Huns Valen

[#SVC-1496] Parcels containing active scripts with llTeleportAgentHome() and/or llEjectFromLand() (with right permissions) can be detected & show up on the map. - Second Life Issues (BETA)

Most people who don't want interlopers on their property are kind enough to put up hideous ban lines, but there are a few who use ejection scripts that wait for you to cross over onto their parcel before booting you out or sending you home. This turns the skies, roadways, and rivers of SL into a virtual minefield. It is the bane of all vehicle enthusiasts and makes casual exploration a TOTAL DRAG. Over the years, we've tried to get people to put DELAYS on these irritating scripts, but there are still plenty of them out there that don't wait at all.

Conditions:
(Script contains llEjectFromLand() OR Script contains llTeleportAgentHome) AND Script has permission to actually eject or teleport

When this happens, SL presents the following ways to find out about it:
* LSL call to determine whether parcel meets the criteria
* Parcel shows up in a different color on the minimap, if user has toggled the option on their client (might be good to default this to ON)
* Something like ban lines, hopefully really obvious from a great distance if you are moving fast enough

This would make it MUCH more feasible to explore - especially in vehicles, where getting ejected can mean you have to relog.

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Nimrod Yaffle

I believe a Linden (Cory?) stated that to be within the CS you need to have at least a 10 second warning or it's ARable.

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Huns Valen

It would be nice if that had an effect on what people did, but what I'm seeing is that people either don't know or don't care. Giving us a way to know about these shitty things ahead of time is a good way for us to protect ourselves.

Aaron Edelweiss

An option to color a parcel on the minimap instead of seeing ban lines in world would be wonderful. I think the way to go about enforcing the delay, would be to flag an avatar with the time of entry into the parcel, then the calls to eject and teleport home would check that time of entry in the background, and silently fail if the person hasn't been there long enough, say 10 seconds. It should be possible without much effort. If they can do autoreturn based on a similar flag on objects.

Ben Hoark

Yep, I agree, but 10 seconds is far too short. A lot of the existing 'land protectors' use 10 seconds, and by the time you've had a chance to react and attempted (Second Life lag allowing!!!) to get out...it's too late, and you are teleported back home.

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Ned Easterwood

I just ran into this for the first time the other day. (OK, I don't get out much - Brig keeps telling me that. )
Bear and I were in his balloon. We crossed into a sim where I started getting warning notices. I tried to tp home but got a tp failure and got logged out.
More than 10 seconds of warning sure sounds good to me.

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Ned

Lucifer Baphomet

I utterly despise that teleport home.
I preferred when people woild put a gentle push (not the whack you acros 3 sims push too many used) back in the old days.
At least you didn't have to start your journey all over again.

Cruise Swain

Well theres your problem.. sitting in a balloon with a bear is asking for problems.

*cough*

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BEARintheMorning

Hey, you stick to providing awesome stream/web/chat hosting and leave the comedy to the professional morning radio hosts okay pal?



Seriously though. I support this proposal. Being able to navigate dangerous areas with the assistance of a colour coded mini-map for both access denied/scripted security parcels would go a long way to enhance ANY SL explorer's life.

It gets tiresome getting zapped home with all but the 30 prim base of a sailing vessel or other vehicle attached to me.

I was a little discouraged when I got to the JIRA last night and saw that I was the first vote. Come on people, do some left clicking here! This effects EVERYBODY that likes to travel and explore SL!

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You know you're addicted to drag racing when:

During the winter, you roll the windows down just to smell the tire smoke from skidding tires.

Malachi

Remember, at present, these are folks who can't operate a forum or their phones well or make a release that doesn't need to be revoked in an hour because of a bad build. Everything is much effort.

Travis Lambert

I can't think of any way this feature could be abused - and if it helps explorers, fantastic.

As far as the feature itself - there's a lot of folks who utilize llTeleportHome and llEjectFromLand for blacklist scripts. Unless you're on that parcel's blacklist, it wouldn't affect you or your vehicle. Its whitelist systems (eject everyone but allowed individuals) that are the big navigation problem. Unfortunately, I dont see an easy way to differentiate the two.

This means that you're probably going to detect more 'script danger' than you really need to be concerned about, and possibly have to navigate around more parcels than neccesary.

Other than that, I can't see a problem with the idea

Verkin Raven

I had long ago given up traveling the grid by anything but a slow moving boat restricted to the Linden strait property... and even then I'd get tagged by people's asshole security orbs. What's sad is that in most cases I don't even need unrestricted camera movement to see entirely inside these people's houses. I mean hey, if I'm gonna get booted off of public property I'd like to know why... and it's never a good reason, it's usually a bunch of shitty poseballs and crummy freebie porn on the walls. Yawn.

Anyway, I support this.

We made a little map device that probably isn't the best solution to this problem, but at least it's something that kinda works now... it's a little HUD map that draws out the evilness of the parcels in the sim when it autodetects a sim crossing. It has some 240-ish blocks which it uses to color code the parcels in a map, and also graphically differentiates between water and land.

I can hand out free copies if anybody wants it. I can't stress "may not be practical" enough. It sometimes doesn't work on sim crossing if the new parcel has scripts shut off, and sometimes it doesn't draw anyway. It's for this reason I'd never charge money for it, but I didn't want to publicly offer it as a freebie anyway because a good deal of people in SL scream bloody murder if an experimental freebie doesn't work sometimes. o.o

Huns Valen

An acceptable loss if it means there's one less way for me to get hosed when I'm flying around!

BEARintheMorning

Travis Lambert

Perhaps. But all you're seeing today are the whitelist-ejection systems when you travel. Just about every venue in Second Life has some sort of security system that at least uses llEjectFromLand. I understand it still might be an acceptable loss, but I think we may be underestimating just how widespread blacklist systems are in use.

Makes no difference to me - but (and this is an extreme hypothetical) if you had to route around every 3rd parcel just because you've detected some sort of script danger that may or may not affect you - that will also make travelling difficult.

Again - I am supportive of the idea, if it helps travellers. I'm just not sure how useful it will really be in practice.

IMHO - the real problem is residents perceived need for privacy. If whitelist systems were made unneccesary because people could get their privacy another, more effective way, I'd bet that 95% of the travel issues surrounding ejection scripts would evaporate.

Lee Linden made a statement in the forums here, about *what he'd like to see* in an ideal security system, and that he'd gladly reccomend systems that function this way. Strangely, that post has been deleted, but its quoted here.

Never did he say that without a script warning, its against the TOS/CS. This is because policy on this is not one-size-fits-all.

Delays & warnings prior to ejection make perfect sense for whitelist systems, where they're passively ejecting anyone who comes within range. For blacklist systems, however - manditory delays and warnings are completely undesirable. If someone is creating a major disruption, you want them gone immediately - not in 10+ seconds.

Cocoanut Koala

I despise it, too, as the arrogant and overkill thing it is.

Imagine the arrogance of someone ELSE deciding when I am going to go home.

coco

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Daisy Rimbaud

Well - I can see the other side of it. If you have a private area where you do not want people meddling even for 10 seconds, then TeleportHome is the only secure way of getting rid of a dedicated interloper.

I appreciate it's annoying for the casual explorer (which includes me sometimes) but the intended targets are people determined to get into a place where they should not be.

Travis Lambert

[devilsadvocate]

Imagine the arrogance of someone ELSE deciding they can do whatever they wish on the parcel I pay tier for.

[/devilsadvocate]

And therein lies the foundation of the philosophical debate over who's rights should trump whom: Rights of the landowner vs. the rights of the explorer. Both often argue that their respective rights are infinite, when they're probably anything but.

Cocoanut Koala

OK, let's say someone else is arrogant for wanting to come on land when the person doesn't want them to.

(As opposed to someone just happening by, or travelling through.)

Why is it necessary to send them home?

Aren't there other methods - ban lines, things that simply push you over a bit, and ban lists?

Where and how is it possibly necessary to actually send someone home?

Not to mention, why it's necessary to send everyone home who simply happened onto your property when traveling, in addition to the 1.5 people who are supposedly determined to enter your particular property?

Seems to me putting people OUT of your property is one thing, or keeping them out. But sending them home is just overkill.

coco

Travis Lambert

Here's my personal take on it:

Teleport Home in 99.9% of cases is completely unneccesary on the mainland (unless its part of some sort of consensual roleplay context), because banlines extend to the max build height. On Private Islands, its a different matter, because there's nowhere to eject them to. The only way I'm aware of to remove an avatar from a private island is to teleport them home.

Overall, I think overuse of privacy systems, access lists, or whitelists are a symptom of a bigger problem, which is either a marketing or a technical one, depending on how you look at it:

Linden teases folks by marketing the ability to 'Own' virtual land. Ownership (in western culture, at least) implies control - of which privacy is a natural expectation. SecondLife offers extremely limited privacy controls - so folks end up attempting to compensate by using scripted privacy devices, or throwing up access control banlines.

Solve the privacy problem somehow, and there will be nothing to compensate for. Or else, stop marketing that folks get to 'Own' virtual land here, so folks don't expect that level of control in the first place.

Aaron Edelweiss

you know...

I have an interesting idea. Sort of related to object muting. What if there were list of three options on objects: "public and private", "public only", "private only".

Something set to public and private (the default, is visible to everyone as normal.

Something marked public only is visible to people not allowed on the parcel. It would be hidden from anyone with permission to enter the parcel.

Something marked private only is visible to people allowed on the parcel. They would be hidden from anyone not allowed on the parcel.

A complimentary change would have to be added, so you can only see avatars on a parcel if you have permission to enter the parcel.

So what you end up with, is a way to make a public and private appearance for your property.

Not only would it allow privacy, but it would help cleanup the landscape, reduce rendering load, and render camera hacking useless, since things just aren't rendered. Ideally things a user shouldn't see wouldn't even be sent to them, which would even reduce network load. It wont fix all crappy builds of course if the owner wants you to see them, but you wouldn't have to see the neighbors porn collection anymore.

It would be completely backwards compatible, requiring very little additional overhead as far as prim definitions.

This wouldn't solve the appearance of ban lines, but If LL won't release a client that colors the mini-map instead of putting ban-lines in world, then I'm sure a 3rd party will.

You could have a house that to everyone not allowed on the parcel, would look like a park with just a few public only trees here and there. Or, if you like your house, you could set the structure to public and private, and everything in it to private only. People could of course still cam through it and admire your house, but they can't see anything you have in it, or even that anyone's home.

Psyke Phaeton

This topic is quite large and complex.

But I will skip to the main point. Why are scripts needed for security?

• When a person needs to protect an area between certain heights rather than between certain land areas.
• When red ban lines are considered ugly and visually intusive
• When red ban lines stop fast fly through traffic as well as intruders and squatters but fly through traffic is OK.
• On island sims when Eject is insufficient and TP Home is needed because there is no where to Eject them to.

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Clancy Sullivan

On these high tech matters, I always wait for Psyke Phaeton to comment before making any decisions. And, then I still do absolutely nothing.

Cocoanut Koala

Well, I'm talking about the "send you all the way home" scripts.

The Island reason, which Travis also mentioned, sounds like a good one.

The certain heights deal - really? You can only do go home or nothing? In that case, I suppose that is fine as well. But not if you can just nudge them over some.

I agree ban lines are ugly and visually intrusive, but again - you can get one of those things that pushes gently, can't you?

As for the fly-through traffic is okay reason, well that sounds magnanimous and all, but I would rather, personally, not be able to fly through than be warned I was going to be teleported home. (And then be teleported there, if I couldn't get my ass moving fast enough.)

And again, why all the way home?

So only the Island one gets my complete understanding.

*****

[Warning: Below, there be long Cocoramblings.]

What's funny is just last night I was wishing myself I could - not transport someone home off my property; no, that would be too GOOD for them! - but blast them to smithereens, grind their smithereens into the dirt, and then spit on them, or perhaps take a du . . . no, I won't go there.

"But Coco, tell us how you REALLY feel!"

It's funny because I'm the type who never minds anybody coming into anything, ever; and who generally likes to have conversations with anyone about anything, in whatever conversational style that person has, however offbeat it may be.

Long on patience, in other words. (A trait that gets a person an eclectic lot of very interesting and dear friends!)

But that doesn't mean I'm unacquainted with the sheer fury that a stranger on one's land can cause! I can think of twice that has happened.

(1) One time was on my lot in Azure Islands, where I came home to find that one of my roomies (who I didn't even want as a roomie, but was a friend of another roomie, Newf, who was my oldest friend from TSO) was entertaining a couple of guys on the lawn.

So I swoop in with some kind of funny comment about a horrible glitch SL had been doing to me, insisting on landing me somewhere over the bridge, rather than at my house (which is why I had to fly in), whereupon this guy standing there says, "Well if you don't like SL, why don't you quit the game."

GRRRRRRRR.

I was ALREADY aggravated about the SL glitch mind you, and here's this guy I don't even know talking to me like this on my own land! WOAH talk about seeing red. I actually MOVED MY AVATAR INTO HIS FACE - for some reason, I felt a physical need to do that - and gave him a piece of my mind, suggesting that if he wanted to tell me what to do, perhaps I would tell HIM to GET OFF MY LAND.

Hehe. He mumbled something, embarassed cause he didn't realize it was my house, and made a quick exit.

(The roomie in question I eventually got rid of, as she had a habit of entertaining men on the lawn, usually topless. Her, not the men.)

(2) Last night was the second time. Something weird was going on in Rosieri, where my shop is. I was working in my workshop, when suddenly there was this guy in a sort of flashing blue ball bouncing past me, at the same time that I was getting inexplicable weapon-sounding items from an "unknown sender" offered to me.

I sat down, and used my camera and the map to make sure no one was going to be attacked on my shop, and clicked off scripts, which had been on to allow a friend to do some funny stuff a couple of nights ago.

Once that was secure - no sign of the blue ball guy and the lone customer in the shop still strolling leisurely - I stood up again, and flew over to my little house I keep across the road on the same sim for the purposes of changing clothes or (as in this case) mentally regrouping.

What do I find in THAT little lot but the same blue ball guy, plus some girl. Now this lot is quite small, with just one of my 'Lil Cottages on it, plus just a whole bunch of white flowering apple trees, a swing, etc., surrounded by a fence. So what the heck are they doing in THAT.

I land. The blue ball guy bounces a bit then bounces off, leaving the girl. I walk up to her. "Hello," I say. (Which is my colder version of my usual "Hiya.")

She says nothing. NOTHING. I just stand in front of her, wishing I could kill her, beat her up, slap her silly. How DARE this bitch stand in MY little land, MY little home, and then not answer my hello! (In addition, of course, to her suspect connection to the flashing blue ball guy, and the suspicious inventory offerings, which already had me on edge.)

Anyway, it was like that time at Azure Islands. Suddenly, one is seeing absolute red.

Well the girl continues to say nothing, and I continue to stand in front of her, marveling at my own sudden fury, for a minute or so, then she poofed.

All that just to say, even I know how it feels to feel personally invaded over some SL real estate.

coco

Daisy Rimbaud

Because there is no LSL call "llTeleportAgentTwoSimsAway".