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Search Errors with Magic Books
Platform decay came for the Magic Book, but, fortunately I found some wet wipes.
The Magic Books searched for information and cover images from two sources: Open Library (part of the non-profit Internet Archive) and what I described as a "private non-commercial source," which was really some old credentials I had for some university library systems as a result of work for them I did years ago.
Back when I created the Magic Book (2017!), the Open Library's search results weren't all that great for a general purpose tool, so I asked the folks at the university system if I could use my login to supplement it. They said it would be fine as long as I wasn't reselling content or serving the content of any works, just conducting searches and occasionally grabbing a (fair use) cover image. Oh, and the traffic couldn't get out of hand. (The traffic never got out of hand: they never even noticed.)
However, academia is kind of like everything else—largely at the mercy of Big Tech—and a series of retirements, redundancies, and administrative reshufflings meant my credentials to access those systems were terminated at some point in late May 2026.
So: I've rejiggered the Magic Book so that it now relies solely on Open Library for search and cover images. Ironically, this makes the back end simpler. Open Library has come a long way since 2017 and it's now much more functional as a general purpose tool.
However, Open Library is not without its own conflicts and controversies, and—of course—if Big Tech has their way public libraries of any sort will be eliminated. So I can't guarantee this is a permanent or long-term solution, but it should work for a while.
As for the completeness of Open Library's data and search accuracy, ISBN searches remain pretty functional in most cases. Searching for titles remains…uh, I'll go with whimsical.
Bonnie I Hardly Knew Ye
Parts of Second Life have been in a mild tizzy this month because the operator of the well-known Bonnie bots has apparently been banned from Second Life by Linden Lab. When Linden Lab terminates an account, they typically also terminate any "alt" accounts they can associate with it. In this case, it means the eleven Bonnie bots that roamed around the grid also seem to be banned from Second Life, and the last time I spotted a Bonniebelle bot running around the grid was 15 Apr 2026.
I've occasionally interacted with the Bonnie operator and team: the operator once characterised me as the "roaming bot random encounter" of SL, meaning that if you run a bot that roams around the Second Life grid, I'll eventually turn up in your IMs. Some truth in that! We spoke a several times about Bonnie features, Second Life oddities and events, and I exchanged several ideas with one member of the team who has a particular interest in mapping because, funny enough, I also have a particular interest in mapping.
How it started
I first spotted the Bonnie bots back in 2020, but they started roaming the Second Life grid consistently in July 2022. Collectively, the Bonnie bots team (they had a principal "operator" but several people were involved in different aspects of the project) worked with some data Linden Lab makes available to, literally, anyone. Initial efforts included looking at real-time avatar traffic on regions. Why? Because Second Life is primarily a social platform, and Linden Lab itself did not (and still does not) make it easy for users unfamiliar with the virtual world to find, you know, real people. So it's very easy to be curious about Second Life, create an account, log in…and find nothing but a ghost town. There are people inworld—some of them are even cool!—but finding them without knowledge or a guide can be difficult.
The Bonnies also branched out: for instance, they had a fun grid-wide map on their site where you could see the bots pop around in real time. The bots collected statistics on avatar attachments (clothes, hair, etc.) so it was possible to see what items and brands were widely used, if you care about that sort of thing. (I don't.) The project also began generating terrain maps of Second Life regions, tracked land offered for sale or for auction, along with large estates and abandoned land. (Those aren't in chronological order; bear with me.) Most controversially, the project scraped some sales data off Second Life's Marketplace (including projecting what of the some top brands might be earning), and offered an "avatar search" feature based on data Linden Lab exposes to the public Internet.
I was nonplussed at the Bonnies implementation of identifying locations with real people. Since I track bots and lets-call-them "bot-like" avatars, I could look at the Bonnies' list of poppin' locales and recognise a number where the reported "legitimate" traffic was strongly related to inworld games like Bloodlines and Tiny Empires, along with traffic generators like Voodoo, Lindo, and similar. It's not that those things can't be social—they certainly are for some people. All I'm saying is finding some pixel vampire on a sky platform bringing 1500+ accounts online to "feed" on is not everyone's idea of a good time. (And if you think I'm making that up, I am not.) I thought about offering to help the Bonnies with that, but I didn't see a good privacy-preserving way to do it. (Short version: the data I collect are non-real-time and anonymised before I ever see them; to help, I'd probably have to work with reasonably live, un-anonymised information.)
At any rate: as Bonnie features debuted, I personally didn't think much about them because I was fully aware Linden Lab made quite a lot of this information available to the entire internet, and all of it available to any Second Life resident. It continues to be available to this day. I cannot speculate why, but the practical truth is that it is available to anyone at any time. I know firsthand several other parties have collected and analysed the same data for ages, and I do not imagine I am aware of all such cases. The technical barrier to entry is pretty low.
But this was not well-known to portions of the Second Life community, and, honestly, it probably still is not. I think that's why the Bonnie project pulled it all together and pushed it out there for the world to see. Plainly, they thought enough of the Second Life platform enough to try to address some its glaring shortcomings—perhaps including the considerable information Second Life "leaks" to the universe. My sense is that they wanted to do something useful, as well as raise awareness and maybe start a discussion.
OMG the Bonnies are evil!
Of course, things popped off. By the beginning of 2023 (it took six months, but hey, you know, people are busy), some members of the Second Life community began whipping up a bruhaha on the official Second Life forums over the Bonnies, particularly the Marketplace scraping and Avatar Search features. Others equated the eleven roaming Bonnie bots to a spy network, convincing themselves Bonnies were stalking them, invading their privacy, and somehow stealing their personal information. Some people created fake Bonnie avatars to gin up paranoia and lulz.
The Lindens eventually shut down the squawl on the forums (which generated more squawl), and Patch Linden (Vice President of Product Operations for Linden Lab) and perhaps other Lindens met with the Bonnie bots operator and other members of the group. As a result, the Bonnie' Avatar Search and Marketplace scraping features were removed from the Bonnie service. Linden Lab also updated its Bot Policy, introduced new capabilities to enable estate owners to ban self-identified scripted agents (then promptly enabled that feature in Second Life's Premium-only communities in Belleseria), and let Second Life scripts identify those same self-identified scripted agents.
Fun fact: with the new policies, the Bonnie bots operating inworld didn't have to make any changes because they were already compliant, and always had been. (Same for Loubottin, the bot I operate.) This was not true for all bot groups. Some who did not identify as scripted agents continued to operate as they had before the new policies were announced. Eventually those groups went offline for a while—maybe the Lindens gave then some vacation time, I don't know—and later came back with their scripted agent flags set. At any rate: they were not banned, and they continue to roam the Second Life grid as I type this.
The Bonnies kept going. In mid-2023 Linden Lab introduced no-fee uploads its top membership tier. Some months later, the Bonnie team leveraged this and began offering text-to-audio and text-to-texture services anyone could use—send it some text, the service would give you a UUID to an audio or texture asset with that text you could use inworld. Another fun fact: the Bonnie team asked Linden Lab whether they could provide these services before they were unveiled. Second Life viewers are famously inaccessible to the visually- and hearing-impaired, and features like that could be very useful for those communities—although I'm sure most actual uses were pretty inane (because it's SL, right?). The Bonnies were told the features were OK, but that might change in the future. Some time later (I want to say late 2024?), Linden Lab asked the Bonnies to stop offering the text-to-audio and text-to-texture services unless they could be restricted to premium (meaning paid) Second Life accounts.
The Bonnie crew complied by taking the services offline, but they probably could have just taken the service under the radar if they'd wanted. I am aware, firsthand, of several other instances where residents are arguably abusing no-fee uploading available on Premium Plus accounts, primarily to upload copyrighted music and audio recordings. (Totally legal, I'm sure.) In two cases I am aware of, they have exposed that capability via an API endpoint, available to anyone, and continue to operate right now as I type.
Anyway: so far as I know, the Bonnie universe was pretty quiet from that point forward. I know at some point the Bonnie team gave up private regions they maintained inworld. It's worth noting that some of the Bonnie capabilities were exposed via APIs programmers can use (region and parcel information, popular regions, attachment reports, etc.), and were integrated into several Second Life products and at least one viewer project. So the demise of the Bonnie bots means those services are now effectively abandoned.
Why the ban?
Given the "outcry" in 2023, it's tempting to say the Bonnies' operator was banned because of the Bonnies' activity or data published on their website. I don't know, but it's 2026 and I've seen no evidence to support that conclusion. To my knowledge, the Bonnies hadn't significantly changed their operation in some time; no new capabilities had been added, and I didn't see changes to the Bonnies' behaviour on the grid. Just in case it wasn't obvious, I do watch roaming bots: all I can really say is that it seems unlikely the Bonnie bots themselves (or their activity) would be the cause of a ban.
Did the Bonnie group do other things? Yes. One of them is the experimental PyroKitty viewer, which seems ambitious but in very early stages. It's built on things I think smell bad—Node, Electron, blah blah blah—so I have no opinion. The only viewer-related discussions I had with the Bonnie folks involved LEAP, a capability for processes to send and receive data from the SL Viewer. There's been some speculation PyroKitty was the reason for the account ban, perhaps for skirting SL's permission system. I don't know if it did that, but plenty of other experimental viewers sidestep SL's permissions system and their creators turn up inworld every day.
But: who knows? Anyone who creates a Second Life account agrees to terms that include "Linden Lab may suspend or terminate your Account at any time for any reason." Second Life is their platform; they can run it however they like, and that includes capriciously. Historically, Linden Lab does not explain or discuss bans: the banned acount receives a generic message citing a variety of clauses incorporated in Second Life's Terms and Conditions. Linden Lab gives no specific reason for a ban, and there is no appeal.