Monday, October 09, 2006

Aftermath?

If you have read the LL blog, then you know another grid attack happened this morning and SL opened up again as i was writing this. It doesn't look like this storm is going to settle soon. But that's not all.

Yesterday's grid attack had some unfortunate consequences.

"Unfortunately, during the course of the update, we discovered that it included a bug which caused objects purchased in-world to be fully permissive.
After we reproduced the bug in-world, we kicked everyone off the grid and restricted login to Lindens only (this was at 2am PST). Next, we identified the bug and created a fix for it, which was deployed and tested while the grid was down."

It's sad and i doubt LL will do anything to resolve the issue, and some peoples products will become open source or resold. I already heard some people talking about quiting over this, all that i can say to them is, Stay! Your products are more then their scripts, prims and textures. They are part of you and when a person buys it, they get a little of your dedication you put in to it. By staying you will give people a reason to buy the originals from you.

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update:
Jeska clarified that last night's rolling update fixed the permissions as best as possible.

"I apologize if this wasn’t clear from the initial post. Part of the rollout last night involved inventory transformation to help repair permissions on most of the objects purchased with the permissions bug. Given the nature of the bug, it is hard for us to determine if everything was transformed or not, but it should have captured most of the affected objects."

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The second thing i want to respond to is if I and other bloggers should be even covering these attacks. As Hamlet pointed out it is a ethical dilemma, should we give the losers the attention that they grave.

There are several ways you can report about grid attacks. I think if you keep it factual and avoid dramatic posts you won't be encouraging the idiots. They get there attention orgasm any way from the different forums where people are making ridiculous demands to LL.

What has annoyed me in the past, before the LL blog, was the lack of information about grid attacks. Often you had to piece together from different reports on the forums on what was exactly happening. It always left me a bit with a feeling of being lost, and that in the Information Age. And while now the LL blog does a good job of reporting on what is going on, it also omits things. For instance about the fact that the particle attack was done with a texture of tubgirl. Which makes much more clear why people needed to be told how to turn particles off on their client.

Also it is important for a historical record to have independent reports about this. While LL is as far as I know not in the business of covering up past events, sometimes important statements from LL do disappear as Csven discovered about his trademark questions. While i assume they where just lost due to the forum changes, valuable info was lost about LL's position about trademarks. You never know what information becomes important when, better keep some records of what you think is important.

6 comments:

  1. I was going to reply on csven's entry but comments are closed -- I remember seeing that way back too, but I don't know of any deliberate removals of such info.

    I do know we had forum database troubles awhile back (incl. forum posts with attachments) that got garbled and lost. :(

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  2. "i doubt LL will do anything to resolve the issue, and some peoples products will become open source or resold."

    See, this is what I hate about blogs.. that people can just use it to stir stuff up. I'm guessing you never bothered to.. oh, maybe, ask Live Help if anything was going to be done about it, because if you had you would already know the answer. Anybody remember the repair inventory thing that happened when you logged in afterwards? Yeah, that thing that people were wondering about (and obviously again, not bothering to actually ask about). Well, it was FIXING THE BORKED PERMS. Amazing what happens when you ask somebody nicely, without seeming like you're coming at them with a straight razor. All this knee jerk drama.. amazing.

    So, unless somebody went right ahead and made a zillion copies of something that was no copy/trans, or had the forethought to *immediately* open and copy scripts out of no mod objects, then the people that went on a spending binge thinking they were going to have a bunch of full perms objects afterwards simply have bought a bunch of items for themselves.

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  3. Torley, I closed comments yesterday iirc. Perhaps Saturday. I leave comments open for about a week usually, after which the blogspam hits and I shut it down. However, it's open now and I'll keep it open til the end of this week.

    I have to admit it's curious to see a specific set of questions (recall that there was a sequence of back-and-forths) missing when some others are still archived. Are there no back-ups of LL's "official guidance" provided on the Hotline?

    Considering I suggested important guidance be appropriately documented and disseminated, only to be told that the Hotline responses were official documentation and thus it was unnecessary to further document and promulgate them, the loss of those responses represents more than answers to questions, but official guidance that's not always found in the EULA or TOS. If the answers were truly official guidance, then the lack of archiving it would seem to indicate some lack of competence. I prefer not to believe LL is incompetent, thus I'm left with the assumption that something was documented in those answers which LL wanted erased.

    An explanation for which of the above is accurate would be appreciated.

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  4. @Dear anomymous,
    Expressing a doubt is not stiring stuff up. It is expressing a doubt, which means that i clearly leave room to be corrected. And i'm glad my doubt was not neccesary. But my doubt did came from historical fact, that a similar occurance wasn't fixed in the past.
    And why blame Blogs, I could have posted in the forum or just told my neighbour, it's called the freedom to express.

    2nd, I couldn't ask live help when i was writing this, because the grid was closed off at the time.
    3rd live help is not the place for such a question, that is the sort of information the LL blog should provide. At the time it did not. Now Jeska has cleared her post up. Everyone has won.

    @Torley, that is what I'm thinking what happend with the posts as well.

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  5. I agree that expressing doubt as to whether or not Linden Lab will fully correct any permission problems is perfectly reasonable, and hardly stirring up something. Their past track record in this regard is deplorable. Each time there has been a bug, exploit, or strange phase of the moon and items get released with full permissions, their response has been "sorry!". I am certain they will try to do what they can to resolve the issues - but I am not certain they even have the ability to track fully what has happened to be able to do so. I do hope that the number of items affected is minimal - I know first hand what it is like to spend part of your time chasing down people who are reselling stuff endlessly thanks to LL's "oops, my bad" policy.

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  6. @csven: Months ago, I noticed how many holes there were in the documentation process. With really important info, especially stuff like what you pointed to, I — and I've been encouraging other Lindens — have been adding the to the Knowledge Base as an archive backup. Such as:

    http://secondlife.com/knowledgebase/article.php?id=291

    I reckon more of my time will be spent doing this.

    Alas I don't have a rewind button and have found no trace of your post, nor have I found any evidence that someone wanted them deleted, but just wanted to let you know.

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