The weird stuff I see in SL

[Simo Vodopan]

6 minutes ago, Cloud Python said:

Those are definitely not normal users "just standing around" and anyone that would claim so would at best be talking from a place of ignorance.

So what are they?

The three most common ones, in no particular order, are Tiny Empire player, data collection agents, and miners... yes, really.
Long story short, with some clever coding and a bot net of SL avatars, people can set up a mining operation that would run on SL servers, couple that with the amazingly easy process of making a new avatar, and LL laxed attitude towards bots, and we could be on the verge of some serious hard times if knowledge of this ability gets more visibility. This is quite frankly something LL isn't prepared to deal with if the day ever comes.

Also to answer a previous inquire, "do they block waterways?" often they do, specially during race or flotilla events these avatars can be in large enough numbers that they'll prevent an event to run by as the region with the addition of one or two participants reaches its cap and won't let anyone else in until those participants already in it exit the region, the open water sims were created and are maintained for mariners and aviators, people that enjoy SL and contribute to its economy, not for people to park hundreds of avatars to "at best" play a silly HUD game with their ridiculous amount of accounts, and at worse collect information up to and including IP addresses or the worse case scenario, do some crypto mining, activity which would affect the performance of not only the region they are standing on, but any other region running on that same CPU.

To the OP, do not get discouraged in this endeavor.

I appreciate it! ❤️ I'm not discouraged by any means. I've gotten quite used to this treatment throughout the years. I'm just glad others see it too.

[Qie Niangao]

3 hours ago, Simo Vodopan said:

That's interesting. Sounds so innocent, doesn't it?

There's no way anybody would use SL to host a webserver just to serve "web pages that are accessed from outside Second Life." It's very likely they are using an HTTP server script in SL to send in-world data to an external data store—it's the only practical means of pushing any significant amount of data outside SL—but humans aren't access those "web pages".

It's a little tricky though because every time the region restarts, not only does the bot need to re-login to the grid, but the webserver needs to get a new URL. That's trivially handled by an external server, but a human end user is not going to that URL directly; it's all doable but not practical to save a pittance on hosting a web service somewhere else.

They also won't be "moving around... looking for a new place to reside temporarily" because every time they change regions, they again need to get a fresh URL and re-up with whatever external registration service through which they're connecting.

The only practical reason to host a web service inside SL is to export data originating in SL.

Point is, whatever the heck they're doing, it's not what they seem to want you to think. Take nothing a botrunner says at face value.

Anyway, a discussion of bots might be illuminated by a rigorous study of them if you haven't seen it before.

[Simo Vodopan]

1 minute ago, Qie Niangao said:

That's interesting. Sounds so innocent, doesn't it?

There's no way anybody would use SL to host a webserver just to serve "web pages that are accessed from outside Second Life." It's very likely they are using an HTTP server script in SL to send in-world data to an external data store—it's the only practical means of pushing any significant amount of data outside SL—but humans aren't access those "web pages".

It's a little tricky though because every time the region restarts, not only does the bot need to re-login to the grid, but the webserver needs to get a new URL. That's trivially handled by an external server, but a human end user is not going to that URL directly; it's all doable but not practical to save a pittance on hosting a web service somewhere else.

They also won't be "moving around... looking for a new place to reside temporarily" because every time they change regions, they again need to get a fresh URL and re-up with whatever external registration service through which they're connecting.

The only practical reason to host a web service inside SL is to export data originating in SL.

Point is, whatever the heck they're doing, it's not what they seem to want you to think. Take nothing a botrunner says at face value.

Anyway, a discussion of bots might be illuminated by a rigorous study of them if you haven't seen it before.

Makes you wonder don't it? I really do love sitting around for a couple hours and watching what they do. My mind goes all over the place theory-crafting with this stuff.

[Love Zhaoying]

Wait, is this one of those "threads run by bots"?

Bot-lovers.  EWWWWWW.

 

[Simo Vodopan]

5 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Wait, is this one of those "threads run by bots"?

Bot-lovers.  EWWWWWW.

 

I could be a bot, you could be a bot. *Suspenseful music intensifies* I got my eye on you... you're not an imposter are you?

[Love Zhaoying]

14 minutes ago, Simo Vodopan said:

I could be a bot, you could be a bot. *Suspenseful music intensifies* I got my eye on you... you're not an imposter are you?

Let's see..we've got "DiscussionBot", and several users who are actively promoting Bots, and either supporting "bot purveyors", or claiming to be "bot experts".

VERY SUSPICIOUS!

 

[Simo Vodopan]

11 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Let's see..we've got "DiscussionBot", and several users who are actively promoting Bots, and either supporting "bot purveyors", or claiming to be "bot experts".

VERY SUSPICIOUS!

 

*Walks around you in a circle and examines you* You dont appear that you have synth made flesh... what would happen if you squirted you with water?

[Ardy Lay]

Looking at those map screenshots triggered a memory.  I remember that the scale levels where LL's viewer would display "green dots" on the map was changed to reduce load on the service providing that data.  Before that change was implemented, I participated in a "pile on" exercise where many people were invited to a region and Linden Lab monitored service load as they instructed us on World Map operation.  We were subsequently thanked for our assistance and told that our test provided the same results as when it was performed by Linden accounts.

[Love Zhaoying]

1 minute ago, Simo Vodopan said:

*Walks around you in a circle and examines you* You dont appear that you have synth made flesh... what would happen if you squirted you with water?

My fur would get soaked. Angry lion would not be amused.

[Simo Vodopan]

1 minute ago, Love Zhaoying said:

My fur would get soaked. Angry lion would not be amused.

Either you're an advanced synth or a legit lion. It checks out (for now). Still, I'll be cautious. *Does the keeping eyes on you hand gesture*

[Love Zhaoying]

I am exiting the thread, but..

The title is "click bait".

Seeing "Bots", or apparently idle avatars (whether they are playing Tiny Empires or whateve) around SL is not "weird".  It is normal and well-documented.

Enjoy!

[Simo Vodopan]

9 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

I am exiting the thread, but..

The title is "click bait".

Seeing "Bots", or apparently idle avatars (whether they are playing Tiny Empires or whateve) around SL is not "weird".  It is normal and well-documented.

Enjoy!

Heheh its okay. We'll certainly enjoy. Its not the bots themselves that are weird, its the kind of bots we see that are weird. Ofcourse its well documented! ❤️ You have a good one.

Edited July 5 by Simo Vodopan

[Ceka Cianci]

Bleh, I thought it was gonna be a fun thread about weird stuff in SL.. Instead it's just another bot thread..

Click bait title!! \o/

hehehehe

[Alwin Alcott]

15 hours ago, Simo Vodopan said:

Found these bots arranged like a crop circle in multiple sims...

wow... been a long time ago we had such bot discussion about... eh really nothing.
Hope it ends well this time, most often there's not a real lot, or more correct nó proof for bad intention or abuse.

[xXSuicidalIdolXx Candycane]

8 hours ago, Cloud Python said:

Those are definitely not normal users "just standing around" and anyone that would claim so would at best be talking from a place of ignorance.

So what are they?

The three most common ones, in no particular order, are Tiny Empire player, data collection agents, and miners... yes, really.
Long story short, with some clever coding and a bot net of SL avatars, people can set up a mining operation that would run on SL servers, couple that with the amazingly easy process of making a new avatar, and LL laxed attitude towards bots, and we could be on the verge of some serious hard times if knowledge of this ability gets more visibility. This is quite frankly something LL isn't prepared to deal with if the day ever comes.

Also to answer a previous inquire, "do they block waterways?" often they do, specially during race or flotilla events these avatars can be in large enough numbers that they'll prevent an event to run by as the region with the addition of one or two participants reaches its cap and won't let anyone else in until those participants already in it exit the region, the open water sims were created and are maintained for mariners and aviators, people that enjoy SL and contribute to its economy, not for people to park hundreds of avatars to "at best" play a silly HUD game with their ridiculous amount of accounts, and at worse collect information up to and including IP addresses or the worse case scenario, do some crypto mining, activity which would affect the performance of not only the region they are standing on, but any other region running on that same CPU.

To the OP, do not get discouraged in this endeavor.

okay now is the time for me to gain some insights here. only read the first 2 pages. so before I forget. i am really freakin interested in all of this like im tech savy but some of this is going over my head. please info dump on me.. so linden lab pays amazon for their servers? does this mean linden lab provides the servers or does amazing provide and linden lab puts the software in them? so 3 types of bots it seems? i seen the name tiny empire a couple times in this thread. what is tiny empire?? also cryto mining?? how freakin far does mining go?? i know you have a server containing a gpu and cpu and then mine? but what does second life have to do with that? another thing... opensim. for all thats holy. please someone explain opensim. i somewhat know about having a homemade server but if someone can explain or youtube videos or a wiki on that.. and.. i think thats it. i will say not sure if there is a group for this kinda thing of talking about bots or just like minded techy people but i want in. please! i have seriously enjoyed this thread so thank you for any education you can give me on any of this. i have been in second life for 3 years and honestly want to understand and explore beyond the casual user into things like this.

[Alwin Alcott]

52 minutes ago, xXSuicidalIdolXx Candycane said:

so linden lab pays amazon for their servers? 

the whole of SL is in the cloud, they pay for thát service, not servers.

[Qie Niangao]

1 hour ago, xXSuicidalIdolXx Candycane said:

okay now is the time for me to gain some insights here. only read the first 2 pages. so before I forget. i am really freakin interested in all of this like im tech savy but some of this is going over my head. please info dump on me.. so linden lab pays amazon for their servers? does this mean linden lab provides the servers or does amazing provide and linden lab puts the software in them? so 3 types of bots it seems? i seen the name tiny empire a couple times in this thread. what is tiny empire?? also cryto mining?? how freakin far does mining go?? i know you have a server containing a gpu and cpu and then mine? but what does second life have to do with that? another thing... opensim. for all thats holy. please someone explain opensim. i somewhat know about having a homemade server but if someone can explain or youtube videos or a wiki on that.. and.. i think thats it. i will say not sure if there is a group for this kinda thing of talking about bots or just like minded techy people but i want in. please! i have seriously enjoyed this thread so thank you for any education you can give me on any of this. i have been in second life for 3 years and honestly want to understand and explore beyond the casual user into things like this.

So many questions.

AFAIK, OpenSim has nothing much to do with bots, it's just a mostly reverse-engineered version of the SL server software that can run individually or in privately run grids sort of analogous to Second Life. This invites all sorts of problems, most notoriously the leakage of intellectual property on those private servers. It's supposed to be handy as an extremely private sandbox (although I'm told scripts are not universally compatible with Second Life, if that's important).

I have no personal knowledge of Tiny Empires but it's been described as a competitive role-playing game where having idle participants in-world can somehow count to the advantage of another participant.

I'm very (very) skeptical of recurring claims that crypto mining is conducted by bots on SL servers. There are only a few tens of thousands of regions so even if every script cycle were dedicated to mining, that's very finite. Scripts are only one thing the region servers do, and their capacity is strictly limited to contain costs: it's not as if Second Life scripts could somehow escape and run unbounded across Amazon's cloud.* The total mining capacity of the entire SL grid must be comparable to a handful of GPUs, if that.

____________
*What could theoretically become a vulnerability in the future is the ability to add LUA scripts to the viewer. Those would at least run on a bunch of unsupervised machines—users' PCs—with mining-relevant capacity and hardware, but it would be a pretty obvious flaw to expose any of that to viewer-side scripting.

[xXSuicidalIdolXx Candycane]

7 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

So many questions.

AFAIK, OpenSim has nothing much to do with bots, it's just a mostly reverse-engineered version of the SL server software that can run individually or in privately run grids sort of analogous to Second Life. This invites all sorts of problems, most notoriously the leakage of intellectual property on those private servers. It's supposed to be handy as an extremely private sandbox (although I'm told scripts are not universally compatible with Second Life, if that's important).

I have no personal knowledge of Tiny Empires but it's been described as a competitive role-playing game where having idle participants in-world can somehow count to the advantage of another participant.

I'm very (very) skeptical of recurring claims that crypto mining is conducted by bots on SL servers. There are only a few tens of thousands of regions so even if every script cycle were dedicated to mining, that's very finite. Scripts are only one thing the region servers do, and their capacity is strictly limited to contain costs: it's not as if Second Life scripts could somehow escape and run unbounded across Amazon's cloud.* The total mining capacity of the entire SL grid must be comparable to a handful of GPUs, if that.

____________
*What could theoretically become a vulnerability in the future is the ability to add LUA scripts to the viewer. Those would at least run on a bunch of unsupervised machines—users' PCs—with mining-relevant capacity and hardware, but it would be a pretty obvious flaw to expose any of that to viewer-side scripting.

I have always been interested in the things you say on here when it comes to tech stuff. this goes for you and the others on here. how did yall get so smart with this stuff? did yall go to school? is it just self tought from being around on here for awhile? i just find it interesting and whenever things are explained like you did with these topics they are things that I find I have interest in learning also if that makes sense. thank you for answering my questions

[Ceka Cianci]

12 minutes ago, xXSuicidalIdolXx Candycane said:

I have always been interested in the things you say on here when it comes to tech stuff. this goes for you and the others on here. how did yall get so smart with this stuff? did yall go to school? is it just self tought from being around on here for awhile? i just find it interesting and whenever things are explained like you did with these topics they are things that I find I have interest in learning also if that makes sense. thank you for answering my questions

That's one of the main reasons so many people stay in second life for years and years.. Because the learning never seems to stop..

 

[Qie Niangao]

14 minutes ago, xXSuicidalIdolXx Candycane said:

did yall go to school? is it just self tought from being around on here for awhile? 

Some have relevant professional backgrounds, but there's no school for Tiny Empires. SL lore is both vast and silly.

[Love Zhaoying]

2 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

Some have relevant professional backgrounds, but there's no school for Tiny Empires. SL lore is both vast and silly.

Some of us have been here 15+ years AND have professional backgrounds. It's a curse!

[Cloud Python]

To clarify for some users, mining can be done with a smart phone, even the vacant space of a hard drive, GPU mining is the most notorious and prolific, but far from the only way.

How does this relate to Second Life?

Mining in which what ever form it takes always comes down to performing arithmetic, to do that with an electronic device, electricity is used, and electric power has a cost. A successful mining operation is one that recoups the hardware costs and generates more revenue than the expense of an electric bill.
Because LSL is capable of executing arithmetic, and can communicate with outside servers, all the pieces are in the board to make this happen, and while it's true regions in SL by design have strict script limits, it's also true there are currently around 28,000 regions online, distributing a bot net around these regions to perform these tasks would offload most of the electricity cost from the individual to LL, and that being one of the primary hinders to on-location operations one can quickly see the allure.

How profitable could this be?

While it's hard to estimate I'll say this, we live in a world with no shortage of people that would end someone on the spot just so they could steal their shoes, so as little (or as much) profit as there is to be made, someone will always go after it given the chance and if people start trying in any significant numbers the normal SL users, the ones that keep the platform profitable, would be highly affected, hence why more attention should be given to these avatars that stand around populating most of the main grid for no good apparent reason.

More on the topic of researching bots...

While I can't post avatar names, in a region known as Eichorn Cove one can find an avatar roaming the grounds 24/7 for reasons seemingly only known to the owner.

[Qie Niangao]

Well, if the Eichorn Cove bot is mining, it's doing a poor job of it, leaving the region's script scheduler 2/3 idle.

See if you can find a bot infestation that actually registers significant script usage. I've never found one.

[Clem Marques]

37 minutes ago, Cloud Python said:

While I can't post avatar names, in a region known as Eichorn Cove one can find an avatar roaming the grounds 24/7 for reasons seemingly only known to the owner.

I've seen that avatar before. No clue if it's a bot, or if its purpose is related to what you described in the rest of your post, but I got jumpscared by that person while admiring the landscape. The avatar just walked right past me out of nowhere, in the Eichorn Cove forest. 🤣

[Paul Hexem]

On 7/4/2024 at 10:38 AM, Qie Niangao said:

Well, not exactly "bots" per se.

 

On 7/4/2024 at 10:38 AM, Qie Niangao said:

 I do suspect they may use a common bot client