The Greed Shepherd

By Prokofy Neva, Corporate Watch

The Electric Sheep Company released for public beta testing a few hours ago a new search engine. The engine doesn't contain things you've tagged, so it's not like SLOOG or SL 411 or Babbage Linden's engine or any one of a score of search engines depending on the community to fill it with items they want found which they opted into.

No, instead, an avatar owned and operated by the Sheep called "Grid Shepherd" (groan) has *already* scoured as many of SL's 7800 sims as it could, collecting data about every single item set to sale in Second Life. Currently, it has 422,020 items to search from -- including an expensive item that a Dreamland tenant discovered from my notice which was set to sale for cheap unwittingly; including televisions and pose balls still containing a sale price set out on numerous parcels of my rental lands which my tenants thought were fairly private; and revealing the names and creators of many yardsale objects that will expose their sellers to harassment from the vigilant and vindictive Sellers' Guild.

The Sheep Search spells the end to privacy and the concept of private property that has profound consequences, even more profound than the hard-to-program and clunky CopyBot, something the Sheep never unambiguously condemned, because they, like other developers, hold the idea that "information wants to be free". Why *my* information has to be free *for them to exploit* has always been a mystery to me; however, they evidently need to place knowledge and development over social and political concerns. In the mad race for the Soul of the New Machine Called the Metaverse, they need to develop the platform uber alles, regardless of the needs or wants of the people on it -- with whom they have not consulted -- and they need to be *the first* to get the coolest software out there for their clients -- regardless of the impact that it has on the fragile inworld community of SL, which has already been deeply affected by the opening up of the platform to big-business and competitive commercial forces. In the name of serving abstraction of "The People" in providing a better search, they have done a disservice to real human beings who want their privacy intact.

CHECK EVERY ITEM ON YOUR PROPERTY FOR SALE TAGS

If you had a TV out that automatically sets to $10 -- anyone may come and steal it now by looking up the names of TV creators or creators of anything and p2ping right to them. That's great for a store that has properly priced things and wants sales, but the greedy Grid Shepherd scours and scans and scrapes ALL data, not just data from stores and doesn't discriminate.

If you have ANYTHING set to sale, accidently, or on purpose, anyone can find it, teleport to your land and buy it. That's why when I type in my business name, I find dozens of properties with private homes showing all kinds of stuff the people don't *realize* is set for sale -- because often, when you take something out of the box it was sold in, or purchase it, the "for sale" function remains. Sometimes, people just have the virtual equivalent of a "Tupperware Party" -- it's quite common actually -- and only invite close sets of friends over, and only sell to them, for all kinds of reasons. All of that social activity is now disrupted by this Eye in the Sky.

IT'S ALL ABOUT CAPITALISM -- BUT RUN AMOK

That's why I call this avatar the Greed Shepherd. He's scouring the land to pick up YOUR private data from YOUR private property. And while the service is to be "free," what it does is enhance the reputation of the Electric Sheep, drive people to their website, and position them as being "the most innovative" with "the most cutting-edge technology" so they can get even more clients and make even more millions.

That's what capitalism is all about. I applaud capitalism, the free market, and free development of platforms. In real life, however, we have many democratically-instituted checks and balances on capitalism even in our democratic capitalist societies that keep them from doing harm not only to privacy, but small business and communities. These checks and balances in the wierd virtuality of SL aren't in place, and the laissez-faire Lindens have usually never even thought of them: they never met a script they didn't like.

YOU DON'T HAVE SEX ON OR WITH A GOOGLE PAGE

Just as with Mark Barrett's slstats.com which scraped information about proximate avatars at first against their will, and with Rathe Underthorn, concerns about privacy and data scraping have been met by some tekkies with a big sneer and scornful derision about our privacy concerns. We're told we're "on the Internet" and to stuff it. We're told this ESC invention is like Google or Yahoo and we need to "get over it" if we think we have any shred of privacy left.

But wait just a minute here. Google and Yahoo scrape information out of 2-D webpages, and scrape pictures and text only. They don't take the contents of your refrigerator, nightstand, and desk, and dump them out on the Internet for everyone to paw and even buy merely because they have price tags left on them. Second Life is a streaming world with people in it, in their totality, immersed. Google has the artifacts of people -- their text and pictures. BIG difference in the way in which scraping will be apprehended, and developers simply need to understand that.

People don't have sex inside Google. They don't have lives and work and relationships on Google. Google scrapes data from public 2-d webpages -- text and pictures -- and makes them searchable against your will, too -- but you understand in a set of social circumstances and unwritten and written convention that you make anything put on a website anywhere searchable unless locked or password-protected. But in Second Life, you have the emulation of privacy when you buy PRIVATE PROPERTY which you can set on ban, or prevent people from entering -- and you have a set of expectations about it. Grid Shepherd's all-seeing, greedy eye, however, can scrap your land even if you banned him, in fact, because no doubt he can function on a radius of 96m2. Just as anyone can buy something off land from which they are banned from using camera zoom, there's no real protection from Grid Shepherd.

WHY GREED? MERCHANDISING GONE MAD

It's like merchandising gone mad, the ultimate "interaction with the brand" that is bringing us toxic immersion in corporate greed. Everything is for sale. Every aspect of ourselves. Virtual worlds appear to have been *made for* scraping our sales data, making everything we have and are, about buying and selling. How prescient humdog was with her "Pandora's Vox" in 1994 reprinted in the Herald.

Why do I call this "greed," if it's a free service, you ask? Because it's greed to be the first with the SEARCH. Whoever wins the SEARCH wins not only SL, but virtual worlds -- period. Because the dirty little secret about them, as I explained, isn't just what There's Michael Wilson said about them -- that there's nothing going on inside them. It's that you can't FIND the stuff you need or the people you need to having something go on WITH. You can find it well enough, actually in Second Life with the existing search functions, combined with traffic ratings, but it takes some learning. It's a social context. And things like Grid Shepherd, while ostensibly making the social media MORE social, in fact invades privacy and crosses the line. The line that people set everywhere, in RL and SL is: opt-in.

GET OFFA MA LAWN!

This isn't opt-in. The page offering opt-in is put up AFTER your data was scraped. And it's ineffective, as Grid can be banned but can still scrape in a radius. You can opt out your stuff, as a creator or owner, but you can't get him OFF YOUR LAWN.

Get offa ma lawn, Grid Shepherd!

From scraping items for sale, ESC and its ambitious developers will easily skip on to *any* item and any parcel of land. That means all your private data that you believe is private because it's in your home, your workshop, you land is now public. Anything rezzed is now freely vulnerable pray to giant scouring machines that grab it all and make use of it, first and foremost not for the public good, but to enhance their reputation merely as the makers of such an engine, and to drive shoppers, visitors, business to their site and their brand.

THE DREADED GOOGLE EFFECT AMPLIFIED IN A VW

Google is also notorious for rewarding bad behaviour. There's no telling what might end up in Google because it's whatever is clicked on the most -- engendering more mindless and stupid clicking. There's no judgement, even by the crowd. That's why Babbage's tool, that enabled you to CHOSE what you wanted to be found AND rate it, is so much better as a search concept. It means human judgement, not mindless artificial intelligence and arrogant coders' coding rules. It means a world that grows with folksonomy, not the taxsonomy of unfeeling coders. It has its drawbacks too, because the mob can game it and flash it and artificially pump and dump. But it is the more preferable option.

Many arrogant types are already arguing on various lists that the Sheep search is a good thing for stores -- so those of us with concerns about privacy should shut up. But...some stores are still in the process of selling to smaller audiences, not the whole Internet. A person trying to price an object, new to the market, can't test it with his targeted ads -- now the Machine can just come and buy it. Many, many objects will be stolen now in the coming weeks as people who put things out on $0 accidently, or intentionally only for a close-by friend or neighbour, find it disappear to unscrupulous teleporters.

NO PUBLIC NOTICE; NO OPT-OUT FROM THE SCRAPE

Only after the fact, by word of mouth, do we learn that this search was created by Grid Shepherd physically coming and scanning our parcels. We didn't get advance notice to ban him if we didn't wish to be scraped; only now do we find out, when the damage is done.

An opt-out gives us only the option to have objects we've created taken out; it doesn't give us the option to have *our land* taken out of the scraper's view. That's what we need. The ability to make ourselves immune from scraping, given the overreach or the scrapers.

I feel the only right thing to do with this monster is to close it, dump its data, and start over by announcing that all those who wish to opt in can permit Grid Shepherd to come on their land - by not banning him. Proper public notice should be given to the community of Second Life that all objects on all parcels set to sale by accident or design are now going into a giant data base. That gives people time to adjust their behaviour and figure out what among their private items they want publicized now.

I think questions need to be raised with the ESC and with the Lindens about how one avatar is able to scrape the whole of SL --as this will grow to be more of a problem not less, with the ability of the Sheep and other developers to use LSL and their own technology to make bots that scrape information on anything under the artificial Linden sun.

WHAT'S THE LSL COMMAND? HOW CAN THE AVATAR SCRAPE?

What is the LSL command that is being used? I'm told by Forseti Svarog that no special LSL command was used. But surely there is some special command, designed by Sheep and enabled or at least tacitly tolerated by LL that enables the bot-run avatar Grid Shepherd to race all over SL automatically scraping data from parcels about what is for sale and feeding it to a web-page data-base.

The function is likely now proprietary and copyrighted or secret -- but is that appropriate, to give one company the right to scrape all the information off the grid?!

WHY IS SEARCH PRIVATIZED BY MR. LEE'S HONG KONG?

There are also profound political questions that everyone on the grid should be encouraged to discuss and participate in. Why does one company feted for years by Linden Lab get to change the nature of the world so profoundly without our consent? Is this the Snowcrash concept of the franchulate, Mr. Lee's Hong Kong?

That has *always* been my concern about LL and its sherpa friends, who began as the Feted Inner Core. I've always proclaimed: "Nothing about us/without us". We don't have any avenues to be involved in the decisions made by a private company. Many would claim we shouldn't have any such avenues. Yet...those private companies have PROFOUND and sometimes DRAMATIC effects on our lives in virtual worlds -- and now in the real world increasingly merging with the reality of virtuality. It's no different than the issue of transnational corporations across frontiers in real life.

SEARCH: A PUBLIC GOOD, BUT IN PRIVATE HANDS

I believe that SEARCH is a public good. It's like a public utility in RL -- like water, or electricity. It should not be come the provenance of any one company, any one developer or commercial interest. It must continue to remain in the hands of the "federal government," LL, at least until they open source all their features. Any one company grabbing search grabs eyeballs, traffic to their website -- and does it without our consent. I'm known for saying we will all become roadkill on the way to these developers' developing the platform and software for their use, which involves its sale and sale of their services. I fail to see why all the information I have available on a sim I purchased suddenly can be grabbed away from me and used by another business.

Currently, the Lindens' search through their client costs $30 to opt-in or $50 to go in classifieds. Nothing the Lindens have made can scrape *for public consumption* although their own servers scrape data and publish it in aggregate on their statistics page. Third-party developers cannot be relied upon to observe such proprieties.

When any one company can do the same thing -- scrape avatars' data not only for public consumption but for private benefit -- they have an unfair advantage.

The community responded to Mark Barrett's sldata.com and Rathe Underthorn's land business unequivocally: they signalled loud and clear that any scrapers MUST have opt-in -- not as an afterthought, not as an add-on AFTER you've scraped, but from the beginning.

Yes, it means for greedy developers that they don't get to populate their data base as fully as they like. Let them think of their long-term relationship with the human beings they've exploited in this fashion -- they are their future customers, and already the current customers in RL of their clients in Second Life.

Comments

[Nacon]

First of all... don't be a BITCH. Seriously, don't be a bitch.

Second of all... I took my time to see if I "could" steal anything from someone's home with this search. I found nothing but I learned few things about this little "mess" I would call it.

When you have an object with price tag on with No Tran, No Copy, and No Mod... A person can buy it and take it home and rez it down out in the open. The new search can find that object that the person just brought. The object has a "price" information on it but flagged not to be "selling". That's something that LL need to clean up a bit or ESC can find a workaround with that little leftover param flag mess.

However, is stealing possible? No... unless you want to steal bunch of freebie that are copyable... which is stupid.

Prok... DO YOUR HOMEWORK! and don't be a bitch. It's better than searching in SL than doing it on website.
(wtf... you could even search while SL is offline for updates.)

[Nimrod]

Don't forget the 2 easy ways to opt out that Prok seems to be ignoring. On involves a TP and 2 clicks, the other involves banning one avatar.

[Nimrod]

Also: "SEARCH: A PUBLIC GOOD, BUT IN PRIVATE HANDS"

No, Search is still belonging to LL, others have just chosen to do better on their own. Maybe if this were an informative post I could see why it was reported on. But it's not, and it's just part of Proks conspiracies against him.

[Prokofy Neva]

No, Nimrod, you are totally off on this one. You don't set up a system forcing people to opt OUT, you offer them the chance to opt IN. That was the message that people should have learned about community searching -- Mark Barrett learned this the hard way with SL Stats. That's not being a tinfoiler. That's knowing what is proper with communities.

I didn't get to chose whether hundreds of my tenants' stuff on *my land* got suddenly to be exposed to day-trippers and thiefs today, now did I? To benefit *one company among many developers*? Did I?

I can't undo that for those tenants.

I can't get this thing off my land -- it has no option to get it off your land AFTER it has scraped, and banning it for future scrapings, as you know, will be ineffective if it can still come within 96 m2 of you off Linden land or a neighbour's land.

And why should thousands of people be sent scurrying to a dbase they *didn't ask to be in*, to make "two clicks" and find themselves and hurry to turn something off sale, and ban this gawker and stalker made by ESC?

Why? That argument didn't fly for SL Stats and it doesn't fly for this. Greedy developers grab and grab. That doesn't mean we need to become walking marketing information depots for them.

This piece is news intended to warn the public -- something the ESC should have done -- to get everything on their land out of "for sale". Everyone needs to look themselves up on this and make sure that nothing out on their land is for sale for prices they don't want it to be sold at. And I've been forced to put it into the "op-ed" category for obvious reasons.

[Prokofy Neva]

I did my homework. I warned several people who managed to undo items ON TRANSFER that were expensive and would have been stolen. If something is no-transfer it may still have a pricing showing up, and that causes unneeded intrusion from day-trippers and stealers trying to grab it or just see what's up.

Who needs some asstard tping into your bedroom to see some erotic painting that still has the "for sale" option on? Maybe you only wanted it to be bought by your partners or friends, not the world.

You're like a lot of tekkie contrarians and Haskellians who pretend we're the problem if we affirm privacy and decency. We aren't. You're the problem with your intrusiveness.

I don't believe all our possessions in Second Life rezzed in world, and our land, and our avatars, should be yielded up for any marketing development companies to scrape against our will and use for their commercial benefit.

[Nimrod]

It only shows things you have for sale, you shouldn't have them for sale if you don't want them sold... Even if it is a mistake.

[Kami Harbinger]

The web went through this early on, too. Early search spiders just grabbed everything, and often tried random permutations of numbers and words. People screamed and got pissed off about the invasion of privacy, the revealing of corporate secrets from intranets (one accidentally-linked page, and your entire intranet's exposed!). So now there's the robots.txt protocol (see http://www.robotstxt.org/ for details), which tells spiders they're not allowed in various places. Even so, a smart site will have a ban list of several dozen known criminal hostnames and user agents.

I would expect that ESC is doing this through libsl. Drive an avatar around the grid, scan every nearby object for a price tag, record and move on. Technically fairly simple.

Ethically, of course, it's one of the most unprofessional things ever in a long series of unprofessional activities from the sheep. I'm increasingly coming to the conclusion that they're either actively malicious, or are just completely insensitive and uncaring. They show the same kind of incomprehension of the consequences of their actions that criminals do. If it was once or twice, their bad behavior could be written off as mere mistakes, but at this point there's too consistent a pattern.

[Prokofy Neva]

I couldn't have said it better.

The maker of this invention is Christian -- Christian who was also in the libsecondlife group at the time of CopyBot, and on the channell talking to John Hurliman and a subject of my investigation about CopyBot. He is a young, eager, talented programmer. He has absolutely no interest in the concerns of people who are immersed in SL and make it a world. It's not a world or place or society to him, but merely a project to work on for his company.

It's insect politics. You could say it's malice, but I'm not sure in one so young and merely so ambitious as Christian that it's malice. It could be malice in those older and more cunning, but not him.

People who own property and take care of customers inworld in Second Life develop a sense of what is good or not good for people. They have to! They are waiting on them and their livlihoods depend on them!

These sherpa companies do not have customers inworld. While a few once sold content, they've long since left behind any notion of having "inworld businesses with customers".

That strips them away from people. Their concerns are all about their outworld, real-world clients who want marketing data and ROI -- and they want it yesterday.

All the ESC wants to do is to be able to say to their clients and the world -- "We made the SEARCH first, and we made it the best".

The other considerations like people's privacy or their land are totally unimportant to them; those people aren't their clients or customers now, and they may never be their customers in the future.

But they are the customers of the ESC clients. And I think people need to sound off very loudly to the corporate clients and the Lindens who have created these monsters about what they view as completely unacceptable behaviour.

I've come to conclude that the Metaverse is like the insect politics of the Fly. It needs the uncaring criminally-minded to make it. It represents a stage of dehumanization of humanity.

[Lecktor Hannibal]

Search on prokofy neva and admire the hyprokacy at it's finest.

[mootykips]

"They don't take the contents of your refrigerator, nightstand, and desk, and dump them out on the Internet for everyone to paw and even buy merely because they have price tags left on them."

No, Prokofy, it's more like leaving something outside with a giant "for sale" sign on it that nobody noticed before and then bitching when suddenly someone comes to buy it from you.

Is it really so hard to click a checkbox?

[Artemis Fate]

Search engine for all content on sale? That sounds really cool and useful especially considering how often LL search is busted, might be kinda rough for sites like SLExchange and such though. But there's still that slight convenience factor of having it sent to you.

"These sherpa companies do not have customers inworld. While a few once sold content, they've long since left behind any notion of having "inworld businesses with customers"."

Yeah, you're right. Cory Edo, Makaio Stygian, Toast Bard, Nylon Pinkney, Forseti Svarog, Barnesworth Anubis, to name a few don't have stores anymore.

Well, except for Cory's store at Tiny Seadog, Makaio's store of Apollo, Toast's store of Fashionably Dead, Nylon's store of Nylon Outfitters, Forseti's store of Figments at Tableu, Barnesworth store of Barnes Boutique.

And that's only just the major ESC builders.

Here's an idea, if you want someone to not buy your object for public sale on your land (and thus have it listed in this ESC search engine), then don't put it for public sale. That'll not only make it so people can't buy your stuff, but it'll opt you out of the search engine.

[Luth Brodie]

What is the use of this search engine? It seems to have no more function than the search places. The description used is the limited space you have in the parcel description. Actually less because they posted the section of my sim that the store isn't even on. So even though most of what I sell is poses, a search for poses doesn't bring me up.

Then you can search for the name of the person, but you can do that in people search as everyone has their store location(s) in their picks.

In the off chance that you know the actual name of the object you want to buy, don't know store name or avatar name, nor is it one of the many keywords in a classified ad then it would be of some sort of use. As long as it's not in a vendor. Then again, about 1/2 my items aren't listed. But how often does that actually happen?

The problem is is that there is a LOT of items for sale out there. Something like this and SL411 is like searching for a needle in a haystack. At least with Sloog it has tags instead of the useless list of sometimes oddly nammed objects.

As for the way they did this... The sheep should have contacted the parcel owner to get permission to run this script. A quick IM saying if you don't want it, then ban the avatar within X amount of days would have been enough. Actually now that I think about it, to get the *under construction* parcel description they would have been on the part my sim that is set to group only. So, it looks like banning will do nothing.

Even failing that, they should have stuck just to stores. That's the point isn't it?

Then, the FAQ says not to worry about lag because it only takes 5 min. But no matter what part of the grid it's on, it must have an impact on the database lag that has become normal in SL.

It just looks like yet another overly hyped and useless service from the sheep.

[Mem]

QFT Artemis, or one better, they could make one tp and two mouse clicks and opt out entirely, or ban one AV from their property and opt out entirely. No longer be listed at all.

Really it's terribly insidious how terribly difficult those evil sheep have made the opt out process... oh wait it's not is it?

I hear there is even talk of the eventual inclusion of a robot.txt like solution, but given that this search engine is only still in beta I guess its already a done deal and simply too late to add anything to make the process even more easy... oh wait again, it's not is it? ^.-

[Prokofy Neva]

>It only shows things you have for sale, you shouldn't have them for sale if you don't want them sold... Even if it is a mistake.

Um, you don't get a choice, or a notification, Numrod.

Um, try to grasp that people don't realize when they are on their private parcels that some big Eye in the Sky is scanning all their objects to put them in a data base, such that they have to worry about this problem.

Seriously, get a clue.

The problem isn't that people leave things on to sale, the problem is that this greedy scraper is now going to try to capitalize on that.

[Prokofy Neva]

Um, Mem, people's privacy is ALREADY compromised. So the robot.txt thing which they only considered under the duress of a slew of criticism isn't a solution, is it?

Who gave them the right to scrape every parcel for data? Oh, the Lindens have built that in to the client? Well, why aren't we notified?

As for use, Luth, it is outside of SL, and that's what it's beauty will be for greedy corporations. They don't have to bother to make an avatar and struggle on the grid, they can just skim off what they need out of the data. Once every single object, land, avatar is in it, they will have the marketers' wet dream. It's what There execs were lustily promising to all the marketers with their tongues hanging out of their mouths during the lunch-time demo at Virtual Worlds 07.

It's a way of pwning everyone on the grid. It doesn't even have to work very well.

I find it profoundly violative.

>Yeah, you're right. Cory Edo, Makaio Stygian, Toast Bard, Nylon Pinkney, Forseti Svarog, Barnesworth Anubis, to name a few don't have stores anymore.

Some of these people never hardly had very many customers, and were bored, and would go around griefing people and annoying them like little teenage grieftards -- Toast and Nylon to be specific.

Others like Forseti do not care about their inworld business anymore because they don't need to sweat for micropayments, they can just get the big bucks from the millions coming in from companies. It would be nonsensical for them to huff and puff to make little stuff for avatars for micropayments. They are very cut off now from any kind of inworld customer base.

And the best of them like Barnes never really had to think about customers, because they sold content people wanted and the clicks and payments just endlessly came in, whether they were here or playing WoW or whatever.

BTW, Artemis, did you graduate from college? I hear you work for the Sheep now.

[Artemis Fate]

"The problem isn't that people leave things on to sale, the problem is that this greedy scraper is now going to try to capitalize on that."

Sorry, legitimate question here, how are they capitalizing on this?

Seems like they're just listing places with items on sale and a TP link to get there if you want to buy it.

"Um, you don't get a choice, or a notification, Numrod."

Well now you do! Just search your name up and see if you have anything up for sale that shouldn't be.

[Artemis Fate]

"Some of these people never hardly had very many customers, and were bored, and would go around griefing people and annoying them like little teenage grieftards -- Toast and Nylon to be specific."

Cory and Forseti might not have been big on their stores (but your point was that they didn't have customers, not that they didn't have a TON of customers), I know Toast, Nylon, Makaio, and Barnes have some very popular stores, Toast and Nylon even started a fashion trend of hand painting their clothes.

Also, "griefing" you (aka disagreeing with you), doesn't give you the right to say they grief everyone. And again, your statement was they had no customers, which is flagrantly false, not that they had a LOT of customers in the case of Forseti and Cory, and not that they were "griefers".

So stop trying to place little misdirections to cover the fact that you said something completely untrue and perpetrated it as a fact.

"Artemis, did you graduate from college? I hear you work for the Sheep now."

You know, for a guy who gets pissed off everytime someone mentions your RL, you sure try to instigate talks about mine quite a bit (this is time number 4 you've asked, for god knows what reason, I guess you find it demeaning or something)

Here's my opinion, taken from what I already posted on Second Thoughts:

. . . Now, I myself am thrilled about this - or would be if they had simply offered it to everyone to sign up for. I would have signed up for it.

Finding myself signed up for it FOR me is kind of off-putting.

Why didn't they simply announce the thing, and let others sign on? Why just take everybody and put them on there whether they want to be on there or not?

Then everybody would have been happy. People who wanted to be on it - like me - would have been thrilled, and those who didn't wouldn't have to scamper to get themselves removed, having to jump because ESC says frog.

And then, too, there would not have been this matter of me tp'ing into the person's treehouse just because he had my Fly Settee for Two [not for sale there]. Multiply that by a whole BUNCH of people suddenly getting publicity they may not have wanted, and you see the problem.

So I love the thing for myself, but it seems they got rather presumptious about it. Had they been a little more considerate of people, they could have avoided a lot of problems.

I just don't think it's a good idea to publish a list of people on the basis that they have objects for sale (inadvertently or otherwise), whether or not they WANT that to be publicized.

Having objects for sale and wanting them to be published on someone's site are two different things.

coco

[Prokofy Neva]

It's all about opt-in. Developers who force opt-out on communities will be completely out of step with what customers want. Aggressively forcing this on them will backfire.

Artemis works for the Sheep now. That explains a lot.

Nylon and Toast flew around griefing my tenants on several sims without me even being present and even knowing what they were up to. I was amazed actually to find independently, some tenants had banned them all on their own. Once a tenant called me to a sim to tell me someone was harassing and griefing him, and I was amazed to find those two being asswipes.

[Scott McMillin]

Yeah I'm not sure why this wasn't announced and people given a simple opt-in tag they could enable or possibly avatar registration, etc.

While I applaud attempts at innovation, more thought should be given to services before being released into the wild. I have a suspicion that this is a project that flew under the radar of ESC leadership (and if not, they should get a handle on what makes its way out of their labs).

[Nacon]

Prok, did you even realize that you're helping ESC with this coverage crap?

....scratch that, did you even graduate from college? Idiot.

(I am helping Herald with traffic by posting and I didn't go to college, asking that question, irony isn't it?)

[Prokofy Neva]

What's really obnoxious right now is listening to Cory Edo pontificate about all the things that MIGHT be done some day to mitigate this disasterous scraper.

And listening to her shark everybody by describing this problem of how it shows things for sale as a "bug".

But the very reason such a "bug" can become in fact a "feature" is because the ESC didn't think about *people*. They didn't *respect their privacy and their private property*.

If they weren't so greedy about wanting to fill up the data base, they wouldn't have GRABBED stuff WITHOUT CONSENT.

Cory is yammering on about how the data showing things for sale that are not really sellable (they are non-transfer items) is a "glitch" that they've reported to Linden Lab.

Huh? But they have a device determined to show everything for sale, duh. It *is* showing stuff for sale. It doesn't discriminate between public and private -- how can it? So it shows my tenants' erotic art picture for $10 in her bedroom which somebody really can come and buy outright because it *is* transferrable.

My tenant and I didn't opt into this. Had it been opt-in, we might have put our stores in it; we might not, knowing that ultimately, it's not about serving the world or the people in it, but serving the needs of ESC to impress clients with search engines. We're here merely as load testers, beta players, cannon fodder.

They don't need OUR stuff to show up for sale; they just need to show that they can SHOW UP anything. That's all.

[Nimrod]

Prok, unlike the SLstats thing, you're the only one crying very loud.

[CronoCloud Creeggan]

It's not the end of the world.

How could they properly test the thing without doing a full release of it on the main grid. Though like folks have said, it probably would have been best to announce it.

Let's not assume malice aforethought, where simple human error explains the problem. Software has bugs, testing them in "standard use" conditions (in other words using it how it would normally be used) is one of the ways to try to find them.

[Spankubux]

Once again the Herald proves what a quality news organization it is.

This blog is such a fucking joke.

[Lewis Nerd]

If this thing has been working as described, that would explain part of the horrendous lag.

This is yet another reason why open source was a bad idea. It's not "clever programming", it's just as bad as a virus, and benefits nobody in the long-term.

Lewis

[Prokofy Neva]

This device is *intended to show objects for sale*.

That is the description on the liner notes.

it is not "a bug" or "software that needs improving" -- it's a deliberate, working feature that it scrapes and shows objects for sales *against our will*.

The only reason people haven't said anything about it yet is because they haven't heard about it or grasped what it means.

It was released on Easter Monday when many people aren't even online in SL, and are travelling. When they figure out its ramifications, they'll be sounding off, trust me.

[Hiro Pendragon]

Categorical Imperative: Act in such a way that if everyone did something, it wouldn't be harmful.

Let's say someone were to, for instance, open source a client that did exactly what eSheep's scanners are doing. Let's say 1000 people started using this. This is less than 1/10th of 1% of all users in SL. It's reasonable to assume that search engines will multiple and want to use this technology, and 1000 is hardly a far-fetched number.

So, imagine 1000 avatars, once a day, visiting every single place on the grid. Imagine if one or two of these people decided, "Oh, we don't need to be as lag-efficient as Electric Sheep's Bots", and they did 100 scanning the grid at a time. Imagine if no one complained, and suddenly that were okay, and then there's 10,000 bots running around doing nothing but scanning.

And so on, and so forth.

While I'm very sure that Electric Sheep took excellent care to reduce the lag of their scan-bots, the fact is that their system is a classic land-scanner (worse, since it's a client, far more lag-intensive than a moving object) that is grid-wide. This is not something that the grid can sustain en masse. And while Linden Lab might be chastised for not creating a stable enough grid for this, the fact is still the same: This is not the sort of precedent we want to start setting as "Okay."

In fact, in multiple occasions in the past, Linden Lab has firmly rejected land scanners as okay.

I'm all for opt-in search, but opt-out is just not scalable. In this time when Linden Lab has so many growing pains, the last thing we need is the precedent to be set that unscalable user applications are okay.

The good news is that this is still in Beta, and it would be very, very easy for Electric Sheep Company to change this to an opt-in search. I don't agree with Prokofy's tone, but the truth is that Electric Sheep Company has a lot of veteran members who should have known better, with their extensive knowledge of the history of Second Life. I can't imagine how this one snuck through the cracks; I can only imagine that they thought to "test the waters" of opt-out search in Second Life. Thus, they can't be too especially surprised when they read negative reactions.

I especially find it funny how the search is based on for-sale items, when a great deal of the items in Second Life are sold through vendors. :)

[Nimrod]

Prok by your last comment, you make it sound like a conspiracy... usually if someone sets something for sale, people will want it to be known it's for sale. I guess you can't make everybody happy though, especially you.

[Artemis Fate]

Curiously, Prokofy was somewhat silent with Anshe's land scanners looking for land for sale.

Also, Prokofy, you ask me 4 times about college, I reply, and you suddenly have nothing to say? Or are you planning on asking me for every reply I give instead of attempting to debate my points?

[Nacon]

even I asked her if she graduate college at all... maybe she never really did!

Or actually ignoring a "troll" as she call me, which I'm gonna go ahead state the fact that she never actually went to college, the very same idea that she has been doing with most of us. The whole "Prok is crazy" thing. Meaning she gonna have to ignore everyone, even Artemis as well... BUT NOOOOOO.... she had to ask her if she graduate from college at all.

Meaning she's not actually ingoring "trolls"... she's just hiding from facts for every little bit of herself (himself, itself, wtf whatever!), unable to admit anything personal on the Herald. Which is of course, you shouldn't... BUT NOOOOOOO.... she had to ask something personal of Artemis' life.

So what this means? Prok is still an idiot.

(duh anyone?)

[Prokofy Neva]

I've never approved of land scanners, Anshe's, Weedy's, or anybody's. I don't like the fact that all these fake alts with names like Jumpy Grasshopper were constantly trying to put prims on my land to scan and scrape stuff. They'd claim it was temp-on-rez -- it wasn't. I'm well aware of the endless battles on the LL forums about people like Pete Fats and their land-scanners. Land-scanners got into an unfair advantage over other people, and the Lindens addressed this by ruling that they couldn't function in such aggressive ways. I'm not sure of the specifics of how they removed some or all land scanners; whatever they did isn't clear, and that may have been deliberate.

"Get parcel data" is the scrapers' dream, and various alts periodically goaded the Lindens on the old Linden answers forum trying to get an estimate out of them when they could grab parcel data. I'm not sure this is possible even today, but scraping for what's for sale is a start.

Hiro, you may not like my tone, but in my experience in community journalism, you have to speak loudly and forcefully when there are important matters like privacy and private property. There is a huge din now of corporate-sponsored blogs in a huge gold-rush atmosphere, and it is impossible to get the story out by maintaining a hushed, golf-course tone. We're not in Hollywood.

From hearing Cory pontificate for more than an hour tonight, I can see that "opt-in" is not at all in the cards. They view opt-out as the only way to make a Google-type search. They few themselves as the heir-apparents of the Google approach. Hey, it worked on Web 1.0, let's *force it on people* in Web 2.0 or 3.D.

My problem with your concept, Hiro, is that very few people will have the skills, resources, staffing -- and most important -- corporate clientele to have the drive -- and the greed -- needed to go scrape like this. So it will fall to a few who will do it, and they may well make their scrapers low-lag.

The issue isn't the laggyness of scrapers, and you are merely playing into the literalist tekkie camp by focusing on that narrow, technical issue.

The issue is our privacy and our private property. If Linden Lab allows any third party to come in and grab like that, they don't have a sustainable world. They need to take more steps to ensure that these vaunted partners of theirs, that they've feted and cossetted for years and steer media to, abide by the TOS in the same way LL itself ensures privacy.

Instead, I'm well aware that under the TOS 6)1, there's this nasty little kicker:

"Linden Lab does not guarantee the security of any of your private transmissions against unauthorized or unlawful interception or access by third parties."

That's been there for years, and it's been something I've inquired about in the past, over issues like Nexcom, and their holding of all their customers' conversations on their servers.
I'm not sure where "transmissions," i.e. IMs or emails, is defined such that it could exclude or include the data available on your avatar, parcel, or object. I don't feel it's sufficiently spelled out, and their lawyers and the public interest litigator should be examining what this means.

Hiro, what do the Sheep care about vendors? What isn't for sale out in the world is for sale on SL Boutique in vendors they already pawn.

[Trinity Dejavu]

Geeeezzzz Prokofy, how exacty does that H U G E rant count as being news worthy. Land scanner, indexes everything for sale, search here, opt out here. W0000t.

Prokofy Neva said: This device is *intended to show objects for sale*.

it is not "a bug" or "software that needs improving" -- it's a deliberate, working feature that it scrapes and shows objects for sales *against our will*.

###########################################

It shows objects for sale that have a sale amount set but aren't really for sale, correct? Then that's a bug.

And it is software, and most software is improved/altered/new features added over time. For example, I play a game that's been in continuous development for a couple of decades. It's still not bug free and new features are still being added. For not being a "tekkie" you're quick to judge what is or is not software.

And most people who have objects for sale want as many people as possible to know that they're for sale, because they want to make money by....selling their objects. Consider it free advertising.

yes it didn't ask first, no it doesn't have the equivalent to the honoring of a robots.txt file that web spiders have.....yet. But it's beta, do you understand, it's a prototype, it's a work in progress. Remember how long the original google search was in beta? Instead of getting all riled up about invasions of privacy, realize that this thing is essentially an SL version of a web spider.

###########################################

Prokofy Neva said:

It was released on Easter Monday when many people aren't even online in SL, and are travelling. When they figure out its ramifications, they'll be sounding off, trust me.

###########################################

Plenty of people in SL numbers weren't noticeably lower. You're attributing intent on the release date where there might not be any. Remember, there's people who don't celebrate Easter, and to whom "Easter Monday" is just another Monday.

[Dusk]

This is really more about the internet and privacy in general. There IS no privacy on the internet - if you want to keep it private, the last thing you do with something is put it on the internet.

From my perspective, SL is just the internet in 3-D - not some glorious new world with actual private property. SecondLife is the new Geocities - Linden Labs merely a company giving out 3D webpages. The company-sanctioned ability to exchange virtual-dollars for real ones is where all the confusion and histrionics come in. This is essentially the same thing as having a special directory on your domain for the pictures you took at that party in Vegas. It isn't linked to your main page, nor do you give out the URL, but it's there and it CAN be found - even if you lock it down with password protection and what not.

Unfortunately, you opt-in to this lack of privacy merely by being part of the internet.

[Prokofy Neva]

Most, if not all ESC are Americans. They know exactly what they're doing. They didn't hold a press conference, or release this during prime-time. They had a kind of flash roll-out they announced on Twitter and made sure Mark blogged before going on a trip.

The device finds things for sale, period. Some are transferable. Some are not. If it turns out to be a "bug" that things not for sale are captured, and they removed them, so what? That doesn't change my concerns one bit.

Because people did not opt in. They didn't get to chose.

You don't first inflict something on people's privacy and scrape the hell out of them, then fix it later.

I reject the idea that going on the Internet means you cannot have privacy. That's ridiculous. All reputable companies have privacy policies. They make sure your private information doesn't get in the public domain. They keep financial data encrypted. They vow never to use your email address to spam you. Lots and lots gets done daily to protect, not disclose privacy. So I completely reject the idea that we're all supposed to let it all hang out on demand, in a forced march. We're not.

Second Life *is* a glorious new world with immersion and private property -- and the Lindens, and their beloved Sheep better get that through their heads. The value of it for people is precisely that they can own their own land. This is the Lindens' business model. The Lindens make up 80 percent of their revenue from selling land, and selling land that people feel is privage property and places they can have private relationships on.

They throw that overboard at their own risk. They listen to the freaks and pranksters shouting that it's "the Internet" at their own risk. They understand it. Now these kids they've indulged all this time need to get it, too.

[Dusk]

Prokofy stated: "Second Life *is* a glorious new world with immersion and private property -- and the Lindens, and their beloved Sheep better get that through their heads. The value of it for people is precisely that they can own their own land... privage property and places they can have private relationships on."

I'm not trying to bust your chops here, but what makes 512m, 1028m, half a sim, an island, any different than say a myspace page, a world of warcraft account, a flickr account, an IRC server, or a private domain? People have private property (in the form of images, text, etc) and private relationships related to all of those things. Many would argue that SL is simply Geocities, IRC, MySpace and Ebay all rolled together in one fun little user-customizeable 3-D package.

The only thing I can see that makes SL any different is that Linden Labs legitimizes the exchange of virtual and real currencies. I know that there are people who want desperately for SL to be something new and different, for the people, by the people and what not (which is a noble goal), but unfortunately, the banner waving of a user base does not always dictate the direction of company policy.

Maybe it is simply from having a different perspective on the game but this is nothing to wave a banner over. Sony Online Entertainment these days boasts online-character profiles for a significant number of their games, where you can look up any character in the game and see what they are wearing, what they have in their bags, their level, their alts, where they last leveled, when they last logged in, so on and so forth - that too is an Opt-Out system. The profiles are automatically generated by the servers - one must set their information to Anonymous to prevent it from being shown. When that was put in place, there was no outcry from the userbase even though it has the potential for MUCH abuse.

[Hira Susanti]

As a resident I really can't see what a grid scrape can offer me over and above what the Lindon Search does, except dilute the results with spam and noise. At least with the Lindon Search there is some motive to advertise what you are selling.

Isn't a better solution tagging and rating by users? I came across a really neat in-world solution last week - Slicr - which does just that. Cool hud and worth checking out.

[dandellion Kimban]

It sounds like double standards:
a company can release the bot to scan up the whole grid without anybody knowing that, to put all the info in company's database and then to make search service. On the other hand, it is against ToS to record chat that is going on on channel zero (and therefore is public) without telling everybody around that you are recording!

LL is concerned about privacy when it comes to chat logs (and chat logging is common feature of any decent IM client in the last ten years), but there is no problem if a company come and scan the whole grid!

[Prokofy Neva]

Dusk, you're just trolling. Everybody knows that land isn't a page. It has depth and meaning that a flat page doesn't have. It's 3-D. Myspace is nothing like a house, which is your own personal place. People have very different relationships to their land and relationships in SL precisely because they are immersive. Pestering people with your dismissive tekkie take on this isn't at all persuasive.

Avatars in a space or game that have no bodies or interactions simply cannot be compared. The stretching and bending of the truth that we all know that people are engaging in here with this "Web 1.0 and Web 2.0" forced analogy is really starting to grate. People fetch up preposterous analogies merely to justify what corporations are doing to erode our privacy and our owned private property. It's wrong.

dandellion, I couldn't agree more about the chat log rule, it's insane. And that the Lindens still prosecute this, and even act like scared ninnies themselves, and bat away any chatlogs you try to send them in your quest for justice -- it's just plain nuts. Now with voice coming in, they'll have to drop that insanity, they can't very well policy people's recording of chat from their own computers.

I didn't see SLICR work yet, but I hope that what will eventually get developed is a community-based tagger and rater that -- or better yet multiple services of this type that will compete, and maybe find niches--that people themselves can take part in and feel an ownership of, as a public good, that doesn't merely capture their market data for someone's benefit.

[mootykips]

There is no difference between "3D" land and a webpage besides you assign to it. "your own personal place" can mean a lot of different things - plenty of bored teenagers would tell you that MySpace is exactly that - their own personal place. Do you assign the same "omg srs bsns" attitude to Habbo Hotel, where the view is fixed and rooms (their equivalent to land) are standard and often free? That may be so, but what about web-based MMOs (stretching the term here) like NeoPets? NeoPets offers a Flash based "NeoHome" system with a rather simple interface of drag-and-drop, completely 2-D, and the furniture is bought via a bunch of php and absolutely no 3-D interface (scroll boxes and such). Where the hell do you define what is a SL-like "personal place" and what is not? The answer: there is no difference. A website is, usually, a set of pages where HTML and CSS and random shit like PHP can be used to plop down whatever you want whereever you want. Second Life land is the same, except using fancier graphics and a 3-D interface. Are you implying, then, that the difference between a game like Second Life and a webpage or social networking site is the method of content delivery? That the fact Second Life uses 3-D player models puts it in some sort of unique category that should be untouched by the Interwebs at large?

[dandellion Kimban]

Sure there is difference between flatworld and 3D world. And yes, there is personal space in metaverse. Web are pages that are PUBLISHED. On contrary, SL is the place where some people are building, chatting, just watching rise of virtual sun or doing anything else. But all those 'else' is not PUBLISHED.

[Dusk]

Prokofy:
That was an honest question. I am not attempting to troll. Were that the case I would have simply spouted something like "lol lol internet serious bizznizz, amirite?" I am trying to understand the other perspective and an answer beyond a dismissive "Psh, you are trolling. It's just different. You wouldn't get it anyway." would be appreciated. I may be reading it wrong, you appear to be insinuating that SL, by virtue of it being immersive and 3-D, is inherently 'more meaningful' to a user (or userbase)than any other space on the internet. I would dismiss that opinion based on not only grey-market sales of MMORPG characters/items/gold, but also real-world relationships, businesses and marriages forged in other online mediums. Not to say that they don't occur in SL, but to suggest that SL has greater meaning and/or value than anything else is far too dismissive for someone that crusades for Web 2.0 and webcrime/griefing to count as real-crime.

As an aside, it would be an interesting study on the the ratio of users-to-real-world-relationships-forged-in-world (or on-service in the case of myspace, irc, etc) ranked by service. I know of quite a few marriages where the couple met in Everquest, SWG or on internet forums.

I mentioned the situation surrounding SOE Character Profiles as an extremely similar example in a game where people have avatar-to-avatar interaction. No ripple went through that community because of a data-scrape.

So please, would you further elaborate on exactly *why* this is any different than any other internet space? I am honestly interested.

[Ian Betteridge]

Prokofy says: "Dusk, you're just trolling. Everybody knows that land isn't a page. It has depth and meaning that a flat page doesn't have. It's 3-D. Myspace is nothing like a house, which is your own personal place. People have very different relationships to their land and relationships in SL precisely because they are immersive. Pestering people with your dismissive tekkie take on this isn't at all persuasive."

No, Dusk isn't trolling - this is a genuine question. SL is not immersive VR. Land isn't a page, but it isn't real-world land either. It has more in common with a MySpace page - both are bits, intellectual property not physical property. And ownership of property has nothing to do with the depth of relationships in the virtual - any verteran of MOOs and MUDs could tell you that.

[Simondo Nebestanka]

Hope I'm not regurgitating someone else's arguments here. My following point about 'ownership' certainly isn't new.

Part of the issue here, and probably the reason ESC have felt confident in going ahead with "opt-out" instead of "opt-in", is that LL grants IP rights over content creation, but as everyone figures out, we don't actually *own* the contents of our inventory, or a particular copy of something residing on our land, or for that matter that piece of land we 'bought' holding all those items we 'bought' or spent time creating. We own 0% of all that stuff.. and are paying for access to it.

Section 3.3 of SL's Terms Of Service: "Linden Lab retains ownership of the account and related data, regardless of intellectual property rights you may have in content you create or otherwise own ... you do not own the account you use to access the Service, nor do you own any data Linden Lab stores on Linden Lab servers (including without limitation any data representing or embodying any or all of your Content)."

Since we don't own 'our stuff', and have it sitting in an easily accessible place, it's hard for anyone to stop nice folks like ESC creating a tool to publicly list any or all of those items, "for-sale" or not, if the actual owners of the items, or data, are okay with that.

However, Second Life is promoted as "Your World. Your imagination." The constant growth, improvement of, and sustained interest in this virtual world is tied completely to the idea of ownership by its residents. To reduce anyone's and everyone's experience to purely legal terms of ownership would be very unlikely to be welcomed by many at LL, I would hope.

If we take the view that "All your base are belong to LL", well I guess no-one has much recourse for how LL's items are indexed and publicly searchable, if LL is okay with that.

But if we take the view which I feel is more widespread, and certainly more in the spirit of how all these items "became" in the first place, it's *our* stuff. If it's *our* stuff, why is it all of a sudden listed in some third-party database, without *our* consent, and we have to ban some bot-atar from our land to get off that database? I personally don't ban anyone, bot or not-bot (hehe), from my land, and don't care to have to start taking that anti-social, negative action to preclude myself from someone's fancy new tool.

I love some of the stuff ESC have done but this is just too intrusive.

Peace

ps. Is the scanning avatar "Grid Shepherd" subject to clauses 2.1 or 2.2 of SL's TOS? Or are those Terms only applicable to meat-controlled avatars?

[Talia Jiang]

The ESC announcement says that "any objects marked 'for sale' are made available through this service." Saying more information was gathered but only items marked 'for sale' are shown in the service.

Electric Sheep have given the option to 'opt out', but the opt-out is only for objects we can see on the search, not other information held in the ESC database. The wording from ESC "if you would like to remove objects you own from our service" doesn't say if objects are removed from the ESC database or merely hidden from public search.

ESC would have used code similar to copybot and it would depend on the programmer and ESC policy as to what other object information would be stored apart from creator, owner, price and location.

[Tenshi Vielle]

Okay, now the Christians are to blame for the sheep search engine? Take a vicodin and go to sleep, Prokofy. I think you've become bewildered from stress.

Maybe I'm blindsided by the awesomeness of Paffendorf, but I think this is a great idea. Searching by individual items? Yay!! Pulling people's private stock? Not so yay.

[Yo Brewster]

My opinion? I think this is a great tool and I want to congrat The Electric Sheep with this search tool that was way overdue as there isn't any good search tool for Second Life at the moment. Search should be up to LL? Wrong! LL job is to provide us with API's so other can do all the work. A tool for scamming people? If people are "dumb" enough to leave objects up for sale while they didn't want to loose them, then this is really their problem. Sorry but you can't blame The Electric Sheep for things that others do wrong.

[Reality]

Web Page: Data.
Second Life (All of it): Data.

There is no difference. People do not live in Second Life. Full stop. No argument. Find me a person that uploaded their entire consciousness to Second Life and you have a possible argument, until then - don't bother.

[Scott McMillin]

"There is no difference between "3D" land and a webpage besides you assign to it."

Statements like this and others in this thread show a lack of critical thought that should be given to this situation. It seems many of you are judging this article not own its own merits but simply because of its outspoken author.

As Prok says above "People don't have sex inside Google. They don't have lives and work and relationships on Google."

For me, this is the crux of the privacy issue. I think a large majority of people in Second Life, especially 'younger' avatars, embrace the anonymity that SL provides and don't necessarily give much thought to the possible collision of their RL identity and SL identity. Maybe most don't have to. But there is no doubt that many people are expressing themselves in SL in ways that require anonymity. I've been in SL for 4 years now and seen plenty of real life relationships ruined over secrets kept in SL. You may have nothing to hide in SL, but plenty of people do.

It is understood that a Web page, unprotected by password or other means of security, is open to the public. I guarantee that the same understanding does not exist within Second Life. That is why opt-in is so important in situations like this. (I understand this particular engine is for sale objects only and ESC have no nefarious intentions in mind, but it appears they haven't quite thought through the potential consequences. Hopefully this dicussion will help shape the approach to future services like this.)

Identity is fast becoming important topic not only on Web, but also in Second Life -- I would expect to see announcements from LL regarding identity (and privacy) in the coming months.

[Tenshi Vielle]

Forgive the tongue in cheek of the previous comment. I'm ready to make a serious one now, and it's totally Prokofy worthy: it's quite winded.

I have spent time catching up on this entire report and I feel well prepared to make a fairly decent reply.

While this is GOOD FOR STORES - it is not yet good for the residents. The best way I could see for the search to be integrated properly is for there to be a zoning - commercial property vs. private property, and the sheep search would only crawl the commercial property. I did notice that when I searched my name it was all too easy to find my own private home in-world just because a few objects still had the "buy" option enabled.

Those that do not want Grid Shepherd on their land have the possibility of banning him. That is one solution at the user's discretion. Another possibility would be for people to sort through the objects they own on their land and take the "buy" option off.

I don't think you should call the Sheep greedy on this one. There is no such thing as being greedy in business, and you should know that, Prokofy. It's first come first serve, whoever has the best gets the best. The Sheep have the best, and their search only needs a bit of tweaking to disallow private property.

"He has absolutely no interest in the concerns of people who are immersed in SL and make it a world. It's not a world or place or society to him, but merely a project to work on for his company."? I'm sorry, did you ask him to validate that?

By the way, beginning comments with "Um, Nacon..." or "Um, Artemis..." is not only a horrible attempt at being patronizing, it's also SO 11th grade.

Prokofy, I think it's time to lay off. You obviously lack some pertinant information and all I see here is your poor attempts at being a catalyst to induce fear in the public of yet another "corporate giant". You're the kind of media I don't like. Someone tries to do something good and you attempt to rip it to shreds in the face of "privacy".

Tell me, Prok, are you planning on gathering social security in your age? Or are you too afraid of the government "griefing" you and finding out where you live simply to send you a check?

[Scott McMillin]

"Web Page: Data.
Second Life (All of it): Data."

@Reality:

Your Avatar Name: Data
Your Real Life Name: Data
Your ATM PIN Number: Data
Your Social Security Number: Data
A list of everything you've purchased this year: Data

I notice, you're not using your real name for your post. And is that your email address? Why is that? If it's all just data why are you hiding behind a nickname?

If anyone wants to have a real discussion about identity and privacy on the Web and in Second Life, let's do it. We can do a podcast, in real life, with real names.

[Tenshi Vielle]

Hey, I volunteer, Scott. We can get down to the nitty gritty.

[Reality]

Nice try Scott.

You want any of my real life information? You'll have to use barely legal methods - perhaps some illegal ones - to track it all down.

I notice you do not have a ounce of common sense - Why are you using your real name, if that is your real name?

[Gando Thurston]

Many people like Second Life because it allows a certain level of privacy and anonymity. This search scraper just takes away one more bit of SL privacy.

What is next? A list of all the shit I own? Gee! That would be handy so people could find their lost sex-beds!

I can't wait to hear from the first person who is griefed by this tool when someone places an object for L$0, with the name of a very popular object, under their bed.

[Scott McMillin]

@Tenshi:
Sounds good; I think Identity & Privacy in SL is would be a great topic to discuss. We could probably rope some other people with differing viewpoints in as well.

@Reality:
I take it then that you agree that some data is fit for public consumption and other data should remain private?

In your brief comment you said that there is no difference between Web data and SL Data, but didn't actually explain why. Please read my original comment in which I explained why I thought there was a difference (the perception of public vs private data, etc).

And instead of doing the typical anonymous blog comment where one disparages another commenter instead of building the discussion or refuting an argument, why don't you explain yourself. I'm certainly open to being refuted. And please elucidate as to why I "do not have a ounce of common sense."

[Reality]

Simple Scott - common sense dictates that when posting comments to a web log, one does not needlessly give away information that a person with no grasp on reality could use to track them down.

Common sense should also have told you that my comment had nothing to do with private, real life data and that as far as second Life is concerned, the only private data that exists is data that only Linden Lab can access.

This topic has nothing at all to do with that sort of data - none.

As to my earlier comment: Just like Web Data - in which only your provider, the government, and web hosting service, if any, have access to your account information - Second Life is the exact same. The only data that is private is the Data that only Linden Lab is allowed to access.

The notion that data of the sort discussed and brought up by this laughable excuse for a blog entry is tied to a real, living person by any means other than a bank account is absurd ....

Oh, and on the topic of common sense, yet again, it should be apparent that some people do not wish to sort through e-mails, IMs and the like that contain far less than polite words regarding a topic. when commenting on things such as second Life - such spam is in the majority of responses.

That is all for now - I may respond later with more .... if need be.

[Prokofy Neva]

No, Dusk isn't trolling - this is a genuine question. SL is not immersive VR. Land isn't a page, but it isn't real-world land either. It has more in common with a MySpace page - both are bits, intellectual property not physical property. And ownership of property has nothing to do with the depth of relationships in the virtual - any verteran of MOOs and MUDs could tell you that.

Ian, you seem oblivious to the fact that there are simply two schools of thought on this, immersionists and augmentationists. We've all been over this. You will not convince people who treat SL as a world to dumb it down and degrade it to become a mere MySpace page. My God, my kids understand the difference between MySpace and Second Life, even if you wish to word-salad it to death. Those who are trying to deconstruct somebody's world experience out of SL are just arrogant and cruel, trying to diminish and ridicule them so that they can maintain their power center. There are people who think of what they buy in SL stores as their goods which they have the rights to. There are those who say they are mere software products completely controlled by their maker. This is a real debate, and you don't win it by merely insisting over and over that you are right, with a sneer. You aren't.

Virtual worlds aren't MUDS. And you don't get to strip away all the "software products" of land ownership, homes, objects and say "they don't count, the tekkies pwn them, and the mere mortals get only the relationships". Because the only way you get people to participate in the game-gods' world is if they have the emulation of private property. They're not there merely for a Hallmark moment. They're there to have private property and privacy. If you can't respect that, you will not have a world.

I'm not going to assign more meaning to There, Second Life, or World of Warcraft, and that wasn't the point. The point is to say that a virtual world, like There, WoW or SL, is more important and more immersive and interactive for people than a webpage. Treating worlds cynically and reductively like webpages will not keep customers. That attitude shines through in spades. In fact, it's one of the key reasons that Second Life membership in terms of real numbers isn't higher.

Tenshi, the government doesn't scan the contents of my refrigerator, nightstand, and desk in order to send me a social security check or a tax refund. It's opt-in. Of course, it's an opt-in that you have to make when you get a job -- giving your social security number. But the government doesn't go up your ass to get it -- at least not yet, because these tekkies haven't had their way yet.

I'm quite confident that Christian is not an immersive worlder. None of the Sheep are. In fact, it's one of the reasons they can be so casual and cavalier about the world of Second Life and the communities in it. And of course it's greed, to want to be first. People should have had a public notification of this bot's cruising all over SL, such as to ban it, and had time to turn off their objects for sale. They as a community should participate in something that so severely affects their privacy. It's not up to one company to deconstruct and demolish it and grab it for their own commercial benefit.

These issues are important, and not made trivial merely becaue they occur in a virtual world. Companies are always going to be ruthlessly and cynically deconstructing and demolishing. They need to be curbed and pushed back, and taught self-interest -- deconstructing and demolishing their very customers means they won't have any in the future.

>My opinion? I think this is a great tool and I want to congrat The Electric Sheep with this search tool that was way overdue as there isn't any good search tool for Second Life at the moment. Search should be up to LL? Wrong! LL job is to provide us with API's so other can do all the work. A tool for scamming people? If people are "dumb" enough to leave objects up for sale while they didn't want to loose them, then this is really their problem. Sorry but you can't blame The Electric Sheep for things that others do wrong.

I take utter exception with every bit of this. LL is all we have as a "federal government," as weak and ridiculous as it is, to protect us from the depradations of voracious corporations. It's the last bastion of our privacy. We don't sign up for the SL service and buy the SL private island being told "you are the plaything of corporations who will be scraping your data for their own competitive and commercial marketing purposes". LL has to develop a policy on this -- and fast!

The scornful idea that SL exists merely to be harvested by cynical tekkies for their own benefit and the rest of us are mere load-testing cannon fire has to be repudiated completely. People have to start now to bring the technical class to heel as it is creating technology that is controlling humans (i.e. making one tiny set of humans have control over others), not technologies that all humans can reliably control and have oversight over. I don't wish to cede my life to these people, as their cynicism and scorn and malice lets me know they are unreliable and not acting in the benefit of the real public interest.

People who put something on their land for sale, accidently or on purpose, aren't "dumb". They aren't *informed* of a data scraper in their midst. It's the data scraper that is dumb, invading private property and scraping.

BTW, read Christian's blog. For those of you who think this wasn't tied to Easter. He entitles the blog "Happy Easter" and the meme is like searching for Easter eggs.

[Cocoanut Koala]

1. "I'm not trying to bust your chops here, but what makes 512m, 1028m, half a sim, an island, any different than say a myspace page, a world of warcraft account, a flickr account, an IRC server, or a private domain?"

There is a great deal of difference. If I have a web page, I can’t meet my friend there, in physical form, and chat or dance or build together, with the ability to see whoever else is there, or approaching, in physical form, at the same time. MySpace si a web page.

I would argue you are taking something that is already one way (requiring physical presence in order to view the items and people present, or take part in the conversation) and trying to make it another way – such that all things on the space are immediately available to everyone else, thousands at a time, as would be the case with a web page.

Once that is done, there will be no point to having a physical space that is interacted within in a way analogous to real world physics.

You will then have a space which is at all times visible in all ways to anyone, and who needs that? We already have that. We already have MySpace and all the other web sites, which are nothing but pages anyone can access completely at any time.

It is going backwards to try to make SL into that.

2. "I mentioned the situation surrounding SOE Character Profiles as an extremely similar example in a game where people have avatar-to-avatar interaction. No ripple went through that community because of a data-scrape."

I ask you: Was all of a sudden all this published without anyone knowing about it? And people had to find out piecemeal, by reading some personal blog somewhere, then going to another blog and arguing it, or hearing it from a friend, etc. etc.?

Or was it instituted openly, with everyone knowing at the same time exactly what to do to opt out? Or was it made such that people got a chance to NOT mark the box, rather than having it secretly marked for them?

And who did it? Did the game gods do it, in an open manner, equally to everyone? Or did a few residents do it, secretly, behind the scenes? Essentially TAKE it, and publish it, without a by your leave from anyone?

And who gets the information? The game gods, or a few other residents? And what other information do these few other residents have that they are compiling? Who are they going to give/sell the information to?

We signed on with the people who own the game, not the other residents. If SOE decides to change the rules, that's one thing. If a group of other residents decides to, that's different.

3. "There is no difference between "3D" land and a webpage besides you assign to it."

That's like insisting that there is no difference between a book and a television program, or a television program and a concert.

4. "it is creating technology that is controlling humans (i.e. making one tiny set of humans have control over others), not technologies that all humans can reliably control and have oversight over."

That – in a nutshell – is why people objecting to things like this in no way implies they are anti-technology. Of course people can legitimately argue over the uses of technology and its control without being accused of being technophobes. Or should be able to, anyway.

5. Where is Christian's blog?

coco

[Tenshi Vielle]

"Tenshi, the government doesn't scan the contents of my refrigerator, nightstand, and desk in order to send me a social security check or a tax refund. It's opt-in. Of course, it's an opt-in that you have to make when you get a job -- giving your social security number. But the government doesn't go up your ass to get it -- at least not yet, because these tekkies haven't had their way yet."

Oh. So it's okay IF IT BENEFITS YOU, right? Block the fucking avatar and take a chill pill.

[Yo Brewster]

"LL is all we have as a 'federal government,' as weak and ridiculous as it is, to protect us from the depradations of voracious corporations. It's the last bastion of our privacy."

Privacy? Why would this search tool invade privacy? All this search tool does is display information that is already available to the public in world. True, you can rapidibly do a search BUT the point is that this data is and always has been available to the public. All The Electric Sheep did was made it more accessible to people.

Prokofy says:

"Ian, you seem oblivious to the fact that there are simply two schools of thought on this, immersionists and augmentationists."

I'm not at all oblivious to it, it's simply not relevant to the matter at hand. People were (and in some cases, still are) just as immersionist over MUDs and MOOs.

"Those who are trying to deconstruct somebody's world experience out of SL are just arrogant and cruel, trying to diminish and ridicule them so that they can maintain their power center."

No one is "deconstructing somebody's world experience": they're saying that your claims about the world are wrong. If someone's view of the world - virtual or otherwise - doesn't match reality and they persistently deny the facts, they're simply delusional.

"Virtual worlds aren't MUDS."

Which shows you know nothing about MUDs.

"Because the only way you get people to participate in the game-gods' world is if they have the emulation of private property."

And emulation is not reality. Your point is?

"The point is to say that a virtual world, like There, WoW or SL, is more important and more immersive and interactive for people than a webpage."

But the fact that it is *more* immersive and *more* interactive does not make it intrinsically qualitatively different, anymore than putting video on a web page makes it a television. And you saying "it just is" repeatedly - which is the sum contribution of your posts so far - isn't going to help forward the debate on this.