SecondLife and Spam On The Web
Submitted by Taran on Thu, 05/31/2007 - 02:26
I've been connecting the internet (through Drupal) and SecondLife in quite a few different ways. Most of these connections are not public yet (keep an eye on Your2ndPlace.com), mainly because there is a lot of beta testing involved and underway.
One thing I found - while using Drupal's Troll module and using the Linden Scripting Language's llHTTPRequest - was that at least some of Linden Lab's simulator server IP addresses are... blacklisted. Which blacklist? I'm not sure, I didn't dig too deep - but it struck me: What a brilliant way to spam people using Linden Lab servers for almost nothing.
One 16 m2 plot could have 3 objects with email addresses in notecards, just firing out spam emails (and perhaps lagging the sim). Or posting spam comments on websites, or any manner of strange things. There are no rules against it - and the rules for spam are a big point of contention on an international level. Most people accept spam as a part of life, but if you asked a lot of people whether they would like to get rid of it - the answer would be 'yes'.
So here's one for internet governance - how does a virtual world figure into internet governance in the 'traditional' sense - with things like spam? Of course, WSIS was as effective as intellectual onanism.
The truth of the matter is anyone with even a 16 m2 piece of land within SecondLife is getting server time and space - never mind that it looks three dimensional, it is the same as regular web hosting with one big difference: The amount of virtual land you have does not affect how much of the server's script resources you can use. Counterintuitive, I know, but there it is.
And if someone uses Linden Lab servers in such a way - and it becomes or is illegal in certain parts of the world - where does Linden Lab stand in a legal context?
Interesting thing to consider. Once again, policy lags technology - and the internet? Increasingly so.
llHTTPRequest and llEmail
I think you should dig deeper into llHTTPRequest and llEmail.
They both have spam-protections functions built in.
llHTTPRequest is throttle controlled. But anyway I don't quite see how you can spam with llHTTPRequest. But even then, the requests are throttled, so no good for 'spam'. See Wiki for details.
llEmail has a built in sleep function. Means you can send one email to one recipient every 20 seconds. Feel free to spam. You can send 4320 emails in 24 hours. I doubt it's worth the effort with such numbers and you'll most likely be picked by LL and it will be a violation of the ToS.
You can't spam with llHttpRequest...
or you shouldn't be able to. BUT - why are those servers blacklisted then?
And let's be frank - 1 email every 20 seconds is 180 emails an hour. That's 4,320 emails per OBJECT.
So if you have more objects...
I think you should dig deeper, too - because we both don't know why Linden Lab servers are appearing in published blacklists. ;-) Spam protections? Nah. Throttles. Not Spam protections. Get it right.
Now, why was it you missed XML-RPC? :-)
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