Bots. Should I care?

[Thecla]

Let's talk about bots. They are flashing in and out of my sim all the time. For awhile I did not pay them any attention, but I had a discussion with someone who insisted you really wanted to keep them out of your sim, mainly for privacy reasons. Not because of what you or your visitors might be doing on your sim (at least not for me), but rather because of the data that they can scrape.

I ended up buying a product that would ban/eject known bots and make some sort of "educated guess" about others. I left that running until someone who clearly was not a bot got kicked, even after I dialed the "aggressiveness" of the product down to minimal. I ended up turning the thing off.

So what's the word, is there any reason to be concerned about bots and keeping them out? If so, what are effective strategies/products that are effective to keep them out in the most non-intrusive manner?

[Rowan Amore]

If it's a private estate that you own, you could just set the land with the new feature to ban registered scripted agents...

 

[Thecla]

1 hour ago, Rowan Amore said:

If it's a private estate that you own, you could just set the land with the new feature to ban registered scripted agents...

 

Thanks but I *think* that won't work because one tenant of the sim is a dance company and they use bots to fill dance slots when developing dances. Had not thought about that, hmmm. Guess I'm stuck with doing nothing for the time being.

That said, are bots really capable of any sort of uncrupulous activity? 99.9% of them seem to TP out seconds after they entered.

Edited January 22 by Thecla
addition

[Wulfie Reanimator]

30 minutes ago, Thecla said:

Thanks but I *think* that won't work because one tenant of the sim is a dance company and they use bots to fill dance slots when developing dances. Had not thought about that, hmmm. Guess I'm stuck with doing nothing for the time being.

That said, are bots really capable of any sort of uncrupulous activity? 99.9% of them seem to TP out seconds after they entered.

Actively do anything? Nothing any other random passer-by couldn't do.

Most bots, especially the ones that pop by for a few seconds, are only there to collect data. Bonniebots are a known example.

[Rowan Amore]

37 minutes ago, Thecla said:

Thanks but I *think* that won't work because one tenant of the sim is a dance company and they use bots to fill dance slots when developing dances. Had not thought about that, hmmm. Guess I'm stuck with doing nothing for the time being.

That said, are bots really capable of any sort of uncrupulous activity? 99.9% of them seem to TP out seconds after they entered.

Registered agents can be whitelisted at the estate level, also.

[UnilWay SpiritWeaver]

They're generally harmless.

When they become an issue is when you're dealing with lag caused by a region that has a huge pile of them, or just the general desire most people have of wanting the other "people" in SL to be actual people they can interact with.

Very rarely we've seen them used for griefing or intrusive data collection - but this happens more from actual users than bots.

 

[Love Zhaoying]

Fun Fact: The Bot that is checking all your attachments will probably report on your "junk"!

IYKYK

 

[Setsuki Takeda]

Honestly, you're probably being tracked more by those stupid "by body" unpackers than you are by bots.

Those things are a plague, and it is terrible to need to unpack two or three bodies and merge the folders so someone doesn't say "Well, we have "all" unpacks but nobody uses your body..." Because we just unpack the whole box and then deleted the junk.

[Ineffable Mote]

The average real world telephone, car, and even television now is collecting and broadcasting quite a bit of data too. Besides door cams, street cameras, etc. People love their outrages, but they also tend to be rather selective when exercising them. They're also prone to snake oil for "protection" systems, which only exacerbates the ingrained histrionics. Not that people shouldn't care, but at the end of the day maybe it's not entirely the bots themselves that are the problem.

Edited January 26 by Ineffable Mote

[AmeliaJ08]

The bonnie bots all seem to declare themselves as scripted agents so it's no big deal to keep them out if you really care, they're not doing anything secret though and as far as I can see cause no real trouble but of course people have the right to exclude them - or anyone/anything - from their land should they wish to.

They are primarily concerned with collecting attachment data to publish on the website but they also do live region information. I think that second function could be dropped if LL just published a live list of where everyone is though!

 

 

Edited January 31 by AmeliaJ08

[Qie Niangao]

On 1/22/2024 at 8:26 AM, Thecla said:

because of the data that they can scrape.

Not sure what data is a concern here. If the worry is that visitors want to keep secret that they've been to your region, then yeah, bots could collect that data. Thing is, most of the grid—including all Linden-owned land—is wide open to bots. I suppose there might be some appeal to being one place visitors can hide from self-identified bot data collectors, but unless those visitors never leave, they'll be "scraped"… and it's ineffective "hiding" anyway because a bot that doesn't declare itself a scripted agent won't be detected.

So banning bots from a region won't hide the visitor's choice of mesh body (for example) when they visit the next region, and won't hide their whereabouts from stalkers willing to use undeclared bots.

On the other hand, if they're just a pest, popping in where they don't belong at just the wrong moments: ban 'em. You could ask the bot-runners to relocate visits, but one region probably doesn't matter much to their data collection project.

[Gabriele Graves]

The thing that amazes me about scripted agents on mainland is why people operating them aren't making sure they stick to the public areas on a region when they teleport in.  I've detected hundreds of scripted agents teleporting directly to my parcels at Nautilus City since the script function was made available.  There is no need as a lot of the region is LL public land due to double-prim parcels.  Scripted agent owners really ought to be teleporting their bots to the public land only where it is available.

It's lazy and careless to do otherwise and may be contributing to the bad will they generate.

My system (no, not the one I give away) auto-bans them to get them to move them to LL public land - I don't have to help them gather data by making my land available as a landing point.

Interestingly enough, many of the scripted agents don't end up coming back to the region at all once my system bans them.  A lot do but also a lot don't.  I know this because I log scripted agents (not non-scripted agents) that come and go in the region.

[Wulfie Reanimator]

1 hour ago, Gabriele Graves said:

The thing that amazes me about scripted agents on mainland is why people operating them aren't making sure they stick to the public areas on a region when they teleport in.

Just guessing, but I can't imagine the bot runners are picking any specific landing zones if they're scraping hundreds of sims.

I can't imagine it's a small task to hand-pick "safe" locations for what's basically a blink in that sim.

That they land in your parcel is probably related to the location of that parcel within the sim, or whatever other factors LL uses to determine where avatars should arrive.

[Qie Niangao]

Now that you mention it… assuming a region doesn't use Telehub routing, and the destination parcel doesn't use Landing Point routing, why wouldn't the "just passing through" bots always choose, like, 4000m where only scripts would notice? In fact some do, but others pop in at ground level; why would they ever choose that unless they're advertising their existence?

(By "destination parcel" I mean the parcel at the X,Y location the bots specify for teleporting in, or presumably 128,128 if they only specify the region.)

[Gabriele Graves]

4 hours ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:

Just guessing, but I can't imagine the bot runners are picking any specific landing zones if they're scraping hundreds of sims.

I can't imagine it's a small task to hand-pick "safe" locations for what's basically a blink in that sim.

That they land in your parcel is probably related to the location of that parcel within the sim, or whatever other factors LL uses to determine where avatars should arrive.

Nope, the default routing spot is in the middle of the region (128, 128) which is LL public land.  Lots of bots do land there but clearly lots don't.

Edited January 31 by Gabriele Graves

[Qie Niangao]

37 minutes ago, Gabriele Graves said:

Nope, the default routing spot is in the middle of the region (128, 128) which is LL public land…

Wow, this is either bringing back ancient memories or creating false ones. I think I recall that at first the region where my First Land was located had a tiny, literally Governor-owned parcel in the middle, and then it went away at some point. Was that a real thing?

[Love Zhaoying]

3 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

46 minutes ago, Gabriele Graves said:

Nope, the default routing spot is in the middle of the region (128, 128) which is LL public land…

Wow, this is either bringing back ancient memories or creating false ones. I think I recall that at first the region where my First Land was located had a tiny, literally Governor-owned parcel in the middle, and then it went away at some point. Was that a real thing?

It sounds like owning land near 128, 128 would be ideal for Bot Trapping and/or Target Practice!

[Gabriele Graves]

12 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

Wow, this is either bringing back ancient memories or creating false ones. I think I recall that at first the region where my First Land was located had a tiny, literally Governor-owned parcel in the middle, and then it went away at some point. Was that a real thing?

I have no idea but I wouldn't disbelieve it.  I wasn't around for First Land though I have read about it a lot.  I started in 2007 but would have loved to have been here in the real early days but I doubt I owned any computer even close to being usable back then.  The one I had was barely usable in 2007.

In my home region 128x128 puts an agent right on a public walkway that goes for many regions in both directions and there is a lot of public land between resident owned parcel clusters which are all square clusters of 4x1024sqm.

I do have a parcel which is close by to 128x128 but that's not where the scripted agents that land on my parcel appear.  The parcel that they appear on is a good way further down the same walkway and set back by at least 1024sqm.

Edited January 31 by Gabriele Graves

[Extrude Ragu]

Judge me how you will, I don't like having to ignore things, no matter how tiny.

It takes cognitive effort to focus somewhere else when something pops up on your screen uninvited.

It's like Ads. It's a mental work to keep your eyes on the article when there are other distractions on the screen.

[PheebyKatz]

6 hours ago, Extrude Ragu said:

Judge me how you will, I don't like having to ignore things, no matter how tiny.

It takes cognitive effort to focus somewhere else when something pops up on your screen uninvited.

It's like Ads. It's a mental work to keep your eyes on the article when there are other distractions on the screen.

I try to be tolerant, because there's not much else I can do, but I agree with this. I don't just live on my home sim, I work there. This involves a bit of looking out for the place, and that involves, naturally, a tendency to look at profiles when dots appear on the mini map.

Looking away from what I'm doing, clicking to view a profile, and having the dot poof, sometimes before I can even get an option to look at the profile, well, that's pretty derned annoying. Like having a mosquito land on you, and every time you think to swat it, it buzzes around and lands somewhere else.

[Medusa Torok]

I find bots intrusive and once I owned some mainland where the same bot would turn up every single day, and stayed for a looong while before it naffed off again, so i set a security orb which ejected it. then it went on appearing every day but  just outside my boundary. it annoyed the heck out of me, so much so that in the end I sold the land and moved somewhere else. Where I live currently, there are several bots visiting but they seem to come and go when I am not there, which is not so bad, I am seeing about 4 or 5 on my security orb list every 2 days. Still annoying but since I don't see them when I am at home, I guess I don't need to worry and in any case theres not much else i can do about them.