[New Feature: Scripted Agent Estate Access Discussion]

All I see is an ongoing whine by certain bot operators, who's profiles do not identify their bots.

 

Do their bots identify who controls them, what they are up to? naming no names ref "naming and shaming".

 

Personally, I'm mega happy that my landlord has turned on "no bots" on all their sims.  About an hour ago I was up to 56 bots abuse reported, 42 of whom are no longer in search.

 

And I'll continue to report any suspect avatars, including those who "want to map ban lines and orbs".

[ZOMG Aliens are spying over us in Bellisseria!]

1 hour ago, Sid Nagy said:

My cookie jar is still untouched by whoever they are, so I'm all good for now.

i know full well the Dutch cookie jars

[New Feature: Scripted Agent Estate Access Discussion]

3 minutes ago, Phil Deakins said:

I totally agree with you that it needs to be available to all of SL, but I disagree with you that bots "serve no real purpose". There are many perfectly good uses of bots, as stated by LL. I can accept that they serve no useful purpose for you personally, but that's quite different.

Incidentally, LL can't "just remove bots outright" because they have no way programatically discerning which avatars are bots and which aren't.

That we know of

[New Feature: Scripted Agent Estate Access Discussion]

Up to 47 bots reported now 🙂

[New Feature: Scripted Agent Estate Access Discussion]

1 minute ago, bunboxmomo said:

Well if your primary concern is seeing bots, yes, deny_bots will mean you see less of them, but that will come with a cost.

This is a list of all the "known" roaming bot networks as of Feburary 2023.
As you can see there are far more on here than the BonnieBots, which I believe were the bots that created resident cocnern due to fears regarding how may have operated, rather than concerns about how they did operate.

That aside, BB isn't the point here.
The point is there are many other networks that are now unable to provide reliable information for the purpose.

Perhaps one of the mist interesting ones here in my opinion would be that of SurveyTeam, which is a bot network that operates on behalf of GridSurvey which is a long long long time pillar of the community in the valuable information they provide about SL and generously provides API that countless scripts make use of over the past decade and a half, if not more.

This dataset can no longer be relied upon for production and mission crtiical standards of code, due to the patchyness of the dataset.
That means algorithms needs to be changed to account for that, if they can be at all.

This is true for not just that bot network, but multiple ones. I'm not saying "dont add deny_bot" personally, I think it's a good thing, but it should be parcel level with region override on negative parcel permissions, and the invisible setting on parcels should also hide residents and objects from the viewer, and scripts in my opinion. Personally, I think it didn't go far enough, but it could have been a bit less of a blunt hammer approach to the situation in my opinion.

My support of that position, is not informed by a fear of bots or a spookyness of them. I'm a scripter myself, I'm not the least bit concerned when I see a bot come and go, because I know they really dont do anything spooky. I support the policy change because I believe users have a right to decide for themselves how to manage their own land without having to justify their choices about their own land.  Code is unfortunately a black box to many users, and by the nature of our own human psychology we conjure imagined threats and fears about things we don't know exactly what they do, and bots become the boogeyman under the bed. So while I do think for a lot of users, this "botphobia" as I've seen it described as by others in this thread, is informed by a misunderstanding of what these bots even do, that has just blown out of control, I still think people should have the right to decide for themselves on their own land.

However, despite being in support of that, I'm also not going to pretend that this won't have a significant impact on the grid, thats the nature of what I'm getting at here. This is a major policy change that will fundamentally alter much about the grid as we know it, even if that is not immediately obvious yet, and it will do so in ways far beyond how many bots you see every day.

These decisions should be made with this in consideration, rather than from a hopeful utopia where the bots are gone but everything else stays the same, otherwise we run the risk of cheering on potentially devastating changes that can take a while for things to re-adjust from, asuming project maintainers are even still active in SL. The sudden workload, may even push a number to decide SL aint worth it for them, and I'm not just talking about bot operators.

With regards to degradation to service, first part of what I said about that was with regards to the deny_bot flag. This means that datasets are now unreliable, so code that acceses this data via APIs, and not just BonnieBots, but any of them, can now not be safely relied on, which means algorithms have to be changed. This takes time, and there is no guarentee equal functionality will be viable. This has to be an accepcted cost of such a change, and people who were pushing for this, I hope they were aware of that.

In terms of the HTTPRequest aspect again, soft's statement is a good one and it is good to hear that, however, this still does not change the fact that as it currently stands the nature of llHTTPRequest, and any handling of UUID36 for that matter (Which is one of the most important data types in LSL) is in the realm of uncertainty for the forseeable future, pending future statements from LL.

While, as soft said, we will not see action taken or enforcement against existing scripts and services. This does mean that developers, myself included, will be a lot more hesitant for now to continue development of anything using these functions (Which again, are some of the most important ones in LSL), until this uncertainty is cleared. In addition, projects that may have been started, likely now never will given the unknown status of the function and use of UUIDs in the future.

This will have an impact on the grid, even with the pending status of enforcement by LL, due to a slowdown in development out of caution, to avoid wasted workhours into algorithms we'd have to redo.

Again, I am in favour of these changes (a bit spicy on some aspects of httprequest though), but I wouldn't say its a good idea to pretend to ourselves the only impact this will have is, how many bots we see popping in and out over the course of a day, and we should be prepared to accept the consequences of this change as a result of the policy change that has been asked for, by who I can hope knew what would that entail with it.

 

Just my two cents on the whole "Yeah this is great!"
 

Bots have NEVER been the "pillar of the community".  Aty least now, something has finally been done about the plague of anonymous bots plaguing landowners.  At least the bots whom we daren't name, actually chose to identify themselves, and what they were up to.

 

for me, my land has the new setting in place (thanks landlord ^^) and I'll continue to AR the suspected (my word) undeclared bots.

[New Feature: Scripted Agent Estate Access Discussion]

3 minutes ago, M Peccable said:

I guess I missed something somewhere. All the PII regulation quotations I have seen refer to RL personal info. How did avatar UUIDs and user names get connected to RL personal info?

Patch said in another post they were taking advice from a GDPR specialist.

[New Feature: Scripted Agent Estate Access Discussion]

8 hours ago, Soft Linden said:

Of note: The "PII" definition in the Using Personal Data guidance isn't our own formulation. It's a superset of the concepts from multiple regulations. For example, "capable of identifying an individual or household" is a qualifier in California regulations, while other aspects are from European Union regulations. We've attempted to provide some safe guidance for people who want to do very basic things when dealing with a global user base. But as the guide emphasizes, it's no replacement for reading all applicable regulations and/or seeking guidance from a privacy attorney.

The "Using Personal Data" guide points to global privacy regulations that exist outside of Second Life. This is an important distinction, which is why we opted to carve out that guide and put it outside any Policy document.

But yes, the goal of a policy update is to give Linden Lab the ability to act based on documented standards. And we want to give well-intentioned creators some guidance on supporting privacy and safety for everybody!

Let us be clear on ONE thing: Soft Linden is a TRUE and FAIR advocate of a user's right to privacy.  Soft was practically the only Linden who helped out over the RedZone fiasco years ago.

[New Feature: Scripted Agent Estate Access Discussion]

I LOVE the GDPR

 

now to file a GDPR ticket.

[New Feature: Scripted Agent Estate Access Discussion]

Let's not forget, LL can probably tell via how an avi logs in, the chance of it being a bot or not.  If they weren't reasonably certain, they'd not have told us the best way to file an abuse report on undeclared bots.

[New Feature: Scripted Agent Estate Access Discussion]

31 minutes ago, xDancingStarx said:

There already existed a ban on bots. The ban to be excluded from traffic counting. According to most people in this thread there shouldn't be a problem with bots and traffic anymore. Why is there still?

Because the bots are mostly anonymous so you have no idea of their actions.

At least that site we can't name, identified it's purpose and published what they were up to

 

[💡 Positive News Regarding Scripted Agents Function 💡]

4 minutes ago, Paul Hexem said:

This is actually a great point. I wonder, especially if the feature gets enabled on mainland, how many products are going to stop working correctly and what the response will be.

I can imagine a ticker tape parade.

[💡 Positive News Regarding Scripted Agents Function 💡]

1 minute ago, Count Burks said:

It was not active yet except on RC regions.

Still old news.

[💡 Positive News Regarding Scripted Agents Function 💡]

it's old news.

 

LL blogged about it last week.

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

1 hour ago, Setsuki Takeda said:

Payment Info does help to weed out bots, but I have a few friends who don't have info on file, so I tend to just slap them home manually when they show up. I keep radar open, and I see who is on my land at all times, I will head over to people and greet them and if they are AFK or a bot I will immediatly eject them to "home" rather than just from my land as I do human annoyances.

 

The downside to trying to herc bots off is that it increases the *really* annoying whole parcel whitelist orbs that attack flyers on the mainland, this is a major pet peeve of mine, flying slong at 750m up where I can't even see most of the stuff on the ground and getting instantly ejected to home by someone who wants to be left alone.

it's a landowner's right to use a zero second orb.

[Unnecessarily scary message from SL]

.

 

[how to know which security question was selected when creating the account?]

8 hours ago, LittleMe Jewell said:

And in the same paragraph, just before that, I said:

 

 

While they might ask you your question, in order to get an answer, they will not just tell you what the question is.

The difference between my two statements are 'ask' versus 'tell'.

Yes, LL will ask you the question if you are trying to recover an account -- but if you just go open a ticket and say 'what is my secret question', they will not just tell you.

Someone mentioned opening a support ticket to get the question from LL or get it reset.  My comments addressed that post as well as the OP questions.

They do tell you the question.  When you file a ticket they reply with the question for you to answer it.

 

So yes they do tell you it.  And if you pass verification they will also reset it for you if you ask them.

[how to know which security question was selected when creating the account?]

5 hours ago, LittleMe Jewell said:

Yes, and that is why I said the only way you will ever know what the question is -- if not recorded somewhere -- is if LL asks you for the answer to it.  And that assumes that the account has a question associated with it.  Way back, not all of the 'create account' portals asked for a question/answer.

But if you just go ask them what they question was, they aren't going to tell you.

That's not what you said, what you said was " They definitely will not tell you what the Question was that you picked, nor will they reset it for you"

 

I said, to provide correct information to the OP, that LL do ask you the actual question, when you try to verify the account.

[how to know which security question was selected when creating the account?]

10 minutes ago, LittleMe Jewell said:

The only way you will ever know what Secret Question you chose -- if any (cuz there were not always Secret Questions) - is if LL asks you for the answer.  They definitely will not tell you what the Question was that you picked, nor will they reset it for you.  If you did not give a truthful answer at the time that you selected the question, then you are totally out of luck in that area.  If you ever have to prove you are you to LL, then you'll have to find a method that they'll accept other than the Question/Answer -- they do have other ways of verifying people/accounts.

when you go down the route of recovering lost accounts, they DO ask you the secuirty question you chose, as I've done this myself.

[Ad Farming Persists]

1 hour ago, Qie Niangao said:

Abandoned land is mostly no-object-entry, but old Mainland protected roads, rails, and water allow object entry ( "old Mainland" because Zindra protected land mostly bars object entry, as does Bellisseria).

I'm not actually sure about no-pushing. I had given it a very cursory try with an old script and couldn't get any of these things to budge, but it wasn't a proper test at all and could have been using an broken version of the script. I may try again later, just for kicks. (It's not a real solution because, as usual, not all the griefer objects remain physical.)

did you message the land owner? I did.

[TOS... for Griefing...]

6 minutes ago, Kalegthepsionicist said:

but they can cause mental distress, remeber some people has depression, and griefer is a psychomaniac that use this as their pleasure.

I found some grifer r are narcisstic guy,  while other are people with mental disability.

some are prople that hv ptoblem with social interaction in real, disfunctional socoal ability.

well good number  i found.

and also there are sociopath, this is form of other disorder.

That's why there's a big "X" in the top right corner.

 

And a mute button in the viewer.

[TOS... for Griefing...]

You can't actually cause "physical distress" to an avatar, it's all virtual 🙄

Even these afk ones.

 

[Infrastructure Investment Update: Buy/Sell Fee Change and Land Pricing Effective Mar 6, 2023 DISCUSSION]

8 hours ago, Tech Robonaught said:

LL is NOT - a non profit business.

I don't know what their overhead is, but based on the difficulty getting a human on the phone at their office and the fact their office hasn't moved in 2 decades, I'm going to have to say other than the AWS portion, not much compared to the 3+ million a month they collect in Land fees.

Actually their office has moved.  Check the address on LL website it's not shown as battery street now, it looks like a mailing address and a small office when you see it on Google maps.  Bulk of their workforce are remote workers now since lockdown.

In fact the jobs they advertise pretty much all say remote workers.  So probably saving a ton on rent "if" battery street is going/gone.

 

[A Healthy Debate: Avatar Regulations with loopholes Category: Anime Avatars]

Personally I just report for ***** in certain themed Sims/rated Sims.  Then block, and just get on with my own second Life.

If that "person" suddenly vanishes from search, safe bet they were up to something.

 

No discussion needed.

[All adult ads taken off the Marketplace]

3 hours ago, Froukje Hoorenbeek said:

It’s not fixed, 95 percent of my listing enhancements have 0 impressions and no matter how many times I refresh the frontpage of the MP, I am not seeing any of my listing enhancements. But I appreciate you looking into it, I will dm the ticket nr. 

did you read where tommy said to DM the ticket number so he can have it looked at?

[How to deal with Griefers?]

@Tommy Linden

@Kristin Linden