Secret Grids?
by Alphaville Herald on 19/01/07 at 9:06 pm
by Agent Molder, Department of Rumors, Conspiracy Theories, and Tinfoil Hats.
When the Second Life client software went open source several days ago, we all wondered what marvelous new permutations of the client we might see. Few of us thought to ask, “what secrets will be revealed?” But according to one reliable source who has been poking around in the client software, there is reason to think that Second Life has as many as 10 different grids. O.K., we know about the main grid (including the mainland and the islands), and we know about the teen grid, and we speculate that there is a developmental grid. But what are the other 7? Are they under development or are they in use now? Who is using them? Large corporations? The military? Area 51? Enquiring minds want to know! We encourage informed readers to provide any insights in the comments section below, or via email to the Herald Braincramptrust.
Simon Lameth
Jan 19th, 2007
They’re probably like the government fallout shelters that were built all over in the sixties. They’re there for Philip to frolic in while the main grid becomes self aware and destroys itself.
Yuka Itamae
Jan 19th, 2007
The Lindens mentioned late last year in their blog that there were, I think, 6 development grids, and also, there is the preview grid.
agent51
Jan 20th, 2007
It’s not “Linden Laboratories” for nothing… why do you think they have a Lab? They keep the Roswell aliens on the secret grid.
Eddy Stryker
Jan 20th, 2007
If you have a question about the open source Second Life viewer the best place to get answers is #opensl on EFNet. Aditi and Agni are the two main public access grids, although there is another that is sometimes used alongside Aditi when there are dual preview branches (Siva maybe?). The rest of the grids are internal LL grids for unit testing, bug testing, sandboxes, experimental simulator code, etc etc. Oh except for Uma, the new public access 5-sim grid just for open source coders to have a place to play with experimental builds without harming Agni.
Inigo Chamerberlin
Jan 20th, 2007
‘Harming’ Agni?
You mean the ‘main’ customer facing grid could be fucked up worse than it currently is? Now THERE’S a concept!
Urizenus
Jan 20th, 2007
Thanks Eddy!
Prokofy Neva
Jan 20th, 2007
>Oh except for Uma, the new public access 5-sim grid just for open source coders to have a place to play with experimental builds without harming Agni.
So why do they continue to keep coming on Agni and harming it?
Lordfly Digeridoo
Jan 20th, 2007
How are they harming it?
Don’t say Copybot, you silly person.
Kerian Bunin
Jan 20th, 2007
I recall there also being a grid called Colo, Durga, and then one called DMZ, add that to Siva, Agni, Aditi..
Kerian Bunin
Jan 20th, 2007
source:
http://www.lslwiki.com/lslwiki/wakka.php?wakka=newview/
DMZ, Uma, Colo, Durga, Siva, Aditi, Agni, thats 7
Ordinal Malaprop
Jan 20th, 2007
Well, that’s no fun, is it? Bah, by all means spoil everything.
Kerian Bunin
Jan 20th, 2007
No, now we can focus all our paranoia on the 8th grid :S
Eddy Stryker
Jan 20th, 2007
“So why do they continue to keep coming on Agni and harming it?”
I couldn’t really say without more detail about what harm is going on here, but I’m sure you don’t need to be told how to report abuse from another resident. The opensl code is the same viewer code that everyone else runs and is fully capable of working with the stable grids. But lets say you found a potential sim crashing exploit, by logging on to Uma to test you won’t be killing a main simulator and it helps the Lindens identify the problem without having to dig through long log files of activity.
Inigo Chamerberlin
Jan 21st, 2007
Um, Eddy, let’s say someone finds a potential sim crashing exploit. Surely that puts the person in a position where they have sufficient information to give LL and allow them to investigate?
Where is the need for ANYONE to actually crash a sim, Agni or elsewhere?
Having said that, when I discovered a simple series of legitimate estate tool actions which could reliably crash a sim, I had to demonstrate the ‘exploit’ – actually poor coding by LL – over and over again before anyone took any notice. Despite submitting bug reports for a couple of weeks, and reporting it to Concierge representatives and even giving them Estate Manager status so they could reproduce it themselves. That’s not taking into account the number of times it was ‘fixed’ either…
Still, one wonders what level of mayhem it’ll be necessary to wreak on Uma to capture LL’s attention regarding a crashing ‘exploit’ (bug)?
Eddy Stryker
Jan 21st, 2007
Inigo, maybe your report wasn’t received by the proper channels? If you are sure you found a way to crash a sim, send an e-mail to security@lindenlab.com that has a title starting with EXPLOIT: and put the following parts in the e-mail:
* Overview
* Instructions to reproduce (this is why a test grid is needed, to make sure your repro works)
* Why this is a threat (can crash one or more sims in this case)
* Your name, e-mail address, and Second Life name
* Optionally a patch to fix it if this is a viewer problem, or speculation on what is causing the problem
Often times you can pull a Linden aside to confirm a problem as well.
Prokofy Neva
Jan 21st, 2007
Uh, has the world been absolutely free of self-replicating objects since open-source? No, it has not.
Has the world been free of CampBots? No, there are more of them than ever, sucking down sim resources and of course ill-gotten casino money not intended to be stolen in this fashion.
Soon to come: dancebots, or fillupyoursimbecausewehateyoubots.
All of these are products made or produced or copied and tweaked by libsl and its spinoff groups.
BTW, Open Source Fan Club is the new W-Hat hideout, and the members who were all around sending out a fake notecards (like one by Partyhats Loll claiming Pathfinder and Cubey Terra were griefers and “warning” newbies”) are all in it, along with Lindens. I asked several of the Lindens why they were in a group with known griefers who harass other people. Several of them left after my question.
Inigo Chamerberlin
Jan 22nd, 2007
Well that’s a well guarded secret you just let out Eddy…
No, not being privy to such info I didn’t use the method you outlined.
All I did was bug reported, about 5 times, then finally got Concierge to look into it – you’d think THEY’D know about that security@lindenlab.com wheeze, wouldn’t you?
Fritz came out several times to check it out, requesting temporary Estate Manager status twice so he could verify it – which he did, several times, Hermia dug into the logs and verified just how many times I was able to reproduce it after it was ‘fixed’ too…
Anyway… just a thought.
Eddy Stryker
Jan 23rd, 2007
Inigo, it is a semi-secret because any route that LL opens up for communication immediately gets filled with hundreds of “my neighbor left a prim turd on my land! this is an exploit of my liberties!!$#” messages. But if you have a valid exploit to report that’s the number one way to get it to the Lindens, and you are correct in the assumption that concierge generally has no idea what is going on outside of flipping on and off buttons for sims.
“Uh, has the world been absolutely free of self-replicating objects since open-source? No, it has not.”
Sorry Prokofy I misunderstood your original question. When you asked “So why do they continue to keep coming on Agni and harming it?” in response to “Oh except for Uma, the new public access 5-sim grid just for open source coders to have a place to play with experimental builds without harming Agni.” I assumed you were talking about the open source version of Second Life. Since you were actually asking about self-replicating LSL scripts, libsecondlife bots, and fake notecards I’ll save the discussion for another thread.
Inigo Chamerberlin
Jan 23rd, 2007
Your insights into the structure of LL and the capabilities of one of the premier sources of assistance for sim owners are fascinating in their detail Eddy. In fact they could easily lead to speculation regarding your day job!
Seola Sassoon
Jan 23rd, 2007
I vote male Chippendale stripper!
Nacon
Jan 29th, 2007
yay! more fake crap facts about SL. %!#%@