to, but that's completely LSL based and thus not related to bots.

 

Yes, you conceded my point, thank you. And yes, you've told us the troubling news -- stated by others -- that there is nothing to stop this, that the morals of bot wranglers only would stop it (those using bots for rentals, stores, RP sims etc don't also use them to spam stupid messages -- they never write or program their bots to do this out of just plain common sense and self-interest, if not for moral reasons). You say that throttling the number of messages or conference calls seem possible -- well, let's hope the Lindens do that but what would be better is to be able to pre-opt-out of all conference calls, ever. Many people would love that. And if they opt-in, the ability to opt out and block the caller forever, like on a RL phone.

As for your claims about ban exports you are describing *your own practice* but you must not be familiar with the history of this issue in SL because people ADD ADD ADD constantly all the time. The fear driving this is astounding.

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9 hours ago, Love Zhaoying said:

After we rename contact cards to friendship cards and ban them, maybe we should ban notecards because malicious coders with wet brains write scripts to use notecards.

10573929-B68D-4A1F-83E3-C2A77B7B87C4.jpeg

Calling cards, which result from a "friendship" request and show up *on a list on your browser* under "communications" as FRIENDS (not "calling cards" ) and therefore are legitimately called "Friendship cards" given that they are all in a list called FRIENDS on the viewer, are exploited by being pasted and used for spam or by having someone's name who didn't consent to friendship pasted into them and used for conference calls.

This post-fact exoneration of all things coded is always creepy. Consent is important. Friendship and its true meanings is important. The system makes list of Friends. If a griefer copy-pastes and exploits and makes fake friends like a Russian bot, the system will still read "Friends" and that is why it is insidious as they were not made with consent. Consent of humans is important in any coded system. Even the Lindens get that.

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Just for the record, my bot stays in our own regions normally. 

It might evade when there's rolling restarts, but as soon as the sim springs into action again it goes back.

Also the way spam bots work is interesting as I said before.

I am about 90% they get seeded with certain large open groups, then people complain about the spam in the same group chat, it scans the profile and looks for open groups in there.

Then spams those group and people comment again and so on.

Large groups would always get hit faster since there's more people in those groups thus more people will have it on their profile.

As how they find targets for conference spam? I have no idea really. Might be search related. I've never seen them teleport to anywhere near me before spamming though.

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14 minutes ago, Prokofy Neva said:

It seems to me you botters want to save out this ability of mass spamming because "you never know" if you might need it. Perhaps you imagine your bots valiantly spamming out a message about a RL end of the world? But you know, I think we'll manage without you? What you really seem to be doing with this parsing, edge-casing of singleton issues, etc. is to say "we reserve the right to do WTF we want with our bots". And the answer is, no, comrades, you don't get to do that.

 

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@Klytyna re:

So now you are denying the figures on which viewers are the most popular and most used? Even LL know FS is more popular that the official SL Inferiority Viewer, that's why they are so cooperative and chummy with the FS devs...

As for why people don't use a feature in their viewers...

For EXACTLY the same reason you don't know how to use 'calling cards'...

Bloody minded ignorance and a refusal to make ANY effort to learn how to use their viewer.

You're calling 'calling cards' an exploit when they are not. You're demanding their use for making conference calls to everyone on a sim be banned, when in fact they are almost never used at all, and conference calls to everyone on a sim do NOT require the use of calling cards at all, just the use of crtl+leftclick in the people panel, on the list of people nearby, a standard feature of all viewers, no exploits or calling cards or properties edits needed, just a case of...

LEARNING HOW YOUR VIEWER WORKS BECAUSE IT'S NOT... NOT... NOT VIEWER ONE ANYMORE.

Noobs don't know how to use their viewers properly, because they are, well... Noobs. They have a legitimate excuse, they can and do learn with time.

You don't know how to use your viewer because you are PERMANOOB, you've been a NOOB for more than 12 years, and by now it's pretty much incurable.

1. Self-reported figures are never figures that I would trust. Has Linden Lab officially stated that there are more Firestorm users than SL official browser users? That is the received wisdom. Could LL verify that and state it? Oh, they didn't. Oh, they won't. OK, well, see point one then.

2. Oh, dear, this popular viewer, this supposedly E-Z streamlined viewer, has a feature that users that ran toward it and use it in droves "don't understand how to use"?  I have tenants that hate Firestorm, as I do, but they'll download it and use it once for the "find things" feature. I give them the free Searchbert to use instead, but Searchbert can only go in a certain diameter in a certain distance so Firestorm is "better" when people really get desperate. I downloaded it once to see if in fact that was easy to use, and also to check the group title change since this is so confounding to so many tenants constantly -- and Firestorm makes them relog to kick in a title change in a group, which the SL viewer doesn't make them do, one of the many reasons why I think it's better. 

3. I find it really hard to believe that conference calls, that people hate hate hate -- sometimes confusedly thinking they "come from a group" which makes them get on that group and say "stop that!"  is something they find "hard to turn off". From what I gather, they easily turn them off.

4. Therefore, it is reasonable to believe that in fact these SELF-REPORTED NUMBERS could be inflated. 

5. Or, not that it is hard to turn off, but that you can turn it off only after getting the first spam! There isn't an option to NEVER get conference calls? And one spam is one too many for most people, especially if racist and stupid -- it drives them madly wild and they think one is evidence of a horrid form of abuse. And maybe they aren't wrong.

6. Calling cards not obtained with consent are indeed an exploit. You know, like copies taken outside of permissions "just because you can" are an exploit. Same principle. Some techs love to argue back from the capacities and affordances of machines and code to code morality. Why? We're humans, and we have human morality, and we're not machines.

7. I know how to use the SL viewer. It does not have an option to opt out of conference calls. I thought maybe there would be one of those commands on the advanced or developer sections like the way you fix the view of sculpties, or the way you fix your typing hands, that would just stop that forever, or at least, on each log-in. Too bad there isn't.

Edited by Prokofy Neva
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1 hour ago, Ghost Menjou said:

I only made it through the first bit of the inane rambling.

You made it through a lot more than me then. If people didn't write walls of text, they'd get more readers. But I suppose that some people need things to fill some time, and naively imagine that people are interested enough to read their walls of text. Or maybe it's a tactic, and they're hoping that nobody will be interested enough to read the stuff and respond to it, so they'll have the last word lol.

Edited by Phil Deakins
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  1. They are Calling Cards, not Friendship Cards - Friendship Cards do not exist. 
    1. Calling Cards can have an additional tag associated with them that sorts them into a Friends folder and causes them to auto delete when you remove a friend - they are easily retrieved from Trash. 
  2. Unless the function has been removed, right click on an avatar and select "Give Card" to give out your Calling Card. No Friend Request needed. 
  3. Alteration of Calling Card UUID is rather obviously a feature, not an exploit. This function has existed for too long to not be known by the development team. 
  4. The ability to send out an Instant Message to multiple people through the use of radar or similar functions is not an exploit either.  See point above. 

Your refusal to accept the above is irrelevant. 

If you have an idea on how to mitigate unsolicited messages that doesn't cripple existing functions to an absurd level, suggest it. Otherwise you're doing nothing more than spouting hot air. 

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