The bot war is over and the bot farmers have won :-(

[Zalificent Corvinus]

Ok, before the Positivity Cultists moan that I don't make "positive" suggestions...

 

How about...

Every login has to be verified by a live video chat, to a call centre worker, to PROVE you are human, and NOT an Evil Bot.

You'd just need to hire, hmmm, based off 200,000 logins a day, FOUR overlapping eight hour shifts per day, seven days a week, each shift having, hmmm, about 500 call centre agents, at $10-$20 an hour if using people in the First & Second World, less if you shamelessly exploit people in oppressive dictatorships in the Third World.

Easy peasy lemon squeezy!

The Bot Problem is SOLVED forever!

[Silent Mistwalker]

 

13 hours ago, Rowan Amore said:

And this is why I stated previously that the only thing LL should do is warn newcomers that any info they CHOOSE to put on their profile is viewable to everyone anywhere.  If one is not wise enough to understand personal safety, perhaps the internet isn't a place they should be let alone SL.

Not directing these questions at you specifically, it's in general.

Why would any platform like SL make inworld profiles visible to the whole internet? What purpose does that serve? Does it benefit the individual whose profile is making the rounds? 

Remember when they tried to turn SL into FB and how badly that went over with residents?

Think hard about the answers. This current bot situation is no different in the long run and it reeks too much of RedZone and zFire.

Edited March 28, 2023 by Silent Mistwalker

[Scylla Rhiadra]

1 hour ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

A "Brilliant Plan" to identify "Evil Unregistered Bots" by falsely accusing EVERYONE who goes bargain hunting in the weekend sales, as it's common to teleport to a damn site more than 8 regions in an hour, and stores often have teleport routing, landing you in the middle of the region for example.

To solve the Non-urgent un-problem of "Evil Bots" we should falsely accuse and blanket ban the majority of SL's weekend bargain hunters for no damn reason at all?

Where on earth are you getting this stuff from?

No one that I've seen, least of all me, has called for AR parties or mass bannings of bots, registered or otherwise. And the notion of mass ARs against shoppers at weekend sales is plain silly: LL would detect them as transparently false reports immediately.

What I have suggested would be good are the following:

• A new, more thoughtful and considered policy on bots that includes, amongst other things, guidelines on the kinds of data being scraped, how it is stored / aggregated, and how it is published.
   
• Some actual enforcement of existing and any new policies. The perception is that LL has been ignoring its own prohibitions on the use of bots for gaming traffic for a very long time.
   
• Some form of tool(s) that enable individual landowners and renters to exclude scripted agents from their land -- hardly an outlandish suggestion, as the mantra of "my land, my rules" is well established here.

Any suggestion that I've called for anything else, or that I believe bots are "evil," is a misrepresentation of what I have said.

And just to make that clearer, I'll add that I've never, in my 14+ years here, accused someone of being bot, or issued an AR against a bot, suspected or otherwise. Nor have I banned known bots from my parcel. In fact (note to @Skyler Pancake!), if BB would like to hold their annual Spring Picnic on my parcel (which is a kind of park), I'd be delighted to accommodate them.

I neither hate nor fear bots. I want them better regulated.

Edited March 28, 2023 by Scylla Rhiadra
clarity

[Silent Mistwalker]

3 hours ago, Innula Zenovka said:

Otherwise, let's please stop worrying so much. 

I thought I would be able to stop worrying so much when my stalker died in RL. 

It hasn't worked that way yet. I still look over my shoulder.

[Rowan Amore]

5 minutes ago, Silent Mistwalker said:

 

Not directing these questions at you specifically, it's in general.

Why would any platform like SL make inworld profiles visible to the whole internet? What purpose does that serve? Does it benefit the individual whose profile is making the rounds? 

Remember when they tried to turn SL into FB and how badly that went over with residents?

Think hard about the answers. This current bot situation is no different in the long run and it reeks too much of RedZone and zFire.

I've seen screenshots of people's profiles on various sites such as Twitter, Flickr and VS.   I do agree the website that linked the avatar with their profile without having to log into SL was a bit icky but...who would even bother looking at profiles of NON-human entities?  There was nothing to link that information to any RL identities or information.  Who aside from anyone already a member of SL would even care to look or know anything about that website?   The main way people found out about it was...wait for it...

ON the forums

[Love Zhaoying]

4 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

1 hour ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

A "Brilliant Plan" to identify "Evil Unregistered Bots" by falsely accusing EVERYONE who goes bargain hunting in the weekend sales, as it's common to teleport to a damn site more than 8 regions in an hour, and stores often have teleport routing, landing you in the middle of the region for example.

To solve the Non-urgent un-problem of "Evil Bots" we should falsely accuse and blanket ban the majority of SL's weekend bargain hunters for no damn reason at all?

Where on earth are you getting this stuff from?

It looks almost like sarcasm to me.  Hard to tell!

[Scylla Rhiadra]

37 minutes ago, Silent Mistwalker said:

LL did drag their feet a bit in the RZ thing but in the end, they did the right thing when some legal and criminal things were pointed out to them. That's not saying LL wasn't going to do anything at all, just that they were reluctant to at first. Once they had more sound information to go on, they acted, changing the ToS in the process.

A worthwhile point to make is that discussions we have here about, well, pretty much anything, can have an impact on LL's perception of how its policies are perceived. I can think of perhaps a half dozen instances at least where the SL forums became the focal point of discussion and/or protest over something, RedZone being a really salient example. And I do think that the clamour here (and probably on Twitter) did push LL to move, or at least hastened their response. The fact that LL has been so anxious to shut down certain discussions here suggests that they at least understand the influence of the forum.

[Love Zhaoying]

3 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

 The main way people found out about it was...wait for it...

ON the forums

I think the um..not paranoid but..sensitive (?) Forumites use Alts on the Forums.  Go figure! 

"I'm not brave enough to post this BS under my MAIN account, so I'll make an Alt real quick for that."

Hopefully, those Alts don't have anything to be askeered of in their in-world profiles.  That would be ironic.

[Love Zhaoying]

2 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

A worthwhile point to make is that discussions we have here about, well, pretty much anything, can have an impact on LL's perception of how its policies are perceived.

It would sure be nice to think so! Especially considering the responses we do get.

So, the System works!

[Love Zhaoying]

11 minutes ago, Silent Mistwalker said:

4 hours ago, Innula Zenovka said:

Otherwise, let's please stop worrying so much. 

I thought I would be able to stop worrying so much when my stalker died in RL. 

It hasn't worked that way yet. I still look over my shoulder.

I'd worry about them haunting me, or coming back as a zombie, vampire, or demonic presence that gives me nightmares despite them being ded.

[Count Burks]

2 minutes ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

What do I have to gain?

How about NOT being falsely accused of being a bot and banned from SL because I spent less than a minute on a parcel which USED to be a shoe store, but is now owned by an overentitled jerk who thinks I shouldn't leave untill I've been there long enough to add to their traffic score.

How about NOT being falsely accused of being a bot and banned from SL because I teleport to a dozen stores in under an hour during the weekend bargain hunts, because somebody made a BLOODY AWFUL suggestion to fix the non-urgent un-problem.

Even if you are falsely accused by somebody that you are a bot Linden Lab will pretty soon realize you are an actual human. Your teleports during the weekend when you go sale hunting will not be used to identify you as a scripted agent. Roaming bots are using specific patterns. Any MMO game is able to distinct actual players from bot users. So there is no need for your fear.

8 minutes ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

What do  YOU have to gain, from this drive to implement draconian measures that will adversely affect more people than bots?

I do not like being disturbed and annoyed by these scripted devices. I do not like my clients to be disturbed on their land. I do not want anything to enter the islands and start scraping data on myself or my customers without them asking me for permission.

These "scripted agents" are making a high percentage of residents in world uncomfortable which is why I (and others) asked for tools to block them. Linden Lab is now putting these tools in production and hopefully these tools will be enough to resolve the current issues with scripted agents. 

Your fear is unwarranted, if you do nothing wrong you will be fine. Do you really think a woman that goes on her shopping trip will get identified as a bot? 

21 minutes ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

As for your prideful boasting about your victory over "Evil Bots", lets see what you so bravely fought against, you HERO.

"Their goal was to find out how many male and female avatars (sorry SL has no official trans setting) are active.
how many accounts are basic, premium or premium plus.
The set viewer language was detected as well. Additional to that date, they record every region they visited, how many avatars are on that region and if its mature, adult or general.
All data was hashed and there was no personal data collected."

Yeah, we REALLY needed protecting from that particular piece of EVIL, right ?

He was annoying me with his bot farm. Why should I be annoyed on my land because some little script kiddie needs to come and measure the length of my toes? Why should anyone be annoyed on their property because some little script kiddie needs to come and collect data on their parcel or region? 

Linden Lab is selling a PRIVATE REGION product to its customers. PRIVATE REGION as in having privacy and not being bothered. 

Also it seems are you clueless about the volume of these roaming bots in world. Nobody knows their intentions. It is naïve to think all of these "scripted agents" are collecting data on the maturity rating of a region, or they are doing it for the love of Second Life and to make Second Life a better place.

Again take a deep breath and realize if you do nothing wrong you will be fine.

Residents have the right to keep out people who are under 18 from their land.

Residents have the right to keep out people without Payment Info On File from their land.

And now Residents will have the right to keep out roaming bots from coming to their land.

There is no reason for your fear, it will have no effect on you or on any normal Resident in world, on the contrary it will improve the resident experience for many.

[Zalificent Corvinus]

2 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Where on earth are you getting this stuff from?

Learn to read your own posts.

16 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

the only effective way to counter the use of unregistered scripted agents might be some kind of tool that identifies them, possibly on the basis of behaviour (visiting 8 regions in the course of an hour, landing in the same spot, etc.).

And this.

16 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

I will note that the new post from LL urges us to report those we suspect are unregistered bots -- which may suggest that they have some means of determination I don't know about.

You really think the second one won't lead to people falsely accusing others of being bots just as attempt to get LL to ban their "enemies"?

Read the post by @Count Burks above where he basically implies I am an Evil Bot Farmer, violating the ToS because I object strongly to your inane suggested "fixes".

10 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

What I have suggested would be good are the following:

• A new, more thoughtful and considered policy on bots that includes, amongst other things, guidelines on the kinds of data being scraped, how it is stored / aggregated, and how it is published.
   
• Some actual enforcement of existing and any new policies. The perception is that LL has been ignoring its own prohibitions on the use of bots for gaming traffic for a very long time.
   
• Some form of tool(s) that enable individual landowners and renters to exclude scripted agents from their land -- hardly an outlandish suggestion, as the mantra of "my land, my rules" is well established here.

Yes all very "reasonable", but

12 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Any suggestion that I've called for anything else, or that I believe bots are "evil," is a misrepresentation of what I have said.

Let's recap on what you said.

16 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

visiting 8 regions in the course of an hour, landing in the same spot, etc.

THAT, would target more shoppers than bots, and YOU suggested it. We can only interpret your meaning from the words you use, if you use words that suggest hot garbage, that is the interpretation you will get.

 

 

[Scylla Rhiadra]

3 minutes ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

We can only interpret your meaning from the words you use, if you use words that suggest hot garbage, that is the interpretation you will get.

Possibly, you should base that interpretation upon all my words, and not just cherry-picked ones?

5 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Any identification of scripted agents should be coming from LL.

[Love Zhaoying]

5 minutes ago, Count Burks said:

Even if you are falsely accused by somebody that you are a bot Linden Lab will pretty soon realize you are an actual human.

Ok, great - I just realized that the "next level" is, when Bots start abuse-reporting non-Bots as Bots! LL will assume the Bots are non-Bots because they are creating abuse reports.

[Love Zhaoying]

5 minutes ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

17 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

visiting 8 regions in the course of an hour, landing in the same spot, etc.

THAT, would target more shoppers than bots, and YOU suggested it.

That's a good idea. All those shoppers are clogging up the Regions, making it hard to get around.

[Istelathis]

3 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Ok, great - I just realized that the "next level" is, when Bots start abuse-reporting non-Bots as Bots! LL will assume the Bots are non-Bots because they are creating abuse reports.

Just how deep does this go!?!  

Soon we will all have to have our own bot armies to combat other people's bot armies, well damn..  SL has now turned into some strange virtual robot wars hybrid. 

 

Actually, that kind of sounds like fun. 

[Love Zhaoying]

Just now, Istelathis said:

Just how deep does this go!?!  

Soon we will all have to have our own bot armies to combat other people's bot armies, well damn..  SL has now turned into some strange virtual robot wars hybrid. 

 

Actually, that kind of sounds like fun. 

Yep! Is like war where it is only Drones attacking other Drones. 

[Count Burks]

16 minutes ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

Read the post by @Count Burks above where he basically implies I am an Evil Bot Farmer, violating the ToS because I object strongly to your inane suggested "fixes".

Count Burks did say there is no reason for your aggression and fear. You are writing a book here on a topic that will have absolutely no impact on you. Hence my questioning of the reason why you are so upset about a policy that has absolutely no impact on you.

Edited March 28, 2023 by Count Burks

[Zalificent Corvinus]

4 minutes ago, Count Burks said:

Also it seems are you clueless about the volume of these roaming bots in world.

There were 12 of the "Bots we cannot name anymore", 12, not 120, not 1200, not 12,000, just 12.

7 minutes ago, Count Burks said:

It is naïve to think all of these "scripted agents" are collecting data on the maturity rating of a region, or they are doing it for the love of Second Life and to make Second Life a better place.

Obviously YOU are clueless about the long running Grid Survey sight which did EXACTLY that, monitored how many regions there were, what maturity rating they were, what the concurrency figures were, hour by hour, day by day, year after year, to help make SL better.

Obviously YOU are clueless about the bots that survey what mesh heads and bodies people use, and provide listings showing not only how many are seen out on the grid, but trends, which are rising or falling in popularity, a useful tool for merchants in the mesh avatar business.

13 minutes ago, Count Burks said:

He was annoying me with his bot farm. Why should I be annoyed on my land because some little script kiddie needs to come and measure the length of my toes? Why should anyone be annoyed on their property because some little script kiddie needs to come and collect data on their parcel or region? 

"Take a deep breath, you will be fine"

16 minutes ago, Count Burks said:

There is no reason for your fear, it will have no effect on you or on any normal Resident in world, on the contrary it will improve the resident experience for many.

Pure speculation based on what surveyed data... Oh wait, you don't want data surveyed do you.

 

 

[Love Zhaoying]

7 minutes ago, Count Burks said:

Count Burks did say there is no reason for your aggression and fear. You are writing a book here on a topic that will have absolutely no impact on you. Hence my questioning of the reason why you are so upset about a policy that has absolutely no impact on you.

For some, kvetching is a major hobby or activity.  Part of the continuum of humanity's experience and expression, I guess.  

Edited March 28, 2023 by Love Zhaoying

[Silent Mistwalker]

53 minutes ago, Istelathis said:

It has been a bit since I last tried to create an account, I think it was for SL and I believe it asked me for one.  Years ago though, when I was told by family members that I had to join because FB was so much better than MySpace, I don't think it required any such phone number just an email address which I made a new one for.  I think with FB, you now have to provide more than a simple email address, it could be different in other countries and there might be ways around it that I don't know of.  

Being anonymous on Facebook is a lot harder than in Second Life.  It is doable, I'm sure, but to create an army of bots I imagine is not as easy as it would be on SL.  

There's this nice little thing, usually called a skip button, that allows you to continue registering without entering a phone number. Some platforms finally figured out that not everyone has a cell phone and not everyone wants or needs one. Or qualifies for a free government phone you have to use at least once a month to call your own landline because there isn't anyone to call. Seems rather pointless to me when I don't do business online (banking, buying products/services etc.). The only way to keep my info safe.

Edited March 28, 2023 by Silent Mistwalker

[Zalificent Corvinus]

16 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Possibly, you should base that interpretation upon all my words, and not just cherry-picked ones?

Yeah yeah... You suggested LL should do the false accusations based on "being a shopper who visits more than 8 regions an hour and often lands at the FIXED landing point in the middle of the region set by the region owner"

 

Do you really think a bloody awful suggestion will be more acceptable to the victims if it's all done by LL following your piss poor advice, than if it was a resident vigilante committee?

 

The outcome is still the same, visit more than 8 regions, land at fixed landing points, you are an unregistered bot and banned.

 

Just accept that once again, you made some inane suggestion that you didn't ACTUALLY think out, and move on.

[Count Burks]

1 minute ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

There were 12 of the "Bots we cannot name anymore", 12, not 120, not 1200, not 12,000, just 12.

That is strange, I had to lock several hundred of these things in the previous two months. (These things did not come from the same origin of course). 

5 minutes ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

Obviously YOU are clueless about the long running Grid Survey sight which did EXACTLY that, monitored how many regions there were, what maturity rating they were, what the concurrency figures were, hour by hour, day by day, year after year, to help make SL better.

Obviously YOU are clueless about the bots that survey what mesh heads and bodies people use, and provide listings showing not only how many are seen out on the grid, but trends, which are rising or falling in popularity, a useful tool for merchants in the mesh avatar business.

I am well aware of that, but are you aware about all the other anonymous ones where you do not have any clue on what they are collecting and for what purpose? 

[Silent Mistwalker]

41 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

I've seen screenshots of people's profiles on various sites such as Twitter, Flickr and VS.   I do agree the website that linked the avatar with their profile without having to log into SL was a bit icky but...who would even bother looking at profiles of NON-human entities?  There was nothing to link that information to any RL identities or information.  Who aside from anyone already a member of SL would even care to look or know anything about that website?   The main way people found out about it was...wait for it...

ON the forums

I have seen, in the past, where (on VS aka SLSecrets) people have been tracked down in RL. Or rather, their information. That info was used to threaten and, if I'm not mistaken, got at least one person fired from their RL job.

There are always consequences to our actions. It's the ones that we don't see that do the most damage.

 

[Arielle Popstar]

1 minute ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

Just accept that once again, you made some inane suggestion that you didn't ACTUALLY think out, and move on.

It is a discussion thread, not a "these are the new rules" thread. There is a difference for those who understand the difference. The heavy sarcasm isn't actually contributing anything of real value.