License and Regulate Bots, Linden Lab!

Linden Lab needs to license and regulate the bots.

The CopyBots, the CampBots, the SheepBots, the MultipleInstanceBots, the LandBots, and now the SearchBots -- all the bots. I want the bots off my lawn.

People who design, script, deploy artificial intelligences across the grid automatically, so as to perform automated tasks and pick up cash, land, or information, are like mega accounts. They perform the jobs of thousands of avatars -- if powered by individual humans.

Accordingly, they are mega-accounts that need to pay a whole bunch more for resources and grid access. Like, hundreds the amount of a cost of a regular $9.95 account.

If I have to pay $150 US to buy my name back from griefers on Second Life, then I'd like Christian W. of the Sheep to have to pay $1500 or more to deploy an aggressive, scraping avatar all over the grid for his company's commercial gain.

The mountains of data that he can grab are the kinds of things that humans build up incrementally in communities, and it is swiped and stolen in an afternoon in one fell swoop. The device could have been used to steal thousands of untended objects accidentally left on for sale.

CampBots have already been used to vacuum up thousands of RL US dollars from casinos -- and they've been cashed out of Second Life. The bots used for testing for shows for clients use resources and fill up sims. The LandBots grab numerous parcels ahead of everyone else and capitalize on their automation of the land market. Even if you argue that the one account doesn't use up a lot of sim resources, once one company can use them, a dozen more will spring up to use them, or license them out of the Sheep to be used to scrape whatever they need scraping.

The unfair advantage that bots gain over humans puts them in a position to make substantially more money from the grid than others. Therefore, they need to have a commercial license, and be regulated. They are like fishermen who overfish.

In real life, you have to buy mailing lists. There are mailing list houses that sell them. Magazines have them from subscribers, but they resell them for a cost, and the more scrupulous ones make sure not to sell names of customers who opted out. In real-life, people don't want to be forcibly put on commercial advertising lists unless they opt-in. Opting-out is usually very easy.

It's not easy with the Sheep. For one, you must go in world, go to their island, and click. It's not as fast as email. More to the point, that only opts the listing of your objects on that public webpage. It does NOT stop the collection and use of your data! Worse, you cannot control the placement of your LAND in the data base -- that it does even accidently, and you can't control it.

You're told you can ban bots from you lot -- but everyone knows how useless THAT is as they can still "hear" and "touch" within 96 m2 I think it is. So it's useless. And banning him is like shutting the barn door after the horse fled.

When we sign the TOS, we do not sign up to volunteer our virtual bodies for science. We don't enter into a marketing experience. We don't donate our virtual blood or our virtual kidneys. If anything, with its wording about the prohibition of distribution of chatlogs, and the entitlement of the Second Life resident to a "reasonable degree of privacy," LL sets the stage for a social contract and a social construct that people expect to adhere.

Why is it an actionable offense that could lead to my banning if I spread around a private chatlog, yet a bot can come on my land, scrape off a list of parcel data, objects on parcel, avatars on parcel etc etc and pass that around in the public domain?

The chatlog is easily grabbed, now even saveable by the client itself automatically. So...why is that still a bannable offense because a human does it manually, but a robot who also gathers information is free to do so? (The fact that the Lindens may remove the chatlog violation with the onset of voice in SL shouldn't distract from the point here).

I want the bots to be identified, and regulated. When I come into Second Life, I expect that every avatar has a person behind it with reason and intelligence to some degree -- a human. If the things I'm dealing with aren't human, I want its name, or a colour of its avatar chat, or some marker, to let me know that. Furthermore, I want the option to turn my land OFF to such entities just as I have the option to turn off the entry of "no payment on file".

It's the easiest thing in the world for the Lindens to mark and regulate bots. Just as they have a designation "no payment on file" they have to have one that says "artificial intelligence" or "bot". Just as that is a click-off box on my land for no-payment unverifieds, so my land has to have a wall I can put up for "bots". I'm way more leery of aggressive bots coming to grab all my information and put it into databases that it makes commercial benefit from than I'm leery of some kid from France who doesn't have a credit card.

Comments

[Rukh Zeno]

Sounds like you're the type of person that would fight the Dewey Decimal system because it gives people the chance to find a book without the need to manually walk down every isle just because you don't understand it enough to take advantage of it yourself.

Bitch all you want, but if you're not willing to embrace and adapt to change and new technology, maybe SL (and the internet in general) isn't the place for you. Maybe you can find a nice group of Amish folks to hang out with. You might find it more your pace and style.

[Prokofy Neva]

There's a curious Big Lie that tekkis tell, claiming that all that is technological is progress.

It isn't.

The Luddites knew that -- that is, if you study them in E.P. Thompson's works, and not Wikipedia nuttiness. I've written about this elsewhere today -- Luddites broke their looms not because of hatred of technology, but because of rebellion against the cynical users of technology that broke their society. Different.

The Dewey Decimal system is something I know a lot about. Each Saturday as a kid, I used to put the books that came into the library into their places with the right number. *Put them*. Nothing put them in automatically. Librarians, humans, made decisions about where they were to go, and shelved them. They didn't land in the spaces automatically.

And I and others were happly to use a system decided by a human with meaning, that people used and made judgements about with meaning and placed stuff in.

Very very different than a scraper and a data dumper.

[Rukh Zeno]

First off, when you say that not all that is technical is progress, you don't really seem to understand what the term in the context of something like technology, or possibly in general, I don't know. Just because you disagree with something, doesn't mean a certain change or new idea/product/etc isn't progress in the wide scope. Nor is your opinion (or mine, or anyone's) enough to denote something as not being progress. And even if it was, not all progress successfully gets closer to the goal YOU think it should be headed to. But that's a whole other bag of objective ideals I don't see you embracing, so don't worry about it.

As for your quote... "And I and others were happly to use a system decided by a human with meaning, that people used and made judgements about with meaning and placed stuff in.

Very very different than a scraper and a data dumper."

There is really no difference, unless you consider the people behind the bots actions and functions to be non-human in some way (reading some of your previous posts, I have noticed a consistent distaste for anyone with even an inkling of technical knowhow...let alone actual coders/scripters). Really the only difference I see is that you understood and accepted the Dewey Decimal system as good, because it helped you, and others that understood it. Whereas the bots are apparently beyond your understanding at least for practical use, and thus somehow are deemed a bad thing. Hardly an objective view...but then, I suppose I never intended to accuse you of objective thinking, so the whole thing is really a moot point, as is your opinion in the matter from what I understand.

By all means, keep the blinders on so you don't accidentally learn something.....at the very least, your skewed view of reality gives me a laugh now and then, so power to you for that.

[Prokofy Neva]

I don't have to be a rocket scientist to understand what a bot does. It's like a lice comb. It combs. It picks up lice. Say, from sheep. After they've been put in sheep dip. Pretty simple concept.

[Kerian Bunin]

Automation, albeit not a complicated idea, is one that seems to drum up controversy. In the auto industry many people have been automated out of a job. The automation benefits the company doing the automating, but hurts the people that have been replaced. I am unsure how a year from now this influx of automation will have effected SL, but personally, I would reserve my judgment for a later date. It may end up being one of those things that people ever wonder how SL went about with them, or it may be a situation where people look back to a time before bots and reminisce about the good old days.

[Economic Mip]

Well personally I strongly believe that the camping robots will lead to the end of the system all together. It used to be you could find campers for 4-5 lindens per minute. Now I have seen some that offer 2L every 15 to 20 minutes. How low can they go before it just isn't worth it? Also robots supposedly are less demanding on the server then a real avatar (this is a claim by their programmers, don't kill me).

[Prokofy Neva]

the 2L per 10 minutes happened long ago ,before there were any bots, I recall this.

And hey, let the Lindens fill up the damn grid with all robots. That's fine. They don't need us. I just wonder where they will get their tier from however.

[Sage Straaf]

I'm not a big fan of bots on most games, but on SL, the difference between a human-controlled av and a bot is surprisingly slim. A bot is just a heavily-scripted (and usually unattended) av, so... although they can certainly be detected manually -- in fact, most games use this approach -- that requires a fair amount of manpower. In other words, if you want to keep bots off your land, you're going to need people patrolling and observing/IMing suspect avs.

One question that I have for you, is... what bothers you more? The fact that avs are doing automated tasks, or the tasks themselves? If it's the former, the problem could largely be eliminated by extending the capabilities of objects. Most people would much rather script an object to do a task than create a whole new av for it. However, if it's the latter, I doubt all that much can be done about it without severely crippling an awful lot of non-bot-related scripts.

[Ace Albion]

You know when you tick the box to set something on sale, then you get to change the price from 10L to whatever it actually should be?

Is it possible for BargainBot to scan, swoop and buy faster than you can add the three more zeroes on that you wanted to?

[Ace Albion]

Oh and that's "sell original" by default, right?

[Basil Berntsen]

It boils down to the inherent lawlessness of the internet. Many times this is a good thing (for example the impact of Tor on free speech in China), but if people are using replicating bots to take what's not theirs, a compromise needs to be made. Griefers in SL are there because nobody wants to regulate SL. The government is considering taxing it soon, and if that ever happens, it might make sense for them to provide protection from theft for their citizens while online.

At the very least, the prospect of having to try and police something fundamentally unpolicable will make the IRS think twice before starting to tax SL profits :)

[Cocoanut Koala]

If I had a bot to build a house for me - I wouldn't want to build a house.

Roofs aside, building a house in SL is a great deal more rewarding (and challenging) than building one in TSO.

Socially speaking, it's not strange that people would rather interact with other people than with bots.

Once bots take over the world, the world is no longer attractive to people.

All bots are doing is making it possible for a few people to make a killing in the meantime.

coco

[Taco Rubio]

Prokofy quote:
When we sign the TOS, we do not sign up to volunteer our virtual bodies for science. We don't enter into a marketing experience. We don't donate our virtual blood or our virtual kidneys.

TOS quote:
You also understand and agree that by submitting your Content to any area of the Service, you automatically grant (or you warrant that the owner of such Content has expressly granted) to Linden Lab and to all other users of the Service a non-exclusive, worldwide, fully paid-up, transferable, irrevocable, royalty-free and perpetual License, under any and all patent rights you may have or obtain with respect to your Content, to use your Content for all purposes within the Service.

Prokofy, I'd argue that you have no right to protect publicly accessable data within SL.

If I typed under "search">"people" for "Pro" i would get the first 100 listed people returned. If i then typed "proa" and then "prob" and so on, eventually I'd get to you at "prok". If I did that by hand, which would take a very long time, and then copy/pasted the results, I could eventually get the entire population of second life, because that's public data.

using a bot that did the mouseclicks and search entry population, I could do the same thing overnight in my sleep. by your argument, the former would be fair use of a tool, while the later would be an abuse. the end result is exactly the same, isn't it ?

this isn't mud slinging, I'm honestly curious to hear your opinion on that.

[Prokofy Neva]

Taco,

You don't grant LL or third-parties the right to post your private data. You're invoking a part of the TOS related to creative rights, not privacy. The part that deals with privacy says that you are entitled to a reasonable level of privacy. It says that chat logs can't be posted in the domaine of SL.

So who's to say that the analogy is the license to use content, and not the analogy *not* to use private chat?

The fact is, it wasn't conceived or covered. And it has to be. People must be able to opt out of marketing scrapers. Just like they can opt out of spam lists.

More and more this issue will be raised, and it's right to raise it, and those screaming for an absolute expose and a forced lifelogging of everybody and their data are going to get a slap in the face, or worse. People don't want to live that way, just because it's a virtual world, and just because the data can be scraped.

Jut as RL has many checks on the publicizing of information like health, income, race, etc. so virtual life will evolve them, too. There is no given that you have to give your body to science -- none at all, and you haven't cited anything that bolsters that argument.

[Taco Rubio]

I'm afriad you are defining private data using real-world terms, as in "this vase is in my house, I don't want people looking at it so I shut the drapes" and not in system terms, as in "if I fly over your house and ask the area "what's here?" the area tells me.

I couldn't agree with you more that private data should be protected. I'm just saying that if you put a chair in your front yard, and you don't have a 20 foot fence up, you can't really get upset if somebody takes a picture of it.

[Prokofy Neva]

My Second Life land is my hard-drive. Google does not scan my hard-drive. It's not my webpage.

Taking a picture of people's chairs over their fences is anti-social peeping Tom behaviour.

It's not acceptable in an individual; it's not acceptable from a bot.

Real-world terms are more than fine to apply to a virtual world that is also a holistic human space like real life, not a flat webpage.

My RL house has no RFIDS or tags or cells or spies to tell something flying over it what's in it. And most people would like to keep it that way. I see no reason why my SL house has to be different just because you and your fucked up friends *can* scan something and just because you and your fucked up friends wish to exploit other people's stuff greedily for personal gain.

and hey, BTW, I'm done talking to you, because you are an asshole. You are a vulgar, griefing fucktard from Second Citizen, and I simply don't wish to have these discussions with people from SC who aren't questioning things in good faith to find the truth, but just being little annoying dicks to harass.

[Rukh Zeno]

"My Second Life land is my hard-drive. Google does not scan my hard-drive. It's not my webpage."

That might be the case if you had no access to other people's SL stuff. Or didn't accept a TOS expressly allowing others to access that stuff. But that is NOT the case. It really is your "webpage" so to speak, and Linden Labs is your ISP. And really, if that's not what you want, then don't use the service.

You are basically just whining because you don't like something, and can't find a real reason it shouldn't be allowed, which is pretty sad.

[Baba]

If your Second Life land is your hard drive why do you let anyone just come and browse around in it?

Second Life has private storage areas that are more like hard drives. They even have a directory structure like a real hard drive.

I beleive they call them Inventories.

If you're going to make analogies, why not get it right. Then again, if you did it the right way, it wouldn't make your point.

[Prokofy Neva]

I don't let them. They intrude like idiot asswipes uninvited. If I want to show something off my hard drive, I upload it.

Inventories are inventories. Private propety is private too.

People's social constructs over hardware matter too.

And you are an asshole, and it's rarely useful to talk to you about any of these things because you are untethered.

I'll never forget as long as I live the profoundly malicious way you talked about people on the channel, gleefully making fun of them and plotting to clone and copy furries. Never.

[Prokofy Neva]

That might be the case if you had no access to other people's SL stuff. Or didn't accept a TOS expressly allowing others to access that stuff. But that is NOT the case. It really is your "webpage" so to speak, and Linden Labs is your ISP. And really, if that's not what you want, then don't use the service.

You are basically just whining because you don't like something, and can't find a real reason it shouldn't be allowed, which is pretty sad.

No, I found many reasons I don't like this, and they are logical, and normal, and important.

It's you who aren't logical, normal, or important. You're just liking something that scrapes merely because you love the idea of power over other people achieved through technology. That rots, big time.

and I didn't accept any TOS allow access by commercial entities to my stuff. Linden Lab has access, but they so far have treated me pretty good, as far as privacy goes. Sure, there's that one time their dbase got hacked, but they recovered. Sured, there's Nolan Nash, the Gift that Keeps on Giving, but that only shows the deep viciousness of the tekkies and the FICs and their zeal to stalk people, and it's not an ordinary case. Most of the time, the Lindens keep us free from commercial intervention. And that's a good thing. They fight spam. And they're pretty good at it.

No, I refuse to countenance the usual brainless tekkie "exit clause" -- "leave if you dont like it". That always assumese that there is some powerful fuck who has made some set of switches on yes/no that he refuses to change because he refuses to yield power.

At the end of the day, that's all technology is: a series of yes/no switches that some powerful fuck has set up that they feel very emotionally shouldn't be changed.

But they'll have to change. And they'll have to accept that people want to put more "no switches" against their greedy scraping bots.

[Curious Observer]

"Why is it an actionable offense that could lead to my banning if I spread around a private chatlog, yet a bot can come on my land, scrape off a list of parcel data, objects on parcel, avatars on parcel etc etc and pass that around in the public domain?"

That's a very good question!

So what are you saying? That you should be banned for redistributing private chatlogs without permission?

[otakup0pe Neumann]

"...and I didn't accept any TOS allow access by commercial entities to my stuff."

Excerpt from Section 3.2 of the ToS - You also understand and agree that by submitting your Content to any area of the Service, you automatically grant (or you warrant that the owner of such Content has expressly granted) to Linden Lab and to all other users of the Service a non-exclusive, worldwide, fully paid-up, transferable, irrevocable, royalty-free and perpetual License, under any and all patent rights you may have or obtain with respect to your Content, to use your Content for all purposes within the Service.

Excerpt from Section 4.2 of the ToS - Notwithstanding the foregoing, you may use and create software that provides access to the Servers for substantially similar function (or subset thereof) as the Viewer; provided that such software is not used for and does not enable any violation of these Terms of Service.

I hate to be one to call you out on the small details Prokofy, but you did actually read the ToS before you agreed to it, correct ? The Terms of Service actually do expressly permit such use of the service. The fact that you do not expressly agree with them is not a valid argument in this case, although it is most certainly a valid opinion. If you do not like these Terms of Service, then I am afraid you are (as they say in the industry) SOL. Are there privacy concerns ? Certainly, and the Electric Sheep Company has made an extraordinary effort since the service launched to address any and all concerns brought to them in a valid fashion.

"And they'll have to accept that people want to put more "no switches" against their greedy scraping bots."

These "no switches" are in place for this particular service. There are several ways to opt-out of this service. The steps are incredibly simple, compared to attempting to de-list something from Google. And Google has, in the past, uncovered troves of personal information. Credit card details, troop deployment schedules, personal erotic pictures of unsuspecting computer users. Information far more personal and damaging than whatever may be found in Second Life.

[Prokofy Neva]

otakupOpe, I've been over this repeatedly, and your citing these sections of the TOS like a parrot is hardly persuasive.

The section of the TOS on *content* specifies uses of *content*. Content means things like objects for sale and pictures. It is NOT defined as *information* -- and content is *definitely* not defined as "private information".

You can't arbitrarily decide, oh, content is just everything I wish to consume. It's not. It's objects, skins, etc. not information. And certainly not scraped and aggregated information.
There is nothing in the TOS language understood in its entirety, and in the spirit of its intention, that says "private information is consumable content". It isn't.

Look in the other sections of the TOS for information about *privacy* and *information* which shows a very, very different outlook than your extremist, nihilist tekkie view on "scrapable information that I view as content to consume."

It says elsewhere that residents are entitled to a *reasonable degree of privacy*. It says that chatlogs can't be copied for use elsewhere in the SL domain. Oh, to be sure, people copy and publish on third-party sites. But it is a punishable TOS offense *within* SL and you can easily argue that Grid Surveyor publishes within the SL domain and as such should be banned.

The act of putting out an object on my lawn is a conversation, not content.

My information on my parcel about what's for sale; the name I've given to my parcel and the data on the parcel -- these are conversations, they are not content.

Conversations, not content. As such, they are in the private sphere, not in the public sphere for you to grab.

Perhaps only a social construct preserves the membrane around these conversations and these pieces of information. Yet the TOS defends them. Just because you *can* grab chatlogs doesn't mean you can get away with publishing them within the SL domain. That's the kind of social norm that the TOS sets up beyond the harsh automatic switches of the machine itself.

LL hasn't grappled yet with the problem of bots. The TOS in fact does NOT define what bots get to scrape; it doesn't define even the operation of bots. And it should. And it will have to. And this area of law or TOS elaboration should not go in the direction of extremist tekkie nihilism but in the direction of respect for people and their privacy, and opt-in, not opt-out.

I find it simply hilarious, really, that a section of the TOS code that the Lindens put up to give people both freedom of creativty and IP, but also make them aware that their products would in fact be used by the population, is invoked to take that creativity away from them, by stealing all their information off their privacy property, and then serving it up to the public so as to benefit one company. That's wrong.

Your notions that there are switches in place have already been discounted for days, you're just refusing to see it.

We've already explained a million times that you can't opt out YOUR LAND from this search. It keeps showing it up whether you wish it to be there or not. You can opt out only your created objects, but not even all of them -- the service still grabs the information and keeps it for commercial use by one company, it merely hides it from general use. It doesn't care about general use anyway, because the purpose of grabbing search info isn't to serve the public, it's to collect markeeting information to satisfy the voracious appetite of corporations for such information.

I don't care what Google has uncovered. We're not in Google. We didn't sign up to inhabit Google. Google is not the be-all and end-all of human experience.

As noted, the bots can scan on a radius, and scan areas from which they are banned, so it's little use to turn on a ban against them.
I'm amazed that you suggest facile exercises like banning when it's ridiculous and we all know banning won't achieve removal from the data base. Opting out after the fact isn't sufficient either as your land group or business can still be found and you cannot turn that off.

[Prokofy Neva]

>So what are you saying? That you should be banned for redistributing private chatlogs without permission?

I think the chatlog ban is indefensible on civil rights grounds as it is overbroad. I've always written about that and the Lindens are indicating that they aren't going to be able to prosecute this as they once did when the system moves to voice.

I personally advocate publishing chat logs when they are in the public interest. That doesn't mean personal convs on people's lots that I somehow used spyware to gather. It means public conversations. I think journalists and researchers and scientists need to be able to publish and discuss public conversations in SL. That can include a journalist's questions put to Lindens or other residents.

I think conversations with government official equivalents like Lindens should be publishable.

Common courtesy suggests that private and intimate conversations between people should not be published. It makes sense for the Lindens to have a law that you cannot publish private chat logs within the SL domain. So to take a convo you had with someone in IMs and publish it on the forums was a bannable offense. I agree that it makes sense for the Lindens to institute that as a law to try to protect people's privacy. I see no reason for them to remove this law in fact even after voice appears.

It's a law that civil rights activists would be right to constantly be fighting as overbroad in its application, however, as it is invoked to cover up the misdeeds of government and big business. And I'm a firm believer in the Pentagon Papers type of case.

I find that many people filing chatlag abuse reports are using the system frivolously. Example. One tenant tells another tenant that they can expect a certain extra prim discount on my rental and they IM them that information. I inform that tenant that in fact there isn't such a price or offer and that he should consult his lease, not his friend. Both he and his friend start up a firestorm of harassment. He sends me the chatlog of his friend. I then IM that friend and say, hey, you are wrong. There isn't such an offer, don't mislead your friend. That person then AR's me for passing around a chatlong, when in fact my 'passing around a chatlog' which was sent to me by *her friend* which is then *the original violator whom she is not ARing her* isn't any kind of intentional divulging of privacy, it's merely an effort to settle a dispute.

I find that without the right to publish or disseminate chatlogs, no dispute resolution agency, lawyer, or governance operation in SL can function. That's why I always objected to their overzealous and overbroad prosecution of it. That tenant, in bad faith, with malice, then ARs me for sending back to her, her own chat log containing false information, and then I get an automatic notice from the Lab that I'm warned for chatlog disclosure. My God, that's ridiculous. I'm to be prosecuted, and not that friend of the tenant? And...over this?

My point in invoking this section of the TOS isn't to have one of these tekkie literalist distractive discussions about some sort of 'gotcha' and 'hyprokisy' blah blah blah, but to point out Linden jurisprudence here.

Linden jurisprudence tells us that LL has conceived of a *different* way to treat some of the material on its servers, namely conversations. These are clearly established as not 'content' that somebody has a permanently paid-up non-revokable license blah blah to take.

They don't.

And that's very important to note. Conversations, private information like the credit card or the RL name, are not to be disclosed. The Lindens don't specify further about inworld privacy about things like who has cybersex with whom or partners with whom or whatever, but it is understood and implied by this language here that this is within the privacy sphere.

The Lindens didn't define it as I just explained elsewhere. Just because it isn't defined dosen't mean that tekkies can grab it voraciously.

It can and should be defined better, and if the Lindens don't define it better, some other service that makes a better Home for people *will* define it.

[Curious Observer]

So you're saying it's OK for you to break TOS whenever you choose and without oversight, in order to reveal 'private' IM chatlogs.

But you're also saying that it's not OK for someone to publish a list of items set for sale, based on information freely available to any passing av?