Jennifer Boyle

I'm surprised that the people talking about intellectual property rights have ignored that under the TOS LL has an unlimited license to do anything they please with anything that is uploaded into SL.

The title says it all. Assume that the animation is full perm. How can it be done?

Wrong! In the US you have a right to photograph anything you can see from a place where you have a right to be and to publish it.

It is in the eye of the beholder whether or not they are vulnerabilities. In addition, there are always trade-offs between desirable functionality and security. We usually accept something less than ultimate security as a trade-off for desired functionality. After all, the ultimate security is an air-gapped computer in a windowless room. It has great security, but it isn't worth much for most things we want to do. For sure, if you restrict your computer activities to that, bonniebots won't be a problem!

I am not going to try to respond individually to the recent multiple very articulate, cogent posts individually. Instead, I'm going to make some comments that I think are relevant. First, all information that is passively available publicly about anyone's avatar in SL can be harvested. Period. The only information that that is even relatively "safe" is information that one has to actively share. Obviously, we couldn't have the second life that we have without considerable information being publicly available about avatars. Therefore, there is a lot of information that we need to make available, and that information will be harvested, for good or ill, because it can be. It seems to me that the measures that have been taken so far and that may be taken in the future to restrict registered scripted agents' activities are pointless because registered scripted agents are not necessary to the data collection enterprise. Profile information is going to be available to whomever wants to collect it and has the skills. Collection of additional information, e.g., attachments, location at a particular time, etc., can just as easily, perhaps just not as efficiently, be done by stationary scripted objects or scripted objects worn by avatars. I can envision an entrepreneur providing a script, instructing people to create an object with a random name of their choice and put the script into it, and paying them to wear the object. They could have an army of avatars collecting data, and no one would be the wiser. They could even pay them a piecework rate to encourage them to move around and encounter lots of avatars. The only way to prevent this is to remove funtionality from lsl, breaking existing content, and depriving us of future creations that would have made our SLs better. This scenario is possible even in the absence of unregistered scripted agents, and who is naive enough to think that the actual bad actors who intend to use information to harm people would register theirs? I do think LL could and should do a better job of informing people about what information that is not on the public tabs of their profiles is accessible to scripts. Currently, I don't know of any way of finding that out other than looking it up in the lsl Portal, which the average user cannot be expected to do, and is quite laborious if one does not already know which functions to read about. The bottom line is that everyone should assume at everything in their profiles and everything about their avatars that can be accessed by scripts will be in a database somewhere. Each person must decide if what they get from SL is worth whatever risks are associated with that for them.

If you are not using the LL viewer, try logging in with it. If you don't crash, seek help from the developers of the viewer that is crashing. if you do, come back with the info that Nalates asked for.

Hopefully, staff members of multinationals are smart enough not to reveal the RL information necessary to make the linkage. Here's what ChatGPT has to say in answer to your question: "As of my knowledge cutoff in September 2021, I do not have any information about a person named Sid Nagy in Second Life. Second Life is a virtual world created by Linden Lab, where users can interact, create, and trade with one another. Users in Second Life are called residents, and they create and customize their own avatars. It is possible that Sid Nagy is an avatar or resident in Second Life, but specific details about them are not available in my training data. It is important to note that, as an AI language model, I cannot actively participate in Second Life, and I cannot access real-time or current information. My knowledge is based on the text data available to me during my training period."

My unscientific, anecdotal observations lead me to believe that most people don't care. I have voiced my opinion previously that a vocal minority of residents is responsible for the uproar about bonniebots and that most residents don't care. I have taken to asking people I encounter inworld what they think about bonniebots. Most are unaware of them and when told what they are and what they do, don't care. There sure are a lot of such people. Many, many residents enjoy SL as a fantasyland where they can roleplay things that they can't or won't do IRL. If they are prudent, they protect their RL selves by not revealing RL information that can be used to identify the accountholder. If you don't reveal RL information, the wellbeing of your RL self will not be affected by what anyone knows about your avatar.

Yesterday, textures were loading normally again.

No. I'm using the most current release of Firestorm.

I respectfully submit that it is. Share all information about your SL avatar freely. Share no information about the account owner. If you do that, you will be sharing the information that will help the avatar find friends, etc., but you will be sharing no information that could cause harm to the account owner. The above refers to sharing publicly. After you know and come to trust other account owners, you may decide to share information about your account owner privately with them.

You should try SLex. It's a lot more fun than filing ARs.

In RL in the US, it is legal to photograph whatever one can see from a place they are legally entitled to be and publish the photo. If the law is more restrictive of what one can do with avatars in SL than with real human beings in RL, that is bizarre, and the law is indeed an ass, and it needs to be changed.

For the last week or so, I have noticed that, very often, textures load very slowly. For example, if I change outfits, it may take a minute or two before all of the textures for the new outfit load. Textures on all manner of objects also are slow to load, and avatars are slow to rez. This is a marked change from the way it was. Is anyone else noticing this?

I have a couple of questions that I'm just curious about. If someone had a stationary scripted object that collected the same kind of information that bonniebots do about every avatar that entered the region rezzed on their land in one or more regions, how would people feel about that? What if a non-scripted-agent avatar that was operated by a real person at the keyboard wore an attachment that collected information about every avatar in every region they visited? What if a large group of people did that and aggregated the data they collected? Obviously, no one who travels to regions they don't control can be sure of avoiding the first of the above possibilities, and no one who enters regions where there are people they don't know well can avoid the second, and maybe not even then.

The number of people who have commented in the forums is miniscule compared with number of people who use SL. As I type this, there are 45,307 residents logged on. What proportion of them have voiced concerns, let alone objections? Generally, people who are upset about something tend to be more vocal than people who don't care, and I think that that is the case here. It is at least arguable that the vast majority of SL users, who are busy enjoying their virtual lives instead of posting here, don't care what information is collected about their avatars or what is done with it. Why don't they? Because avatars are not real; they are fictional characters. Would I be concerned if information about account owners, who are actual human beings, were being collected and published by a third party? You bet I would, because account owners are real human beings.

It's the usual situation in which a few vocal whiners get things done their way, to the detriment of the community at large.

So, could they avoid throwing the baby out with the bathwater by giving you a viewer setting to suppress notifications about scripted agents' comings and goings?

I think you are confusing two different things: Accounts that are operated by computer programs and, which, therefore, meet LL's definition of bots, and accounts that are logged in by human operators who are usually AFK. The latter do not meet LL's definition of bot. I guess we mainland-dwellers are second-class citizens. I cannot imagine that enabling it at the parcel level would have been substantially harder. The code should be very similar. On the other hand, I never understood why people had their panties in a wad about information-gathering bots like bonniebots. As Facebook told me years ago when they closed my account, SL avatars are fictional characters. As such, we have no need to keep information about ourselves private. The human account owner is who needs to safeguard private information, and the way to do that in SL is to not leak any information that connects them to the avatar. Bots have no access to information about the account owner. I think the information at bonniebots.com is interesting and useful, and I frequently look at it. I just don't get why anyone would object to it or want to impede its gathering and publication, other than that there is nothing somebody won't object to.

Just forget about the checkmark. It only matters when you are deeding land to a group. If you feel that you just have to clear the checkbox, set the land to your group, check the "Allow Deed to Group" checkbox, and then clear the "Owner Makes Contribution with Deed" checkbox.

I am constantly looking for combinations of fitmesh clothing and underwear that work together. The brand of underwear that I have found that works best under clothing is Style PH. Their underwear works under more clothing than other brands, it seems to me. It seems to fit closer to the (Maitreya) avatar surface. In addition, they have some clothing in their store that works perfectly with their underwear.

Thanks again to all who answered for being so willing to help a beginner.

YES!!!!!

Many thanks for the help.

I am a rank lsl beginner. I have just made my first useful script. To get it working, I did things like hard code keys, etc., that make it non-generalizable. Now I want to revise it to make usable by anyone anywhere on the grid. I already was using llTextBox to get user input. I added llDialog. I have spent all afternoon trying to figure out how to get the second one to wait until the user has responded to the first before displaying its prompt. I have read a lot of material in the wiki, watched YouTube videos, asked ChatGPT, looked at many scripts online, and done a lot of trial-and-error, and I can't figure out how to do it. The script actually functions as intended. I can input appropriate text into the text box, slick submit, and then click on a button in the dialog, and the result is as desired, but having them both on the screen looks inelegant. How can I use both a text box and a dialog for input in the same script and not have the second prompt appear before the first has disappeared? Thanks for any help and my apologies if this question is so elementary as to be inappropriate for the forum.