New Feature: Scripted Agent Estate Access Discussion

[xDancingStarx]

11 minutes ago, Sparkle Bunny said:

I've suggested before that making scripted agent status a perk of premium (or even basic plus) membership would help with regulation as well as offsetting the costs of such regulation. People are substantially more likely to think about what they're doing if they have to pay for it.

So you're saying that someone who wants to run a bot (who you are scared of may be a bad actor) and has to decide between a) not registering it and getting it potentially banned after x days and b) registering it to have the recent restrictions apply plus additionally to pay money for it is going to opt for 2)? And those people who opt for 2 they better think about what they do? I have a really hard time following that train of thought.

Edited April 1, 2023 by xDancingStarx

[elleevelyn]

21 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

So, what needs to be done to mitigate the damage to legitimate bot operations, while at the same time ensuring that those same safeguards against future abuse remain in place?

1) A parcel-level tool to restrict bot entry

2) Maybe lift the blanket sanction on Belli (although I don't think that's going to happen).

 

What else?

i think that the legitimate uses of roaming bots is to fill in gaps that Linden don't yet have a solution for

for example: a roaming bot that gathers location info on security orbs and transmits this info to grid travelers (boaties, pilots, drivers, etc)

using a bot to gather this info is the only way to do this at this time, whereas the better solution would be for Linden to provide this info on the mini-map. This means that scripts containing llEject and llTeleportHome would need to have some metadata attached to the script so that the region server could more simply advise the client minimap of this

another legitimate use of a roaming bot is gridsurvey. A better solution for this I think is for Linden to provide this info directly themselves. In the interests of monetization, Linden could charge a fee to access this service

there may be another legitimate use for a roaming bot but I am unsure what that might be. Altho it could be attachment scraping to provide merchant customers with anonymized data on attachment types. Like on this day: Body A 40% usage, Body B 12%, Body C 5% etc. Again tho Linden could itself provide this kind of anonymized data to merchant customers for a fee  

 

 

[Soft Linden]

2 hours ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Linkset Data now lets you store 64K, soon to be 128K per object. Not everyone needs to store megabytes of memory.

They can pry the 8 megs of resizing and retexturing scripts out of my cold, dead 250-prim hands…

[Rolig Loon]

Gosh, can you imagine a whole region packed to the ceiling with plywood cube prims, each storing 128Kb of data in LSD? It would look like one of those government warehouse in the Indiana Jones movies. Of course data storage and retrieval might be a wee bit slow, but it would be a sight.  

I was never even vaguely suggesting LSD on that scale as a solution when I brought this up earlier.  Honest.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

42 minutes ago, M Peccable said:

That's true, but it isn't the crux of the problem. The website(s) that host the information you refer to appear to be going away now, and my understanding is that the botphobia is being caused primarily by bots suddenly appearing and invading privacy, not so much by the data hosted on websites. The problem then is more so the roaming bots, and requiring stationary bots to be preapproved puts an undue workload on both residents and LL.

The changes instituted by LL yesterday had two complementary parts: a bot mobility element, and a privacy / use of data element. Both are important, whatever we may think has caused "botphobia." I'm assuming that your project doesn't collect personal data, so you may well not care about that aspect of it, but many -- and most definitely me -- are actually more interested in the data side of this.

In other words, this shouldn't just be about alleviating people's anxieties and angst regarding bots. It should represent a real solution to a very real problem. And that has to include the data privacy piece.

[M Peccable]

17 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

In other words, this shouldn't just be about alleviating people's anxieties and angst regarding bots. It should represent a real solution to a very real problem. And that has to include the data privacy piece.

Yes, but it is two different solutions to two different problems. I think once the good bots can be separated from the bad ones, no matter what it takes to accomplish that, the subsequent elimination of the bad bots will make the personal data collection problem go away on its own.

Requiring that roaming bots be pre-approved by LL might be one way to accomplish that separation. Stationary bots, even if they are scarfing up every scrap of info they can, will collect in a day only a tiny fraction of what it could if it was roaming for only an hour. The personal data collection problem is coming  99% from roaming bots, not stationary ones.

Edited April 1, 2023 by M Peccable

[elleevelyn]

30 minutes ago, Rolig Loon said:

Gosh, can you imagine a whole region packed to the ceiling with plywood cube prims, each storing 128Kb of data in LSD? It would look like one of those government warehouse in the Indiana Jones movies. Of course data storage and retrieval might be a wee bit slow, but it would be a sight.  

I was never even vaguely suggesting LSD on that scale as a solution when I brought this up earlier.  Honest.

ooowah!

20,000 prims on the region

approx 5,000 packed UUIDs in the LSD = 20,000 * 5,000 = 100,000,000 UUIDs

and then we have script memory storage as well. We can stuff about 3,000 packed UUIDs into a script and still be able to manipulate it without a stack collision. And we can stuff an unlimited number of scripts into a prim

say a 100 scripts in each prim so hopefully the whole thing will still run

100 * 3,000 = 300,000 times 20,000 prims = 6,000,000,000

so altogether 6,100,000,000 UUIDs

and after scrolling thru them all, I probably go: How come they don't have any textures that I like. This is sooo sucky! I dunno why I bought this
 

 

[M Peccable]

Just now, elleevelyn said:

ooowah!

so altogether 6,100,000,000 UUIDs

Let me guess: you liked math in school.  

[xDancingStarx]

"Scripted Agents joining groups and sending group IMs or notices such that more than 5,000 individual messages will be received."

https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Linden_Lab_Official:Scripted_Agent_Policy

 

Does that actually mean that an owner of a large group cannot use a bot service in order to post notices? If a bot, owned by the group owner, sends a notice (or message), and there are 5,001 people in that group, does it mean that more than 5,000 individual messages will be received and this is forbidden? I started thinking this because of the "will be received" phrase which seems to be missing in the other cases such as "A single Scripted Agent sending more than 5,000 individual messages in a calendar day."

Also, what about services like *****bots in general that offer group messaging services. I can imagine their bots can send more than 5,000 legitimate messages each day.

Edited April 1, 2023 by xDancingStarx

[Scylla Rhiadra]

1 hour ago, M Peccable said:

Yes, but it is two different solutions to two different problems. I think once the good bots can be separated from the bad ones, no matter what it takes to accomplish that, the subsequent elimination of the bad bots will make the personal data collection problem go away on its own.

Requiring that roaming bots be pre-approved by LL might be one way to accomplish that separation. Stationary bots, even if they are scarfing up every scrap of info they can, will collect in a day only a tiny fraction of what it could if it was roaming for only an hour. The personal data collection problem is coming  99% from roaming bots, not stationary ones.

So, if I understand you correctly . . . "pre-approved" roaming bots would be exempt from the restrictions placed upon other bots in visiting Bellisseria or estates with "deny_bots" enabled?

I can see some issues with that? You'd still need to make sure that bots, approved or not, weren't landing on people's heads -- so maybe public land only? And an estate owner who has enabled the bot ban may not be terribly happy to see them appearing anyway.

Am I understanding you correctly?

Edited April 1, 2023 by Scylla Rhiadra

[M Peccable]

45 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

So, if I understand you correctly . . . "pre-approved" roaming bots would be exempt from the restrictions placed upon other bots in visiting Bellisseria or estates with "deny_bots" enabled?

I can see some issues with that? You'd still need to make sure that bots, approved or not, weren't landing on people's heads -- so maybe public land only? And an estate owner who has enabled the bot ban may not be terribly happy to see them appearing anyway.

Am I understanding you correctly?

No. They would not be exempt from restrictions, they would just be the only bots allowed to roam.

That opens up the possibility of getting things back to the way they were before botphobia, because the roaming bots would be much rarer and pretty much assumed to be benign since they are approved by LL, so that maybe estate-level restrictions could be eased. But any parcel-level or region-level bans on them would of course be enforced just like with any avatar. It's important to note I am referring to avatar bans, not parcel-level bot bans. As others have tried to indicate, and I think most don't understand, is that parcel-level bot bans would be very difficult to implement technically because of SL's structure. And likely quite expensive from a simulator resource point of view.

People like Tyche and myself operated roaming bots for over a decade without causing much of a stir, and it worked because we labeled the bots as being ours, responded to residents if they contacted us with concerns, and we didn't overuse the privilege.

Of course, if things go the wrong way and the estate-level bot ban is expanded to include all of the mainland then all of this flies out the window and SL takes a step or three backwards towards the dark ages.

Edited April 1, 2023 by M Peccable

[Silent Mistwalker]

1 hour ago, xDancingStarx said:

"Scripted Agents joining groups and sending group IMs or notices such that more than 5,000 individual messages will be received."

https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Linden_Lab_Official:Scripted_Agent_Policy

 

Does that actually mean that an owner of a large group cannot use a bot service in order to post notices? If a bot, owned by the group owner, sends a notice (or message), and there are 5,001 people in that group, does it mean that more than 5,000 individual messages will be received and this is forbidden? I started thinking this because of the "will be received" phrase which seems to be missing in the other cases such as "A single Scripted Agent sending more than 5,000 individual messages in a calendar day."

Also, what about services like *****bots in general that offer group messaging services. I can imagine their bots can send more than 5,000 legitimate messages each day.

This section gives more details.

Linden Lab Official:Scripted Agent Policy - Second Life Wiki

[Scylla Rhiadra]

12 minutes ago, M Peccable said:

No. They would not be exempt from restrictions, they would just be the only bots allowed to roam.

Ok, this sounds like it would work -- although the pre-approval process might require a bit of extra work for LL?

12 minutes ago, M Peccable said:

Of course, if things go the wrong way and the estate-level bot ban is expanded to include all of the mainland then all of this flies out the window and SL takes a step or three backwards towards the dark ages.

That seems to me very unlikely, because it would literally just kill off all the bots. Far more likely, or possible anyway, is a parcel-level tool. But that wouldn't interrupt data collection.

[M Peccable]

1 minute ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Ok, this sounds like it would work -- although the pre-approval process might require a bit of extra work for LL?

That seems to me very unlikely, because it would literally just kill off all the bots. Far more likely, or possible anyway, is a parcel-level tool. But that wouldn't interrupt data collection.

Definitely extra work, so there would probably be a fee involved, and it's why stationary bots won't need such approval.

Implementing a parcel-level bot banning tool is much harder than it sounds.

[Prokofy Neva]

23 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

The Bellisseria Bot Ban was surprising to me because I never really knew about these issues. Now I'm worried about the Mainland more than ever. Even if we somehow manage to get parcel-scope access control applicable to bots, the public land (and abandoned parcels) will be bot haven unless the Governor decides to ban them from the estate.

The problem is, there are useful purposes for bots.* They don't need to be on Belli—sorry @Paul Hexem, but it won't break SL if Belli bots need to find a new home. But if all of Mainland were off-limits, where would they go, really? But if Mainland is not off-limits, isn't it all subject to the same abuse the Belli bots inflicted on residents?

So, seriously: now what?

Before the Belli ban, I thought the parcel-scope ban would be just fine for Mainland. Sure, it wouldn't do anything about data privacy, but I'm fine with Mainland being wide open for that kind of data collection. But if the place is gonna be flooded by Belli bot refugees hovering everywhere they aren't banned, this is gonna get old real fast.

_______________
* Repeating myself, as usual: There shouldn't be data uniquely available to bots, but that's how it is because the Lab has a weird fetish about routing even non-real time data directly to the viewer instead of through a public API. They claim to be incapable of securing such an API. Makes ya feel real confident about the security of that viewer interface, too, don't it? How many after-the-fact throttles have needed kludging onto viewer data access over the years?

It widens the gulf between the haves of Bellisseria and the have-nots of the Mainland and makes second-class citizens of people who even pay more than some in Bellisseria (with only a premium and the use of the 1024 m2 included), serving them up as bait to data scrapers.

The speed and rapaciousness with which this occurred lately was troublesome.

I'm still not certain that parcel-level control would block data scraping that could still scan certain distances including parcels where bots are banned, but again, I note that with all the Linden roads and public land and abandoned land around -- LL owns half of the Mainland, which is not "nobody's" but belongs to Governor Linden -- surely 16m could be carved out on each sim designated as a bot landing.

I think the privacy policy also contains overbroad language and can be easily misconstrued. And a reminder that it is a private company's policy, not "rights" which are ensured by governments. 

Edited April 1, 2023 by Prokofy Neva

[Polenth Yue]

2 hours ago, Paul Hexem said:

Again I'm going to use myself to speak for a larger crowd- my own bots were ever only ever used to make my life easier performing very specific tasks via my direct input, and never collected data at all. If I ever bring them out of retirement (or for others that use theirs like I used to use mine), why am I being told I need to improve my behavior because someone laughed at you on the forums? Why should my own alts be banned from my own parcel?

I talked about roaming bots, which you don't own, so you decided it was about you. I talked about a specific group behaving badly and you immediately decided it was about you and not them. This does not make sense. All I can really say is that me describing things that have happened is not what caused the bot bans. It was the behaviour of some bot owners that caused the bans. You could ask them why they didn't take it seriously and do something, but really, it's too late for that. All anyone can do now is adapt to the changes, which means roaming bots need to play nice to be whitelisted.

[Paul Hexem]

1 minute ago, Polenth Yue said:

I talked about roaming bots, which you don't own, so you decided it was about you. I talked about a specific group behaving badly and you immediately decided it was about you and not them. This does not make sense. All I can really say is that me describing things that have happened is not what caused the bot bans. It was the behaviour of some bot owners that caused the bans. You could ask them why they didn't take it seriously and do something, but really, it's too late for that. All anyone can do now is adapt to the changes, which means roaming bots need to play nice to be whitelisted.

Did you miss the part where it's applied on the region level and they've already done Bellisseria?

Non roaming bots have been banned from their own homes.

[Polenth Yue]

Just now, Paul Hexem said:

Did you miss the part where it's applied on the region level and they've already done Bellisseria?

Non roaming bots have been banned from their own homes.

I wasn't talking about that in the post you replied to. Your reply was random and out of context. However, I did talk about the issues of bots and Linden Homes earlier. I also know that few people have pet bots at their homes, because I visited every house as part of the bear contest. As a result, I'm unsurprised that the Lindens went with an estate ban, because more people had bot issues than wanted to keep bots at home. The people who are to blame for those bot issues are anonymous, so I can't even point you at who you should be shouting at.

[Alwin Alcott]

6 hours ago, bunboxmomo said:

Sparkle, this is a thread announcing a significant change to decades old policy and operation of Scripted agents in Second Life, and I'm a scripter.

Yes of course I came out of nowhere, this is the first time I've actually been interested enough in the topic to actually read the forums.

Don't assume ill intent like that, come on.

but you assume some things that aren't true.. BB didn't contact LL as example, .. the residents here were fed up with the constant flow of bonnies, and the discovery of their website with all the names and info published. THAT triggered the "talk" with LL. And the super solution they offered "opting out"  .. totally unacceptable for most people.

And don't make the constant flow impact lower than it is please ( in general, not personal to you) there are regions and small estates that had to deal with 400 or more bot visits weekly. I'd go look  to nuke them within a week myself too. 

Till LL activated the ban i visited my home in belli around 5 to ten minutes a day, at different times. The change seeing a bot popping up on the radar was 2 out of ten during that short time i was there... in one word absurd, and don't let you fool by some bot farms they don't do it once every day, it's simply a ly. When the radar sees them, on the region or not, they can see you too.

[Alwin Alcott]

6 hours ago, M Peccable said:

Hopefully you won't get what you wish for.

We will have to agree to disagree on this one. Those constant menu boxes (which you will constantly get since if you don't opt-in, it can't remember your choice like a web site does) would drive most people battier than bots do.

we see this still sometimes on regions/venues with picture boards .. nearly all i know about ask everytime if you agree they post your picture there ..
yes or no doesn't matter, you'll not be banned for i there, but i do like to have the choice in own hands.

[Cinnamon Mistwood]

I asked in one of the other threads what the negative would be to banning all bots.  No one really answered the question (beyond a bunch of screaming about ARs,) but I have a better idea of some of the services bots provide now.  I hope over the next few weeks/months that the new tools can be fine-tuned to allow some kinds of anonymous data collection for some specific purposes and allowances for other inworld tools to work properly.  

For now, I will lay the blame squarely at the feet of the few bad actors who appeared to have no purpose than stirring up trouble for way more than just the people they had fun annoying.  They managed to hurt the legitimate uses for bots, too.

I suppose we can all argue about what those legitimate uses might be.  Whether its bot population control, registering bots, or some other solution that hasn't been brought up yet, I hope a clear and fair solution can be reached.

[Alwin Alcott]

6 hours ago, Rowan Amore said:

My security orb emails me the name of anyone entering my parcel.  Wonder if that's now in violation.

disclaimer at the parcel border "if you enter, you agree with your name to be send to owner"... and add a bit more txt, by the time they read it the minimum of  10 sec will be reached and booted.

[Alwin Alcott]

5 hours ago, bunboxmomo said:

I just don't think it's fair to vilify bot operators when there is a genuine passion there in a lot of them.

what's that for weird statement? Simply change the profession to see it's really strange to say that...

I just don't think it's fair to vilify burglars when there is a genuine passion there in a lot of them.
I just don't think it's fair to vilify kidnappers when there is a genuine passion there in a lot of them.

Passionate is always a danger when it's not used with a big part of sane overthinking. It isn't as genuine as you think it is. 
(we nearly all seen the egoistic and stubborn answers from BB in several discussions... "we can so we do and won't stop"

[Gwin LeShelle]

My whole takeaway from this is ...a tad of frustration.

I am premium plus, no I don't want to brag ...but I pay more than the normal premium user, that can have their full land allowance covered by getting a Linden Home.

So I went for Mainland, that I even had to pay for of course. Because still no 2048 LHs...and I feel like getting punished for being paying extra 😂 and I bet I am not the only PP user frustrated by that move.

And I bet many are thinking about downgrading now, so LL should find a solution. Fast.

Because paying users are not only on the LHs regions to be found.

[Love Zhaoying]

6 hours ago, bunboxmomo said:

I just don't think it's fair to vilify bot operators when there is a genuine passion there in a lot of them.

Just because "there is a genuine passion" does not mean what they are doing is good for us, good for Second Life, moral, legal, or should be encouraged, applauded, emulated, allowed, or continued. Passion may be a motive, but it is not a justification.