December 1, 2007 by Ciaran Laval
The new search. My big fear is spam. All the useful information is available to spammers, my name, my avatar key. Free accounts available. I play world of warcraft when I have time. If you post on the forums, you'll get spammed.
So why isn't this a problem with SL? Well with SL you need to sign in to the forums to use them, this makes it a pain for those who want to collate names and spam people, until now that is.
The new search provides all the information spammers need. Free accounts mean they can sign up and have no worries and most ridiculous of all, if you opt out of profile search, any information that spammers need is readily available, any information that residents need ... well that's not available.
You can't even get the IM tab up for an opted out profile, so what on earth is the point of opting out of profile search? It's useless if you have any business interests, it's useless to those whom who want to contact you, but it makes no difference to those who want to spam you.
Spam isn't an issue you can shut the stable door after, anyone who has worked with spam knows this. Yet LL make an opted out profile so utterly useless that it serves no purpose. You're only hiding your information from those whom you don't want to hide your information from.
So when our IM's are capped because of spam, when we're getting notecards galore from people who want to sell us L$, remember that LL were told about this. Even facebook allows you to opt out of having spiders trawl your profile and yet leaves your profile in a position to be useful to other facebook users. LL? They've created a situation whereby opting out of profile search is a lose lose situation.
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You make a good case.
You honestly do. I haven't really used the new search (yet) since I'm in between machines at the moment, but I think you make a valid point. Of course, at some level Linden Lab will start tracking IP addresses that are bulk emailing to their servers - but still... at what point is it considered bulk email?
A new Linden Lab service... spam filters? Second Postini? :-)
Second Life Consultant
Spam was very easy before,
Spam was very easy before, the new search doesn't change things that much. Running a sandbox we get a few clowns every day that drop spam prims, or come in shouting.
Additionally, I hate to say it, I have created what could be used as a spam server, type up a list of avatars, no keys needed, and ever 2 seconds depending on the model it will either send an IM, Notecard, or Object. I will have the image on shortly. This isn't high level scripting, it was pretty easy actually.
Lets take this farther, I could easily build a hud that would record the keys and/or names of everyone around me in 96m. I simply hit the top 20 locations in SL, how many keys would i get in a day? a few thousand? Even farther over the top, I use libSecondLife, and simply get the information directly from the DB, legally. I setup 20 in world items that IM everyone in the db, with a 3 second delay between IMs, everything done is with in the term of service.
Spam is a problem when ever you have communications, you need tools in place to prevent it. This is true of email, IM, postal service, sms, telephone, the little hangers that you find on your door ... it goes on.
All of that being said, LL needs to step up and start putting things in place before it happens, not after it happens, letting it linger for 6 months on the JIRA.
I agree with you about the opt out of search not only profile but parcel and sim level also. The defaults should always be to the most secure and private, not the least secure and public
Arthur Fermi
Fermi Sandbox & University
www.fermidesigns.com