Innula Zenovka

In order to protect residents' privacy we perhaps need a scripted tool that enables other residents to track their movements round the grid, down to the exact coordinates of their destination each time. What could possibly go wrong?

So you say, and yet no one, in the almost 20-odd years that SL has been going, has yet taken it upon themselves to offer such a service, though at various times people have certainly set up as SL private eyes, not just as role-play but also offering, for a fee, to find out what your partner is up, and I am sure I remember once reading about someone who offered virtual "honeypot" entrapments, so you could find out how well your partner behaved when given the opportunity to misbehave. And I've certainly known people whose vindictive and obsessive exes have gone to frightening lengths to track them round SL harassing them. The capability to do what you describe has been around as long as bots have but it's yet to happen. Personally, I'd rather try to deal with actual problems rather than hypothetical ones that could theoretically happen but, in 20 years, have yet actually to occur in the wild. The only two actual complaints about bots of which I'm aware in the current outbreak of concern are the publication online of highly speculative figures about people's marketplace sales, and the publication of some very badly indexed SL profiles in the same place (I had to struggle to find mine). Other than the fact that the website belongs to a business that runs bots for what seem to me to be perfectly legitimate purposes -- trying to identify regions where bona fide events are taking place, and trying to track regions on Belliseria with vacant parcels -- I can't see what the connection with bots is, They may be involved in grabbing SL profiles (I just don't know what role bots play in that automated process, but I guess at least they may provide the uuids to feed into whatever's pulling the profiles) but it's hardly a core part of the business if they are. What other than that do we know bots are doing that's objectionable? Not objectionable stuff that they might be doing, or might possibly do at some point in the future, but bad things they're actually doing right now? Turning up on people's land unexpectedly, certainly, though it's not just bots that do that, of course, and we do have land tools to mitigate the problem, but what else? I suppose we count ourselves fortunate that SL moral panics are about things like bots, while First Life ones are considerably more serious and sinister.

Has anyone in the almost 20 years that SL has been going ever actually offered such a service, though? I mean, I've seen seen bots deployed for all sorts of purposes, ranging from swooping down and buying vacant land to moderating in-world groups to being automated sex workers doing house-calls, but I've yet to hear of anyone offering the sort of service you describe. This suggests to me there's simply not the market to support this sort of automated avatar tracking service. That's possibly because, at least in the experience of some of my friends over the years who've had the misfortune to be stalked in SL by jealous or vengeful partners or exes, there's no need to deploy an army of bots to track people down when it's all too easy, and provides more sick fun, to stalk people using a script to determine when they're online, a knowledge of their habits and favourite shops and hangouts, and the judicious use of alts.

That's what puzzles me, too. Even if I didn't take respecting other people's privacy and confidentiality very seriously (which I do, in both First and Second Life), I can't think of any way I could monetize that kind of data, so it would be a bit of a waste of effort. After all, most data mining is intended to help boost clicks and engagement, because what makes money from advertisers, which doesn't work in SL because SL is subscription bases (subscriptions and tier).

That's what I meant, though -- if I wanted to collect data on people I'd do it by script, of course, but I wouldn't bother with a bot. I'd either do what a bot does, and wear an attachment that did it for me, or put out objects on regions that contain a venue that gets a lot of traffic. Bots do their data collection using LSL scripts in prims, but you don't need the bot to do that.

Sid, I'm sorry, but you're mistaken. A bot can't collect any data in SL that you or I can't collect because, like us, they can use only the very limited data collection tools available with LSL -- basically, grab the uuids of all the avatars on the region using llGetAgentList and then use those to collect what they can using llGetObjectDetails and llRequestAgentData and a few other functions.. It's really not much. A bot is simply a regular SL avatar whose actions in SL (teleporting, responding to IMs, etc) are controlled by code running on the owher's PC rather than by the owner directly. They can't do anything we can't, and there's no way they can gather data on thousands of individuals in a jiffy, as you put it. because they need to be on the same region as the individual about whom they're gathering data.

Scylla, I think we started to explore this in one of the other threads just before it got locked, so let's see if we have more luck here. What "data scraping" or "data harvesting" do you say a scripted agent in SL is capable of? Outside SL, depending on the privacy settings you've chosen in your web browser, people can use both cookies and the data your web browser sends them to track your searches, where you arrive on a page from, which links you click, and so on, but that's not possible in SL. All a bot can do in SL is grab some basic data about your avatar if it happens to visit a region at the same time you're there. And if you consider the number of regions in SL, combined with the fact agents (scripted or otherwise) are limited to (I think) 6 teleports in a minute, the odds are pretty good that most of us are going to encounter them only very rarely. If I wanted to gather data on avatars I'd not waste my time having an army of bots flit around the grid hoping to find people. I'd rent small parcels on regions with high-traffic locations and drop scripts in objects on my parcels, or drop them in my vendors or ad boards at the locations themselves.

From what I know of LL's development and testing cycle for new LSL functions, it's inevitably going to take a few months for any new function to be delivered. The engineers' workload and the simulator release cycles are programmed several months in advance.

As I understand it, there are two distinct types of "I am not a bot" checkbox. One type works because it's invisible to bots (don't ask me how) and the other because it is visible, but it detects bots because they check it immediately the page loads, while humans take a moment or two to read it and check it. So maybe the website was taking a belt-and-braces approach, on the assumption that bots might be able to detect one or the other type of captcha but not both?

I suspect the government website's anti-bot checks may have been there to prevent DDOS attacks rather than fraud.

I've been using PureVPN a lot, for various purposes over the last 10 years or so. I sometimes find particular servers they use are blocked by particular sites, but it's the work of seconds to switch to a different server when that happens. Second Life have a couple of their US servers blocked but it really isn't an issue because it's so easy to switch.

Thanks. I had misunderstood your point, and didn't realise you meant that you foresee a future with two viewers, mobile and desktop, but both based on Unity, and the this will leave no room for third-party viewers on either mobiles or desktops. If that's the case, though, LL are going to have to set against the cost of maintaining two viewers the fact that the ability to choose between, and to contribute to, a variety of third-party-viewers is demonstrably highly valued by most of LL's existing customer base and that, as a matter of policy, LL is very unwilling to break existing content, which in this case would be anything scripted for RLV. I really find it difficult to envisage a situation in which LL would consider it a sound business decision to tell a plurality of existing users they can no longer use their preferred viewer and also to tell a considerable number of customers and content creators that their RLV content will no longer work. I don't say it's impossible but I can't imagine it's a decision they'd take at all lightly.

Yes, but since there are any number of possible reasons why LL abandoned the project, most which have nothing to do with Apple, it seems pointless speculate any further.

I may be missing the point, but the link you provide contains a long list of apps rejected by Apple. Which in particular do you say are analogous to SL? LL will presumably have considered all this before committing much time and money to developing an Apple app for SL -- Randy Waterfield and Brad Oberwager don't seem the sort of people to miss that kind of thing.

Can you provide an example of when Apple have refused to list, or have delisted, an app that you think gives cause for concern about their possible attitude to an SL app, or are your concerns based wholly on your interpretation of Apple's terms of service and how you think they might be applied?

Perhaps not, though I see from The Guardian that Parler, the rightwing social network being acquired by US rapper Ye, was restored by Apple in 2021 after the app updated its content and moderation practices, the companies said at the time. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/nov/28/elon-musk-apple-twitter-app-store-ban So perhaps Apple don't interpret their own terms quite as stringently as some people fear they might.

Quite possibly so, but are you saying that they don't comply with Apple's rules but get a pass because of their size? I see that both Parler and Truth Social are available in the Apple store, and they're a lot smaller.

Being an Android user I wouldn't know, but can people use iPods to access, for example, reddit or twitter via a mobile web browser (I assume iPod supports them)? If they can, then what's the difference between the possibly objectionable content they might discover on reddit or twitter vs the possibly objectionable content they might encounter in SL? I know at one point Apple were, at least if Elon Musk is to be believed, threatening to remove the Twitter app from their store, but it still there.

I don't think that comparison works, though, because we're not talking about making different versions of the same content -- the game -- to download onto either a PC or a console, but different viewers to accessing the same content, which remains on LL's servers, depending on whether you're using desktop/laptop or a mobile device. A better comparison, to my mind, would be with either newspaper and magazine publishers offering their own app for reading on your mobile device the same content you'd read on a desktop with a regular web browser, or with the makers of web browsers making different versions of their apps for use on pcs and mobiles. I'm aware neither of those is completely analogous, but I think they're better than the comparison with games. You talk about "the more profitable viewer," but what does that mean? LL make their money not from viewers but from land, subscriptions, and fees on marketplace sales, L$ sales and purchases and cash-outs. They're interested in whatever keeps people engaged enough in SL to keep on coming back to buy or rent land, take out premium subscriptions and buy stuff in-world and in the marketplace. Making it easy to access SL wherever you are and whatever you're doing would seem to be a good way of promoting engagement and retention, and people will doubtless use different platforms, depending on what they're doing at the time and what they want to do. I can certainly see how being able readily to access SL at times and in places when otherwise it wouldn't be possible or convenient will help build engagement and retention so that people come back and spend money when they do have time.

I remember Lumiya, because I found it an absolute lifeline when, ten years ago, I had to spend a lot of time in hospital and used it to stay in touch with friends on SL on my tablet. I don't see mobile or tablet access as an alternative to a desktop or laptop particularly, but certainly it would be a very useful supplement -- I can certainly see myself logging to kill time in for 20 minutes or so when otherwise I might use my tablet to read or listen to music.

I find using Google Advanced Search gives me far better results than does the Marketplace search engine -- simply open https://www.google.co.uk/advanced_search, enter https://marketplace.secondlife.com under "site or domain" and then play with the search boxes accordingly.

Certainly, but I still don't think it's safe to move from "The lead developer is highly experienced and multi-talented" to "their skillset and expertise must therefore include fixing whatever it is I think needs fixing". I mean, you wouldn't necessarily expect a cardiologist, no matter how experienced, to treat cancer, nor a criminal defence lawyer, no matter how eminent, to advise you on the finer points of commercial law. Indeed, but it must therefore follow that it wasn't a simple choice between introducing the new feature and fixing the existing issue. Consequently, whatever the reason was for not fixing the thing you think they should have fixed, it doesn't seem to be they were too busy working on the new feature to attend to whatever it was to which you would rather they devoted their attention.

Yes, it is, since I've yet to see anyone explain what exactly it is they think could have been done instead of whatever Linden Lab actually did do, and why they think that people who did whatever actually was done could just as well have done whatever it was the person thinks should have been done. However, there's a first time for everything and I look forward to your explaining what you think could have been done instead and why you think people with the skills to introduce PBR would have been able make the improvements you would have preferred to see.