LL Mysteries Revealed By Accidental God Mode
by Pixeleen Mistral on 08/04/07 at 11:23 pm
Lab can’t afford a legitimate site certificate for internal web server?
by Inigo Chamerberlin
[As reported earlier, Herald correspondent Inigo Chamerberlin was mysteriously granted game god-mode powers temporarily this Easter. Before his powers evaporated, he was able to file this report from the heavens - and take a number of screen shots - included here as a sign of divine intervention. Click on the pixtures here to get full-size views - the Editrix]
I’m intrigued by those functions on the Region panel – now WHY would you want to be able to block a region’s traffic calculations I wonder?
[to improve the user experience? - Editrix]
And those billing related functions… hmmmm…
[does billable factor mean there is a way to charge different amounts for large customers? I do like tha light grey God Tools on the title of the window- the probably makes LL staffers feel important - Editrix]
Note Lyonesse’s Estate ID is NOT it’s server code.
GRID: Set region to ‘Mainland’ , go to this and click ‘Kick all users’ – I WAS tempted, but WHY that function? Seems like overkill to me.
REGION: Note that any IM convo now reports the location (at least the Estate anyway) of the initiator?
Here is an exmaple of a profile in God mode – note the kick, freeze, unfreeze, and CSR buttons on the lower left side of the pane
Clicking on the CSR button takes you to a Linden Lab web site – but you need a password to get in.
See the initial notice you get – the warning about an unsatisfactory security certificate
and the details of why it is unsatisfactory? It’s self signed – bloody cheapskates!
And shortly thereafter my Divine powers evaporated. No warning, no kicking, simply gone! Mortal again. Frankly I’m not pushing my luck playing with the settings again either. Someone found out what was going on and smoothly ‘fixed’ it – until the next screw-up.
Nimrod
Apr 8th, 2007
Enable debug, and push Ctrl+alt+V, or go to Enable Admin Mode or something like that at the bottom of the “client” menu. No biggie.
Kerian Bunin
Apr 8th, 2007
Yes quit freaking out this is view admin options enabled in the client menu. Also block traffic tracking is for linden land like sandboxes so they don’t show in popular places if i recall.
Nimrod
Apr 9th, 2007
They changed that Kerian. They let them get traffic so that they’re “easier to find.” But now they also bump people off of the popular places list, which does not seem right. Oh well.
Artemis Fate
Apr 9th, 2007
“They changed that Kerian. They let them get traffic so that they’re “easier to find.” But now they also bump people off of the popular places list, which does not seem right. Oh well.”
A popular place is a popular place, atleast the people there aren’t afk camping.
And yeah. Wow. You guys stumbled on something people have been using for close to a year if not more.
Even Prokofy knew about this o_0
Nacon
Apr 9th, 2007
CSR stands for “Customer Service Reports” where you get all the reports on the selected person or even all the reports from that same person as well. …I think, I was told.
….and youre doing a good job being an old noob, Inigo.
Talthibus Brevity
Apr 9th, 2007
Reason for a “kick all users” function: emergency maintenance
Reason to tweak traffic or boot from popular places: test clients have gotten loose into the wild via the LL inner circle cliquefest and can be (and have been) used to put dozens of zombie AVs ‘hidden’ on a SIM 24/7.
Self-signed SSL certs is what everyone does on a server which is accessed only by staff. You only need to pay for an SSL cert from verisign, netsol, thawte, (and now also any DNS Registrar and/or Hosting Company who wants into the SLL Cert market) to prove to customers that you’re legit. Your staff knows you’re legit, they don’t need a third party SLL cert company to tell them so.
p.s. i’m no fanboy. i’ve posted plenty of blog comments ranting about the lack-of-formal-QA and the release-management-from-hell.
but writing an article full of uneducated guesses about staff-only parts of the gui, without even bothering to do any research at all is just so silly to me that i couldn’t keep my big mouth shut about it. if you’re going to pretend to be a journalist, at least try to get into the role.
qDot
Apr 9th, 2007
OH MY GOD. HAX TO THE MAX. WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE.
And what if… and I know this is total conspiracy theory… What if… someone got… AHOLD OF THE CLIENT SOURCE CODE!
What is this… “Open” source were to leak into the hands of the public?!?! THEN THEY COULD SEE EVERYTHING IN THE CLIENT! THE INTERNALS WOULD BE EXTERNALIZED. LIFE AS WE KNOW IT WOULD BE TURNED UPSIDE DOWN.
OH. MY. GOD. THEY’RE COMING RIGHT FOR US.
Prokofy Neva
Apr 9th, 2007
Um. yeah, qdot, and your employer’s little business model that relies on people buying land, to make up 80 percent of their revenue, which pays your Linden salary, would, um, be turned upside down. Not really our world so much. But. Yours. I’d thank you to be more respectful about that, instead of adopting this fuck-you extreme tekkie bullshit arrogant attitude that you all adopt toward us, like we’re fucking retarded merely for holding the values that people have held for centuries.
Because open-source doesn’t leak into the hands of the public, qdot. That’s what on the big lies you open-source freaks always hustle on us. It leaks into the hands of griefing idiots like W-hat and irresponsible asstards like libsl, and only elitist coders who know how to make something out of it. No “public” ever gets to hear even what the issues are.
Second Life as it is now, as much as you evidently find this repulsive to your extremist code-cave world-view, is actually more democratic and free, because it’s a world made by a company to which anybody can come and make stuff with tools that are not so easy to learn — but a lot easier to learn that sitting and coding C+++ from scratch on some back of the moon with a rabbit and a cube. That’s because they have to have some sense of responsibility to a public at large that *pays their bills* with subscriptions and auction buys and island buys.
When it’s host-your-own, yeah, the public will be at the mercy of people like you who shout in their faces fucked-up ridicule nihilst shit like this: LIFE AS WE KNOW IT WOULD BE TURNED UPSIDE DOWN.OH. MY. GOD. THEY’RE COMING RIGHT FOR US.”
I hope they come for you some day, qdot, and turn YOUR world upside down. I seriously do. I hope you get to feel what it’s like to live what you wish on other people.
Proprietary values matter. In fact, your employer has them, and hasn’t open sourced their Pandora’s box because they still hope to get paid back. Really, you ought to be more keenly aware of that then you are.
Yes, we’ve all seen this for a year. But not quite like this.
When I see this “block traffic” thing, which I don’t recall seeing before
I had a Linden behaving badly this evening confiscating a voting poll from my land (!) brag to me something about god-mode being given to us soon, and that may be their grand idea of “governance” or “tools” — just make the mainland like islands with a little bit more of a user panel to do a few more things on.
Prokofy Neva
Apr 9th, 2007
I think we now have some understanding of why some big venues would mysteriously suffer times when they’d have traffic static and unmoving for days. Probably some resident-turned-Linden was settling scores, flicking the switch on some of the clubs they hated, for whatever reasons, who the hell knows.
It wasn’t something everyone experienced always, but just some of them. You can be damn sure that if god-mode contained the ability for Lindens to turn off traffic stats on some parcels, they surely *did* use it, and there’d be no one even to monitor it, as they could just fly around and use it when they felt like it.
I wonder what the payment in L$ per square meters is all about. That looks to me like they are sticking something new in the client which involves rentals. Sigh.
Prokofy Neva
Apr 9th, 2007
By the way, CSR is probably the same as “rap sheet”. I had a Linden tonight even suddenly paste to me a line that said:
[2006.12.07] Banned from the Official Linden Blog for repeatedly trolling other Residents. Notified
He probably can get that by pressing CSR.
I’ll bet they aren’t very schooled in either a) netiquette of the sort you need to do community relations or b) any concept of double jeopardy, but that’s another story.
Inigo Chamerberlin
Apr 9th, 2007
I must admit I’d expected a Linden techie/fan-boy backlash on this. But the crude attempt we see above is so painfully unsubtle it hurts.
Still, holiday’s over soon and then we shall see if, and how, seriously the older kids take this mess.
One thing for sure:
“You are about to change a Linden owned Estate (mainland, teen grid, orientation, etc.). This is EXTREMELY DANGEROUS because it can fundamentally affect the user experience. On the mainland, it will change thousands of regions and make the spaceserver hiccup, Proceed?
Change Estate/Cancel”
which triggered all this, is NOT a standard Resident Estate Tools dialogue box. Something went seriously wrong at this point.
Connected with last Wednesday’s complete ‘maintenance’ screw up?
I’d say yes, but then, who am I? Just a know-nothing, non-techie ‘old-noob’…
However, it’s barely possible that in the course of time, more will be revealed.
qarl
Apr 9th, 2007
yo yo qDot -
you know that engaging a troll only makes it stronger.
but it IS tempting, i agree.
K.
Cocoanut Koala
Apr 9th, 2007
qdot = childish Linden, unprofessional Linden.
LL is shockingly unprofessional.
coco
Artemis Fate
Apr 9th, 2007
Holy shit Prokofy, you were totally right about everything! I was looking around the super-hyper secret god-mode menus, and I found this button!
http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b254/Tesahli/Prokofy.jpg
Gaius Goodliffe
Apr 9th, 2007
Aww, I just checked my God Tools (I’m not a Linden, I’m just someone who, unlike Inigo Chamerberlin, actually knows how to set check marks in menus anyone can set to view dialogs anyone can view, without having Linden powers), and I don’t have the “Suppress Prokofy Neva” button.
Maybe that only appears on the spiffy new class 6 servers that only FIC members can get right now (us normal people are always a generation behind so that the FIC can always have the least lag on their servers and look better than us, ya know).
FIC
Apr 9th, 2007
Actually our servers are a sh*t ton better than that. Remember Deep Blue, the machine that mullered Kasperov? He’s one of us. Ever see that ‘short circuit’ movie from the 80′s? Where do you think Johnny 5 ended up. He ain’t making nike’s in thailand, my friend. Heck, most of the cast in the new transformers movie worked their way up through us, Optimus prime actually started as a coffee machine..
Its all true.
Ask Profoky.
Artemis Fate
Apr 9th, 2007
Johnny 5, that reference is as obscure as it is horrifying o_o
I remember Optimus Prime when he was a starry eyed intern, spewing out coffee, which we would derisively throw in his face, laughing heartily as he short circuited and collapsed on the floor, spasming enthusiastically. And now he’s fighting decipticons and saving the world, what a year.
Anonymous
Apr 9th, 2007
Because open-source doesn’t leak into the hands of the public, qdot. That’s what on the big lies you open-source freaks always hustle on us. It leaks into the hands of griefing idiots like W-hat and irresponsible asstards like libsl, and only elitist coders who know how to make something out of it. No “public” ever gets to hear even what the issues are.
I don’t think you truly understand “tekkies”, or more properly “geeks” as well as you think you do.
By definition, open source means the source is available to anyone. That doesn’t mean that everyone automagically gets a copy, but it does mean that it’s available to anyone who wants it.
To use that source doesn’t require much skill at all. There’s all sorts of information telling people how to get sources, and what to do with them. Major alterations often require serious coding knowledge, but some modifications are well within the skills of anyonee who can follow a “recipe”. But there’s many, many people who use and benefit from open source code every minute of every day without knowing the slightest bit of programming code. I use open source code al the time, Firefox, Claws-Mail, GIMP, Gaim etc. I’ve compiled open source code on my decidedly non-standard Linux machine.
Second Life as it is now, as much as you evidently find this repulsive to your extremist code-cave world-view, is actually more democratic and free, because it’s a world made by a company to which anybody can come and make stuff with tools that are not so easy to learn — but a lot easier to learn that sitting and coding C+++ from scratch on some back of the moon with a rabbit and a cube. That’s because they have to have some sense of responsibility to a public at large that *pays their bills* with subscriptions and auction buys and island buys.
Prokofy, writing code is as democratic as using the tools of SL. Is there really that much difference between:
Hello Avatar in LSL
default
{
state_entry()
{
llSay(0, “Hello, Avatar!”);
}
touch_start(integer total_number)
{
llSay(0, “Touched.”);
}
}
Or Hello World in Python:
print “hello world”
or in C :
#include
int main(int argc, char* argv[])
{
printf(“Hello, world!\n”);
return 0;
}
Those “tekkies” with their “wikis and their source code repositories are being every bit as creative when they write code as an SL resident making a house, or dress. And many of those “tekkies” take pride in how many people can use their code without being geeks. They take pride in making in improving it and making it better. They feel a sense of responsibility to give the people they give their code to something useful and good, that does what it was designed to do and does it well.
“Tekkies” being creative invented the web browser, they created the software behind the Second Life Herald and Second Life itself.. Obviously we all enjoy the fruits of “tekkie” labor.
But the “tekkies” aren’t some medievel guild or club. Anyone can be a “tekkie”.
For example: If you use the LSL wiki to learn how to write a script that does something you want it to do, you’re a “tekkie” You don’t have to do anything special to benefit from that wiki, just read.
“tekkies” aren’t some monolithic group of evildoers. they, WE are individuals with individual interests and goals.
CronoCloud Creeggan
Apr 9th, 2007
Sorry, I did not mean to post anonymously, above comment was written by me.
Mako Mabellon
Apr 10th, 2007
I wonder what the payment in L$ per square meters is all about. That looks to me like they are sticking something new in the client which involves rentals. Sigh.
Could just as easily be some old code for something that isn’t used anymore (or never was) – Linden Labs are really bad at removing that sort of thing.
Hazim Gazov
Apr 12th, 2007
Cocoanut Koala = childish Koala, unprofessional Koala.
Cocoanut Koala is shockingly unprofessional.
LL
Cocoanut Koala
Apr 12th, 2007
lol – that actually made me laugh!
I’m an unprofessional Koala! I like that.
coco
Himeko
Jan 31st, 2009
What is rating? O_O the Lindens put rating on us? what’s mean?