W-Hats Bring Down the Grid. We Told You and Told You and Told You, While Lindens Bent Over and Said “Fuck Me Harder Bad Boys!”
by Alphaville Herald on 25/10/05 at 9:45 am
Photo from Websnake Nightshade forum post
It hardly comes as a surprise – it comes more as a prediction fulfilled – that members of the W-Hats are responsible bringing down the entire grid by use of a griefing tool that spawned massive numbers of balls with racist and other images on them.
Of course what we want to know is how long the Linden’s intend to put up with this. We know what will happen next: The W-Hat leaders will come on with their Eddie Haskel impressions, saying stuff like “Gee Philip, what a lovely dress you are wearing,” and Philip will blush and say “thank you boys, would you like some milk and cookies? It is really *awful* about those few bad eggs in your organization.”
But you know, Phil baby, as much as you like bending over and taking it like the jailhouse bitch you apparently are, the rest of us have fucking had it. So like if you thought is was cute when they wrote a hack that allowed then to view protected scripts or when they got busted for the building giant swastikas and penises, or when they engaged in the griefing and virtual extortion of Anshe Chung, or when they engaged in griefing of other users in SL, or when they built their Pope assassination joke build, or their Twin Tower joke build, or their murdered hooker bloodbath, etc. etc. etc., the rest of us are Not Amused. So please pull the dress down over your ever so willing derriere and do something about this. For us.
According to Websnake Nightshade, reporting in the forums, here are the particulars.
Griefer Item Name: GriefSpawn RC3 redo (Redux? I saw redo..)
Texture/Shape: Gman Face (Reports of other images as well, including stereotypical racist images), .25 m sphere
Contains the scripts: Rezzer (no copy) (no modify) (no transfer), Particles (no copy) (no modify) (no transfer)
Contains the objects: GriefSpawn RC3 redo (Redux?) (no copy) (no modify) (no transfer)
Contains the texture: Drumstick (no copy) (no modify) (no transfer)
Walker Spaight
Oct 25th, 2005
Oh, they’ve taken care of things, all right. They’ve taken away the ability of objects to give anything at all to other objects, except on land you personally own (i.e., not group-owned land). This wrecks some of the coolest scripts in SL, however. But I guess that’s when you get when you rely on your code not only to be the law but to enforce it.
Antje
Oct 25th, 2005
This is stupidity by LL at it’s finest.
For some reason when the SA Goons first showed up in SL LL had no problem doling out liberal bans to this mal-adjusted kiddies.
Then they re-invented themselves in a really OBVIOUS PR move as W-Hat.
Ever since then, LL has allowed them to basically trounce all over the ToS.
Why the fuck does LL seem to be afraid of these assholes?
Just because some of their leaders are self-ascribed post-modernists, and trot out Derrida from time to time doesn’t mean they add one ounce of value to SL on the whole.
Most of them obviously have RL issue. Maladjusted, attention deficit teens whose parents didn’t or don’t pay attention to them.
I will tell you what it is with these punks. They cannot stand to see people get on the net and socialize AND ENJOY it without feeling ashamed.
If any of you twerps are reading this- get it through your heads- you’ll not make the rest of us ashamed. The shame you bear is your own, quit projecting it on the rest of us.
And now people are losing sales in-world because LL has decided to kill o2o. What a crock of shit.
A Teen
Oct 25th, 2005
Hey, watch your asociations. There is not a single teen anywhere in the TG that is even close to the level of these assholes. You’d get banned way before this on the TG, and you’d stay banned. I don’t know why LL is so light on the MG, but here they aren’t. So, don’t call a these guys ‘Teens’ when you obviously have no idea what the teens are like.
Oh, and I do know that I’m breaking the law even being here. But, you guys have the best news anywhere.
Antje
Oct 25th, 2005
I didn’t say all teens. You’re being a little bit sensitive there. It’s not “the teens”, it’s “those teens”. There is a difference. You have to understand, some of these folks have been caught underage on the main grid.
And I laid the blame on their parents. Hell maybe some of them are lazy net addicts in their 20s, and mom and dad haven’t found the spine to tell them to get out of the nest yet, there seems to be a lot of that going around.
I have teens of my own, as well as nieces and nephews who are just as good of kids as you probably are.
Prokofy Neva
Oct 25th, 2005
Walker, I’m so glad you highlighted this problem of the Linden propensity to “rely on code not only to be the law but to enforce it.” This was *exactly* their problem in wilting under pressure about removing the bounced script functions “teleport home” etc — when what they needed was a desk policy banning *the use* of such scripts without warning and the teleportation all the way home, such that that *function* could then still remain for those who legitimately used it for elevators, weapons, etc.
This over-reliance on coding to do the job of parliaments and courts really, really freaks me seriously — because they end up not enforcing their own TOS, being too lax in early-warning kind of stuff they could be dealing with like punishing and removing the racist and homophobic statements when they appear ingame and on the forums, and then just removing object-to-object as the solution to grid-crashing — that curious combination of excessive lenience and excessive force that comes from weak governments trying to stay in power.
See my blog today, “The Anti-Nuremberg Defense and the Nuremberg Response” about group liability and guilt-by-association at http://secondthoughts.typepad.com
I’m wondering if the Herald is in fact calling for the group W-HAT as a group, and all its known members and even sympathizers or spin-off groups, to be forcibly disbanded/ejected from SL. I see “Something Awful” is now misisng from the group list, that may only be because its members got banned and booted so their group fell apart without the necessary 3 members.
urizenus
Oct 25th, 2005
Agree about the “Code instead of law” strategy that the Linden’s are deploying here. This is precisely the mistake that TSO made — they didn’t want to control the behavior of people, so they adopted the policy of changing the code in the game to make the bad behavior impossible, but in so doing they nerfed the game into irrelevance.
If this continues — nerfing the game mechanics instead of finding strategies for dealing with what are fundamentally behavioral problems — Second Life is doomed.
And no, the Herald isn’t calling for mass bannings — Your editor is calling for the Lindens to hold the W-Hat leaders accountable, and to work with them on keeping the minors out of the adult grid. Failing everyting else, the problem could be solved simply by establishing a LL presence inside the group. Not hard to do. Maxis, as I recently learned, had infiltrated the SSG and was privy to all their communications. Can’t we do the same with the Hats?
Prokofy Neva
Oct 25th, 2005
I don’t think calling for mass bannings or group liability is the answer for the federal government, no. It is too easily abused. However, I’m not going to call for the federal government to put informers into civic groups, either, Uri! Geez, did the McCarthy and Vietnam war eras teach you nothing?! If they put an informant into W-HAT, why stop there? Why not in all groups? Heck, it’s bad enough that we have *visible* Lindens in various groups like educational groups, art groups, SLTV, etc. where I believe they have no business being as government agents — that creates the whole endorsement and FIC problem. So I don’t want them in as secret-sharers, either.
No, I think the civic response here is for individuals and groups themselves to say: we do not want W-HAT in our groups, events, or land. I personally called for ejecting the known W-Hatters from MJW (they actually had already left), and land-bans (I banned them from land where they were already documented as griefing or leeching.) I think if you’re going to call on Philip Linden so graphically not to be a jailhouse bitch and not spread his cheeks for known criminals, then you really have to ask the society at large to say, you know, we’re not going to let all our hippie radical leftist liberal ethics that we have as tekkie wikis here get in the way of “boot-ban-eject”.
I always thought eject/boot/ban was a much better way to deal with the SSG, too. And with the SSG in TSO, for the solution was 1) end the ban on discussing groups and individuals critically in the forums — LL suffers from that problem too; 2) let each individual lot take a stand that they refuse to be “shadowized” and glove/ban/etc SSG operatives; 3) fight them with a partisan movement — I as a partisan movement infilatrated some of their lots with alts to gather intel and I think partisan activity is a good idea — I’m all for the Herald creating an alt and getting into the W-HAT scene now and reporting the hell out of it later.
BTW, I continue to be horribly hurt that you’re never interviewed me about the SSG and TSO for your book. But I’ll just fix your wagon and do my own book some day lol. There are two stories I could tell that would blow some of your main theses out of the water. Ah, well.
Prokofy Neva
Oct 25th, 2005
BTW just for the annals let me state the 2 things EA nerfed on TSO that made it a namby-pamby game: 1) removing gloving except by consense, which takes the whole point out of it 2) making all-powerful lot leaders who then had the power to give build privileges to roomies. LL has done the same thing, even worse, with negrating by removing it completely — they could have had a policy that mass negrating or neg rating posses or neging on all alts was an actionable offense, but left the individual singleton use of negrating because it is so well-deserved and so useful to have in the overwhelming majority of cases.
So now they face the issue of whether they’ll make an all-powerful group leader who can fire the other officers or dish out build privileges a la TSO. I look at this and I cringe. I was among those arguing with Will Wright at the time that making these all-powerful lot leaders would turn all the lots into mini-fiefdoms with no more true collaboration. I thought it was a lot more important to let the game dynamics alone and let people build up their own systems of trust so they never had roomies that would tile up their entire lot with a FUCK YOU LIGHTBULB kind of thing like I used to get all the time from SSG infiltrators (which I allowed deliberately to infiltrate in order to watch them.)
While I don’t want all this hippie crap with the group tools spreading money — and criminal capacity to steal land — equally, I’m just trying to think of how not to create more mini-tyrants than we already have in SL. I think probably I’ll err on the side of having the all-powerful founder who can toggle all the perms for everybody else in the group and hope that some groups get formed where the founder and officers simultaneously have toggled all the perms or most for each other as they will have already established trust by other means.
One Song
Oct 25th, 2005
Exactly Uri, I have been telling everyone that bringing down the entire grid of more or less the whole of the mainland was totally possible and not that hard to do.
For how long have I been saying this? About a year or so? Since the Second War of Jessie???
It’s no surprise the W-hat has been able to do it. Only reason I didn’t do it because I have nothing to gain from doing so, and the fact that it’s highly immoral ruining thousands of people entertainment for your own leisure.
As you suggest Uri, the way to counteract such attacks is not by limiting the abilities of the residents creating cool scripts, but instead infiltrate those well known groups of grievers to anticipate their next attack.
As the SL population grows such exploits will be more commonly known by SL’s residents and more of this kind of crap will occur. It’s obvious that LL is wasting precious time looking through hundreds of abuse reports per week when they could instead facilitate us with a governmental structure that could allow us to punish those who commit crimes in a far fairer manner. Not only this would add allot of fun to the game, but also keep things interesting as well as grow a sense of patriotism amongst the residents.
And message for King Philip Linden if you’re reading this:
Don’t you think its becoming more evident that you need our help if you want this project to sustain its growth capability along with its features uncut? Trick here is not to condemn those who are perceived as bad people or favour good people. In reality there is no such thing as a totally bad person or a good person; we all make mistakes from time to time some mistakes that we must be punished for. But to give certain people life sentences, is that just?
Only because you were unable to come up with creative enough code that would allow the world to continue to be full of features and entertainment but at the same time not to kill our abilities to code what we need?
I’ve got one thing to say to you Sir, you either lack in creativity, or your team lacks on coding skill and enthusiasm. Either way it’s sad because when we first joined up SL, speaking for myself at least. I saw a world of boundless possibilities, a world created by its own denizens. Since you created the platform that allows us tools to build our own world. Tell me what sense is there on you preserving full control of it?
Especially at this stage we’re we near 70,000 people. At the State of Play II, did or did not those advisors and so fourth recommend you to allow residents to solve their own problems due to the sheer number of abuse reports and problems would rise beyond your ability of solving them with employees of your company.
It all seems like common sense to me. Your next priority should be more than obvious, in case it isn’t I will list them bellow:
* Forget adding more features to something that has accumulated enough bugs and security exploits as it is.
* Concentrate 80% of your efforts on fixing those exploits on a matter that won’t limit our ability to create interesting and entertaining content.
* Develop tools that will allow your to build our own Governmental Structure and Law System. Hopefully one that would result to a Democratic/Republican Virtual Government.
* Offer incentives that will facilitate and compensate those who decide to commit to such endeavours listed above
And take away the god damn stupid dwell systems that create nothing but a stupid not fun chat box, and remove easy hand outs such us stipends where people are getting money for nothing.
There is too much else to say here but I’m done for now.
Please sort it out Phil!!!
Your old buddy,
One Song.
Hurrrr
Oct 25th, 2005
So for anyone who actually cares for the facts, here they be:
Ol Fitzcaraldo, being relatively new to the game, made a scripted object that utilised physical objects with push associated with them, he the added a self replication feature to the scripts which caused them to spawn at infinitum and crash the grid. It was a totally unexpected side affect when he just wanted to achieve the highest amount of push possible by an object, simply to test the limits and it broke.
There was no mass conspiracy, there was no grand W-hat conspiracy. Sorry that doesn’t feed everyone’s doom and gloom view of the group but it’s the facts and I don’t expect to change anyone’s mind. This is just information provided without bias for everyone to view.
Ian
Oct 25th, 2005
Urizenus I now have confidence in you again … awsome way to tell it to them.
w-hat perspective
Oct 25th, 2005
I would just like to respond to urizenus’ response about how Linden Labs should infiltrate our channels of communication with a question. Do you honestly think that Linden Labs and the administrators of Second Life do not have full access to our group and personal IM sessions? I guarantee you they do, they have logs of everything that anyone has said (for possibly years). Also, do you honestly think that if anyone other than the creator of the Griefsphere™ was in any way related they would not already be banned?
Do you think that Linden Labs WOULD take it up the ass from a bunch of punk griefers on their grid? I dont. Linden Labs has never been fair in banning us by association. I have been banned for something I had absolutely nothing to do with before, on a completely new account with no warning. If LL had any probable cause to permaban anyone but the perp believe me, they would. In our world, Linden Labs is entirely too liberal in their bannings!
I personally agree with LL’s decision to take action against self replicating objects immediately. I hope it will be remedied with a better solution soon, but until then it makes perfect sense to do something like this.
Urizenus
Oct 26th, 2005
Why thank you Eddie.
Ol
Oct 26th, 2005
Yeah, sorry about this.
To clear up a couple things, there definately were NOT any other images other than the g-man on the balls. I assume the racial image rumor came from the fact that my avatar was a “stereotypical” African American (some people didn’t like it.)
Also, I was completely alone in this, w-had honestly had nothing to do with it.
Believe it as you will.
Antje
Oct 26th, 2005
Hey Eddie -
Do you think we’re all so stupid as to not realise that you assholes talk OUTSIDE SL when you need to keep things hush hush?
Hurrrrrrrr!
We know you’re very adept at this. These covert tactics. The problem for you is that with each repetition, more people become aware of your game.
Do you think we do not see the name of the offending objects is GRIEFSPHERE? Do you think we do not see you asshats standing around celebrating with signs sayong “Ol crashed the grid”, replete with the SAME image of G-Man as was used on the GRIEFSPHERES?
You’re dealing with many, many adults in SL, most of whom have been around the block a few times, and many of whom are raising or have raised kids. That means we know how to recognise patterns of behavior in young people. We know the tactics. So you half-wits keeping patting yourselves on the back in your IRC channels, mutually mentally masturbating each other with your pseudo-intellectual faux concern for society at large. We see right through you. Your fake concern about world events is simply a facade which you use while taking your anger born of personal insecurities out on others who are simply enjoying themselves. It’s really as simple as “misery loves company”.
Save it. Your group is exposed more with everyone of these fuckwitted moves you make.
Antje
Oct 26th, 2005
Sure “Ol”.
We believe you. *rolls eyes*
Oddly enough, I saw a screen shot that showed the contents of at least some of griefspheres had chicken drumstick textures in them.
Walker Spaight
Oct 26th, 2005
Just a note to “A Teen”: There’s no law against teens reading the Herald. We’re not in any way associated with Linden Lab, so in that sense we couldn’t care less. If the Herald were a movie, we’d be R-rated, it’s true, but the Internet doesn’t make that distinction. As long as it’s not hardcore, you’re good. A couple of naked toons once in a while isn’t breaking any law. We welcome your readership–and hope to turn you to the Herald way of life, mwuahahahahahaaaa…..
anominous
Oct 26th, 2005
I found W-Hat is a very easy group to infiltrate. Register a Something Awful forum account. Wait 3 months. Go to Baku and use the terminals. Bam, your in. You don’t even have to talk to anyone. You don’t even have to be a mamber of their forums to join their IRC channel. You only have to be a member of the forums to join their Ventrilo server and read their private discussion thread, and of course to join the group.
Besides, Linden Labs logs every IM session, they can watch them while they’re going on, and they can even pick an individual and watch their every interaction with the SL client. This is straight from the mouth of a Linden. If you watch their forums, some W-Hat members have been logged off with messages about what they were talking about on the group IM. It also seems that a certain leader of the group either has their private IMs monitored or likes to turn in members of their own group.
This is interesting tho:
A month ago W-Hat kicked out someone for selling a gun that used the Seburo’s source code. The co-creator of the gun got mad and left the group also, and started his own Something Awful group with no rules. They bought land and Gallii and acted like the old SA Goons group. Many of them were banned, and their land was cleared several times. If you look at the screenshots, you will see that is the group that is set on the GrieferSpheres, that is where the permaban was issued, that is where the pictures of the group celebrating are, and that is the tag all of them have active.
If you look at their forums, you will see that the leader of that group is also being permabanned.
internet
Oct 26th, 2005
starts to masturbate
Stubblehead
Oct 26th, 2005
Oh God, the ragging on Linden Labs never stops. Children, grow up please.
Simone
Oct 27th, 2005
Bahahahah Jailhouse bitch BAHAHAHA *grins* Ok, that was funny
RUDE, but funny 
Ol I hope yer mommy catches you up past yer bedtime online one night and restricts you to no access, with nothing more than Pong to entertain yourself with.
Louis Neutra
Oct 28th, 2005
For a bunch of supposed “adults”, you people sure have horrid grammar and rational. Not only was Ol NOT a member of w-hat when this happened (he is a member of the SA forums and the new SA group, though), but he also acted on his own with absolutely no intent of destroying grids. Maybe you geniuses should do some actual detective work instead of spouting off things like:
“You’re dealing with many, many adults in SL, most of whom [sic] have been around the block a few times, and many of whom [sic] are raising or have raised kids. That means we know how to recognise patterns of behavior in young people. We know the tactics. So you half-wits keeping (?) patting yourselves on the back in your IRC channels, mutually mentally masturbating each other with your pseudo-intellectual faux concern for society at large.”
I find it hilarious how seriously you “adults” take your “second life”. Maybe you should concentrate on raising your kids instead of wasting your time on your online virtual sex bordello.
If you’re going to reply with “yeah well look who’s talking mr. louis neutra who logs onto SL all the time”, please take note of how often I log on (not often).
Sausage
Oct 28th, 2005
Louis, I don’t think you, or anyone, could have said it any better than that.
Prokofy Neva
Oct 28th, 2005
Here we go again. Rather than forthrightly condemning the actions of Ol Fitzcaraldo and the victory dancers, and the actions of all previous griefers, and the nature of W-HAT itself as a group attracting and failing to control griefers, Louis Neutra is trying to put nervous liberals on the defensive, trying to throw their values back in their faces, trying to shame them into not engaging in “guilt-by-association”.
Baloney. Bad grammar, or hours logged online, or pixel sex on game have absolutely nothing to do with the issue of bringing down the grid through a purposeful act of griefing with an item named “griefball” which was intended to harm at least *something,* even if we’re to buy this utterly dubious excuse that Ol was just kidding, not intending to replicate throughout the whole game, etc.
This sort of thing has happened enough times that even the most naive liberals see the patterns and they are fed up.
Where’s your condemnation of this act, pure and simple, without qualifications, unadulterated with slams against other people and their online habits — real condemnation without simultaneous efforts to try to condemn liberals either for unrelated “offenses” (logging on and allegedly not taking care of their kids)?
Each time one of these incidents happen, we have to listen to this phony chorus of denial, distraction, and denigration.
Obviously, Ol’s parents haven’t been paying enough attention to him, and that’s the only parents whose behaviour is at issue in this story.
Ol joined this group because it was a griefing group with a track history of outrageous activities and “pranks.” That *is* intent. Therefore all of us are well within our rights even as “good liberals” not only to robustly condemn what he did, to call his “innocence” into question, and to condemn all of you for not only failing to disassociate yourself from him and his actions, but for protecting the group and its identity LONG past the sell-by date. We’re not buying.
Urizenus
Oct 28th, 2005
Yeah I can see buying the Eddie Haskel pleas of innocence and the “few bad apples” excuse and the pseudo-intellectual post modern word salad justifications *once*, or maybe even twice, or possibly even ten times if one was a granola cruchning fattie huffing acid casualty like most Lindens are, but *surely* by now even the Lindens aren’t buying it. Right? Someone please telling me they aren’t buying it. Please?
Louis Neutra
Oct 28th, 2005
Hey Prok, can you prove, in any way, that Ol purposefully meant to take down the grids in Second Life, without associating past incidents of w-hat with the griefballs, despite Ol not being a member of w-hat? Oh, wait, you can’t.
Why are you spouting off about liberalism? Are you really this stupid? Do you feel like a big man by labeling and generalizing a group that may not be what you labeled them?
Also, you’re an idiot if you think I condone Ol’s actions. If they were purposeful I’d be the first to say that it was a remarkably stupid thing to do and that he deserved his permaban. But hey, it wasn’t, and he’s permabanned anyway, so now you can continue selling your sex toys without disturbance from Ol, or praising your blonde haired, white, blue eyed savior that supposedly died 2000 years ago on a cross for our sins when in reality he was 4’6″, Arab, hunchback and died on a T as the “King of the Jews”. See how fun it is to go on about subjects that are not relevant to the issue at hand? I just lumped you into the “religious conservative” group without any proof. My name is Prokofy.
And it’s spelt bologna. Seems adults can be just as, if not, more stupid than kids.
Ugh, reading your rant again makes me depressed. I can’t believe you’ve spouted off about the negative ramifications of liberalism and how Ol’s parents are at fault here without any solid evidence to back up your alligations. ggnm
Antje
Oct 28th, 2005
Hey Louis, can YOU prove, in any way, that we are “wasting our time”?
You have nothing to qualify that statement with. You have no direct insight into our real lives, or our second lives. It’s the same old weak-ass non-argument that w-hats, goons, and their apoligists come out with EVERY SINGLE time.
More importantly (to me anyway), is the fact that this mindset exposes what folks like yourself are really up to here. You don’t want to participate in the world other than to play some bizarre “we’ll teach them to not take this so seriously, and we’ll expose the fact that they are all a bunch of sex crazed shut-ins with no real lives” game. What a fucking joke. Is that all you have? Because it’s becoming damned trite at this point.
I submit that the people responding here, Prok, Uri, and others, people who I sometimes strongly disagree with, by the way, do not use SL as an “online virtual sex bordello”.
This is the crux of the issue. Folks like you have made up your minds about, and passed judgement on SL. Shove off. You don’t get to tell us “how it is”, or how we should be spending our leisure time. Furthermore, if you think it’s so “bad”, then just leave. The fact that you don’t just further reinforces my belief (and the beliefs of the others who see through the smoke and mirrors) that folks like you are in SL for ONE reason, to agitate people because you have personal issues with the way the wish to spend their leisure time, or rather, the way you THINK they do. Simply put, that’s YOUR problem. It’s none of your damned business how people choose to entertain themselves in SL, so long as it’s not in YOUR face, so piss off. This is a big part of the issue at hand here. W-Hats, Goons, and the others like them go out of their way to ram their type of self-entertainment into the faces of others. All the “sick” crap they howl about is NOT thrust into THEIR faces. They don’t have to go to clubs, people’s homes, or events, yet time and again, they do just that, and they drag their circus side-show of intolerance along with them.
I love how you attack my grammar, it’s a sign of a weak argument when you have to try and shore it up with school marm grammar nazi tactics. Not to mention, you didn’t capitalize “m” when you wrote “mr.”, and you committed other mistakes as well. Why am I NOT surprised?
President Ferret
Oct 29th, 2005
President Ferret am I rite?
observer 77
Oct 31st, 2005
I am happy to criricise LL in this instance. Because a substantial crippling of the game was an unnecessary, pointless, hysterical over-reaction.
Contributed to to some small extent by the endless complaining-for-complainings-sake in venues like this.
Ever a distinguishing feature of fringe journalism which without controversy is dead.
Firstly, this replication-crashes-sims is rare enough so far to be tolerated in order to maintain valuable functionality. If it was happening once a month I would conclude differently.
Secondly, less reaction would give less satisfaction to perpetrators.
Thirdly, if there must be a technical fix on the server, then surely there are alternate steps without crippling, and I hope these are being worked on so our functionality can be restored.
Fourthly, the crippling is hysterical because I don’t believe it does the job. I am sure that any decent scripter could crash everything just as effectively under the new regime. A tiny bit more thought required, but not much. I think we are in danger of someone disgruntled by this crippling giving us an actual demonstration that it is ineffective. That would get discussion going.
Fifthly, was there any time given for discussion of entirely other solutions ? i am by no means convinced that we scripter residents could not have come up with some “protector objects” which could have come up with countermeasures, and scattered around by sufficient numbers of public-spirited landowners to damp the problem to below criticality, like the rods in a nuclear reactor. We should have had the opporrtunity to try. A competition, perhaps ? With a coupla dedicated sims for experimentation/evaluation ? Or just leave it to private initiative. The good guys like a challenge too.
Lastly, this whole hyped up story has the usual hallmarks of journalistic hype and rumor-based mythologising.
Lets just invent racist connotations, shall we ? Sounds good – never mind the truth. Someone will always imagine they saw them. Where, moreover, can I find any discussion of the real evidence with regard to whether this ractually was an attack – and the affiliation if any of the attacker.
Any half-debugged replicator can easily run away from you if you don’t build in safety features. How about a “good practice” entry in the wiki for anyone wishing to experiment, complete with recommended freebie guard scripts to be incorporated, including auto die, and geographic and numeric limitations.
Even if it was an attack (and it is perfectly likely of course), and by exactly the sort of people you assume, it did not merit the “cripple-everybody” response it was given by LL, and the hysterical responses it has received in so many other forum and blog locations