The Great Bot Hunt – part 2
by Alphaville Herald on 18/11/07 at 11:44 pm
Open season for Abuse Reports on bots hiding on Linden Land – landbot payback time?
LL deletes one account – waits for community reaction to 20 more still hidden in plain view
by Pixeleen Mistral, National Affairs desk
Bot stuck in the mud in Sansooyoo
I first noticed a strange pattern a couple months ago while racing sailboats through Linden water sims on the mainland. For some reason, there was a perceptible slowdown in regions that happened to have a single avatar located right in the middle of the sim. I also tended to crash more often on the sim crossings when the map showed a mysterious green dot in center of the sim. What was happening?
I spent some time investigating – and eventually discovered that someone is placing bots in Linden water sims – usually underwater and beneath the ground. Because I am a simple, trusting soul, I’m sure this is a totally innocent activity – there is nothing shady about placing a single bot beneath the ground on land that is owned by Governor Linden – then leaving it there for a month. I was also reassured that the bots are not physical and so cannot be bumped or pushed out of place. I felt even better when I found that the bots have no group memberships, do not answer to IMs or chat, and always re-spawn after the sim is restarted. Nothing fishy going on here!
Of course some cynical people would suggest that if you were planning to launder money or scan the land sales listings, you would do exactly this sort of thing – so that you would not attract attention. But that is crazy talk! Nobody would do something like that unless they were trying to make money.
bot hunters – look for a single avatar dead center in a quiet Linden water sim – like Nana
Still, I worried that a bot scanning like crazy was slowing down the database queries for the human players, and the unverified bot is not even paying tier. If all the human land owners are subsidizing this it hardly seems fair. Then I started noticing a lot of these single bots located at the center of Linden void sims.
Plexus Linden likes abuse reports
After weeks of looking for a Linden staffer in world, I eventually made contact with Plexus Linden on friday and dragged him by the hand to see these almost certainly benevolent bots — bots that improve our world and spread joy among the players – perhaps by land swooping anyone who messes up on the land sale price.
Plexus and I had a great time exploring the wonders of these zombie avatars, and he even logged one out, then deleted it when it re-appeared a few minutes later.
However, there are 20 more of these things loose in the world and Plexus explained to me that Lindens really really like the community to weigh in on these sorts of issues. The more abuse reports the better.
So – if you are are concerned about scanners swooping players’ land or money laundering you might want to spend some time hunting down the mystery bots that love Linden water sims and abuse report them. Sailors, boaters, pirates, and pilots who like water sims that are navigable might also want to abuse report the bots – or look forward to all Linden water sims filling with unverified mystery bots.
I’ll have some tips on how you can play the bot hunting game in part three of The Great Bot Hunt.
the single green dot in Nana is a bot – Wu Straaf
nimrod Yaffle
Nov 19th, 2007
LL would like the community to chime in? Where did anyone ever say the liked land bots swooping land? I haven’t seen that anywhere, quite the opposite actually. I have personally ARed at least 5 bots, and 2 bot owners.
2 owners of the top bots in SL are: Skye Whitcroft, and Elanthius Flagstaff. Their landbot group is named Ninjaland, such a clever name!
Another off bot (Not sure what he is up to) I have seen pop onto some parcels across the grid is “Jim Kayo,” he only stays in a sim for about 5 seconds until moving onto the next one.
Currently in the Banda sim is a bot named “RowdyRandy Petrov”
Him, and a lot of them, are in a hidden group with the title “Ruth” above them. Witty, eh?
Also I am seeing “Ich Bade” in Mirtoon under the ground.
And “Han Carter” in Aswan
Kyle Munro in Jergens
Reb Pera in Zolezzi
Jada Auer in Margery
These names were only from a quick (Less than 5 minute) scan of the grid. Just look at the void sims, if you see a person in the center, go look, 99% chance it is a bot.
This is ridiculous, and I am disgusted that LL has not taken any action to thwart this. Instead they state “we are not the police” (Torley quote from Linden answers…. remember that? The one place the actually talked to us at.). If they want us to police ourselves, give us the tools to ban these people from the grid.
Lets not even talk about the HOURLY grid attacks (replicating objects) that start in Murray and spread to surrounding sims!
nimrod Yaffle
Nov 19th, 2007
LL would like the community to chime in? Where did anyone ever say the liked land bots swooping land? I haven’t seen that anywhere, quite the opposite actually. I have personally ARed at least 5 bots, and 2 bot owners.
2 owners of the top bots in SL are: Skye Whitcroft, and Elanthius Flagstaff. Their landbot group is named Ninjaland, such a clever name!
Another off bot (Not sure what he is up to) I have seen pop onto some parcels across the grid is “Jim Kayo,” he only stays in a sim for about 5 seconds until moving onto the next one.
Currently in the Banda sim is a bot named “RowdyRandy Petrov”
Him, and a lot of them, are in a hidden group with the title “Ruth” above them. Witty, eh?
Also I am seeing “Ich Bade” in Mirtoon under the ground.
And “Han Carter” in Aswan
Kyle Munro in Jergens
Reb Pera in Zolezzi
Jada Auer in Margery
These names were only from a quick (Less than 5 minute) scan of the grid. Just look at the void sims, if you see a person in the center, go look, 99% chance it is a bot.
This is ridiculous, and I am disgusted that LL has not taken any action to thwart this. Instead they state “we are not the police” (Torley quote from Linden answers…. remember that? The one place the actually talked to us at.). If they want us to police ourselves, give us the tools to ban these people from the grid.
Lets not even talk about the HOURLY grid attacks (replicating objects) that start in Murray and spread to surrounding sims!
Bot hunting, December 23, 2011 | The Green Lanterns
Jan 2nd, 2012
[...] a 2007 series of articles in the Alphaville Herald called “The Great Bot Hunt,” part 1, part 2, and part 3. I went hunting and found some bots myself, but at that time I didn’t have a blog [...]