Gone in 60 Seconds
by Alphaville Herald on 13/12/05 at 11:28 am
Even the Herald is bored with global attacks and grid crashings these days, there are so many of them. But the cleanup from Monday’s attack had an interesting side-effect. Many objects were wiped from the grid. Here is how the Lindens described what happened:
Tonight started as a run-of-the-mill gray-goo style attack. We had essentially cleaned up all the items and the perpetrators items in world when we came across a few more items to clean up.
What happened next we still aren’t entirely clear. There were reports of content loss on a number of regions across the grid. After looking into the incidents we found that approximately 160 simulators re-interpreted a clean up command and began deleting items seemingly at random. There is likely logic to what they did, we just don’t know yet.
See the forums for cool pics of the swiss cheese effect on the grid. Lindens have restored content from backup. And the question remains, when oh when are the Lindens going to take real world legal action against these denial of service attacks?
Prokofy Neva
Dec 13th, 2005
Lordfly was the first on his block to start up a huge howl on the forums that his Grignano building was gone — it seemed there was a story about everything named “object” being deleted. (This was among the reasons I have taken buildings from architects and renamed all the pieces in them called “object” to “right south wall” etc. — I never did understand why architects let all the pieces remain with the name “object”).
For a time, he and others actually believed these buildings may have been destroyed, Lordfly even put his building on a milk carton jpeg and displayed it on the forums with “Have You Seen Me?”
Frankly, with all the smug and nasty comments coming from him and others about telehub landowners, I really would have liked to see the forum FIC response to the loss of their buildings, had it been permanent. Would they quit in protest? Would they demand compensation? Hey, I bet they’d demand compensation…and of course that demand would be very different than telehub land owners demanding compensation, eh? I’ll bet!
I was interested to hear Jeska say shortly after this announcement that all the stuff was disappearing that they were going to roll back the world and reclaim that way, kinda like “system restore”. I had understood a Linden once who gave a talk that they couldn’t save the world, i.e. they didn’t have like back up copies of, say, September 11, 2005 and all the buildings that were on the world that day. Apparently that’s too complex to do, to save like server back-up tapes. I don’t know why. But evidently they do at least have 90 minutes of tape or whatever to dial back after a huge mess like last night.
Harlequin Salome
Dec 13th, 2005
Its not a bad system, a short-term backup. Saves on space i suppose.
Though the Herald, as usual, takes the opprotunity to kick LL. Always can trust you guys to be snarky.
Taking real world legal action is hard enough as it is, but to take action against someone in a digital space for something in a digital world, ina way, is an unexplored territory. Its very possible that LL wants to be absolutely sure they have their stuff together, because going to court and losing because of technicalities or not covering their bases would set prescident, and make further proceedings harder.
TrannyPet Barmy
Dec 13th, 2005
Personally i feel it’s more a case of scare mongering, LL hoping the ‘exploiters’ will start to quake in their boots and run away from causing any further problems in the fear that they may land up in court.
Some how i don’t think this is going to happen, and judging by the fact that the attacks are continuing since LL’s warning, it doesn’t seem like any exploiter has been detered.
I’m not going to get into the whole court case and legalities thing again, but suffice to say, all the while that LL’s scripting language allows for such scripts to be written simply and easily, it’s an invite to use/abuse.
Instead of making threats that quite probably are not possible to follow up, why don’t LL just fix the problem ?
Regarding backups, the problem i presume is the fact that the SecondLife system doesn’t simply reside on one machine. Yes they could back up every one’s inventories and account information from one cluster of machines quite easily i should imagine, however, to back up all of the sims to a snapshot in time is going to be very difficult and involve some down time of the whole grid of machines. They need to all be backed up at the same time in order for each of the sims back ups to be in synch with one another.
I’m not even sure that diskspace is the issue here, since each sim is only capable of holding 65k prims, and each prim being defined as a small number of bytes that relects it’s position in the sim, the object it’s apart of, it’s texture, along with any attached script, etc etc, thats the beauty of using prims for building as oppossed to allowing folks to upload full meshes to the server
…. so …. lets say 2 or 3kb per prim, and thats heavily biased towards heavy load, and works out at around 195mb per sim, lets say 200 sims, thats 39gb(uncompressed) + a couple of hundred meg for the account data from the main asset server, it would fit on one DLT tape no problem at all (after working out data structures for SLAlt, and where they would need to be stored/reside i’ve started understanding alot more of how SL is likely to work in the background).
Strange the objects named “object” are getting removed, sounds like a poorly written piece of code to me, perhaps some hardcoded string that should perhaps of been a variable name
Afterall Object is a keyword in Java, amongst numerous other languages, and even if SL isnt coded in one of these languages, i’m sure the variable/structure name Object appears all over the place, being as Object is one of it’s primary concepts.
Maybe it’s time LL tidied up their act, fixed their LSL language compiler, and fixed the fundamental game code.
cheers
TrannyPet Barmy
The REAL ONE
whatever
Dec 13th, 2005
Legal action from LL is a 14 day suspension for the attacker according to the police blotter.
urizenus
Dec 13th, 2005
link please.
Tony Walsh
Dec 13th, 2005
Uri, the 14-day suspension was posted to the police-blotter today, but we don’t know for certain if it’s the punishment for last night’s attack.
Discussion at Clickable Culture.
TrannyPet Barmy
Dec 13th, 2005
Hang on a second, you mean to tell me, i got perm banned, for an accidental exploit with DBomber that was intended as nothing more as a one on one attack(which got out of hand by all accounts and apparently lagged the grid to buggery), but got classed as a ‘Grid Attack’ due to the unpresidented levels of im’s it was able to send, and yet this guy, INTENTIONALLY sparks of a full on grid attack, and yet he only gets a 14 day suspension, despite my having been told that “a grid attack is an instant perm ban” by the Lindens on the other end of a phone.
How can this be right ??? It’s crap is what i say.
I now firmly beleive there was something quite a lot more to my being perm banned, dodgy Linden, FIC involvement, or business competitors in league with dodgy Lindens, i dont know what for sure, but i’m now POSITIVE there’s alot more to it than i first realised.
The fact remains, there were a number of people who had alot to gain from my removal, both business wise, and from selling linden reclaimed advertising land patches at ludicrous prices.
I wonder how much Schwanson Shlegal(i think i spelt that right) paid for the 16m piece of land in Royal. It even still has my SLex magic box on funnily enough. I wonder how much all of those other 16ms i had sold for, over 80 of them in all universe wide !!!
Last i saw of any of my land on the grid a certain Colin Linden had his name on them, although i’m trying not to assume any false conclusions, i still need to find solid proof before i make any accussations.
I wonder which of those lovely Lindens pocketed all the virtual cash that was remaining on my account to. Yeah there must have been around 13-23k L$ on it, along with a bucket load of land.
Infact for that matter, has any one actually asked what happens to funds/assetts on an account once it’s perm banned ? Have any answers been given ?
14 days for a grid attack for one, and perm ban for another, even when it was unintentional !!!!
something fishy is going on around SL.
TrannyPet Barmy
The REAL ONE
Fallen Hasp
Dec 13th, 2005
huh? ahhhh kay. Got it. This is where I feign surprise. Sorry, missed my cue.
Plastic Duck
Dec 14th, 2005
TrannyPet, you have no idea haha.
When my Plastic Duck account got banned LL reclaimed my plot in Cecropia, Michael Linden owns it at this point. They deleted all of my objects except one, which was a pipe I made that jacks into the linden made one, I guess he assumed that I stole it or something. If you look at the creator you can still pull up the profile for my Paper Duck account.
I also had 512sq.m in Waterhead, that’s right, I owned land in a former welcome area. I managed to get it after LL accidentally released some land in the Liaison sim Ambleside, and Pathfinder offered me 10k for it. I told him I would prefer to live nice and close to Lindens and really liked that spot, so he offered to trade for some land in Waterhead. A few weeks later, I get banned. I’m pretty sure he made this trade knowing in advance he could snatch the land back.
But I had deeded the land to a group and someone had offered to throw some tier into that group to keep the land as a Plastic Duck memorial. Well about a month later, Pathfinder Linden took that land without even contacting the person who was paying the tier for it. After said person IMed him, Path conveniently logged off. We managed to contact Blue Linden who then tried to track down Path in the offices and after getting him back in-game, Path explained that that land is being reclaimed because of “special circumstances”.
LL claim in the TOS that when you get banned they will sell all your land and pay you whatever it was worth. It’s lies, they don’t do that.
As for funds? They kept about $25,000 of my L-bux.
Also the resident review panel is a joke. It’s not even used in their decision to ban you, it’s just something they use to justify that decision. If you’re up for review, you’re already banned.
The fact is that LL is being run like a MUD or other online text adventure. There is WAY too much community involvement. Take a look at any other MMO, they don’t get involved with their community because the truth is that when people are on the internet they somehow turn into retarded fucking idiots and make drama over every damn small thing. Maybe if LL just simply ignored all the stupid whining and reports of small bumps then they could stop spending so much money hiring liaisons and abuse team staff and could spend that money getting some coders that can do more than copy and paste the latest pixel shader code from nvidia’s devkit.
But they won’t. They’ll continue paying their employees to settle mindless bickering and flamewars in-game and on their forums. Hey, I wonder who they’re paying to spread bullshit lies about me?
p.s. To whichever Linden is reading these comments, think you could put in a good word for me at LL? I’m currently jobless and wouldn’t mind getting paid to resolve petty internet disputes.
Yours truly,
Plastic Duck
Internet Tough Guy
whatevr
Dec 14th, 2005
Tranny I’ve said it before and I will say it again. Wake up people there are Lindens in game that play the game and not as their Linden names they go under alts.
In fact I know a certain female Linden who logs on her alt to specifically have an affair with a regular SL player, and it has been suggested she gives this person money and has gotten him out of bans. And the things this player has done is definately worth a perm banned. Convenient eh? All you have to do is flirt with a Linden and own a lot of land and you get away with murder.
If you ever paid close attention you will see those players who own alot of land or private sims never get perm banned, if they do something wrong, they more or less get like a few warnings and a slap on the wrist. I’ve noticed if you pay alot in tiers you are guaranteed special treatments from Lindens.
boo parks
Dec 14th, 2005
stop being a cry baby about your perm ban you did it to yourself u stupid fagit. I been perm banned also but i aint crying about it cause i know i deserved it u pussy.
Prokofy Neva
Dec 14th, 2005
14 days? Geez, I got permabanned from the forums for calling Aimee a prom queen? And they bring down the grid and get 14? I do have to wonder if this is just a kind of system limitation, though. Like, the first thing the Lindens do is immediately ban someone for some concrete specific action, and that one-time action in space and time can only reach the 14-day punishment level — they invoke that merely as the highest punishment the system can invoke that day. But to do the permaban, they have some procedure that causes them to make a finding like “gross and systematic violation blah blah”. In that case, they’d take the 14-day action and couple it with (presumably) other discrete actions to make a finding of “gross and systematic” etc. to justify the perm-ban. So it may be a procedural matter.
One hopes.
Fallen Hasp
Dec 14th, 2005
Well i wasnt perm banned. not even close. Plastic duck deserved to be banned. Many others deserved it and were not banned. The problem isnt that Linden Labs intervenes in griefing disputes. The problem is they dont intervene enough. And, when they do, they would just assume suspend everyone involved – griefers and their victims – instead of sort out abuse reports or handle situations proactively. The exception of course is a user who gets in the way of anything Linden Labs. If a Linden wants you gone you will be gone. Period. Its not a democracy. They are not above lies and cover-ups to justify their decisions. Linden Labs cant win in court and the idea is laughable. They dont even enforce their own ToS. Anyway, when its your turn and you get screwed by Linden Labs dont cry about it please.
stubblehead
Dec 14th, 2005
Oh Pleez, the griefer Plastic Duck bitches about Lindens confiscating his/his proxy’s land after his little gang pulls one too many gridcrashes?
Cry me a fucking ocean.
oh, and SL herald…nice balance as usual.
Assholes.
Raymond Polonsky
Dec 14th, 2005
Let’s not forget that no one has any solid proof that this 14-day suspension was related in any way to this one particular grid attack the story mentions. It is just speculation at this point it would seem. Mere circumstancial evidence if you will. Everyone seems to be getting upset over something they are assuming is the truth and not necessarily knowing that it is for fact.
Raymond Polonsky
Polonsky & Churchill
Second Life In-Game Lawyers
TrannyPet Barmy
Dec 14th, 2005
True enough Raymond, but then again, you can bet the only people who are ever going to know the truth of this matter for sure will be LindenLabs.
Do you really think they are likely to say publicly “yes actually certain members of our staff are just about as corrupt as they come”
TrannyPet Barmy
THE REAL ONE
Raymond Polonsky
Dec 14th, 2005
I agree that the Lindens hold the truth. I also agree that the chances of them enlightening us with the truth are next to none.
One possibility for this is that there could be legal ramnifications for them by revealing such things if the EULA or their stated privacy policy dictates that they do not reveal this information. Another possibiliy, which is more beleivable, is that there is a current or will be an on-going criminal investigation. If this was the case they may not be able to reveal the details of such an investigation as it could hinder the pending results.
However, I think it would be in their best interest public relations wise to reveal what happens to the purpotrators of this crime as the result of any investigation. Linden Labs needs to make an example out of someone and soon. Otherwise this will just spiral out of control as others will feel they can do this type of illegal activity without reprecussions.
Raymond Polonsky
Polonsky & Churchill
Second Life In-Game Lawyers
TrannyPet Barmy
Dec 15th, 2005
One possibility you fail to mention, they don’t want the community to know the truths behind the rumours.
if my suspicions are correct, the real criminals in all of this are the corrupt members of staff who are ensuring accounts get the OK for perm ban, then pocketing the assets !!
As i’ve said on previous occassions, perhaps it’s time that LindenLab considered a third party complaints mediations service.
TrannyPet Barmy
The REAL ONE